THE FIRST CATHOLIC PRESIDENT:

THE CATHOLIC TEACHINGS OF GEORGE W. (Franklin Foer, 06.05.00, New Republic)

Is George W. Bush an unwitting papist? You wouldn't think so, given his infamous flirtation with anti-Catholic bigot Bob Jones--not to mention his very public born-again evangelicalism and his coterie of evangelical advisers. But Bush's big idea, compassionate conservatism, owes a great deal to Catholicism. Intellectual genealogies of the Bush campaign usually trace back to Marvin Olasky, the evangelical University of Texas academic who wrote the 1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion. But Olasky's big idea--junking the welfare state in favor of moralistic charities--didn't come out of nowhere. It has strong roots in Catholic neoconservative doctrine, most importantly in the work of two intellectuals, Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak, who hatched the idea as a way to reconcile their two historically hostile loves: Catholic faith and faith in the free market.

Their primary tool has been the Catholic concept of "subsidiarity"--the idea that social problems are best understood and solved by the organizations and people closest to them. (When Bush met Catholic leaders last September, he acknowledged compassionate conservatism's debt to subsidiarity, though he mispronounced it "supsidiary.") Subsidiarity became an important part of Catholic doctrine with Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Pius hadn't intended to presage Barry Goldwater. He'd meant to triangulate, to split the difference between the twin evils of soulless laissez-faire capitalism and soulless socialism. Like all calls for a third way, the church was vague about how much state intervention it would tolerate. But it probably wanted a fair amount. At least, that was the interpretation of both liberal welfare staters like Franklin Roosevelt and corporatists like Benito Mussolini. In fact, in a 1932 speech, FDR pointed to the encyclical to justify intervention in the market, which he described in clearly Catholic language as "social justice through social action."

his statist strain is still potent in Catholic politics. You can see it in Europe's Christian Democratic parties, which have traditionally eschewed Republican-style libertarianism. You can see it in America's Catholic bishops (with their thundering invocations of government responsibility to the poor), in America's Catholic liberals (the Kennedys, House Minority Whip David Bonior, or Tip O'Neill), and even in some Catholic conservatives (Pat Buchanan). But, in the last 25 years, Catholic neocons have tried to nudge the statists aside and reconcile papal social teachings with the unfettered market. They have lobbied the Vatican through an international coterie of like-minded cardinals and intellectuals. (Although, truth be told, the pope remains the world's most prominent critic of corporate capitalism.) And they have churned out reams of essays and books to prove the harmony of Catholicism and capitalism. Novak, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has written a theological justification of the corporation and a shelf of books championing classical liberalism. As Neuhaus, editor of the influential journal First Things, puts it, "Capitalism is the economic corollary of the Christian understanding of man's nature and destiny."

Like all authentic neocons, Neuhaus and Novak started on the left. As a Lutheran priest (who later converted), Neuhaus headlined anti-war rallies and toiled in ghetto parishes. Novak, a sociologist who studied white ethnics, shelled for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign. But both were ticked off by liberalism's dalliance with liberation theology and the nuclear freeze. Fuming at the left, they went down the Bristol path, becoming fierce opponents of the welfare state and brash proponents of the private sector.

But, unlike the mostly secular Jews who traveled the same ideological road, Neuhaus and Novak saw their project as theological as well as political. To reconcile their capitalist faith in self-interest with Catholicism's abnegation of self-interest, Neuhaus and Novak have not only highlighted subsidiarity, they have redefined Pius's concept of it--removing any statist inflection and making it a devolutionary doctrine. Rhetorically, subsidiarity latches them to the Catholic tradition of social justice and gives them cover when their left-wing Catholic brethren accuse them of callously betraying the catechism with their hostility to government expenditures. There's no need for the sclerotic welfare state, Novak has argued, when "the creative impulse is located in the people at the grass roots who no longer trust big government." In neocon hands, subsidiarity is a moral argument that state and local government (instead of the feds) and local community groups (instead of government at all) best serve the poor.

For Republicans, frequently accused of callousness themselves, the rhetoric serves the same purpose: It helps them deflect charges that they're indifferent to the plight of the poor.

As five years have shown, there's nothing unwitting about.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 12, 2005 1:22 PM