354: What Kind of Catholic?

EXCERPT:

Rick Santorum’s decision to quit the presidential race last week offers a lesson about American Catholicism. Put simply: Santorum’s strength as a candidate is that his Catholic faith gives him an aura of conviction and authenticity that attracts many voters. His weakness is that not many of those voters are Catholics.

The lesson comes when we answer this question: how can Santorum’s Catholicism help him with voters but hurt him with Catholics?

The short answer is (1) Santorum’s faith is an authentic expression of the “Catholic right”--an extreme version of Catholicism that often resembles evangelical Protestantism. And (2) the Catholic right does not match the faith of most Catholics. Santorum’s appeal does not work on the mainstream of Catholic voters.

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Some of this is undoubtedly rooted in Santorum’s conservative politics. But what sets Santorum apart from his rivals is not his politics--it is his faith. Even in this era when religion looms so large in our elections, Santorum stands out. Mitt Romney has been much quieter about his Mormon faith, Newt Gingrich soft-pedals his own Catholicism, and Ron Paul’s faith remains mostly unnoticed by voters.

Santorum, by contrast, always puts his faith front and center. He is as comfortable talking about theology as he is talking about policy.
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Santorum also presents himself as a champion of religion, especially by decrying other politicians’ failure to protect religious values.
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So why wouldn’t Catholics want to support a Catholic politician who clearly integrates his faith with his politics and also loudly defends the place of religion in public life?

The answer is that Santorum’s version of Catholic faith is so far outside the mainstream of American Catholicism, most American Catholics do not share common ground with him.

I include in that “mainstream” not only the majority of rank and file Catholics, but also the majority of Catholic clergy, as well as the broad spectrum of official Catholic social doctrine.
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Clearly Santorum‘s faith embraces public policy perspectives that are dramatically at odds with a wide range of church teachings. Why is this instructive about US Catholicism?

Because the truth is that Santorum does not stand alone. Not only does he speak with an authenticity rooted in personal conviction, he also speaks for other American Catholics who share his version of Catholic faith. …
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Such Catholics are, like Santorum, well outside the mainstream of the majority of American Catholics as well as Catholic teaching. And this affords insight into the current state of Catholicism in America.

Clearly “American Catholicism” now includes two kinds of Catholics—those who embrace a quasi-evangelical Catholicism, and the vast majority of mainstream Catholics. Such quasi-evangelical Catholicism often combines personal devotion with fundamentalist theology.

As Karen Armstrong explained in her book The Battle for God, fundamentalism may appear in any religion, and it always takes the same basic form: people who find the “modern world” too threatening seek to defend themselves by concocting a distorted version of their faith tradition which protects them from the values and movements they fear. The upside is they feel safer and more certain of the values they live by; the downside is they embrace a fraudulent version of their own faith.

In my parish work I meet such people quite often, though they nearly always represent a small number. They can be found at all levels of church life, and even in public life. They seldom enjoy wide public support among other Catholics, but they find allies among evangelicals and they can create the impression that Catholicism is simply one form of fundamentalist Christianity.

They also tend to consider themselves the only true Catholics, and have been known to refer to the rest of us as CINO (Catholics in name only).
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Of course, one irony of fundamentalism is its pretense of clinging to “traditional” values, when in fact fundamentalism is a recent invention dating from the early 20th century. What Rick Santorum’s candidacy reflects is that such fundamentalism now infects Catholicism. What his defeat suggests is that most Catholics remain immune to fundamentalism’s appeal.