TP O’Mahony: Church's relationship with democracy has always been inconsistent
Pope Francis has already taken the very unusual step of issuing a rebuke of JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. File photo: AP/Alessandra Tarantino
In 1899 Pope Leo XIII wrote to the bishops in the USA condemning what the Vatican referred to as Americanism — a progressive movement for reform in the Catholic Church and the development of a political dimension to religious faith.
Throughout its history the Vatican has maintained its own position as an absolute monarchy and until very recently popes have been reluctant to join the project of democracy, with an enduring suspicion of liberal social doctrines. The great social encyclicals aimed at improving the lot of the poor had a very marginal impact throughout the Western world, while avoiding talk of political systems. It wasn’t until 1991 that a papal encyclical fully endorsed democratic systems of government.
Yes, the emphasis on the dignity of the human person, on human rights and on social solidarity, and the centrality of the common good, had begun with Leo XIII whose 1891 encyclical (which came to be known as the “workers’ charter”) was a response to the appalling conditions experienced by the working classes during the Industrial Revolution. But that came over 40 years after the publication of the .
Communism (and socialism, with which it was too readily conflated) was, for Rome, the great fear -— culminating with the publication in 1937 of Divini Redemptoris, an encyclical addressing specifically “the menace of Communism”. That document urged governments to adopt measures to help the poor, but without endorsing any system of government.
The anti-democratic position finally changed, so far as wider society is concerned, in the 1960s, with Vatican II (1962-65). “It was in the Council that the Church finally made peace with the liberal democratic state,” according to Anthony Annett of Fordham University in New York.
But prior to that, Americanism — which actually had its roots in France — was growing Catholic support for the agenda of the Democratic Party, which was agitating for a graduated income tax, the setting up of a social security system, and the enactment of federal welfare programmes.
This would all culminate in the New Deal — a major programme of social and economic reform introduced by President Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s with the aim of aiding the USA’s recovery from the Great Depression (beginning with the 1929 Wall Street crash), and improving the welfare of the poor.
Given the wrecking ball that the Trump Presidency (under the driving force of Elon Musk’s “shock and awe” attack) has taken to a whole range of federal programmes, and cutbacks to social service schemes including education, the irony is that today Pope Francis would undoubtedly be one of the foremost champions of the ‘Americanism’ his forebear condemned.
There is, however, a double irony here. On the one hand, aspects of Americanism — despite being condemned as a “heresy” — washed back to Europe and fed progressive ideas into that seminal Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Secondly, the Vatican itself became after the Second World War a promoter of ‘Catholic democracy’.
This would eventually see a Catholic President in the Oval Office for the first time when John F Kennedy won the 1960 race for the White House. Here at home, it could also be argued that ‘Catholic democracy’ had shaped the contents of and won popular endorsement for Bunreacht na hEireann, the 1937 Constitution.
Now there is a Catholic Vice-President in Washington in the person of JD Vance, and the oleaginous Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan (a “close friend” of Trump), has sought to assure people that the President “takes his faith seriously”.
Pope Francis has already taken the very unusual step of issuing a rebuke of the VP, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. Appearing on Fox News to discuss immigration, Vance defended Trump’s America First border-enforcement policy by invoking ‘ordo amoris’, which he characterised as an “old school” Christian concept of social responsibility.
Some Catholic commentators pushed back against Vance’s superficial understanding of the concept, but more extraordinarily, Pope Francis himself took the time to correct Vance's flawed theology in a pointed letter to the American bishops, while offering a powerful defence of migrants and refugees.
Whether the pope’s letter has any effect on the occupant of the White House and his lieutenants is very doubtful. According to the , 56% of Catholics supported Trump in the 2024 election, compared to 41% for Kamala Harris.
“The biggest question now — for Americans as well as the Vatican — is ‘what kind of democracy will the United States of America become?’,” according to Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology at Villanova University. American Catholicism is changing, said Faggioli, and the Trump presidency may end up ideologically dividing the country’s Catholics “even further”.
In this context, just days before Trump’s inauguration, the pope transferred Cardinal Robert McElroy from San Diego to Washington DC. He is expected to spearhead an attempt by the American Church to represent a “moral counterexample” to the Trump administration. In this he may not have the support of all 273 bishops in the US hierarchy.
But for this to be effective, American Catholicism — like Irish Catholicism — will have to rediscover the social gospel; the understanding that the New Testament has very real socio-economic implications.
In the USA one can point, for example, to the 1933-founded Catholic Worker movement, always associated with Dorothy Day, a socialist and pacifist. In Ireland, it is more a matter of discovering this social gospel in the first place, because there has never been a Catholic Left in this country.
But now, with the fresh challenges posed by the second Trump presidency, the very viability of democracy is about to be stress-tested, especially in a country that loved to boast that it was an essential part of its mission to “export democracy”.
That stress-test of course — given the rise of the far right in parts of Europe — will by no means be limited to the USA. How the Vatican responds is an important element in the unfolding drama that, thanks to the disruptive effects of the second Trump presidency, could transform the Western world.
- TP O'Mahony was Religious Affairs Correspondent of the Irish Examiner
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