American Catholics supportive of the Trump administration are, at the moment, in a spot. The back-and-forth between the American president and the American pontiff has raised questions, some easy, some hard. An easy one is whether a Catholic ought to object to the way our president has spoken about our pope. We should. This is true even if you agree with my argument that Pope Leo made his own rhetorical missteps. Catholics, in the end, need to side with their pope when he is so treated by any politician.
A harder question is whether this spat compels American Catholics of the First Things variety to choose between the faith and their politics. Sohrab Ahmari has made a vigorous case that it does.
“Leo can’t force a rethink of the Iran War in Washington. But he has already sounded the death knell for Catholic conservatism of the kind which flourished in the late 20th century and, especially, the post-9/11 years; and which still guides a narrow but influential corridor of Right-wing Catholic punditry and the donors who maintain it. It’s up to American Catholics to figure out how to replace the old compromise.”
Ahmari is a keen observer of the American scene, but I view his pronouncement of the death of what he calls the “old compromise” to be premature. Much of his argument rests on whether he is right to describe George Weigel’s support of the 2003 Iraq War or Michael Novak’s favoring of democratic capitalism as little more than “highbrow Catholic justifications for Republican foreign and domestic policy.” Patrick T. Brown has made a good case that Ahmari has caricatured their actual arguments. Both men were capable of standing against certain trends on the political right on the basis of their Catholic convictions. That said, Ahmari is surely onto something. The Leo/Trump dispute provides an occasion for serious reflection on the part of Catholics who lean right. Here, I can aspire to little more than removing some of the debris cluttering the path forward.
Let me begin with the current president. The problem with saying anything about Trump, apart from total devotion or total disgust, is that he never stands still long enough for sustained analysis. To take the present case, one day he is blasting Leo XIV in a crude Social Truth Post and sending images of himself as a Jesus-like healer. A few days later he is saying that he does not mind the pope criticizing him, but wishes he would understand the dangers a nuclear-armed Iran would present to the safety and stability of the world. The same thing goes for Trump’s war-talk. His threat to end “a great civilization” was roundly and justly condemned, including in First Things. It is also true, however, that the same man who uttered such words is obviously relieved to report that his aims might be achieved without further violence. Thus we have the oddity that the critics who depict him as a blood-thirsty tyrant also mock him for “always chickening out.” That particular circle cannot be squared. Ross Douthat describes this aspect of Trump’s personality as follows:
“Did he say this week that he’ll accept nothing but ‘unconditional surrender’? Check again next week; he might say something else. Is he toying with the idea of sending ground troops into Iran? Allegedly, but he might have the opposite view if the next person who talks to him emphasizes the word ‘quagmire.’ Did his secretary of state call the Iranian leadership ‘religious fanatic lunatics’? Sure, but if declaring victory requires making a deal with a religious fanatic lunatic, Trump will be OK with that.”
In other words, while conservative Catholics should join liberals in condemning Trump when he deserves it, they also know that he often softens or changes his position just as the condemnations begin to fly. National Review’s Dan McLaughlin has noticed the same thing.
I also need to make clear what I mean by “supportive” with respect to Trump. According to numerous polls, Trump won the Catholic vote by a significant margin. Even now, while fighting both an unpopular war and a new pope, Trump retains a favorable rating among 58 percent of Catholics who attend mass weekly. Other polls show a recent decline among Catholics, but these do not separate out regular mass-goers. Whatever the precise numbers, it would not surprise me that many active Catholics feel about Trump as I do. They favor some of his policies while disliking others. They find his unpresidential behavior maddening. In the end, however, they judge Trump in light of the available alternative. Our representative democracy is a two-party system, and its politics are about making a choice between whomever the major parties put up for election.
Preference, of course, is different from slavish devotion. Catholics, whether conservative or progressive, must be willing to depart from their favored politician or party when needed. The teachings of the Church relevant to politics are simply too complex to be identical with any party’s platform. Moreover, the vagaries of democracy often necessitate compromises to which Catholics must object. In my own journeys amongst Republican-leaning Catholics, I encountered few who put partisan loyalty above the convictions of faith.
When considering the point at issue between Pope Leo XIV and President Trump—the Iran War—the best a Catholic can do is try to come to an honest assessment independent of partisan considerations. That is no simple task. Anyone familiar with Catholic just war thinking knows that it is difficult to apply. Of course, there are clear-cut cases when a stronger country invades a weaker country for no other stated reason than territorial expansion or seizure of valuable assets. Most conflicts, however, allow for varying interpretations of the criteria of 1) legitimate authority, 2) just cause, 3) right intention, 4) likelihood of success, 5) proportionality of ends, and 6) whether war is a last resort. Everyone might agree that a just war must fulfill each of these, but that is only a small part of the work in assessing any particular conflict. With respect to the decision to attack Iran, smart and well-intentioned Catholics can disagree, even if otherwise politically aligned.
