A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the Rise of Neo-conservative Catholics by Todd Scribner

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the Rise of Neo-conservative Catholics by Todd Scribner Donald T. Critchlow A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the Rise of Neo-conservative Catholics. By Todd Scribner. (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 244. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-813-227290.) Todd Scribner, education outreach co-ordinator at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, provides a judicious, albeit at times critical, account of the rise of Catholic neo-conservatives through the writings of three prominent Catholic public intellectuals, Michael Novak, the Reverend Richard Neuhaus, and George Wiegel. He shows that these three men often differed on important questions facing the nation and the Catholic Church in the United States in the Reagan years but agreed that the U.S. bishops had become too involved in current policy debates and were neglecting their responsibility to provide an ecclesiological foundation for maintaining moral order in an increasingly secular society. Novak, Neuhaus, and Weigel came into prominence in the post-Vatican Council II years. Novak and Neuhaus began as liberals; and Weigel, a generation younger, was deeply influenced by the pacifist antiwar activist Robert Pickus. All turned to the right in the 1970s in response largely to antiwar post-Vietnam U.S. foreign policy. All believed that the Soviet Union posed a serious threat to American foreign policy interests, but all initially supported Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Novak and Neuhaus came on-board Reagan's presidential bid only in the latter stages of the campaign. The rise of neo-conservatives in this period is well-trodden in popular and scholarly literature. Scribner's significant contribution is to add nuance to the meaning of neo-conservative Catholics, especially around ecclesiological issues reflected in their political positions. He explores in detail their positions on American foreign policy during the Carter and Reagan years, showing that they were not of a uniform mind. Scribner sets his discussion within the context of the post-World War II era, when animosity toward Catholics in mainstream American culture began to decline, while at the same time secularism grew. The trend toward secularism, as sociologist Robert Wuthnow observes, meant that political identity became more important that did denominational identity. Scribner shows that a central goal of Novak, Neuhaus, and Wiegal was to propose a place for the Catholic Church of the United States in this new order. They accepted generally the belief that Catholicism and the American republican order were compatible, if not essential. Novak, Neuhaus, and Wiegal accepted [End Page 394] French philosopher Jacques Maritain's belief that there should be a clear delineation between church and state. Neo-conservatives were especially worried that the U.S. Catholic bishops had become too involved in specific policy issues, as was apparent in the bishops' stances on foreign policy, particularly nuclear disarmament and Latin America. The neo-conservative complaint was just a disagreement that the bishops were too sanguine about the threat that Soviet Communism posed to world stability and American interests, but that by taking such specific policy positions the Church was undermining its authority as a necessary mediating institution within the general culture. All agreed that Catholic intellectuals needed to play a role in American politics, but insisted that the church hierarchy should constrain itself from specific political positions. This parsing of these two spheres, state and church, was fraught with tensions and perhaps inconsistencies on their part. While they called for the Catholic laity to play a more important role in the institutional church and in political life, they gave little attention to how to revive the laity. Scribner does not explore fully this general absence in the thinking of the neo-conservatives. Neo-conservatives spoke in abstraction about the importance of the laity in political life, criticized the bureaucratization of the Church, and the bishops' overreliance on staff expertise, but gave little, if any attention, to how to revitalize the Catholic laity. Scribner conveys the intellectual power of these three intellectuals in policy discussions of the day. Yet the influence of any intellectuals or groups of intellectuals on policy discussion and politics in general is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain...