✣ Papal adviser attacks American conservatives
What happened? An article in the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica condemned conservative Catholics in the US for forming an “ecumenism of hate” with Evangelical Protestants. The article, by Fr Antonio Spadaro, a close confidant of Pope Francis, and Protestant pastor Marcelo Figueroa, said the roots of these groups’ “apocalyptic politics” were “not too far apart” from those of ISIS. La Civiltà Cattolica, while not an official Vatican paper, is reviewed by the secretariat of state before publication. What the media are saying The Guardian saw the article as a critique of the Trump administration, noting that it singled out Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist. But Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, said the piece “reads as an attack by Francis’s inner circle on all US Catholic politics to the right of Commonweal”. On Twitter he suggested it conflated the “far extremes” of ChurchMilitant.com and Calvinist pastor Rousas John Rushdoony with “mainstream pro-life and religious-liberty politics in the US”. Phil Lawler, writing at CatholicCulture.org, described the piece as an “ignorant, intemperate Vatican assault on American conservatism”. The authors, he said, “scold American conservatives for seeing world events as a struggle of good against evil, yet they clearly convey the impression that they see American conservativism as an evil influence that must be defeated”. The piece was welcomed by Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Reporter. The alliance between Catholics and Evangelicals, he said, “was always more about politics than religion”. John Allen, meanwhile, said the article’s criticism of US politics as “Manichaean” was a “time-honoured Vatican take on America”: it sees US culture as historically Calvinist, with “the tendency to think in terms of the ‘elect’ and the ‘reprobate’ ”. Michael Voris, founder of ChurchMilitant.com, called Fr Spadaro a hypocrite, saying he advanced a left-wing agenda in the name of the Church just as he accused Church Militant of “using theology” to advance a right-wing one.
