THE YEARS FOLLOWING the Second Vatican Council signified a period of rupture and turmoil in the American Catholic Church. If the problem was not with the council’s actual teachings, as it was for some, the reception of those teachings often caused a sense of disorientation, as Catholics of every stripe sought to reconfigure the boundaries of what it meant to be a Catholic in the modern world. One area particularly affected was Catholic intellectual life. Writing shortly after the council closed and reflecting on some of the disruptions that were already being felt, Philip Gleason noted that “Catholic intellectual positions...

ONE OF THE CENTRAL FEATURES of neoconservative Catholic thought consists in the conviction that the American political tradition is compatible with, if not an outgrowth of, the Christian political tradition; support for one reinforces one’s support for the other. Such a perspective draws on what David O’Brien has referred to as “republican Catholicism.”¹ The republican Catholic worldview expresses a sense of optimism with respect to the “American experiment in ordered liberty” and is generally supportive of appeals to religious liberty and related political values expressed at the founding of the United States. The church historian R. Scott Appleby used O’Brien’s...

IN HIS BOOKAfter VirtueAlasdair MacIntyre argued that modernity was in a state of moral crisis, with debates between competing parties an often fruitless exercise that resolved little. What was the reason for this? In the contemporary Western world all that is left are disconnected, key expressions and bits and pieces of conceptual schemes, but no comprehensive paradigm that can be appealed to as a way to judge the legitimacy of moral claims. Gone are any objective and widely accepted criteria that could function as the basis for a shared moral or political discourse. In its place are subjective...

THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE DECADES of the twentieth century American Catholics had traditionally sided with the Democratic Party in national elections and were reliable constituents in the New Deal coalition built by FDR. But for the first time since the Gallup organization began in 1935, the Democratic Party was unable to maintain its Catholic backing in the presidential election of 1972. Nixon secured 52 percent of the national Catholic vote, which was up from a mere 33 percent just four years earlier.¹ This shift was due “in part because the Democratic Party in the heady years between 1968 and 1972 became...

ON MAY 22, 1977, President Jimmy Carter gave the 132nd commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. The most memorable and often-cited phrase came after he praised the values of democracy and declared that “being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism.” Such fears had, according to Carter, been costly. They had led the United States to cooperate with any dictator or authoritarian ruler who was an ally against the Soviet Union, contributed to the abandonment of American values and the adoption of the “flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of...

FROM THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY onward, anticommunist sentiment was a staple of Catholic political thought. In his encyclical “On Faith and Religion,” Pope Pius IX decried the pernicious effect of the communist worldview, declaring that if such a philosophy were embraced “the complete destruction of everyone’s laws, government, property, and even of human society itself would follow.”¹ Similar sentiments were reiterated in the writings and public pronouncements of the popes that followed. Pope Leo XIII declared that communism, alongside socialism and nihilism, signified a “hideous deformity of civil society,” and Pope Pius XI asserted in his encyclical on atheistic communism that...

INSPIRED IN PART by the example of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was formed in 1961 with the express purpose of overthrowing the authoritarian Somoza-led government in Nicaragua. Within two decades the group evolved from a guerrilla organization based in northern Nicaragua to the country’s ruling party following the overthrow of the Somoza government in July 1979. Many conservative organizations and intellectuals, including the neoconservative Catholics, interpreted the Sandinista revolution as reflecting poorly on American foreign policy decision making during the post-Vietnam era. There was an abiding concern that after Vietnam, America had...

IN HIS REVIEW of Thomas Reese’s bookA Flock of Shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops,George Weigel closed with a question. Playing on its title he stated that shepherds lead flocks, but “when shepherds become flocks, is something in the nature of being a shepherd irreparably damaged?”¹ One of the purposes of Reese’s book is to explore the workings of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), from its general structure to the component parts that give it life. Central to Weigel’s concern is the size of this infrastructure and the extent to which it has given birth...

THERE IS AN INTERESTING TENSION at play in neoconservative Catholic thought as it pertains to public perception, Catholic identity, and the role that both the clergy and the laity ought to play in the world. While the neoconservative Catholics insisted on the importance of lay activity in political life, they maintained a high regard for the clergy and the role of the bishops. While intent on protecting lay prerogatives, the neoconservative Catholics were also concerned that excessive involvement by the hierarchy in political affairs would damage the long-term integrity of the church. By sullying themselves in ongoing political debates, the...