Bush Brought a Gift for the Pope: The Alliance Between Catholics and Evangelicals

It is an absolute novelty in the history of the United States, and has been consolidated with the present administration. The key role of Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus in the inner circle of the White House

ROMA – The June 4 meeting in the Vatican between George W. Bush and John Paul II brought together noticeably the positions of the two sides: even in the matter of Iraq, over which there was a serious division a year ago. The speech given by the pope is evidence of this.

But there is also underway a noticeable drawing together between Bush and Catholics in the United States. In the surveys for the November presidential elections, a majority of Catholics favor the reconfirmation of the incumbent president. And this in spite of the fact that he is a Methodist, while his opponent, the Democrat John Kerry, is a Catholic.

That’s not all. An even more relevant convergence is underway, the one taking place between Catholic Americans and their most heated religious rivals: the evangelical Protestants. This convergence is an absolute novelty in the history of the United States. And it has consolidated with the Bush presidency.

In the United States, Catholics make up a fifth of the electorate. Traditionally, they have always supported Democratic candidates rather than Republicans. And they have always had the evangelicals against them. In 1960, when the Catholic John F. Kennedy was running for the presidency, the evangelical preachers spouted fire and brimstone. For them, electing Kennedy was like handing over the White House to the Vatican, which they equated with the Antichrist.

Today, everything has changed. There are bishops who refuse to give communion to Kerry, because of the support he has given to abortion rights. At the same time, a growing number of Catholics are making common cause with the evangelicals, in support of the Republican, Bush.

There is an episode that gives a striking illustration of this proximity. Seven days before his meeting with the pope, Bush met in Washington a panel of religious thinkers brought together by “Christianity Today,” the magazine founded by the most famous of the evangelical preachers, Billy Graham. There were two highly influential Catholics among the group: the editor of “Crisis,” Deal Hudson, and the editor of “First Things,” Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (in the photo).

The interview lasted a few hours, and the complete transcript was posted to the online edition of “Christianity Today.” Bush was questioned on every topic: Iraq, Israel, the pope, Islam, Cuba, terrorism, torture, the family, school, prayer. And it emerges from his responses that he has a simple and consistent vision of things, with a strong religious imprint.

One of the interesting details is that the present convergence between Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism is reflected in Bush’s personal experience.

In the interview, Bush said that he reads each morning a page from the writings of Oswald Chambers (1874-1917), one of the most popular evangelical spiritual teachers of the past century. He said he is an assiduous reader of the writings of another evangelical, a former chaplain of the United States Senate, Lloyd Ogilvie. He said he is preparing to re-read the entire Bible in the span of a year, as he has done several times since he attended Donald Evans’ Bible school from 1985-1986.

Bush is himself a born-again Christian. Jimmy Carter was another one. But Bush is the first president who, in two key posts in his administration, wanted other evangelicals close to him: the attorney general, John Ashcroft, member of the pentecostalist Assemblies of God, and Condoleezza Rice, the daughter of a Baptist pastor.

The novelty is that, for some time now, the most inner circle of Bush’s collaborators has included a very authoritative Catholic priest. He is Fr. Neuhaus, a former Lutheran pastor, who converted to Catholicism in 1990 and was ordained a priest the following year by the archbishop of New York at the time, John Cardinal O’Connor.

Fr. Neuhaus is among the most respected theologians. Even better: he is both a theologian and a political analyst, a bit like Reinhold Niebuhr was for Protestant Americans during the mid-twentieth century. He directs “First Things,” the leading magazine for Catholic neoconservatives, whose regular writers include George Weigel, Michael Novak, and Avery Dulles, all three of whom are well-respected in the Vatican. Weigel is the author of a monumental biography of Karol Wojtyla, much appreciated by the pope himself. Novak studied theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University and still teaches in the theological faculties of Rome; last year, Bush sent him to the Vatican to illustrate the theological justifications for his decision to go to war in Iraq. And Dulles, a Jesuit, was made a cardinal in 2001; he is also a convert, and comes from a family of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment: his father, John W. Foster Dulles, was secretary of state during the Eisenhower presidency, and his uncle, Allen W. Dulles, was head of the CIA.

During his interview for “Christianity Today,” Bush addresses only one of the eight panelists confidentially, and by name: Fr. Neuhaus. And he does this twice, to attest to his great respect for him.

On one occasion, Bush recalls being indebted to Fr. Neuhaus for everything regarding the battle over the valuing of marriage and the family, a central feature of his domestic policy.

And on another occasion he says of him: “I need Father Richard around more, he helps me articulate these things.” The “things” are the religious sense of his mission as president, and more particularly the nexus between his responsibility for the nation and the prayers that the citizens offer to God on his behalf.

The conjunction between evangelicals and Catholics, in the United States, began ten years ago with a joint document with an unequivocal title: “Evangelicals and Catholics together.” For the former, at the head of the dialogue there was Charles Colson, a former assistant to Nixon and destroyed with him by the Watergate scandal, then born again in the faith. For the Catholics, there was Fr. Neuhaus, with the support of cardinal O’Connor and the future cardinal Dulles.

A book by Neuhaus had made a great impression on the evangelicals: it was “The Naked Public Square,” an analysis of the growing disappearance of religion from public life. The book brought to light the fact that there are many traits common to both Catholic and evangelical thought, and that some of them can be put into practice.

Since then, the evangelicals have made great progress. They are the fastest-growing Christian group in the world. In the United States, they now make up 43 percent of the population, according to a survey by Gallup. Their influence has been decisive in many of the choices of the Bush presidency: from support of the family to the fight against abortion; from the defense of religious liberty in the world to the battle against the modern slave trade; from peace in Sudan to the war in Iraq and more decisive support than ever for Israel. In foreign policy, within the historic confrontation between the “realists” and the “idealists,” they have aligned themselves with the latter. The doctrine of the exportation of democracy is typically evangelical. And Bush is evangelical when he says, “I believe freedom is the Almighty God’s gift to each man and woman in this world.”

And so, slowly, the evangelicals have met and associated with the neocons, with Jews like Michael Horowitz, a great defender of persecuted Christians throughout the world, and with Catholics. Or better, with a current of Catholicism that was marginal at first, but is now more consistent and authoritative.

In an interview with Laurie Goodstein of the “New York Times,” on May 31, 2004, Fr. Neuhaus said: “It is an extraordinary realignment that if continues is going to create a very different kind of configuration of Christianity in America.”

Meanwhile, the pope of Rome is no longer the Antichrist for the evangelicals of the United States. In a recent survey of them, John Paul II won first place for popularity, with 59 percent saying they view him favorably, ahead of Pat Robertson, with 54, and Jerry Falwell, with 44 percent.

And the pope returns the affection, with an eye for the November presidential election. In the June 4 edition of “Corriere della Sera,” Luigi Accattoli, the Vatican journalist who most faithfully reports the views from the pontifical palazzo, wrote that the pope has already decided: he prefers the evangelical Bush to the Catholic Kerry. And “he wants to help him with the Catholic voters.”

The complete transcript of the interview in “Christianity Today” with the president of the United States, May 26, 2004:

If I'm not mistaken, all sects trace their roots to Catholicism. ~~ I'm afraid you are mistaken. Not all protestant denominations trace their roots to catholicism. Most of them trace their roots to the Protestant Reformation. ~~ The roots before all that. You know, Peter, the Rock I build my Church on, etc., etc. I don't think I am mistaken, but if I am, you didn't make a good case for how I am.

Respectfully, the Eastern Orthodox would, of course, maintain that Roman Catholicism traces its roots to Eastern Orthodoxy -- not the other way around.

However, even in the West, there is an ancient and venerable Independent and non-Roman Christian Faith Tradition dating back to the earliest days of the Church. This lineage can be traced through the Presbyters of Iona and the Ambrosian-Rite Christians of Northern Italy and the Alps (whom even the Popes themselves admitted to be independent of Roman Jurisdiction until well into the 10th Century), through the 11-15th Century Waldensian Christians, to the Reformers themselves. At the 1532 Angrogne Confession, the Reformers severed their adherence to Papal Rome and instead covenanted themselves to this ancient and Independent Christian Faith Tradition.

You can read all about it HERE: The Covenant Line: From Eden to Independence Hall

The story is in many ways a thrilling one; the beleaguered, dispirited Waldenses of Savoy, fearing themselves to be the only true Christians left in the world and facing the possibility of total extermination at the hands of their Catholic enemies, suddenly began to hear accounts of a great religious movement sweeping the lands to the north of them, in which men and women were rejecting Catholic falsehoods and turning back to the truths of the Bible as the Waldenses understood them.

(Williamson, Ibid.)

A manifold interest belongs to the meeting of these two Churches. Each is a miracle to the other. The preservation of the Vaudois Church for so many ages, amid the fires of persecution, made her a wonder to the Church of the sixteenth century. The bringing up of the latter from the dead made her a yet greater wonder to the Church of the first century. These two churches compare their respective beliefs: they find that their creeds are not twain, but one. They compare the sources of their knowledge: they find that they have both of them drawn their doctrine from the Word of God; they are not two Churches, they are one. They are the elder and younger members of the same glorious family, the children of the same father. ~~ (Wylie, “History of the Waldenses”)

According to the very best of 16th-Century Roman Catholic expositors, a definitive theological nomenclature may be assigned to this ancient and venerable Independent and Non-Roman Western Christian Faith Tradition in terms of their covenanted Heirs amongst the Reformers:

Lindanus, a Catholic bishop of the see of Ghent, who wrote in defence of the tenets of the Church of Rome, about 1550, terms Calvin "the inheritor of the doctrine of the Waldenses."
Mezeray, the celebrated historiographer of France, in his Abridgement of Chronology, speaking of the Waldenses, says, "They held nearly the same opinions as those who are now called Calvinists."
Gualtier, a Jesuitical monk, in his chronological tables, drew up a catalogue consisting of seven and twenty particulars, in which he shows that the principles of the Waldenses, and those of the Calvinists coincided with each other...
Aeneas Sylvius (afterwards Pope Pius II) declares the doctrine taught by Calvin to be the same as that of the Waldenses...

So there is at least one Western Christian Sect which does not "trace their roots to Catholicism"; at least not Roman Catholicism. This Sect -- having severed its ties with Papal Rome -- refoundationalized their theological basis, covenanting themselves instead to a Western Christian Faith Tradition every bit as ancient and venerable as that of Rome, and (as is admitted by Rome's own defenders) preserved and advanced the Teachings of Independent, Non-Roman Christianity in the West for the benefit of later generations of Christians.

This Sect is called Calvinism.

best, OP

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