The current wave of anti-liberalism in the nations of the West and in the Catholic Church is bringing fifty years' worth of disappointments to the surface. One would have to be blind not to notice the fact that the period after Vatican II—what Karl Rahner called the beginning of the “world Church,” a new age in the history of Christianity—has been a messy one, full of tension and uncertainty. Most postconciliar periods have been messy, but the disorder of this period has been aggravated by new global anxieties about environmental ruin, nuclear war, and globalization.
The new anti-liberalism springs from an old temptation: nostalgia. The anti-liberals dream of a new Christendom that would restore the church to a position of official dominance enforced by the state. They are allergic to pluralism, especially cultural and religious. There is some of this in the Trump agenda and in the right-wing governments now in power in Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Poland, as well as in the free state of Bavaria in the German Federation. The recent meeting between Cardinal Raymond Burke and the new Italian minister of the interior, Matteo Salvini, says something about this realignment. Salvini is known not only for his threats of unconstitutional police-state repression against migrants and gypsies in Italy, but also for saying that Benedict XVI is still his pope.
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