The 2004 campaign was marked by unprecedented attention to the Catholic vote, and by equally unprecedented attention to the relationship between Catholic politicians and their bishops. In the election’s aftermath, it is clear that public interest in “values” and in “religion and politics” will remain intense, and the politics of American Catholicism---its internal relationships and external engagement---will be at the center of that discussion.

In recent years Catholics have become steadily more politically independent, and more politically divided. The percentage of Catholic identifying as democrats has declined by 30% since 1960. Yet the basic patterns of Catholic social thought and action have remained fairly consistent. At least since the 1890s Catholics and their bishops have usually been progressive on economic issues, conservative on cultural issues and divided on foreign policy. Similarly they have always had to combine affirmative participation in the politics of a democratic and religiously pluralist society (what I have called the republican style) with promotion of their own distinctive interests, including moral interests, (the immigrant or interest group style). And in recent years Catholics occasionally felt drawn to act on the basis of principles of faith and morality that they regard as essential (the evangelical style). The republican approach requires emphasis on shared responsibility as American citizens. The interest group model, grounded in the immigrant, working class experience, also can serve as a form of identity politics, allowing civic action which is clearly Catholic, clarifying boundaries as it seeks power and respect in the public square. The evangelical style, a Catholic version of the “social gospel”, takes a stand on issues regarded as “fundamental” and requires a discipleship that places Christian commitments beyond the claims of citizenship and group self-interest.

In my book Public Catholicism I attempted to locate these “styles” in the social history of American Catholics. The Republican approach is evident as early as John and Charles Carroll, and it found its home in the aspiring Catholic middle class of the twentieth century. Identity, interest group politics found its sources in the experience of urban, ethnic, working class Catholics who had to organize and fight for a place at the table. It also reflected the concrete needs of the institutional church, with its schools, hospitals and social service agencies. Its staying power is associated with persistent bottom up community building and renewed concerns about the unity and integrity of the community of faith. It also remains strong because the church needs to assert its interests, as in conscience clauses for hospitals and a variety of forms of cooperation between government agencies and Catholic institutions. The evangelical style, involving a direct move from religious judgment to political prescription, is the sharp end of identity politics, demanding discipleship, devaluing citizenship, and practicing, at least in language, what Max Weber called a “politics of ultimate ends.”

The boundaries between these approaches are permeable, and almost every issue involves the claims of each. The tension between citizenship, self-help and discipleship, between shared responsibility, interest group, specifically Catholic concerns, and the challenge of Gospel mandates has long shaped the history of the American Catholic subculture. In recent years, as the subculture has fragmented, there has been a decline of Catholic Americanism, which weakens the republican style, a blurring of Catholic identity, which inspires counter-cultural impulses and an emphasis on Catholic integrity, and a continuing Americanization of the Catholic population, which leads inexorably toward evangelical styles of piety and politics.

The last chapter of Public Catholicism, modestly revised, may help clarify some of the questions involved in discussions of Catholicism, politics and law.

In 1973 the Supreme Court overturned the nation's laws limiting abortion. The decision was not a surprise, for the hierarchy had faced challenges to these laws in many states. But the broadly stated decision, with later modifications of the decisions trimester framework, opened the door to "abortion on demand" and seemed to mark yet another collapse of the national moral consensus. Here, just as the Vietnam War was ending, was an issue on which Catholic church teaching was clear, and one that now sharply separated Catholics from their government and from many of their fellow citizens.

The issue was, and remained, integrity. In sharp contrast to their statements on war and peace, where even committed bishops simply laid out the teaching and encouraged Catholics to make up their own minds, the hierarchy treated abortion as a direct violation of church teaching. They undertook a massive educational campaign to mobilize their people, and they skirted the borders of church-state separation by backing lobbying and even partisan political activities. In contrast to their stands on war and race, they also argued for awhile for a specific solution, a constitutional amendment banning abortion. The language of shared civic responsibility which had informed their treatment of issues in the sixties was now in tension with a more separatist, sometimes prophetic, language of Catholic solidarity over and against American society.

Many bishops, priests, and lay people who had supported the Vietnam War and regarded the civil rights movement with suspicion were shocked by the abortion decision. Some ignored the other issues and concentrated on abortion, attempting to use Catholic power to force politicians to respond in an approach that ref1ected the immigrant style. Others were drawn to reflect on the relationship between abortion, racism, poverty, and violence, becoming active on all these issues under the banner of “the right to life," an approach that would eventually be articulated by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin as "the seamless garment" or “the consistent ethic of life.” In either case, abortion more than any other issue ensured that the public turn the church had taken in the 1960s would not be reversed in the 1970s, as it had been in the 1920s and 1950s.

The bishops were by now heavily involved in public commentary about government policy, and the relationship between the church and public life was a matter of serious debate within the community. In 1976, attempting to enlist broad support for the social mission of the church, the bishops sponsored a program of national consultation in celebration of the bicentennial of the American Revolution. Hearings on social problems were held across the country and in October, 1976, dioceses and movements sent delegates to the first national Catholic convention, the Call to Action conference. Given the grass roots, bottom-up nature of the process, internal church issues came up for discussion along with issues of peace, social justice, abortion and political responsibility. The 1,300 delegates passed a large number of resolutions covering everything from birth control, homosexuality, and women in the church to world hunger and the arms race. The democratic process, which saw a lay person having the same vote as a bishop, and the progressive nature of the resolutions, made many members of the hierarchy nervous, so that its results were more or less shelved. A few years later the hierarchy began a slow movement away from the effort to implement collegiality and shared responsibility which the Call to Action process had embodied.

In the debates that took place during and after the Call to Action program, three distinctive approaches to the public presence of the church emerged, each rooted in the history of American Catholicism. Those approaches would shape the remarkable work of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin over the next decade as he led the bishops in developing two major pastoral letters, on nuclear weapons and on the economy, and as he attempted to place the abortion question in the larger framework of a consistent ethic of life.

First, there is the republican approach, extending from John Carroll and John England to John Courtney Murray and to Cardinal Bernardin and bishops devoted to his legacy. Acknowledging the sharp separation of the religious and political order, republican Catholics use the Vatican II formula that the church has no specific agenda of its own but seeks to defend human dignity, promote human rights and con tribute to the unity of the human family. Drawing on their church’s own long experience of poverty, its strong teaching on race, its anguish about war and nuclear weapons, and their own sense of responsibility within the worldwide church, the bishops, acting through their national episcopal conference established after Vatican II, were extraordinarily active from 1963 through 1986. They spoke out on a wide variety of foreign and domestic issues, in some cases even testifying on behalf of specific legislation. In one decade major statements dealt with welfare reform (1970), the environment (1971), correctional reform (1973), the world food crisis (1974), domestic food policy and gun control (1975), aged and the new immigrants (1976), Native Americans (1977), the handicapped (1978), and the energy crisis (1980). Because their first priority has been the poor and vulnerable, they campaigned for action to end abortion and for more humane food policies, more equitable welfare benefits, adequate housing, and budgets that give priority to those most in need. In economics they championed full employment while calling for greater collaboration between the public and private sectors, and within the private sector. These statements in the decades after Vatican II constitute a large volume, climaxing with the major pastoral letters on nuclear arms and the economy of the mid-1980s.

In presidential election years the bishops offered testimony to the platform committees of both parties and issued "political responsibility" statements to the faithful setting forth their views on a broad range of issues, listed without priority among them.

In the peace pastoral of 1983, the bishops came closest to clarifying the role of the emerging public church. In that letter they distinguished two styles of teaching that had developed since the council. One, addressed to members of the church, begins with the message of Jesus and explores the responsibility of Christians and of the church. The second, aimed at the general public, is intended to contribute to the development of the public moral consensus, to influence public opinion, and to help shape the public debate about policy by clarifying its moral dimension. Here the language is that of natural law, human dignity, and human rights. Within the church the evangelical style is dominant, in the public debate the republican style is required. The tone of the theological and pastoral discussion is radical and demanding, tending toward nonviolence and calling for a separation from those values and practices in society that contradict the gospel. The bishops again endorse conscientious objection, including selective objection; they warn military officials against committing immoral acts; and they challenge employees of defense firms to question whether their work can be reconciled with the demands of faith. The public sections of the document, in contrast, are carefully nuanced, their conclusions tentative, their language guarded, most dramatically in the "strictly conditioned moral acceptance of deterrence." As the bishops put it, their "no" to nuclear war is clear and unequivocal, but deciding on the next step becomes complex and difficult.

Thus the problem is clarified but not resolved. By arguing that nonviolence is an option for individuals, but states have the obligation to defend their citizens, the bishops further separated the two discussions. The pastoral contains no ringing call for political action and no exploration of the role of the lay Catholic in business, government, the media, or education in forwarding the work of peace making. Public dialogue and public responsibility are affirmed, but there is no scriptural or theological ground for that affirmation, no religious symbols to give meaning to public life. Meaning and spiritual energy instead concentrate on the community of disciples, the church.

Thus the republican style involves Christian bilingualism, reflective of the daily experience of an Americanized Catholic community. But in the absence of a strong affirmation of shared responsibility for the common life anchored in faith, what was once called Americanism, the evangelical pull of discipleship, and the counter-cultural claims of the church, could easily overwhelm the shared responsibilities of citizenship. In the next few decades they would.

In similar fashion, the 1986 economics pastoral letter, in its several drafts, moved from a Vatican II emphasis on work in everyday occupations as the locus for the pursuit of holiness by enhancing human dignity to a more evangelical emphasis on family and church as repositories of countercultural values standing in opposition to the dominant values of American society. Once again there were serious policy proposals and appeals for ethical behavior, but the religious language and symbols are confined largely to the church.

These developments all reflected a growing concern about the integrity of the church as Americanization of the community brought with it a new sense of individualism, voluntarism and an emphasis on religious experience that seemed to threaten the unity of the church, the identity of its people, and the integrity of its witness to faith. Not surprisingly, then, there was increasing emphasis on what makes Catholics Catholic, on their difference and distance from the larger culture whose life they shared. Republican Catholicism, in such a setting, came to seem more and more tactical, less and less an expression of providential readings of American Catholic history. Slowly, as the church turned inward, concerned about doctrine, discipline, integrity, the careful balancing of civic and ecclesial responsibilities of the republican style came to seem less compelling, soft in contrast to the more dramatic demands of left and right. The Bernardin era was over.

The second approach to the public church is an immigrant style rooted in the church's experience in the United States. The immigrant style did not disappear with the assimilation of European immigrants. In fact it has experienced a revival among newer immigrants and, most notably Hispanics. Echoes of older church battles are heard in demands for foreign language parishes, while older forms of grass roots mobilization take place around parish-based community organizations. Community organizing, that is grassroots empowerment of poor people and minorities through self-help organizations built upon neighborhood, ethnic, and racial groups or people suffering a specific form of powerlessness, is the major form of Catholic social action and reflects the legacy of Catholic experience in parishes, political machines and trade unions.

Unfortunately, there has been little theological reflection on this uniquely American form of social action or on the business unionism and bread-and-butter liberalism so strong in the American Catholic tradition. Church teaching on social issues is caught between evangelical and republican approaches, the one valuing prophetic witness, the other civic harmony and the common good, From both of those perspectives, community organizing, like self-interest politics and conf1ict oriented unionism, seem to unduly compromise either Christian or civic ideals.

There is another, more visible expression of the immigrant style, one that also continues to persist in the American church. John Hughes was the first to mobilize Catholics for public goals, and later church leaders, while professing to be aloof from politics, occasionally used their implied political influence to seek aid for parochial schools, to resist changes in legislation regarding birth control, or to insure that Catholic interests were respected in welfare and education legislation. While opposition to abortion attracted considerable non-Catholic support, the strategies used by activists often reflected this approach. In 1968 Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia seemed to favor the election of Richard Nixon because of his support for aid to private schools; four years later he and several other bishops leaned in Nixon's direction because of his professed opposition to abortion. Four years later, despite public statements that insisted on a multi-issue approach to the election, the bishops aroused widespread criticism by appearing to test candidates Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter on the basis of their view of abortion. In 1984 several bishops similarly challenged the abortion views of vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and New York Governor Mario Cuomo, both Catholics. In the states, abortion, homosexuality, and the school issue continue to arouse Catholic leaders and pose the threat of a Catholic vote. Conservative writers like James Hitchcock even contended that Catholics should develop and promote their own agenda of family and sexual issues and demand respect for these specifically Catholic concerns in the political arena. That banner was later picked up by Catholic neo-conservatives, with telling effect.

The strength of the interest group style is its recognition of how often the moral dimension of an issue is irrelevant in practice. When Americans differ over the morality of a problem, that problem cannot be resolved by government; only when a widespread national consensus was developed was civil rights legislation possible. In the absence of such a consensus, issues are resolved by the relative power that groups can exert in the legislative and administrative process and on public opinion, which shapes the parameters of institutional behavior. This was the wisdom of the Legion of Decency; recognizing that officially imposed censorship would be unacceptable, the movement mobilized Catholics and used boycotts and publicity to influence decisions within the film industry. In the economic sphere, the problem of unionization was not resolved by a moral decision of the government to recognize the right to organize, but by labor mobilization, posing a threat to labor peace, community order, and successful anti- depression policy, while taking advantage of an anti-business climate to influence public opinion in a pro-union direction.

Neither the evangelical emphasis on gospel fidelity nor the republican emphasis on civic-mindedness faces the problem of power in a pluralistic society, nor does either have an evident strategy to bring about changes in policy. The best strategy of the immigrant tradition had included a role for the laity in the secular order; at the boundaries between the immigrant and republican style was the method of the Catholic youth movement and lay activism of the 1950s. By the 1970s those movements and organizations had virtually disappeared. Traditional loyalty to the Democratic party was eroding. The Catholic peace movement, and organized work for social justice, along with the imperatives of Catholic social teaching, helped sustain the progressive tone of Bernardin era statements, but genuine mobilization for political effectiveness was shifting to the pro-life movement and to state Catholic conferences, whose agendas were more focused on the life issues and Catholic institutional interests.

The weakness of the interest group style is also self-evident. To the faithful evangelical, it seems cynical: what would Jesus have to do with organizing, conflict, and confrontation, or with hard negotiation about competing interests? To the republican, the immigrant style seems divisive and self-interested, James Madison's factions expanded beyond property to include social, cultural and moral interest groups. The labor or community organizer and the lobbyist for business seem equally abhorrent to the citizen concerned with the public good. When the church acts from this perspective, therefore, it is tempted to escalate the moral language, making the issue it promotes seem to be directly related to Christian belief, and therefore to brand opponents, at least implicitly, as anti-Catholic or anti-Christian. It also must argue that its position corresponds with the public interest, that what is good for the church is good for the community. In either case it risks appearing self-righteous and authoritarian and often appears more concerned with vindicating its own rights and commanding recognition and respect than with doing something about the issue itself. On an issue like abortion, when it becomes defined as a Catholic issue and a test for the Catholic politician, the church could easily end up in a form of identity politics, demanding loyal witness, clarifying boundaries, and mobilizing its people to symbolic expressions of their commitment and fidelity. Yet as long as pluralism exists, and the church has a set of distinct moral teachings and institutional interests, effective interest group action will always challenge the mediations of the republicans and the witness of evangelicals.

The third approach, and in many ways the most dynamic and influential, was evangelical. Catholic faith and piety, like that of other American Christians, was increasingly centered on the Scriptures and the person of Jesus. Pastoral approaches to baptism, confirmation, marriage, and adult education increasingly featured invitations to personal commitment and decision. While public debates continued to feature discussion of papal teaching and doctrinal formulas, church documents and catechetical materials were less significant than the Scriptures and works of piety that emphasized Christian discipleship. Emphasis on community and ministry increasingly redefined parish life in more voluntary terms. And, as had happened among Protestants, social responsibility came to be seen in more personal terms. The question was less "what does the church teach?" than "what would Jesus do?"

Naturally enough the demands of religious faith and church membership were seen as challenging conventional values and practices, establishing new boundaries for the church not so different from the old. Whether it was a charismatic-oriented lay person worried about drugs, sexual promiscuity, and abortion or a Catholic Worker worried about militarism and poverty, the response was similar: personal conversion, detachment from a corrupt society, and commitment to the community of faith. Touching the heart of faith and establishing the distinctive ground of the church, this approach had enormous appeal and moral force. Ts attraction was enhanced by moral numbness among all too many Americans about abortion, nuclear weapons and other serious moral challenges.

In their 1983 pastoral on nuclear weapons the bishops came close to affirming this evangelical position by emphasizing the dramatic demands of the gospel, affirming nonviolence as an option for individuals, and calling their people to discipleship in a "society increasingly estranged from Christian values," indeed, a society in which they might expect persecution and martyrdom to become normal. In their later pastoral letter on economics, they referred to the phrase popular in Latin America, "the fundamental option for the poor," as reflective of the demands of discipleship and the priorities for the church, once again set over against a society seen as materialistic and selfish.

The reason for the resurgence of this more radical, counter-cultural language lay in the compromises required by the republican and interest group approaches to serious questions. In 1961 America magazine published an article justifying the use of force to keep neighbors from invading one's fallout shelter in the event of nuclear war. Writing to peace movement leader James Forrest, Thomas Merton exclaimed: "Are we going to minimize, and fix our eyes on the lowest level of natural ethics, or are we going to be Christians and take the Gospel seriously?" John Courtney Murray's advanced version of the republican tradition had been modest; he had pointed out that natural law ethics provided no leverage for bringing about the Kingdom of God, only for establishing minimal levels of decency. Neither did it provide an emotionally compelling ground for resistance to evil. Indeed Murray himself had argued that because limited nuclear war might be necessary, it must be justified. Merton posed this question about such natural ethics, and about the gospel, in 1962. In the years that followed he and others would ask similar questions about racism, about the Vietnam War, about world and domestic poverty, and finally about the nuclear problem. In the face of such issues, the issue of abortion among them, the republican style, for all its strengths, seemed inadequate for religious leaders; even more inadequate was the self-interested group-oriented style of the immigrant church or the identity politics which sometimes took its place.

The strength of the evangelical approach is its appeal for integrity, calling the church and its members to live out their faith and thus witness to the demands, and the truths, of Christianity. Like the Catholic Worker movement it exposes the impersonal character of the state; condemns a spiritually empty pursuit of material self-interest; opens up space for spiritual and social renewal; and expands the social imagination to embrace all human persons, including society's outcasts and unfortunates, conveying a vision of a world of personal responsibility and mutual self-help.

Like all radical movements, the Catholic Worker has been marked by "a fierce adherence to a fixed set of ideas, a focus on final ends, an emphasis on changing oneself as well as changing conditions, and a willingness to endure political failure and to stand alone if necessary." It presents a necessary challenge to the concern of other movements with effectiveness. "We believe that success, as the world determines it, is not the criterion by which a movement should be judged," the Worker maintains. "We must be prepared and ready to face seeming failure. The important thing is that we adhere to there values which transcend time and for which we will be asked a personal accounting, not as to whether they succeeded. . . but as to whether we remained true to them even though the world go otherwise." Such evangelical Catholicism inspires dedication and sacrifice as evidenced in the tremendous variety of projects serving poor, homeless, and powerless people, the challenging of the arms race, and the opposition to American policy in Central America and the Third World, and the witness as well as action embodying the “consistent ethic of life.”.

The weakness of evangelical Catholicism lies in the fact that, by defining issues and responses in Christian terms, its advocates become marginalized in the larger public debate. Respected, even admired, they are not seen as offering an appropriate or reasonable way in which the American public as a whole can evaluate problems and formulate solutions. Only part of the problem is church and state. Rather, it is a problem of responsible citizenship. If social problems are at least in part problems of power, organization, and institutions, and if they almost always intersect with government policy, a pluralistic society simply cannot deal with those problems in specifically Christian terms. Nor can the individual citizen effectively participate in the public debate, persuade non-Christians or indifferent ones to the need for change, or influence the larger culture by appealing to the authority of the gospel.

Evangelical Catholicism taken alone, then, challenges the church but limits the audience, restricts the language and short-circuits responsibility, tending toward a perfectionist, even apocalyptic, sectarianism, that, by always questioning the legitimacy of secular institutions and policies, devalues the demands of citizenship and reduces the moral significance of work, politics, and wider community life.

While church teaching struggles between the evangelical approach of Dorothy Day and the republican approach of John Courtney Murray and John A. Ryan, more than a few bishops forget both when they deal with what they regard as a Catholic issue, such as abortion, further confusing the church's witness. Often disputes about these approaches appear irrelevant to the experience of most Catholics. As in the past, the level of educational and pastoral commitment to public Christianity is far less than the moral intensity of episcopal and papal messages would seem to demand. Lay Catholics remain largely unfamiliar with church teaching. Pastors are only slightly more conversant with the teaching and are often sadly lacking in the knowledge of public issues that Ryan thought so necessary. Lay Catholics tend toward an evangelical sense that personal conversion and personal morality are at the heart of the Christian community, and its fruits are measured by being as decent as one can in a hard, amoral world.

Most important, the problems posed by the lay movements of the 1950s have not been faced. The tendency of evangelical Catholicism is to devalue everyday life to the extent that it is lived amid contemporary institutions; if one does not join a radical community, renouncing ordinary secular existence, then the church tends to become a refuge, an alternative, a counterculture standing in negative judgment on the world and therefore on the worldly part of the lay person's life. In another way, the immigrant style, with its emphasis on loyalty to the Catholic church and community, does the same. The republican style tends toward another kind of separation between the church and everyday life; by looking upon Christian existence in evangelical terms and public life in terms of natural law ethics, and not religious meaning, it can contribute to the very separation of religion and life it seeks to overcome and thus plays into the hands of those who regard the intrusion of the church into public matters as inappropriate. All the styles are impaired by a separation of the church and the world, ignoring the religious dimensions of human existence outside the church, and the worldliness of the church itself. Not until the layperson, seeking to live with integrity as a Christian and responsibly as a citizen, (the Catholic member of the school board, the Catholic executive, the labor leader or social worker, rather than the Catholic Worker or the lay director of religious education) becomes the center of pastoral attention and theoretical reflection will this dichotomy, so self-serving for the church and so counterproductive for its public mission, be overcome.

Around 1973 Catholic Americanism, battered by “the sixties”, began a steady decline, to be replaced by the quest for a distinctive Catholic identity, a reinvigorated Catholic subculture that more and more Catholic believed should be in important ways counter-cultural. The disintegration of the united Catholic subculture, the disenchantment with Americanism among Catholic elites, and the growing emphasis by the Vatican, many bishops and pastoral leaders on Catholic counter-cultural distance and difference together help account for American catholic experience since the 1970s.

One suspects, on the basis of the historical record, that in the future public Catholicism will not be contained exclusively in any of these three approaches. The force of evangelical Catholicism will undoubtedly grow as the realities of voluntarism assert themselves more fully among Catholics. Republican ideals, with their careful distinctions, dominated Faithful Citizenship; that approach will persist because it is inseparable from the experience of pluralism, as Catholic politicians in winning coalitions almost always learn. The immigrant style will persist as long as there are groups in need of power and recognition and as long as the church feels insecure about the integrity of its witness to its specific values. Furthermore, when republican ideals of democracy and human rights are carried into the church, they threaten ecclesiastical authority and risk the unity and discipline of the church, as the bishops learned in the trustee dispute. Evangelical ideals, testing everything in the church by gospel standards, also threaten to undermine episcopal power and open the door to an egalitarian church rooted in baptism and calling forth the gifts of the community. The interest group style tends to affirm grassroots organizing and empowerment of the poor while maintaining the internal structures of the church; it poses less of a threat. Thus bishops like George Mundelein and Robert Lucey could be highly authoritarian in dealing with their priests and in their theological and moral teachings. At the same time they were powerful champions of the working class in one instance and of Mexican Americans in the other. They have their counterparts today.

The combination of ecclesiastical conservatism and social progressivism is in greater continuity with the past than the other positions and could receive strong reinforcement as Hispanic Catholics become a more significant element within the church. Worldwide trends support this argument. In the tension between these three, between integrity, responsibility, and effectiveness, a potentially creative dialogue might emerge. If the laity, standing at the center of attention within both church and society, becomes the paradigm of the good Catholic, a better, richer theoretical framework and a more effective pastoral style might emerge. There can be no escape from public Catholicism, for even a religion that professes to confine itself to spiritual matters by that very stance influences the larger society. Whether the development of public Catholicism is constructive, making a substantial contribution to the nation and the universal church, or simply further fragments the American church and weakens its witness and influence, depends, in the end, on attitudes toward history, toward the human community, and, most important, toward American society and culture.

If Catholics and their church can learn to understand and appreciate their history, if they can come to feel that this land in which they live is their own and that they are responsible for it, if they can come to see themselves as part of an American as well as a Christian people, then they may indeed help enliven public life and restore a sense of public responsibility in American institutions. The story of American Catholicism is not yet finished. The next chapter remains to be written.

Three developments since the 1980s can perhaps make that 1989 paper useful in thinking about our current situation in 2005.

First, the decline of Catholic Americanism and the rise to dominance of sub-cultural and counter-cultural language and strategies has drained the Republican approach of its strength and support. John Coleman and others have pointed out that, for a pluralist democracy to work, its citizens must love it. The common good must be a genuine good. Its public square s not naked but a common achievement allowing all to flourish. In the absence of Americanism, the bilingualism required by pluralist democracy become s simply wishy-washy, impotent and indecisive in the whiplash between civil religion and supposed Christian/Catholic discipleship.

Second, the abortion issue, and related life questions, has strengthened the position of those concerned primarily about the integrity of the American church. The growing coalition around a new seamless garment of “non-negotiable” issues includes key figures in the Vatican, evangelical Catholics of the left, and pro-life Catholics inclined to conservative positions on domestic and foreign policy questions. For those who love their church, counter-cultural advocacy on the life questions becomes an expression of commitment and evidence of integrity. Abortion, more than anything else allows discipleship to trump citizenship.

Third, the decline of moderate, seamless garment Catholicism (e.g. Steinfels A People Adrift) is the product of success as well as failure. Positions on war, poverty, capital punishment, international development, even peace that were once considered “liberal” or ‘progressive’ are now incorporated into the Catechism of the Catholic church. In more concrete terms, most Catholics (by polls), and certainly most bishops, agree with the whole span of issues mentioned in Faithful Citizenship. The question on most of these issues is, given our moral judgment, now what should we do? In that discussion discipleship seems distant: these are not questions on which the church takes decisive positions. The church’s integrity is not at stake.

Years ago Karl Rahner argued that it was possible to say in the name of the faith that something is wrong. And it is possible to say in the name of the faith that Christians must do something about that wrong. But it is not possible to say, in the name of the faith, that any particular policy or program is the way to overcome that wrong. Racism and segregation are evil, and every serious Christian must work to achieve racial justice and solidarity, but busing, or fair housing, or affirmative action involve prudential judgments about which Christians can and do disagree.

On most issues discussed in elections, when the posturing and identity politics are set aside, Catholics, evangelical Christians and everyone else are arguing about what is to be done, by whom?

It cannot be expected, and it should not be expected, that Catholics will agree about just how one can best combat abortion, any more than they can agree on what policies will best overcome the threat of terrorism. If there is any hope to be found in the recent Catholic culture and political wars, it is the breadth of the public moral consensus on public life, Perhaps common ground can be found in shared recognition that difference are for the most part about means, not ends, and that in itself may allow Catholics to make a contribution to American public life.

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