The Economist February 19th 2022 United States 41The fightfor CatholicAmerica
W
hen shelton fabrebecame a bishop in New Orleans in
2007 he took as his motto a phrase from the prophet Isaiah:
“Comfort my people”. It was apposite to the city, still recovering
from Hurricane Katrina, and to the priest himself. The 43yearold
had been drawn to the church by the comfort he and his family re
ceived from their parish priests during two calamities. Growing
up in New Roads, a small town near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he
lost one of his brothers to a drowning accident and another, when
Bishop Fabre was 18, to leukaemia. His surviving siblings and par
ents—a bricklayer and schoolteacher—were broken. “But the
church was there for us, comforting us, and that’s what I signed up
to do,” he recalls. “I won’t say I’ve done it perfectly, but to the best
of my ability I’ve tried to be there for people, to be with them in
their communities, to bring them the comfort of Christ.”
His vocation took him to parishes around Baton Rouge and the
Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of America’s biggest
and most violent prisons, where he served as chaplain. His priori
ty, he says, “was to give the people there hope”. It was not the sort
of path traditionally followed by Catholic bishops, let alone arch
bishops, to whose exalted ranks he was promoted this month. As
in the upper echelons of any hierarchy, they tend to be ambitious
careerists. But then Bishop Fabre says he never much wanted to be
a bishop in the first place: “I was very happy being a priest.” And
his pastoral record and relative lack of interest in church politics
are perfectly illustrative of how Pope Francis is trying to change
the American Catholic church, whose 70m members make it by far
the country’s biggest religious group.
Its leadership is still dominated by the conservatives his two
traditionalist predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, ap
pointed. Yet the 13 American archbishops Francis has picked have
begun to move it in a less confrontational and more rounded di
rection. Disappointingly to progressives, they, like the pope him
self, are not markedly, or sometimes at all, more liberal on the sex
ual ethical issues that the old guard obsesses over. Bishop Fabre
opposes samesex marriage, for example. Yet he and other Francis
appointees—again like the pope—tend to speak of such matters
less righteously, less often and within a broader array of moral pri
orities than their culturewarring brethren.
Theystresspastoralism—in the sense of responding to the
needs of congregants as they arise—over advocacy. That in turn
leads them to abhor inequality, environmental damage, poverty
and poor health care as much as abortion. Bishop Fabre, only the
second AfricanAmerican archbishop, is better known for his
work on combating racism, as the leader of a highprofile church
review of the issue, than for his opposition to gay marriage. It is
not coincidental that he has been appointed Archbishop of Louis
ville, Kentucky, which has a large AfricanAmerican population
and saw highly charged protests over the killing of Breonna Taylor,
an unarmed black woman, by the police in 2020.
If leftwing American Catholics are disappointed by the Fran
cis reset, the right is livid. According to a close observer of the
country’s Catholic bishops’ conference, around a third its 260 ac
tive members are hostile to the pope. And they have powerful
champions in, for example, Cardinal Raymond Burke, a former
Archbishop of Louisville who lambasts, among other things, the
pope’s support for civil rights for gay couples and relatively re
laxed view of divorcees receiving communion. He would also de
ny the Eucharist to Joe Biden and other Catholic politicians sup
portive of abortion rights. On the harder Catholic right, wilder
spirits abound, from Bishop Joseph Strickland of Texas, a covid19
antivaxxer and QAnon conspiracy disseminator who suggests it
is impossible to be both Democratic and Catholic, to a legion of
wellfunded and often unhinged Catholic media entrepreneurs.
They include the Alabamabased ewtn, a hotbed of proTrump,
antiFrancis propaganda, which claims to be the “world’s largest
religious media network” with a global audience of over 250m.
Fighting for pre1960s social mores was never going to be easy.
Yet the anger on the Catholic right has been hugely exacerbated by
four decades of reckless and ultimately fruitless activism under
Francis’s predecessors. Some date this development even farther
back, to the 1950s, when Catholics began downplaying the
church’s distinctive stress on social justice in a bid to join the
Christian mainstream from which they were previously excluded.
Yet the politicking became far more pronounced in the late 1970s,
when conservative Catholic activists made common cause with
the wider religious right in denouncing moral relativism, abor
tion, gay rights and other supposed sins of modernity.
The failure of that movement, and the despondency it has
wrought, is signalled by the moribund, aggrieved and Trumpad
dled state of white evangelicals today. Catholic America, anchored
in its network of schools, charities and the growing Hispanic
church, was always less committed to the culture war and has
been less radicalised as a result. White evangelicals are the least
likely religious group to be vaccinated against covid, Catholics are
the likeliest. Yet the anger on the Catholic right, though ostensibly
aimed at the pope, is fuelled by the same sense of cultural and po
litical defeat weighing on white evangelicals.More to life than sex
This makes Francis’s attempt to draw the poison from the most di
visive social issues, by lowering their profile rather than winning
the argument over them, seem especially wise. Through the ex
ample of conscientious pastors such as Bishop Fabre, he aims to
make the church less selfobsessed and more responsive to its
congregants. And thereby, the pontiff must hope, also more rele
vant to their lives,evenas organised religion retreats. Secular poli
ticians might callthis“meeting the voters where they are”. They
should also tryit.nLexington
Pope Francis is starting to get a grip on the world’s fourth-biggest Catholic country