You Can Only Lose a Culture War

The Pope is doing more than signaling

I’ve hardly been alone in my conviction that Catholicism represents a crucial institution and perspective in the modern world, but the attention it’s been getting over the past week or two has caught even me by surprise. As the United States and Israel wage an aggressive, destructive, and highly unpopular war on Iran and few establishment figures can find the nerve to speak plainly about it, Pope Leo XIV and a number of prominent bishops have emerged as powerful critics not only of this conflict, but of the global system of domination that makes any such conflict possible.

“The cross is part of the mission: the sending becomes more bitter and frightening, but also more freeing and transformative,” the pope said at this year’s Chrism mass. “The imperialist occupation of the world is thus disrupted from within; the violence that until now has been the law is unmasked.” Just yesterday, at a vigil for peace at St Peter’s Basilica, Leo condemned, “the delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us,” continuing to say: “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!”

This pronouncement, and the many others like it, have been followed by the usual condemnation by anti-Catholic MAGA types (including some Catholics among them) who think the pope should stick to “religion,”—by which they presumably mean singing hymns, blessing motorcycles, and detailing precisely which sexual acts will get you condemned to eternal hellfire—and the usual praise by, well, people like me, who are thrilled to see traditional Catholic social teaching on state power expressed so clearly and compellingly. But there has been another level of response to this apparently newly politicized magisterium, which is widespread, even mainstream enthusiasm for Catholicism as a voice of political clarity in an increasingly chaotic and frightening global scene. More than once I’ve seen it expressed, largely by non- Catholics, that the Catholic Church is the only remaining moral authority in the Western world. I wouldn’t quite say that, but as someone whose upbringing in the faith was marked by a strong rightward turn among the clergy, a cataclysmic sexual abuse crisis, and an overpowering feeling of cultural and political irrelevance, to see this kind of sentiment proliferate is as baffling as it is thrilling.

What strikes me most about the Church’s current posture toward war, inequality, repression, and extraction, and the increasingly warm welcome it’s receiving, is how cleanly it cuts through the morass of culture war bullshit that has so long defined religious discourse in America, and how refreshed people seem to be in hearing it. Against and across and above the never-ending “debates” about how to fit faith into a consumer culture, or whether wokeness is a religion (or anti-religious, or whatever), what Leo has offered is an authentic, coherent, and consistent ethic that is capable of withstanding the vicissitudes of political or cultural fortune, not least because it is so evidently apart from any.

Not that this has stopped culture warriors from trying to capture this new energy, or pretend it’s not there. Bishop Robert Barron went on Ben Shapiro’s show to say that Pope Leo had been speaking “pastorally” and wasn’t referring to any war in particular. Meanwhile, in the outlet continuing to refer to itself as the Washington Post, Julia Yost has once again argued that some young people are attracted to Catholicism because it offers a rebellion against mainstream cultural liberalism, its condemnation of contraception and rigorous moral structure an attractive alternative to our age of freewheeling sexual libertinism (or arid sterility and sexual vacuousness— something like that; I forget.) She seems even to have found someone to say the coveted line, which lurks in the keyboard of these conservative rebels even if no one utters it, that becoming Catholic was a “punk rock” thing to do. OK.

In the course of this recitation—she trotted it all out a few years ago in a New York Times op-ed, as well—Yost does bury a more interesting point about Catholic iconographic devotion being more attractive in an image-saturated age, and of course there is something to the idea that the Catholic has always stood athwart secular modernity in the sorts of cultural ways she describes. But framing things this way always puts the secular in the driver’s seat, making religiosity in general and Catholicism in particular a kind of deviation from the norm, a purely reactive, even anti-social compulsion that can only ever be assimilated and neutralized, or else marginalized, but never actually engaged with. And anyway, the story is so much more complicated than that, looking much less like a conflict and much more like a dialectical evolution of an internally heterogeneous society, I can’t help wondering about the point of such analysis to begin with. In a moment when the Church is presenting itself as a bulwark against not cultural trends or habits or sins, but against the global hegemon’s flirtation with civilizational catastrophe, does it just feel safer, more manageable, to retreat to stale old lines about how the youths want tradition?

Others have been less opaque in their motivations. A Wall Street Journal opinion columnist, with all the wisdom and clarity that that job title suggests, has condemned the “muddle” of Church teaching on war, claiming that Pope Leo is deviating from just war doctrine and promoting pacifism. None of this, of course, is true. Just war doctrine is about placing severe restrictions on the legitimate use of state violence, not looking around for enough stray quotations that build up to an internal memo reading “Saint Thomas Says Invade.” I wrote about this a bit back when our government was attacking Venezuela for reasons yet unknown, and pointed out that the primary practical purpose of such theories is as a check against the hubris of a presumed mandate. Leo’s message is currently resonating with people not least because, despite long-standing attempts to make it just another cultural identity marker, Catholicism, and religion in general, still is capable of mounting such a check with the requisite legitimacy. Against all odds, when the pope speaks, people listen.