Big problem for US Catholic voters: US Catholic bishops

In 1976 the administrative board of the United States Catholic Conference — then the advocacy arm of the Catholic bishops — took a momentous step, publishing “Political Responsibility: Reflections on an Election Year.” This was something we should note even today for several reasons.

“Political Responsibility” marked the first time the Catholic bishops of the United States intervened directly in the voter decisions that Catholics would make during a presidential election year. Subsequent election year guides would appear, as one will next year. “Political Responsibility” was the first.

There are other reasons why “Political Responsibility” was notable.

The document came during the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade. The document reflected an ambitious effort to enact the call of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) for Catholics “to discharge their earthly duties conscientiously.”

But most of all, “Political Responsibility” was notable because the Catholic bishops of the United States were able to do it at all.

Those bishops in 1976 were bold men, confident about the Catholic Church and about the world we all live in. Catholic bishops today are different. They lack that confidence about the Church, the world, and even about each other.

The 2024 presidential election season will lay bare the Catholic Church’s retreat from a public square it once sought its place in — and understanding what has happened among Catholic bishops will help us understand why.

In 1976, the Catholic bishops of the United States put on a national conference of Catholics from around the United States to celebrate the Bicentennial of the United States and Catholic contributions to this nation of immigrants. The conference surprised the bishops when laypeople seized the floor and passed motions calling for the ordination of women and married priests. Still, those bishops remained committed to engaging a conversation with the world. Also in 1976, the bishops became embroiled in the presidential election, while Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter jockeyed for “the Catholic vote.” The bishops risked politicizing the Catholic Church, nearly endangered their tax-exempt status, and they quarreled among themselves about it.

Still the bishops kept on working together to reach out to the world. In 1983, the bishops wrote “The Challenge of Peace,” a pastoral letter that challenged the nuclear arms race, and in 1986 they wrote another pastoral letter about economic justice that aimed at the public debate in the world beyond the Catholic Church.

You won’t find Catholic bishops doing that sort of thing in the United States any longer. After the mid-1980s, the complexion of the bishops’ conference began to change. The transformation has been understood for a long time. Since then, U.S. bishops generally have been men who preferred to confront the culture instead of engaging it. There are exceptions. The bishops are not monolithic, and today, especially because Pope Francis has had a chance to name bishops for almost ten years, there is a sizable minority among U.S. bishops that favors a less confrontational approach. Even as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops today is dominated by men who reject Pope Francis’s leadership to various degrees, the Conference is a complicated place.

In large part, that is why the Catholic bishops of the United States cannot meet the first presidential election that will follow Dobbs v. Jackson, the decision that reversed Roe, in any way commensurate to how they met the 1976 election.

Today’s bishops found themselves the object of widespread puzzlement when they were unable to revise their current document for Catholic voters, “Faithful Citizenship,” ahead of the 2020 election. The puzzlement continued in 2022, as they found themselves again unable to revise the document for 2024. “Faithful Citizenship” was approved in its current form in 2007. Four presidential elections and Francis’s almost 10-year-old papacy that was six years away from beginning in 2007 have intervened, raising questions about the real usefulness of this unrevised document that itself will be nearly old enough to vote in 2024.

Answers should be quite clear to anyone observing the Catholic Church in the United States closely. To revise the document would expose the divisions among U.S. Catholic bishops in a public way — and also reveal how estranged most of the bishops are from the mainstream of American life. A new document would depend on consensus, even just to draft it. No such consensus exists in 2022. And anything the majority would support on its own would incite embarrassing conversations about whether the Catholic Church really is able to participate in U.S. public life at all.

It is not 1976 anymore.

The differences between 1976 and today matter in other ways, too — for Catholics, and for everyone. In those days, religious affiliation was something that could be taken for granted about most people, as it had been so for centuries. We are living through a remarkable transformation that now finds — for the first time ever — fewer than half of Americans claiming a religious affiliation. The decline of participation among Catholics in the U.S. has been especially precipitous and is especially deserving of attention, given the number of Catholics in the U.S.

Fewer than 50 years ago, the nation’s tens of millions of Catholics could be called by their bishops to be a moral voice in public debate, sharing the perspective of their faith with everyone in hopes of building a world that is more just and peaceful. They spoke for the poor and against nuclear war. Today there are proportionately fewer Catholics to call upon, even if their bishops could manage to issue such a call. This is unknown territory, for our country and our civilization.

The confrontational style favored by U.S. Catholic bishops over the last four decades has not helped Catholics influence the public debate. To all appearances, it has not done much to keep Catholics in the Church, either. As the first presidential campaign since Dobbs gets underway, we will begin to understand what that means for Catholics, for politics, and for our world.

Steven P. Millies, a political theorist, is professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @stevenpmillies