Alito and the Catholics

Good morning, Quad-Squadders! Just read this fascinating article by Joseph Bottum of the Weekly Standard. Here's an excerpt:

This may be the best time in American history to be a Catholic, and it may also be the worst: a moment of triumph after 200 years of outsiderness, and an occasion of mockery and shame. It is an era in which a surprisingly large portion of the nation's serious moral analysis seems to derive from Catholic sources. But it is also a day in which Monsignor Eugene Clark--an influential activist and Fulton J. Sheen's successor as rector of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral--can be named an adulterer in a divorce petition and photographed checking into a hotel with his hot-panted secretary, to the weeks-long titillation of New York's tabloids: "Beauty and the Priest," ran the headline in the Daily News. Catholicism is the most visible public philosophy in America, and the Catholic Church is a national joke.


Since its founding, the United States has always had a source of moral vocabulary and feeling that stands at least a little apart from the marketplace and the polling booth--from both the economics of capitalism and the politics of democracy that otherwise dominate the nation. For much of American history, that source was the moral sense shared by the various Protestant denominations, and it influenced everything from the Revolution to the civil-rights movement.
Somewhere in the last 50 years, however, the mainline Protestant churches went into catastrophic decline. The reasons are complex, but the result is clear. By the 1970s, a hole had opened at the center of American public life, and into that vacuum were pulled two groups that had always before stood on the outside, looking in: Catholics and evangelicals.

Bottum goes well-beyond summaraizing the common moral ground that unites Catholics and Evangelicals in this otherwise unlikely alliance:


"Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft," the New Republic claimed this month as it attempted to explain the Catholic ascendancy on the Supreme Court. That explanation is, as Christianity Today replied, mostly just a condescending update of the Washington Post's old insistence that evangelicals are "poor, uneducated, and easy to command." But the New Republic was at least right that the rhetorical resources of Catholicism--its ability to take a moral impulse born from religion and channel it into a more general public vocabulary and philosophical analysis--have come to dominate conservative discussions of everything from natural-law accounts of abortion to just-war theory.

Bottum's analysis -- that the death of the Catholic Church as a political force gave rise to the ascendency of Catholicism as a "marker of intellectual depth about public philosophy" is well supported:

Work still needs to be done to explain the causes of the priests' crimes, together with the reasons for the American bishops' horrifyingly insufficient response. But, along the way, the political power of the Church itself came at last to its complete end. Perhaps the perceived influence of America's hierarchy had been, in fact, unreal for some time--a brief-lived leftover from the days when Catholic bishops really could direct their parishioners' votes. Still, the national prominence of, say, John Cardinal O'Connor before his death in 2000 seemed the natural order of things: Archbishops of New York have always occupied a powerful place in American affairs--or, at least, they always used to occupy a powerful place. O'Connor's successor, Edward Egan, appears mostly to wish he belonged to the Church Invisible, and he remains little known even to his fellow New Yorkers. With some exceptions (such as Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver and Francis Cardinal George of Chicago--neither, it is worth noting, implicated in the cover-up of the priest scandals), the vast majority of America's bishops have joined Cardinal Egan in full retreat from public engagement.

It doesn't always prove true, of course (as the existence of pro-abortion Catholic politicians demonstrates), but the American public seems to take serious Catholicism as an immediate sign of moral attention on intellectual topics like the law. Who now speaks for American Catholicism? A good example might be someone like Samuel A. Alito Jr.

While it is incredibly discouraging that the leadership of the Church remains frustratingly silent and ineffective on varying issues of importance: the disgusting acts of pedophile priests; subsequent cover-up and refusal to take responsibility for its role in allowing the abuse to continue; to Pope John Paul II's (with all due respect) condemnation of US Military action in Iraq, which made the liberation of millions of its citizens from a maniacal Dictator possible, it is interesting to note that the philosophy of Catholicism is alive and well-represented in the form of lay people like Sam Alito:

NOT THAT ALITO is much of a spokesman for his coreligionists. He's never been a professional Catholic, one of those commentators who make their living off the fact of their faith. Nor has anyone claimed that his earlier jobs at the Justice Department and on the federal bench were obtained through some Catholic quota, the way the Supreme Court for decades had what used to be called the "Catholic seat."

Which, in its way, makes him even more representative. In 2004, during the second presidential debate, John Kerry boasted that he used to be an altar boy, as indeed he did. It was a naked appeal to the old style of the Catholic vote: the ethnic unity that for more than a century delivered the votes of blue-collar urban America to the Democrats. In the end, George Bush won a good majority of Catholic votes--as might have been predicted when Kerry went immediately from mentioning his boyhood Catholicism to explaining why he supported public funding for abortions. Fifty years earlier, Bush's appeal to shared ideas of Catholicism would have been trounced by Kerry's appeal to shared membership in the Catholic Church.

Kind of reminds me of the Nuns in elementary school, who spoke (rightly) of the horrors of abortion, yet voted for Pro-Death Bob Edgar, on the basis that he was a Democrat (who also shared their Socialist/anti-Capitalism leanings).

It seems to me that the Catholic Church's leadership could learn a lot from people like Sam Alito, who truly embraces and incorporates the moral philosophy of Catholicism into public discourse. And thank God that a good number of Catholics follow suit (though there are still too many who follow in the hypocritical footsteps of John Kerry), rather than blindly pulling the lever for a "Catholic" politician. It's just too bad that the Church felt more of a need to condemn the Bush Administration over its Iraq policy than it did to publicly admonish and admit their complicity in the horrific abuse of the most vulnerable members of its congregation.

Ironically, the philosophy of Catholicism thrives, not as a result of courageous leadership from Catholic Bishops, but because of the character of public servants like Sam Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.