Catholic vote and public discourse endangered?

As with Americans in general, it may be too early to make forecasts about the shape of the Catholic vote in this very close presidential election, according to recent polls. Just as Catholic voting patterns are no longer as predictable as they once were, distinct public Catholic voices are no longer being heard above the din of social media memes and culture wars. Writing in Religion Unplugged (September 24), veteran religion journalist Richard Ostling notes that “How Catholic voters view the candidates and issues could nudge margins enough to swing the election, and so could many other factors in such a nail-biter. Though political coverage emphasizes evangelicals, shifts by the two different Catholic segments [Hispanics and whites] are usually much more important in general elections.” It is true that non-Hispanic white Catholics have gradually trended Republican after a long period of Democratic loyalty, while Hispanic Catholics remain “reliably Democratic and by larger margins ([although they] may be more in play this time).” But two notable new surveys of Catholics offer strange and contradictory clues. In an SSRS poll for Pew, Catholic respondents overall were evenly divided between Harris and Trump at 49 percent each. The white, non-Latino Catholics favored Trump at 61 percent, versus 38 percent for Harris. Hispanic Catholics favored Harris at 65 percent, versus 34 percent for Trump.

Source: The Central Minnesota Catholic, https://thecentralminnesotacatholic.org/a-catholics-guide-to-voting/

But a poll of U.S. Catholic voters by the conservative Catholic Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) and RealClear Opinion Research found Catholics favoring Harris at 50 percent over Trump at 43 percent. Trump led with non-Hispanic white Catholics by only 52 percent to 42 percent, while Harris led with Hispanic Catholics by 60 percent to 30 percent. “Most remarkable,” Ostling adds, “was EWTN’s report that female Catholics favored Harris by a commanding 56 percent to 37 percent for Trump. While Trump led among Catholic men, he only did so 49 percent to 43 percent for Harris.” This is in line with other polls showing historic gender gaps for this election. On such issues as abortion, Pew found 77 percent of atheists saying abortion is “very important” in voting decisions, while 44 percent of the traditionally pro-life Catholics (and white Protestants) said the same. “Curiously,” Ostling notes, “72 percent of white Catholics deemed immigration policy ‘very important,’ but only 57 percent of Hispanic Catholics did.” But because Catholics occupy significant percentages of the population in battleground states, their vote will remain important. “Of the 61,858,137 U.S. Catholics (children included) in the recent U.S. Religion Census, 9.7 million live in the seven key battleground states everyone is talking about.”

Regardless of the Catholic vote, in an article for Commonweal magazine (September 24), Massimo Faggioli writes that the larger trend is the “paucity of public Catholic theological voices in the general political and societal discourse.” He sees this deficiency in the worldwide church as well as in American Catholicism. Last May, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, noted the absence of prophetic voices among religious leaders working to foster peace and reconciliation in the region. While Catholics may speak up, they do it in Catholic publications and outlets, not in mainstream media. Faggioli adds that a “national sign-on letter from U.S. Catholics on Israel-Palestine garnered thousands of signatures—bishops and clergy, women religious, laypeople, academics, and activists—but it did not register in the national debate on Israel and Gaza.” One issue crowding out other Catholic public voices is the undue attention to Pope Francis and his views on a wide range of issues outside of official Catholic teachings. “This has created a sort of journalistic ultramontanism, augmented by Francis’s direct and frequent interactions with the press, where the only voice that ends up mattering is his.” Faggioli refers to the in-flight press conference of September 13, when Francis addressed the upcoming presidential election, suggesting a moral equivalence between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

But he adds that “It’s undeniable that there’s a problem with the public voice of theologians. The job of theology professors is to produce and keep alive the critical conscience of a people—a vital component of the experience of faith, but also for people of other or of no faiths. Yet that effort is increasingly politicized and subject to propaganda, given the heightened stakes of two-party electoral politics (which increasingly also seems to infect the Church). And despite Pope Francis’s efforts and personal popularity, the social-justice component of Catholic theology is receiving far less visibility than it used to (and than it should), which influences the public perception of what Catholicism stands for today.” He also lays the problem at the door of the universities, as they have “ceded the role of thinkers and scholars—including theologians—to diversity officers, education experts, and branding wizards. In some ways, that has helped liberate theology from the close watch of Church authorities, but it also now makes it more subject to the pressures of donors, customers, and other stakeholders in the ‘marketplace.’” Faggioli adds that bishops “don’t write for the larger public as much as they used to, and when they do, their voices register only when they’re weighing in on culture-war issues. Lay Catholic leaders, meanwhile, are more and more often identified with a particular agenda or institution…The Catholic Church is not in a state of schism, but there is something like a schism in the social-media world of public Catholic figures.”