A Partisan Church: American Catholicism & the Rise of Neo-Conservative Catholics by Todd Scribner

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Partisan Church: American Catholicism & the Rise of Neo-Conservative Catholics by Todd Scribner James P. McCartin A Partisan Church: American Catholicism & the Rise of Neo-Conservative Catholics. By Todd Scribner. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015. 264 pp. $34.95. Todd Scribner makes a noteworthy contribution to our understanding of Catholic neoconservatism and its promoters’ efforts to shape Catholicism’s role in late twentieth-century U.S. public life. Using a substantial body of published works by three public intellectuals – Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus – Scribner successfully highlights how their perspectives both overlapped and diverged on issues ranging from democratic pluralism to abortion. He goes on to argue that, despite appearances to the contrary, there has never been an organized Catholic neoconservative movement. Instead, he affirms Weigel’s contention that Catholic neoconservatives participated in a common “intellectual conversation,” but never subscribed to a unified platform (15). Regardless, A Partisan Church demonstrates how each of these men strategically collaborated with one another and other like-minded allies to maximize their exposure and influence in both the church and the public square. Though lacking a comprehensive biographical account of his three subjects, Scribner hits upon multiple events and ideas that influenced Novak, Weigel, and Neuhaus’s development as public intellectuals. The Second Vatican Council and the Cold War, both of which set the framework for how these men approached questions of public import, loom largest in their collective narrative. But they were also shaped by the idea, shared with secular neoconservatives, that liberalism reached a dead end in the 1970s and the confidence that Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan – elected in 1978 and 1980, respectively – held out a promise for widespread cultural and political renewal. A Partisan Church goes on to show how these three men, responding to a shared dismay about the liberal bent of U.S. church officials’ engagement in political affairs in the 1970s and 1980s, came to promote an ideology of separate spheres for laity and clergy. Citing the documents of Vatican II on the lay apostolate and ecclesiology, they advanced the idea that the laity was primarily responsible for tending [End Page 76] to matters of public policy, while the clergy’s primary role was to shape the moral and cultural context in which political affairs are conducted. Such a view was and is based upon a contentious interpretation of Vatican II’s teachings. Yet this shared understanding of separate spheres, Scribner concludes, is the unifying principle among Catholic neoconservatives. The 1980s proved fruitful for promoting their shared ecclesiological vision. As U.S. Catholic bishops developed historic pastoral letters treating modern warfare and the economy – The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response (1983) and Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (1986) – Novak and Weigel publicly questioned bishops’ competence for making judgments on complex political matters. Novak led a group of influential politically conservative U.S. Catholics in launching powerful strikes, both before and after the pastorals were released, aiming to erode public confidence in the bishops’ pronouncements on nuclear warfare and the inequality produced by modern capitalism. For his part, Weigel emerged as one of the bishops’ most vocal critics, arguing that they jettisoned a centuries-old patrimony of Catholic moral thought in favor of liberal ideology, thus threatening to make the church just one political interest group among many. Though Neuhaus only converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism in 1990, the battles between U.S. bishops and their Catholic neoconservative critics helped hone his understanding of Catholicism’s historic role as a moral beacon transcending passing political concerns. Alongside Novak and Weigel, he grew alarmed about what he saw as the bishops’ uncritical appropriation of liberalism. Even before his conversion, he become a standard bearer for the idea that a recovery of older strains in the Catholic moral tradition offered the best hope for Western democratic societies which, he said, suffered from moral decay and political decline due to the exhaustion of “the liberal project.” In this thoughtful treatment of Novak, Weigel, and Neuhaus and their work, Scribner leaves room for other scholars to tease out...