"Massimo Borghesi leads us through a very readable analysis of the neoconservative, largely American, detractors of the magisterium of Francis. ... the defenders of capitalism ... who overly identify the faith with its moral teachings." So writes Bishop John Stowe, the wonderful Bishop of Lexington, Kentucky, on the front page of Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis (Liturgical Press, 2021), by Massimo Borghesi, translated by Barry Hudock. Borghesi is professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Perugia and author of The Mind of Pope Francis (2018), also translated by Barry Hudock.
Borghesi's book is about Pope Francis and his agenda, but focuses on Francis' pontificate through the lens of what he sees as the "delusional example of the theological-political Manichaeism circulating in some segments of the church" - notably U.S. neoconservative Catholicism. Personally, I wonder whether he overuses (maybe even misuses) the word Manichaeism much too much. Indeed, the word might well be just as applicable to some alternate factions to which Borghesi is more sympathetic. On the other hand, his emphasis on the apocalyptic aspect of such movements seems more apt, as when he describes "the ideological framework that permeates so much of American Catholicism, one of culture wars, end-time struggle—children of light versus children of darkness."
Apart from an excursus on American neoconservatives' attempts to exercise influence in Italy, the author's dominant focus is very much on the U.S. situation and its influence. The "misunderstanding" he diagnoses as "the foundation of the Catholic neoconservative, or Christianist, position" is "the identification of faith with Western civilization. This was denounced by Jacques Maritain in 1936, in his book Integral Humanism."
Borghesi invokes all three of the most recent popes - John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis - as a consistent alternative to American Catholic neoconservatism. My favorite papal quote he takes form Pope Benedict: "the New Testament is aware of political ethics but not of political theology.” Borghesi's basic warning "is that every time a theological movement follows a political one, it shares its successes and defeats; it gives up its own autonomy. This is the fate of political theologies."
The book is especially useful for its historical treatment of the trajectory of American Catholic neoconservatism. "which since the 1980s has taken the place of the Catho-Marxist messianism of the 1970s," and "is a conservative political theology, a right-wing variant of left-wing political theology." In Borghesi's rendering of recent Roman Catholic history, in the years after Vatican II, "which were marked by intense theological disputes and, in some segments, an attempt to understand Christianity through a Marxist lens—the church seemed to establish, with the pontificate of John Paul II, a renewed sense of identity and balance." The future Pope Francis was attracted to John Paul's "path by which the church could avoid the two siren calls of reactionism and revolution."
A particularly insightful aspect of Borgghesi's analysis is that with Communism's fall, the moral dimension of anti-communist ideology was lost, which "explains why the era of globalization coincides with a much more radical secularization of Western life than occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. The primacy of the economy, with a new type of financial capitalism, coincides with the decline of politics, ethics, and religion. The ideal that stood in contradistinction with Marxist ideology disappeared, and a cynical and soulless pragmatism based on an individualistic, Hobbesian-Darwinist anthropology triumphed. Faced with this 'anthropological mutation,' which had been clearly foreseen in the 1970s by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the church stood bewildered and unprepared." In the U.S., "The secularization of the North American landscape and in particular of the Democratic Party pushed Catholics into the Republican sphere, with its typically Protestant combination of defense of the family and the free market."
One key to this, which is sometimes insufficiently emphasized, is that, being on the left after the fall of communism, has "meant cultivating an individualistic, radical liberalism that elevated physical and individual desires as a model of human progress in general. Poverty, social inequalities, workers’ rights, economic justice, and collaboration between the state and civil society in management of the economy disappeared from the view of the new left. It became libertarian and pleasure-seeking, measuring quality of life solely by one’s personal sense of psychosocial well-being." In this context, the Church increasingly embraced "conservative positions, in reaction to a relativistic and optimistic postmodernism, coincided with an ecclesial “retreat,” a closure from and distrust of a world perceived as hostile, alien, enemy."
The dangerous irony in this was that this militant "dialectical model," with its dismissal of "mission and dialogue," applied only to a narrow set of "life issues." In other areas, "a decisive conformism reigned. The rejection of the spirit of secularization was accompanied by an unconditional embrace of a capitalist model, which, ironically, was the real engine of the very secularization that was supposed to be the enemy. Hence the impotence of a struggle that bears within itself a contradiction: opposition to the relativism and individualism created by economic processes that are accepted enthusiastically."
His historical account focuses especially on figures like Michael Novak (author in 1982 of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism), who, Borghesi argues, advocated "a Catholicism modeled on the American lifestyle." For Borghesi's Novak, "cooperation between capitalism and modern Christianity excludes the idea of solidarity. It also excludes any critical appraisal of the liberal model." It is a bourgeois Christianity, in which "it is the economy that dictates the ethical model rather than vice versa."
Novak was part of "a very active group of intellectuals who, in the span of a few years, managed to establish themselves as the shapers of the American Catholic conscience." This group, which also famously included former liberal Lutheran minister and convert to Catholicism, Fr. Richard Neuhaus, "was part of a neoconservative galaxy dotted with intellectuals, disappointed by the left and by the politics of the Democratic Party."
One of the noteworthy things these intellectuals did, according to Borghesi, was to distort papal teaching - notably Pope John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus Annus. "The result was that a text that was strongly critical of neocapitalism came to be understood as an apologetics manual of the same." This distortion of Catholic social teaching has been a hallmark of this movement. Borghesi, in contrast, stresses the anti-capitalist continuity of papal teaching from Pope Paul VI through Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI to Pope Francis. whose Evangelii Gaudium "cast sharp doubt on the Catholic neoconservative agenda and criticized its assumptions plainly." Borghesi highlights the contrast between Francis's Church in uscita [going out] and the "ecclesial introversion" he opposes.
For Borghesi, Francis "is a pope who truly expresses the intimate popular-Christian religiosity of Latin America and, precisely for this reason, stands outside the ideological dialectic typical of Catholicism between progressives and reactionaries" and "overturns the Catholic neoconservative model wholly polarized by moral issues."
Faced with the opposition by Pope Francis, "the neoconservative movement, with its dual religious and secular soul," seem to have formed an unlikely alliance: "the strange alliance between conservative liberals and Catholic reactionaries hostile to the Second Vatican Council that would constitute the shock wave against the Francis pontificate. Conservative liberals and Catholic traditionalists—diametrically opposed on the topic of the value of modernity—combined forces in the ethical battle against relativism and in unquestioning fidelity to the western capitalist model."
The ultimate example of Catholic neoconservatism's intellectual decline as an ideology is, of course, the political alliance with Trump, to whose fate it seems increasingly tied.
"Like any political theology, Catholic Americanism depended on the fate of the power to which it linked itself."
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