The latest cover of the new New Republic features Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig taking on conservative anxieties about Pope Francisâ??s possible â??radicalism.â? The essay isnâ??t just about the pope; it offers a larger critique of the way that conservatives, Catholic and otherwise, relate to and interpret the human/Western/Christian past. I have a few disagreements with this depiction, and a few critical generalizations Iâ??d make about the liberal tendency in Catholic thinking and debate right now. But Iâ??ll save those for another post; for now I think it would be helpful for the discussion of Catholicism in the Francis era to spend some time distinguishing between the different groups who have doubts, or flirt with having doubts, about this pontificate, because in Bruenigâ??s account they run together a bit and I think the distinctions are actually enormously important.
A preliminary point to make is that Francisâ??s genuinely strident critics â?? as opposed to skeptics or fretters or unsettled observers â?? are quite few in number. â??The differences in opinion between Francis and the movement collectively known as the â??American rightâ?? appear especially numerous,â? Bruenig writes, â??and unusually bitter.â? She has examples â?? Iâ??m one of them â?? and they do add up to a current (or currents) of criticism, but not all of them/us are obviously â??bitter,â? the American right is a lot bigger than a few pundits and bloggers, and itâ??s worth noting that the divide she sees opening up is largely invisible in public polling. In the latest Pew survey, for instance, the pope is just as popular (and he is very popular) among Catholics who vote Republican as among Catholics who vote Democratic, and he has slightly higher net favorables among self-described â??conservativeâ? Catholics than among self-described â??moderatesâ? and â??liberals.â? To the extent that the anxieties Bruenig identifies are visible in polling at all, they may show up in the somewhat elevated number of conservative Catholics who say their views of Francis are â??mostly favorableâ? rather than â??very favorable,â? or the popeâ??s slightly higher net-unfavorables among Catholic Republicans â?? but that â??higherâ? means a net of 10 percent, compared to 7 percent for Catholic Democrats, which is hardly the stuff of deep, bitter divides. (Pewâ??s old polling on Benedict XVI didnâ??t break things down by party or ideology, but Iâ??d lay odds that his unfavorable numbers among Catholics who self-identify as liberal were much higher than than Francisâ??s currently are among any definition of the American Catholic right.)
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