ROME — In the abstract, one might have thought the election of Joe Biden in 2020 was a prescription for a Golden Age in U.S./Vatican relations. Not only is he the second Catholic commander-in-chief in American history, but a man who personally takes his faith extremely seriously, whatever one makes of how he translates it into policy.
Moreover, Biden is a center-left figure simpatico with the social and political agenda of Pope Francis, who accents issues such as migration, climate change, and defense of the poor, all matters where he and the American president see eye to eye.
And, yet.
Yet the last four years actually have witnessed deep tensions between Washington and Rome on multiple foreign policy fronts, especially China, Ukraine, and Gaza. Indeed, one could actually make the argument that, at least on Ukraine, the Vatican would have had less trouble navigating a relationship with the religiously indeterminate Donald Trump than with the Catholic Biden.
All of this is a reminder of a basic point, and one which is especially apt right now as we ponder the dynamics of a Trump vs. Kamala Harris race in November: The bipolar nature of American politics and the integral character of Catholic social teaching are always an imperfect fit, no matter who’s in the White House.
By the time President Ronald Reagan launched full diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1984, he and St. Pope John Paul II were already shaping history together as de facto allies in the struggle to bring down Soviet communism. Yet there were also deep tensions over social and economic policy. It’s worth recalling, for example, that the pontiff’s 1981 social encyclical Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”), among other things defending the rights of organized labor, appeared just a month after Reagan summarily fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, leaving some to actually read the encyclical as a critique of Reaganomics.
During the Clinton years, there were massive clashes between the Vatican and the White House over United Nations conferences on population and development in Cairo in 1994 and on women in Beijing, pivoting above all on abortion policy. At the time, commentators spoke of an “unholy alliance” forged among the Vatican and several Islamic states, including Iran, to oppose the Clinton administration’s push to see a right to abortion enshrined in international law.
In the eight years of the Bush administration that followed, such tensions on abortion and other “life issues” were muted, only to be replaced by a colossal difference over the invasion of Iraq. At the time John Paul took the highly unusual step of dispatching a special envoy to the White House to plead with Bush not to go ahead, but to no avail.
The same basic patterns reasserted themselves under both Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, both of whom found themselves in rough harmony with the Vatican on some fronts and in clear rupture on others.
The root “square peg/round hole” problem of attempting to reconcile Catholic social doctrine with the bipartisan nature of American politics has been compounded during the Pope Francis years by another factor, which is the effort by history’s first pope from the developing world to reorient the Vatican away from its de facto historic partnership with the West toward a more truly globalist and nonaligned stance.
Today, the Vatican arguably is closer in both agenda and instincts on many foreign policy matters to the membership of the BRICS alliance than it is to Washington, London, or Brussels, which is a long-term historic shift which likely will continue to unfold no matter who occupies the White House at any given moment.
None of this means U.S./Vatican ties are disintegrating.
On multiple fronts, ranging from the fight against human trafficking to the promotion of religious freedom, Rome and Washington collaborate on a regular basis. Frankly, the world’s most important soft and hard powers, respectively, perceive too much value to their relationship to allow it to fall apart completely.
Parallel to the Vatican relationship, of course, there’s also the matter of a given president’s uneasy relationship with the Catholic community in the United States, both in terms of the bishops and at the grassroots.
At the moment, it’s taken for granted that the U.S. bishops are somewhat more conservative than Francis and his Vatican team, and hence that a Trump return might make for smoother sailing in terms of church/state ties, while a Harris presidency likely would augur deeper tensions, especially over abortion rights.
On the other hand, it’s worth recalling that the first go-around with Trump wasn’t exactly trouble-free from the point of view of the bishops either, especially in light of their strong advocacy on immigration reform and the rights of migrants generally.
Obviously, none of this is to suggest that from a Catholic point of view, it doesn’t matter who wins in November. There are critically important issues at stake, and American Catholics should (and, rest assured, many will) engage those issues with passion.
If one might be permitted a pious wish, however, perhaps it could be that this passion can be leavened with patience.
No one in America today, especially after the attempted July 13 assassination of Trump, needs to be reminded that we live in a deeply polarized and even potentially violent moment. Managing those tensions isn’t just a political task, but also a moral and even a spiritual challenge, and American history suggests that moral renewal always requires leadership from faith communities.
Catholicism is in a unique position to play such a role, since it’s the only major faith group in America that isn’t clearly aligned with one party or the other. White Evangelicals and Pentecostals are largely Republican, while Jews, African-American Christians, and mainline Protestants are heavily Democratic.
Catholicism, however, contains within itself Republicans and Democrats in roughly equal numbers. That makes Catholics a critical swing vote, of course, but it also affords the Church the sociological capacity of bringing people together who otherwise might not cross paths in any other venue, gently nudging them toward seeing the good in one another.
In other words, the Church has the opportunity to be a great school of friendship, at a time when forging friendships across ideological lines seems to be a dying art. That would be a “Catholic moment” in American life indeed, one potentially with ramifications well beyond this election cycle.
