The Republicans in the Presidential Campaign in the US have announced the formation of a 'National Catholics for McCain Committee'. Both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democrat side have appointed Catholic advisers. It is known that while the majority of Catholics in the US had tended to be Democrats, Bush was elected thanks to a significant shift of the Catholic vote in his favour because of the position taken by the Democrat contender on abortion and bioethical issues. Can we learn anything from this interface between religion and politics?
Admittedly, Pope Benedict has been described as a eurocentric introvert, but he's likely to be careful to avoid statements that lend themselves too easily to spin by either of the two sides in the presidential contest. He has not been too wary in the past about laying himself open to political misinterpretations. Yet the degree of Americanisation that the electoral campaign underwent in Italy, even more than that in Malta, must have fully alerted him to the danger: it is not his precise academic wording that will reach the public but rather the spin the media will give it.
Probably the Pope's interventions, rather than weighing in the Democrat-Republican scales, may be more relevant to the Liberal-Conservative fracture that is still acutely felt in the US Church, especially among the Catholic chattering classes. These are now worried mainly about the Hispanics moving fast towards becoming the majority of the Catholic population in America, of which a sign is the appointment of a Cardinal for Texas.
The words of the Pope relative to the welcome due to immigrants in the US should also perhaps be taken to heart by us. But actually Pope Benedict has been most impressive so far by continuing in all contexts and in all circumstances to speak with his very personal tone of voice. He adjusts the content of what he says very little according to the audience and what one could guess to be its tastes. His constant assertion of the basics of Christianity, what has been called his 'affirmative orthodoxy', results in his bypassing even the Liberal-Conservative polemics. He has been criticised for always preaching to the Choir. In fact, he is always more interested in planting seeds rather than making waves.
Nevertheless those in Malta who watched the Pope's arrival in Washington on the Internet in real time are likely to have heard the commentary of Fr Robert Sirico. He is the President of the Acton Institute, a think-tank that represents in most people's eyes the Right-Wing faction within American Catholicism, conservative in both religious and political matters, and indeed believing and asserting that there is a logical connection between the two. Is not Pope Benedict better liked by Right-Wing than by Left-Wing Catholics?
Internet habitual users are likely to have also heard through that medium Fr Sirico's attack on what he calls the "Religious Left". Under this heading he has primarily in mind non-Catholics such as Jim Wallis, author of the best selling The Great Awakening and God's Politics, an Evangelical Clergyman who heads the Sojourners Community in a poor neighbourhood in Washington.
But he also includes such Catholics as Hans Kung and Schillebeekx, besides Guttierez and the Liberation Theologians. Their main sin, according to Sirico, is that they consider that the coming of the Kingdom of God will not be a completely sudden event at the end of time, but that its advent is being prepared in history through such social reforms as what Sirico calls "mandated redistribution of wealth" - something that he considers to be utterly wrong.
However, Pope Benedict does not bring much grist to the mill of Sirico and his allied enemies of the Welfare State, such as Michael Novak.
Admittedly, Novak and other Right-Wing colleagues of his, such as most notably Rocco Buttiglione, had managed practically to hijack the social teaching of Pope John Paul II.
They have even persuaded many people that his 1991 Encyclical Centesimus Annus was largely derived from their own writings.
This is partly because of the Pope's use of such terms as 'the ecology of liberty' that had actually been coined by Novak. Although the Encyclical is far from amounting to the rehabilitation of 'Democratic Capitalism', as Novak pretends, it moves on lines and uses language that are very different from those in the more famous encyclicals of John Paul II which are believed to owe a lot to Ratzinger's drafting.
The current Pope, unlike his predecessor, has so far shown no inclination to follow the theological justification by the Rightists of such matters as that four per cent of the US population own 40 per cent of its wealth.
Are you saying then that American Right-Wing Catholicism is likely to derive less comfort in the last analysis from Benedict than it did from John Paul?
Precisely. The subject that Karol Wojtyla taught at Lublin University before becoming a Bishop was Moral Philosophy; so his interest typically focused on the socio-political context of human action.
Joseph Ratzinger was (and at heart still is) a professor of Fundamental Theology. He was never persuaded by Rahner and the rest that its focus, at least to begin with, should be humanity, not God.
At his university lectern, his clairvoyant eyes were ever skimming beyond the sulphurous horizon of history in search of timeless Divinity.
They still are.... In this perspective Right/left cleavages simply disappear.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.