With his Munich speech, Vice President JD Vance has dispelled once more any remaining doubt that right-wing, nationalist Catholicism has reached the White House. Vance’s tone and the sources from which he draws his views represent quite a shift from the previous Catholic voices in American politics about international relations and the transatlantic alliance. It’s a paradigm shift, not just in terms of policies, but also in terms of worldviews: it’s a sign of the estrangement between the USA and Europe which is also a religious and theological growing gap. Not just between a militant American Christianity and a more secular European landscape, but also within the global Catholic Church.
Vance’s quotation of John Paul II’s “do not be afraid” did not consider that the Polish pope had a strong sense of European continent, of its unity, of the dignity of nations, and of the confrontation against anti-democratic forces. In this sense, it was a manipulation of John Paul II’s thought. Talking about popes and speaking in Munich, JD Vance could have drawn some positive inspiration about the role of Europe from the otherwise controversial speech of pope Benedict XVI in Regensburg in 2006.
Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic were part of that confrontation in the Cold War and in the thirty years of post-Cold War era. But now the neo-imperial foreign policy of Trump’s White House measures the challenges in terms of “business deals” to be made. Vance’s call to Europe to become more responsible for its own security is just a side effect of a transactional view of foreign affairs. This leaves Christians and Catholics in some countries more at the mercy of their strongmen.
Vance made some interesting points on the threats against freedom of conscience for Christians. But they are deprived of legitimacy given the willful ignorance of the threats against freedom of conscience for Christians that are coming from the illiberal regimes that the Trump administration sees with favor. Not to talk about the threats against freedom of conscience and freedom of speech in a country that is now run by the master of “alternative facts”, Trump, a president that has called the press “the enemy of the people”. This is an administration in which Catholics represent, at the highest levels of the US governments, that culture of grievance and resentment that sadly has become part of the national discourse among Catholics in the USA.
Jd Vance wanted to school Europe about democracy but he is second in command of a president who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential elections.
Massimo Faggioli is a Catholic theologian and teaches theology at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.
Die katholische Kirche in den USA
Die römisch-katholische Kirche ist die größte Glaubensgemeinschaft der USA, denn die Protestanten teilen sich in verschiedene Konfessionen. Ein knappes Viertel der US-Amerikaner ist katholisch, die meisten Katholiken leben im Nordosten und im Südwesten. Genaue Zahlen sind schwierig, weil in den USA der Wechsel einer Konfession sehr häufig vorkommt.
