My grandmother, the emergent Catholic right, and why Massimo misses it

Catholic Culture ^ | Feb 01, 2025 | Peter Wolfgang

[Petrosius]

My grandmother died yesterday at the age of 96. There is no single person to whom I owe a greater debt for imparting to me my Catholic faith than her. I have explained why in numerous Facebook posts over the years and in a Catholic Herald piece commemorating the centennial of Our Lady of Fatima.

One thing she did not pass on to me (at least not permanently) was her lifelong support for the Democratic Party. My grandparents were the “ancestral white Catholics” mentioned in passing in a recent First Things podcast. Immigrant Catholics in places like Southern New England with a deep historical attachment to the Democratic Party in general and a feudal-like loyalty to the Kennedys in particular.

During the 2020 Democratic convention, when “Scranton Joe” Biden turned on the old working-class Catholic piety, I scoffed. 2020 was a year of Peak Wokeness. Covid lockdowns, George Floyd riots, statues of our founding fathers vandalized, and so forth. Surely “ancestral white Catholics” were wise to the Democrat Party’s false claim to speak for them by now, I thought.

I was wrong. Or, rather, I was early. Biden’s 2020 campaign turned out to be the last gasp of the old ruse. He hadn’t the strength to pull it off again in 2024, before he was yanked from the stage. And there is no longer anyone else left who can do it. With Biden’s exit from public life, an era has finally ended.

That, in fact, was the point of the “ancestral white Catholic” mention in the First Things podcast. They voted to put Trump back in office. And by a significant swing from four years earlier. As George Marlin explains in The Catholic Thing, “The Numbers Show the Catholic Vote Still Matters.”

I might tweak that thesis a lit

tle. Not that the Catholic vote still matters but that it matters once again. That there was a period where the Catholic vote mattered, followed by a period where the Catholic vote became indistinguishable from voters in general, followed by a new era beginning just in 2024, where Catholics are once more voting in a way distinguishable from the public at large.

I have been hoping for this new Catholic Moment in Catholic voting for almost 20 years. Again, as I laid out here, the Democratic Party really had to go out of its way to lose me. But by 1996, I was there. The day after Bill Clinton’s reelection I subscribed to Crisis Magazine, joined the Catholic Alliance (a Catholic auxiliary of the Christian Coalition) and something called the Catholic Campaign for America. Wherever Catholicism and conservative political action overlapped, count me in. I was there.

Most of those entities are largely forgotten now. But again, I was not wrong. I was early. The goals those 1990s Catholic groups sought to achieve are now being accomplished—with far greater effectiveness—by CatholicVote.

That is my sense from this wonderful hitjob on the “emergent Catholic right” by USA Today. The mainstream media knows its enemy:

In contrast to the bishop conference’s overall sentiments, CatholicVote heralded those same executive orders as evidence of God answering the prayers of this emergent Catholic right. “And I wanted to remind you: this is what we fought for,” CatholicVote vice president Joshua Mercer said in an online post on Jan. 21. “By the grace of God, we have been given an opportunity that’s been vanishingly rare in modern history: to bring our Catholic political worldview to the halls of the world’s greatest power.”

But the “emergent Catholic right”—whether it be CatholicVote or Vice President J.D. Vance or any of the other recent figures who so terrify the leftist anti-Catholic press—are advancing a project of which the old Catholic Left hasn’t quite gotten its head around yet. The emergent Catholic right is not simply trying to Republicanize the Catholic Church. They are trying to Catholicize the Republican Party. And they are succeeding.

That is the point of Vice President Vance calling out “radical individualism” at the March for Life. And his situating the pro-life cause in a larger pro-family framework. And his telling Catholic critics of Trump’s immigration policies to Google Ordo Amoris. When Massimo Faggioli criticizes the emergent Catholic right for having a “more libertarian, more focused on individual freedom” focus, he is completely missing it. Vance is mixing traditional American social conservatism with an economics more rooted in Catholic social solidarity. Watch Josh Mercer rightly roast Faggioli for his blindness on this point in the last four minutes of this video.

This new convergence between Catholicism and conservatism comes too late for my grandmother. She cast her final vote—alas, for Kamala Harris—about twelve weeks before her death. She died wearing her scapular and, this being the first Saturday after her death, I pray the Mother of Grace is, even now as I type these words, freeing her from purgatory. I know how much she loved God and his Mother.

And, sadly, the Kennedys. I loved her with all my heart. I owe her so much. But if God permits political arguments to continue in the afterlife, someday I might still show her this.

[PGR88]

One thing she did not pass on to me (at least not permanently) was her lifelong support for the Democratic Party.

My neighbors were Italian Catholics who voted Democrat. My best friend's grandma was the prototypical Italian grandmother. She would rage when the 1980s singer Madonna appeared when we kids were watching MTV. "Turna off dat Buttana! Taking da name of Santa Virgina! Disgusting!"

Gave me a glimpse of how culture and public faith were (and should be) united.

[Truthsearcher]

I don’t think this guy is right.
I think the shift in catholic vote is the shift in the Hispanic vote.

I doubt the white catholic vote shifted that much at all.

[ripnbang]

Believe it or not, and I have no statistics to back it up, just my own experiences in my family and Church, FWIW, the white catholic vote (young)is fairly to the right. Could be the product of homeschooling, “trad families”, homesteading, etc., over the last 25 years...and they’re devout and are having lots of children. Again, not hard evidence, but my experience in my neck of the woods.

[siunevada]

If Zogby polling is correct one of the sectors that has shifted is parents with children in the home.

That may be where you find the change in white Catholic votes to go along with the shifts in minority groups.

[caddie]

Just a Rat, plain and simple. Kept in power for more than 50 years a regime hardcore and bloody, killing not political enemies but 70 or 80 million innocent preborns with souls as pure as the driven snow.

Hasta la vista, Granny, you may be surprised to find what you find on the other side.

Get this silly whining obit down.

[Verginius Rufus]

I think Massimo Faggioli’s name means “maximum beans.” Appropriately, he’s full of beans.