Pope Francis continues to startle and confound American observers. There was his famous "Who I am to judge" comment when asked about a gay priest. There was his encyclical Ladudato Si, that placed climate change and the environment as central concerns for Catholics.
Last week, Pope Francis apparently waded into the muck and mire of American politics stating, "A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian." Now Pope Francis has also called for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty -- a call that has a rather discordant resonance especially given recent retrospectives on the life and work of the late Antonin Scalia, the most prominent Catholic in Supreme Court history and an ardent death penalty supporter.
The question is whether a new Catholic political orthodoxy is emerging -- one that is more comfortable for Democrats than Republicans.
In a word, I would say "no."
But that's not to day that there's nothing new or important going on when it comes to Catholics, politics and the ever surprising pontificate of Pope Francis: American Catholicism may very well be entering the global Catholic mainstream.
It's true that many Catholic liberals, many of whom happen to be Democrats, have been enjoying a kind of schadenfreude when it comes to the situation confronting their conservative Catholic sisters and brothers. "The shoe is on the other foot now," some liberal Catholics say, after years of being harangued for disagreeing with the theological and policy stances of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Instead of delivering lectures about Catholic "docility" and obedience, some Catholic conservatives are parsing Papal statements -- their relevance, authority, and claims -- in a much more nuanced way that would seem familiar to Catholic liberals who struggled with papal pronouncements in prior decades. Of course, there is also full-throated criticism of Pope Francis, even among bishops, that would have been denounced as positively unseemly if the target had been John Paul II or Benedict XVI.
Catholics -- both clergy and laity -- who ignore climate change and our environmental responsibilities, dismiss the ethical problems with the death penalty and its uneven application, and fail to acknowledge a preferential option for the poor, are all being challenged by Pope Francis. And this challenge may very well be more complex and troubling for those who place themselves right of center on the political spectrum. That much certainly seems to be true.
But it's not as though American Catholic liberals are not subject to equally deep and troubling challenges. Pope Francis has certainly not softened Catholic teachings on abortion, although he does wish to bring a renewed experience of mercy to those impacted by abortion. While Pope Francis has seemed to relax rules and regulations regarding contraceptive use in the face of the Zika virus, he is doing nothing that departs from the papal precedent set Pope Paul VI when he addressed the dangers facing nuns in the Congo. And as far as contraception is concerned, Pope Francis has seemed to speak and act in a way that supported lawsuits against the HHE mandate. Pope Francis himself has also been accused of "building walls of his own" when it comes to LGBT issues.
With regard to his personal religiosity, Francis has a strong devotion to Mary, deep respect for popular Catholic religiosity, and goes to confession regularly -- there's nothing particularly radical in that, unless one envisions a Catholicism that sheds much of its religious distinctiveness because it simply seems outdated or unfashionable.
The Catholicism that Pope Francis articulates and embodies does not conform to the stereotypical categories of "conservative" and "liberal" in an American sense. Selectively listening to the Pope's words to fit a preconceived political program is just as bad as dismissing him entirely. If Pope Francis is changing the emphasis of issues for American Catholics, that's only because we American Catholics -- both conservative and liberal -- have not been listening carefully enough.
In the constant back and forth over how to characterize Pope Francis's significance for American Catholicism, I think what comes through most strongly is how peculiar and idiosyncratic American Catholicism actually is.
I was in the Philippines a month ago and a professor at a highly-regarded Catholic university in Manila mentioned to me that America didn't seem to be very good on the "culture of life": which meant issues ranging from abortion to the death penalty onto immigration and the needs of the poor. For many Catholics outside of an American context, these issues naturally go together. If they're put together in an American context, everyone gets uncomfortable.
And I do think Pope Francis wants to make us American Catholic feel this discomfort. If there is a new orthodoxy for American Catholics under his pontificate, it means being both Catholic, with a capital "C," and catholic, with a lower case "c" -- that is recognizing a broader context for Catholic belief and practice beyond our own immediate concerns and experiences.