It's Hard Out Here for A Pope

Is "Cafeteria Catholicism" now serving both sides of the political aisle?

Are you in Austin, Texas? Are you willing to get to Austin, Texas, for a one-day conference about reviving marriage and helping strengthen the family? If so, register here for the Austin Institute’s conference held on the UT-Austin campus next Saturday, April 25, where I will be speaking along with Dr. Matthew Breuninger, Dr. Mark Regnerus, and Serena Sigillito. My first time visiting Austin, looking forward to it! But for now, if it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters:

• Freedom and Its Discontents: What’s an American Catholic to do?

• Get Ready for Work, Work, Work, Work, Work, Work: New data on TANF

• It’s Me, Hi: The Free Press, NOTUS, &c.

• Parting Shots

Freedom and Its Discontents

The number one rule of Family Matters is that we stick pretty close to home — our focus is American pro-family policy and, with rare exceptions, we don’t pretend to be an expert in Mesopotamian crop yields, European parenting styles, or grand strategy in the Near, Middle, or Far East. Yet that principle this week conflicts with the number one rule of writing, which is “write what you know.” And the open conflict between President Donald Trump and the first U.S.-born Pope has brought what I know — namely, being a Catholic and an American conservative, in that order — to the forefront in ways that raise fascinating questions (at least, to me!) about the relationship between faith and politics in liberal democratic society. We’ll get back to child tax credits next week, I promise.

Pope Leo XIV is far from the first Roman Pontiff to use his spiritual authority to influence events in the temporal realm, and he’s not the first Pope Leo to do so. In the year 452, the first Pope Leo (“Leo the Great”) met with the invading Attila and persuaded the Hunnic chieftain to spare Rome. He’s not even the first Pope Leo to have taken on political developments across the Atlantic — Pope Leo XIII’s 1899 apostolic letter Testem benevolentiae (“Witness to Good Will”) argued against the heresy he dubbed “Americanism,” characteristics of which included “the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, [and] the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world.” Guilty as charged, your Holiness.¹

“The Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila” (detail), Raphael, 1514, Vatican Museums. Public domain photo via Wikimedia.

It wasn’t all that long ago that there was a veritable cottage industry of American conservatives welcoming, even hagiographizing, Vatican intervention in global geopolitics when it came to Pope St. John Paul II’s clear and powerful witness against Soviet totalitarianism.² Ah, simple times. Today, immigration and war are the topics du jour, where the Church’s teaching about the dignity of the human person is less copacetic with populist impulses on the right.³ There is simply no doubt that the current chorus of Republican voices encouraging the current Bishop of Rome to “stick to sports,” theologically speaking, are clearly motivated by partisan interests. That’s nothing new; Catholic Democrats have long played similar games with Church statements and tenets. Just ask Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who was happy to virtue signal having met with the Pope as a dig at the President — but was just as happy to ignore a direct entreaty from Pope Leo XIV not to sign the state’s recent bill legalizing assisted suicide.

The political gambit from the President is very clear, seeking to use the Pope as a peacenik foil to help shore up sagging approval ratings amid an unpopular war. It’s cynical and I doubt it will be effective — the Pope does not have the intra-Church baggage his predecessor accrued by the end of his pontificate and is popularly associated with his love of the Chicago White Sox more than anything. He’s an odd choice for a villain-of-the-week, though that hasn’t stopped various voices on the right from trying.

But the dynamic also raises tough questions for conservatives who are not used to such overt conflict between Pope and President. Catholics on the right have long accused their co-adherents on the left of being “cafeteria Catholics” for picking and choosing which tenets of the Church to apply to social and political questions. Is the cafeteria now open for both political parties?

Sohrab Ahmari thinks so. His Unherd column on the affair lumps today’s defenders of the Iran War with yesteryear’s Catholic neoconservatives, who he claims “furnished highbrow Catholic justifications for Republican foreign and domestic policy; presented Catholicism as, in essence, ‘safe’ for the Right’s conception of American order; and even sought to remake Roman thought in the American image.” His charge is that Michael Novak, my EPPC colleague George Weigel, and First Things founder Fr. Richard John Neuhaus were backfilling limited-government orthodoxies with proof-texted Catholic teaching that downplayed a commitment to peace and to the poor. Ahmari writes:

“In translating the Catholic tradition for Reagan-era America, Novak rendered it perfectly inoffensive. There was nothing wrong with an individualistic system that couldn’t be fixed with more individualism, bootstrapping enterprise, and a robust “public moral culture” — a pet phrase of the Murrayites. Yet in their telling, the culture or morality was completely innocent of political-economic and other structural dynamics. They were loud about restricting abortion, as Catholic doctrine insists, but refused to notice how a ruthless, efficiency-maximizing order might come to treat the unborn (and the disabled and the elderly) as disposable. More than any other sector of elite opinion, they contributed to the development of a conservatism that would police the bedroom, but never the boardroom.”

That last sentence is a great line, but I don’t think it’s fair.⁴ What the original generation of neoconservatives were trying to do was translate the moral scaffolding of mainline Protestantism, which had already begun its inexorable decline into irrelevance, into a low-but-solid common denominator for a pluralistic America.⁵ American liberal democracy had relied on the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and other mainline denominations to form souls outside the demands and values of the market — with that disappearing, who would provide the counterbalance to the acidifying and alienating effects of capitalism run amok? At the same time, as Ross Douthat pointed out, the Catholic Church was firmly in its post-Vatican II era, seeing to update its application of moral principles for “the signs of the times,” offering fewer Latinate certainties and more felt banner aphorisms.

In that context, the work of Novak, Weigel, and Fr. Neuhaus looks less like choose-your-own-adventure Catholic theology than an attempt to translate it into the American vernacular. Would I, looking back from the onset of the post-religious right in the Year of Our Lord 2026, have counseled a more muscular public morality, and a heavier focus on using public policy to buttress the family against various economic and cultural challenges? Of course. One of my first published book reviews, now lost to the shifting sands of the internet, was an admittedly slightly snotty review of Novak’s 2015 final book, Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is (co-written with Paul Adams). I charged:

“One wouldn’t expect Novak and Adams to champion Francis’ anti-capitalism tendencies. But the book draws so heavily from the context of a Polish Pope writing as part of a global struggle against communism that it comes across — wittingly or no — as the in-house counsel for those who would argue vox commercii, vox Dei.

“The authors are not arguing for pure capitalism, and the book is a serious effort to resurrect a term [social justice] that has been inflated beyond any real meaning. But it is weakened by their attempt to downplay the real tensions between social and economic strains of conservatism. Ultimately, their new definition could be used to cover unjust corporate or social practices under a cloak of personal virtue.”

But to re-read the documents of the 1980s is to look back at a time when most thinkers presumed America’s higher baseline of religiosity would stay a permanent feature, not least because the Soviet Union provided a common enemy for business and religious conservatives to unite against. In his 1991 book, Freedom and Its Discontents, Weigel himself sketches out an agenda for American Catholic intellectualism that hardly sounds like the parody of market-first libertarianism he is accused of.

“We require a new reading of the contemporary American cultural situation, ahead of the standard left/right barricades...[this] new liberalism would reappropriate elements of the classic Thomistic moral tradition in conversation with what we might call the neo-neo-Thomistic proposals made by [Alasdair] MacIntyre...and Michael Novak’s analysis of the American ‘communitarian individual’...It would seek an ongoing conversation with the younger ‘communitarian liberals,’ like Harvard’s Michael Sandel, in their efforts to define American public life as something other than life in a ‘republic of procedures’ in which ‘rights’ are reduced to juridical ‘trumps.’ Concurrently, it would engage (rather than ignore or mock) the critique of post-war liberalism mounted by such Ur-conservatives by Russell Kirk…It would say of America, in the wonderful formulation of William Lee Miller, ‘Of thee, nevertheless, I sing.’”⁶

That is far from baptizing Hayek by way of Ayn Rand and Dale Carnegie. It’s a vision of taking the bounds and limitations of liberal society seriously, and seeking out interlocutors who might find ways of reconstructing a shared moral framework in a rapidly pluralizing society. You can ding the project for being unsuccessful — religious conservatives were always a junior member on the right, particularly once the Russian menace disintegrated and the three-legged stool began to wobble, and we remain so today. We may blame Novak-era Catholic intellectuals for perhaps being too blithe towards the fact that capitalism can undermine itself. But accusing them of “habituat[ing] yet another generation of conservative Catholics to bend their faith to GOP imperatives” is an overreach.

If anything, Weigel himself has been a more consistent critic of the man who launched the bombing of Iran than anyone on the post-liberal right, including Ahmari. I challenge anyone to read Weigel’s column for The Washington Post as a blind defense of this White House’s foreign adventurism. And it was only in October 2022, that Ahmari hosted a conference advocating for a more post-liberal approach to politics; the next year he told Yascha Mounk it was “fair to characterize” his politics as “post-liberal.” So it feels misguided to blame the previous generation of Catholic neoconservatives for the fact that one of the attendees at that 2022 conference recently made headlines for saying the Vatican needed to “stick to matters of morality” and informing the successor of St. Peter that “it’s very, very important for [him] to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” After all, it is the cadre of thinkers with whom the Vice President has most closely aligned himself who have most explicitly positioned themselves as wanting to move past the “dead consensus” and overturn the legacy of the Catholic neocons.

For another thing, this argument minimizes the real wins of the strategic alliances of the Reagan-Wojtyla era. Prudential questions about environmental regulation and corporate taxation, while they clearly bear on the common good, simply do not rise to the same level in a Catholic framework as issues that directly touch on human dignity, like abortion or assisted suicide. It ignores that the Catholic left was itself being wiped out as a political force; Commonweal Catholicism followed the same path to irrelevance as the Protestant mainline,⁷ sped on by the progressive insistence on purity tests on abortion which made the position of pro-life Democrats like John J. DiIulio, Jr., and Robert Casey, Sr., untenable. This charge also underweights the impact of the clerical sex abuse scandal, which rendered the Church’s public pronouncements dead letter to many secular ears, and some Catholic ones as well.

And, while not speaking ill of the dead, it seems inarguable that the true break between American Catholics and the ultramontanism Ahmari favors did not stem primarily from Iraq. Instead, it came in waves — first, progressives dissented loudly (and many mainstream Catholics dissented quietly) from Humanae Vitae’s teaching on birth control and the value of human life. Decades later, conservatives had their own falling-out with Rome, thanks to their undeniably rocky relationship with Pope Francis. American conservatives were not wrong to feel that the late Pope did not particularly care for them, and the rupture between shepherd and flock that the White House is trying to currently exploit wouldn’t be as vulnerable if not for the rupture between the Argentinean Pope and his American sons (and a few daughters.)

Perhaps none of this history can help Catholics today discern the right way to engage with politics. We can start, at the very least, by not overcorrecting in the other direction. We have an example of what this looks like from the progressive interpreter of Vatican news and former Democratic Congressional candidate Christopher Hale, who publishes the Substack Letters from Leo — the American Pope & US Politics. On Twitter, he has suggested with “dogmatic certainty” (!) at least six times and counting that “God has raised up a pope from the Americas to help defeat MAGA authoritarianism.” Any time you are expressing the same kind of confidence in the workings of the Almighty as a second-string cornerback who tells the post-game reporter that God helped his team pull out the victory today, you’re setting yourself up for the fall. (Or…The Fall?)

Theologians can debate how thickly Pope Leo XIV has layered on his near-pacifist pleas for peace, or whether a preemptive war with modern-day technology amid densely-populated urban centers could ever theoretically be justified — I will stake no claim on that matter. I am, however, more convinced that whatever the theoretical defense of just war in the abstract, the rollout and execution of this intervention falls short of that standard, and those who are trying to inflate the Pope into a political punching bag to prop up its domestic popularity should think long and hard about what they are doing.

The role of religion in the life of any believer, Catholic or not, should be allowing it to prick your conscience, not assuage it. No one party can claim a monopoly on the Church’s distinctive vision for human flourishing and anthropology of the human person, and if there is a one-to-one match with your religious tenets and your preferred political party, your understanding of either institution is probably lacking. The post-liberals and America Firsters who are trying to marginalize the Pope’s prayers for peace are taking a political gamble that may well backfire — but even if that gamble doesn’t fail, they risk taking an even bigger spiritual one that almost certainly will.

Get Ready for Work, Work, Work, Work, Work, Work

And now for something closer back to our normal wheelhouse. HHS’ Administration for Children and Families’ recent update on state work requirements in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program offers an interesting glimpse into program design and accountability metrics gone right and wrong.

Work requirements in TANF were established in the mid-1990s welfare reform era, and they’ve always been subject to a little bit of gamesmanship. Technically, states are supposed to ensure that 50% of all families on TANF, and 90% of two-parent TANF families, meet the program’s work requirement. If you have reduced your caseload on the program since the baseline year (FY 2005), a state gets to reduce its target for the work participation rate accordingly (WPR) — in some cases, all the way down to 0.

What’s also interesting is that there’s not much of a partisan valence to who is doing a better job encouraging workforce participation, because the case reduction credits re-jigger who is aiming for what target — the top and bottom of the rankings are a mixture of both red and blue states.

Office of Family Assistance director David Swegle redesigned the letters that recently went out to state offices to more comprehensively break out the all families work participation versus two-parent families and other categories. TANF is suffering from not-so-benign neglect as Congress shows little interest in revisiting what is and isn’t working. My own belief is that the policy conditions that held in 2005 are sufficiently different than the facts on the ground in 2026 that at the very least an updating of the benchmark would seem to be in order; if not, a man can dream, a fuller rethinking of what purpose TANF should serve.

It’s Me, Hi

For The Free Press, I offer a more precise (and concise) version of the argument previewed for Family Matters readers last week — blaming the “girl boss” for declining fertility misunderstands the cultural and economic dynamics at play, and leads conversations about how to address declining fertility down the wrong track.

For the morning newsletter published by NOTUS (soon to be renamed “The Star”), I talked about the political dynamics of the Trump-Leo contretemps:

“The first American pope is pretty popular and the war in Iran is pretty unpopular,” Brown said. “Trying to polarize the former to make the latter more popular doesn’t seem likely to work.”

Elsewhere: Alan J. Hawkins and Connie Huber quote my reminder to be humble about the impact of public policy interventions on marriage scripts in their report for the Institute for Family Studies…My Commonplace piece on Paul Ehrlich’s legacy was highlighted in City Journal’s newsletter…Ivana Greco cited my writing in an essay exploring why working-class men are not, well, working (at least as much as they used to) in a piece for the Daily Wire…And Elizabeth Grace Matthew cited my recent Dispatch piece in her own piece there on the 25th anniversary of “Bridget Jones’ Diary.”

Parting Shots

• My EPPC colleague Erika Bachiochi spoke to members of the U.S. Religious Liberty Commission earlier this week on the relationship between religious liberty and women’s rights. Her remarks can be found on her Substack (The Duty of the Moment)

• My EPPC colleague Stanley Kurtz offers a straightforward approach to increasing conservative influence on education policy: “The most powerful steps we could take to wrest public schools from the hands of the woke would be for states to move school board elections “on-cycle” (to federal Election Day) and allow political parties to nominate the candidates.” (National Review)

• My EPPC colleague Francis X. Maier reviews my fellow EPPC colleague Carl Trueman’s new book “The Desecration of Man,” calling it “serious scholarship, delivered in an appealing way…[about] the impact on our humanity of an intensely materialist culture (Public Discourse)

• Idrees Kahloon writes about the generational divide in politics, and how the unbalanced economic and political power of the Boomers is turning “respect for our elders” into “resentment.” (The Atlantic). Carmel Richardson hits similar notes in her piece for First Things.

• The South Carolina state legislature is currently debating a bill that would tighten the state’s abortion law and introduce penalties for women who obtain an abortion of up to two years in jail. They should do the former and not the latter.

• Pro-life leaders are hoping a second reconciliation bill will extend the federal ban on funding for Planned Parenthood. They face an uphill fight. (NOTUS)

• Terry Schilling writes about the need for the administration to focus on policies that will enable more young people to form families and buy a house (Fox News)

• A new Justice Department investigation reveals the lengths to which the Biden administration went to investigate and harass pro-life activists.

• Isaac Arnsdorf reports that the President’s recent comments that “We’re a big country, we have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.” are sapping some momentum from child care efforts (The Washington Post)

• U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin is introducing a bill that would require major sports leagues to offer a free local option for nationally-televised games behind a paywall, and ensuring that subscription packages like MLB.TV and NFL Sunday Ticket have access to games that would otherwise be blacked out nationally. Congress needs to rein in sports leagues soaking fans for every dollar, and this bill is a good start to that conversation. (The Athletic)

• There is often lots of lip service paid to finding community and building a village and all the rest in the modern era, but this is one of the most practical posts on the subject I’ve come across in a while, from Chloe Sladden and Lindsay Meisel:

  The Secret to Better Weekends with Kids

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1. For the record, Pope Leo XIII’s condemnation of Americanism was less about enforcing clerical authority than responding to the work of a theologian, Fr. Isaac Hecker, whose work was being read as encouraging a Protestant spirit of acclimation and acculturation among American Catholics. The letter stressed that “the rule of life laid down for Catholics is not of such a nature that it cannot accommodate itself to the exigencies of various times and places” and stressing the difference “between the Church, which is a divine society, and all other social human organizations which depend simply on free will and choice of men.”

2. Interestingly, beyond the intangible benefits of his moral witness and the spiritual benefits of Pope John Paul II’s visits to various nations, there is suggestive evidence published in the Economic Journal last year by European economist Alexander Popov that his visits led to greater economic development in countries he visited, suggesting he helped put countries “on the map.” (working paper version)

3. If I could offer one piece of armchair quarterbacking for all the U.S. bishops reading this newsletter — many Catholics don’t seem to know that the Church does not call for open borders, or that there is plenty in Church teaching and advocacy that stresses the need for humane and orderly enforcement of immigration processes. It may not be intentional, but being seen as swallowing the whistle on those principles while foregrounding other concerns about migration is a little bit of an own goal that plays into a framework of conflict that could be assuaged by a little more emphasis on both the just and orderly management of border crossings as well as humane treatment for legal and illegal aliens.

4. To be fair — I am hopelessly biased; the think tank that I call home, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was founded 50 years ago explicitly as a result of that project (focused initially on foreign policy) and we’re proud to carry on that legacy.

5. I owe this interpretation heavily to Joseph Bottum’s recounting, as in his remarks to an AEI conference two years ago.

6. This is a heavily abridged excerpt of a section in Chapter 5, available starting on page 115 via the Internet Archive if needed.

7. To my friends who write for Commonweal: I’m sorry, but you know I’m right.