Voices of Catholic Political Conscience, Past and Present

While we on this website do not tell people how to vote, putting forth information to educate the electorate is perfectly within our purview here at Catholicism.org. If, as Aristotle thought, politics is part of the philosophical discipline of ethics, then we can and should discuss matters pertaining to the governance of society in terms of God’s unchanging Moral Law.

In 1992, Patrick J. Buchanan delivered his famous “Culture War” speech at the Republican National Convention. To be sure, that speech was controversial even to people in that room on that day. However, there is no way on God’s green earth that such a speech could be delivered today, not in that same forum.

Here is Buchanan’s speech, a masterpiece of modern political rhetoric:

Four years after PJB’s speech, Judge Robert H. Bork would publish Slouching Towards Gomorrah, a book that blamed the worsening moral decadence of American society on the New Left and their championing of certain vices. (At the time he wrote the book, Bork was not a Catholic, but was famously married to one. He converted to Catholicism in 2003, Deo Gratias, nine years before his death.) Many of those things toward which Bork lamented America was “slouching” — including that sin crying to heaven for vengeance evoked the book’s title — are a part of the big-tent “conservatism” currently embraced and promoted by the party to which both Bork and Buchanan were affiliated.

To put it bluntly, the thirty-two years intervening from Buchanan’s speech and the twenty-eight since the publication of Bork’s book have witnessed the acceptance by the “conservative” mainstream of sodomy, abortion, and other forms of deep moral depravity. (I fear that the Republicans were always OK with usury, itself morally depraved and a font of other forms of moral turpitude.) Witness the talks from the just concluded Republican National Convention, where Lara Trump and others chose to include “gay or straight” into the categories of human diversity cast into irrelevance by the transcendent humanity of Americans that the Party of Trump embraces. We even heard a trite pious platitude of depravity, “It’s all love” — a variation on the theme of “Love is love” — echoing in the hallowed halls of Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, uttered by a porn star, no less.

To behold the moral evolution of the GOP before your very eyes is not a difficult thing thanks to modern technology. Just compare Buchanan’s speech, above, to the offerings of Lara Trump, Eric Trump, or Amber Rose. Lest I be accused of comparing apples to oranges, let me emphasize that my point is this: The open embrace of moral depravity on the part of those three speakers is diametrically opposed to Buchanan’s message, and that message is now officially unwelcome at the RNC. (Significantly, J.D. Vance seems to have felt obliged to run interference for the party on this very point.)

Yes, I realize that Catholics do not look to political parties for moral guidance, nor should they. However, American political battles are consistently framed as moral struggles, and many self-identified conservatives, Catholics included, cast political struggles in especially religious terms. This means that children of such folk are going to pick up on the idea that the candidate of choice is, in some respect or another, a paladin of virtue. For many of the true believers in party unity, it would be wrong to be a stick-in-the-mud or a crank and drone on about unpopular moral issues that would divide the big tent and let the really evil guys win.

We cannot, on the one hand, say that we don’t expect a proper moral stance on Natural Law issues from a political party and then frame that political party in terms of moral righteousness. Yes, I understand that the principle of double effect is relevant here, but let us be differentiated, critical, unyielding on principles, and honest enough to be frank about political candidates and their clay feet. If “we the people” really have a voice in these matters, then we should certainly not shut up about the Moral Law and its demands, which cannot be dismissed for the sake of false unity and mere political expediency.

As a result of that false unity and political expediency, when the Catholic philosopher, Dr. Edward Feser, took to social media to play the part of the gadfly, in proper Socratic fashion, he was pilloried by fellow conservatives, urged to take time off, and otherwise treated as a pariah. Here are a few of his postings:

A penultimate thought: Thank God President Trump was not assassinated. I pray that, if he does become No. 47 he will realize that the God who spared him will hold him accountable to His Law, and that he will govern accordingly. I also pray that, whether he wins or loses, he will embrace not only the Moral Law but the Catholic faith so that he can save his soul. Because of his reach and influence, his conversion could have far-reaching positive effects to help us make America Catholic again.

And now I will conclude with the most radical political statement a Catholic can make: Jesus Christ is King!

Filed Under: Catholic America, Columns, Morals, Politics and Society