HBO Presents: The Lib Pope
C'mon guys.
If you're Massimo Faggioli, the Villanova professor named after a now-discontinued novelty product from Philip Morris Italy, you get a lot of phone calls from outlets like Religion News Service or National Catholic Reporter asking for your thoughts on the American church's goings-on, and you get to kick in like eight different pull quotes a week depending on what's going on. At some point, after so many phone calls, your brain starts feeling like it's turning to soup and you run out of things to say and you just end up blurting out something stupid. That, I assume, is what happened this week when RNS reported on Cardinal Robert McElroy's appointment as the new archbishop of Washington, and got Faggioli's comment that “there is no doubt that with this choice Pope Francis wants to give voice to the resistance against Trump.”
Look, I don't really have anything against Faggioli, I've never met the guy and we probably agree on a lot of things, and he pays more attention to these sorts of stories than I do, but I promise you that I'm able to provide more useful analysis of Pope Francis’ selection than Faggioli did when I tell you: no he does not. The Pope does not care about giving voice to “the resistance against Trump”, and to say that “there is no doubt” about this is ridiculous on its face. It suggests that McElroy - a guy who was clearly being set up for a big promotion given his recent elevation to Cardinal and work on the Synod - being named to Washington - an archdiocese that was due for a new bishop since their current bishop is two years past retirement age - was a shrewd papal chess move that Francis made after the results of the presidential election became clear. If Harris had won the presidential election, was Pope Francis going to tag Joseph Strickland back in to make sure DC was properly balanced out? These things take time to do! They didn't slap it together! And also, the Vatican doesn't care who the President is!
I mean, the Vatican cares who the President is to the extent that it affects the issues that the Vatican cares about, but the Vatican's approach to those issues doesn't really change based on who the President is, especially if there's not a lot of daylight between presidential candidates on these issues. It's obvious from Francis’ remarks and writing that he cares a great deal about the war in Gaza; well, it turns out that our two candidates had basically identical views of that conflict. Francis cares a great deal about mindless consumerism and militarism; the Democratic candidate campaigned while touting her endorsements from Mark Cuban and Dick Cheney. Francis cares a great deal about environmental degradation; neither of the candidates really brought it up during the campaign. Francis cares a great deal about caring for immigrants; here there were great differences between the two candidates in rhetoric, which were undercut by the Democratic candidate promoting a draconian border bill based on the Republican candidate's rhetoric. When asked about the candidates during campaign season, Francis basically responded with “ugh seems like you guys got a real mess on your hands”. So when Francis names a new archbishop of Washington, does it seem more likely that he's reacting specifically to Trump’s election, or that he's reacting to something much bigger that has been around, and will be around, for a much longer time than Donald Trump?
McElroy could very well be a good archbishop and public voice for the church, I honestly hope he is. I hope Francis gets to appoint more bishops like him to our country's most important and influential dioceses: New York, Chicago, and Winona-Rochester (I copied this list over from Word On Fire). I appreciate his convictions and his writings and if he is a prophetic voice for our country and church, that's wonderful. But we need prophetic leadership far beyond “hey this president is bad”, and I think both Francis and McElroy know enough to understand that. So Faggioli's analysis is bad, in the sense that any analysis is bad if it can be completely derailed by someone asking “hey what the fuck are you talking about?” This, of course, brings us to Michael Sean Winters.
I’m tapped out of witty appositional phrases, so: on Friday, NCR columnist and huge fucking idiot Michael Sean Winters published “President Biden made us Catholics proud”, and while he technically has a right to that opinion as an American citizen, I still think he should be jailed for this column. I’m not trying to be a contrarian dick here - my views on Michael Sean Winters’ opinions have been consistent for years - because yes, obviously a Biden presidency was preferable to another term of Trump (which we’re getting anyways!), and yes there were good things that happened during the Biden presidency that would not have happened under a Trump presidency, and yes I vote for the Democratic candidate every time even though I live in a state where that doesn’t really matter. Regardless, Winters’ column has some glaring omissions that we will look at in a minute (you have already correctly guessed what they are), but there are also just straight-up baffling choices here presented as statements of fact:
“Biden's largest political success was the banishment of neoliberalism from the Democratic Party. Trump slayed the political cachet of neoliberalism in the Republican Party (while maintaining the kind of pro-corporate policies that neoliberalism enshrined) and Biden did so for the Democrats. As David Leonhardt noted in The New York Times, "the Biden shift on economic policy remains virtually a consensus within the Democratic Party." The easy acceptance of neoliberal orthodoxy as a necessary consequence of globalization is dead.”
If you can remember events from a relatively short time ago, you remember that Biden ran in the 2020 Democratic primary as the candidate who would defend free-market neoliberalism from the other leading primary candidate, Bernie Sanders. He was the guy who asked for votes from the people who didn’t want to touch neoliberalism. In fact, back in 2020, you didn’t trust Biden to do enough to “banish” neoliberalism and in fact told progressive Catholics to vote for Sanders in 2020 - it’s very easy to find your old columns! - because you thought it would put additional pressure on Biden to take policy positions that you didn’t trust him to take. You even wrote, assessing the risk of Biden’s candidacy in 2020:
“And, on top of that, there is his record, so similar to that of Hillary Clinton: voting for the North American Free Trade Agreement, to admit China into the World Trade Organization, the Iraq War, and supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Can anyone point me to an instance in Biden's long career that gives confidence he might stand up to corporate interests? He has refused to embrace one of the most popular proposals to come out of the Democratic nominating contest, a wealth tax, despite the fact that it polls well among Independents and Republicans as well as Democrats.”
Now, to be fair, there were actually some good policies made on behalf of the working class under a Biden presidency, mostly through enforcement agencies like the FTC and NLRB. But those by themselves are not enough to “banish neoliberalism” from a party that couldn’t convince its own senators to pass a minimum wage hike or paid family leave policy1; it bears mentioning that all of those black marks on Biden’s record that Winters pointed out also apply to most senior members of the Democratic party.
Hey, speaking of “senior”, there’s actually another really interesting passage in that old Winters column where he endorsed Sanders in the primary: “The Biden candidacy is too risky. Period…The fact that Biden has aged so remarkably since he left the vice president's residence four years ago is understandable, but also undeniable.” That’s Winters in spring of 2020. You’re never gonna believe this, but five years later, Winters’ 2025 retrospective of the Biden presidency makes no mention of Biden’s diminished capacity and advanced age which has been reported on extensively and which was so bad that the guy had to stop running for President. There is no mention that age issues ever came up during Biden’s presidency or second campaign; it was as though, like George H.W. Bush, he had achieved all of his goals in his first term and just felt that there would be no need for a second, after about eighteen months of campaigning. We, instead, get this paragraph, where Winters probably shouldn’t have used the word “cultic” because it may open him up to uncomfortable questions about why he’s written such a glowing review of Biden:
“The thing I most admired about Biden's Catholicism these past four years was not his embrace of Catholic social ethics. It was his observance of our cultic ethic. Biden always carries a rosary in his pocket. He never missed Mass. The White House press pool would issue the reports: "POTUS entered St. Edmond's church at 4:01" when he was at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, or "POTUS departed Holy Trinity church at 9:57" when he was in Washington. When there was no such notice from the press pool, you knew a priest had gone to the White House to say Mass for the first family. It is a comforting and very Catholic fact that the most powerful person on earth said every week, "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and I shall be healed."”
You can say the words, but if you’re cancelling policy meetings because you’re having you have “good days and bad days”, the words’ ability to guide you through the tough moral decisions of the presidency is compromised, as well as their ability to help you actually show up to the meetings in which those decisions are made. When it comes to tough moral decisions, just to state something screechingly obvious that you’ve already guessed: there is no mention of the war in Gaza in Winters’ piece. The major global political conflict that defined the final year of Biden’s term, the thing that billions of American dollars went to fund at Biden’s direction, the thing the Pope kept denouncing as a moral atrocity, none of that made it in to Winters’ evaluation of the Biden presidency. The most charitable way for me to read Winters’ throwaway sentence “In his efforts to address climate change and his tireless efforts to bring peace in the Mideast, Biden aligned American government policy with the hopes of Pope Francis” is as desperate willful ignorance; the least charitable reading is as mockery of people who care about America funding a genocide. You don’t just get a pass on that because you’re holding a rosary at the same time! Remember how Trump gassed protestors while holding a Bible, we thought that was bad! “Yes, he did questionable, perhaps even horrible things while holding a doodad but it was our doodad” no! It is your literal job to be better at writing and thinking than this! Also, I would have preferred that Biden not be holding a rosary as he did some of this stuff!
Winters concludes his column by sharing a story about JFK, opening with “There is an apparently apocryphal story which, like most such stories, should be true whether it is or not.” I don’t understand what that is. Like, before I even get to the story. I don’t understand what that sentence is saying. This may be true but it may not be true as many things may or may not be true but it should be true whether it’s true or not like many other true-or-not-true things. Aren’t you glad we get this man’s brilliant mind to dissect the brilliant mind of our outgoing president? Any analysis is bad if it can be completely derailed by someone asking “hey what the fuck are you talking about?”, which is what I am left saying as Winters concludes that “Our nation is the better for his presidency. His presidency was better because of his Catholicism. On the whole, he did us Catholics proud.”
How do we fix this? Well, part of the solution is obvious: news outlets should stop calling Massimo Faggioli for pull quotes and should start calling me instead. Even if I’m not as knowledgeable as Faggioli on church history and ecclesiology, I am much funnier and more succinct. Imagine how much you could jazz up a piece by including “Robert Barron’s aggressive approach to apologetics is not always well-received by Catholics. ‘He looks like a Jell-O mold of the Buddah if the Buddah had gotten into some sort of terrible accident,’ added Tony Ginocchio, Junior Associate Editor of the influential Grift of the Holy Spirit blog.”
We - meaning “you idiots who work in Catholic media”, not “me” - also need to focus a little less on viewing everything in our faith through the lens of presidential politics. The people that our faith demands we encounter and revere are people that exist regardless of who the president is: the immigrants, the sick, the imprisoned, the unhoused, the hungry, the disabled, none of whom were treated particularly well by the outgoing administration, and it doesn’t look good for the incoming administration. We’ve got plenty of work to do and it is hard work. I don’t think we have very many public figures in Catholicism that get this, so I can’t always tell you who to look to for guidance and consolation to do that work. But I’ve got a pretty good handle on who we can ignore.
And also, you know, ran a 2024 campaign with Uber executive Tony West as a key advisor.