U.S versus Vatican: A clash of cultures

Although the shooting in Iraq is over, the war of words between Rome and Washington continues, as the Vatican has again criticized American policy in remarkably strong terms. As things turn out, the “clash of cultures” most exacerbated by the Iraq war may not be between Christianity and Islam, but between the Holy See and the United States.

If so, it would mark not a new chapter in relations, but a return to the ambiguity that has long characterized attitudes in Rome to the superpower across the Atlantic. This reserve has been rekindled in recent months not only by the war, but also by the sex abuse crisis, both of which have suggested to Vatican observers that the ghost of John Calvin is alive and well in American culture.

The vehicle for the latest critique was the Jesuit-edited journal Civiltà Cattolica, whose pages are reviewed by the Vatican Secretariat of State before publication. In the lead editorial of its May 17 issue, the journal asserted that “the United States has put international law in crisis.”

The editorial said the U.S.-declared war on terrorism has generated strong anti-American sentiment in Europe. Especially repugnant, it said, has been the decision to hold 600 Taliban, including five teenagers between 13 and 16, and five men over 80, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba without recognizing them as prisoners of war.

In another explosive charge, the editorial said the rebuilding of Iraq is “chancy” because “the western countries that should make it happen seem more interested in exploiting Iraqi oil than in the reconstruction of the country.” It is not the first time Civiltà Cattolica has suggested that oil interests are driving American policy.

Noting that Iraq’s army was weak, and that weapons of mass destruction have not been found, the editorial said these facts “have clearly shown that there were not sufficient reasons for moving against Iraq, because the country did not constitute a true threat for the United States and its allies.”

The editorial said the most urgent task now is to “reestablish international legality, wounded by the ‘unilateralism’ of the United States.” It called for the United Nations, not the United States, to direct the post-war work in Iraq.

“It’s a matter of relaunching the spirit of the United Nations charter, based on cooperation, rather than on competition among enemy states and on domination of an imperialistic sort by the hegemonic superpower.”

Many Americans have been surprised to hear this sort of language, which calls to mind the harsh anti-American broadsides of the European left, from the Holy See.

Indeed, key officials in the Bush administration were initially taken off guard by the depth of Vatican opposition to the war. Condoleeza Rice was not being disingenuous when she told the Italian weekly Panorama that she “didn’t understand” the Vatican’s argument. That incomprehension was widely shared among American personnel both in Washington and in Rome.

The surprise reflects the fact that the political psychology of many Americans, including Bush administration officials, took shape in the Reagan years. During the Cold War there was a clear intersection of interests between the United States and the Holy See in support of anti-Soviet resistance in Eastern Europe, above all Solidarity in Poland. Some American Catholic thinkers, most eminently George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, saw this “holy alliance” as a harbinger of a broader global partnership between America and the Catholic Church, based on shared values (pro-life, pro-family) and on shared political objectives (human rights, economic freedom and democracy).

The project, on this theory, was delayed by eight years of Clinton liberalism, but the election of Bush put things back on track. And indeed, there was a “Catholic honeymoon” in the early days of the Bush administration, as the president’s elimination of public funding for abortion, his restrictive decision on stem cell research, and his two visits to the pope all played to positive Catholic reviews.

From this point of view, the rift over the Iraq war is a temporary disruption of a natural alliance, and the needle will eventually swing back into place. In fact, however, history suggests another hypothesis — that Cold War politics made temporary bedfellows out of the Vatican and the United States, and what is reemerging now is the caution and reluctance that have always characterized Vatican attitudes about America.

Papal reservations are well documented, from Pope Leo XIII’s Testem Benevolentiae, condemning the supposed heresy of “Americanism,” to Pius XII’s opposition to Italy’s entrance into NATO based on fears that the alliance was a Trojan horse for Protestant domination of Catholic Europe. Key Vatican officials, especially Europeans from traditional Catholic cultures, have long worried about aspects of American society — its exaggerated individualism, its hyper-consumer spirit, its relegation of religion to the private sphere, its Calvinist ethos. A fortiori, they worry about a world in which America is in an unfettered position to impose this set of cultural values on everyone else.

The last 18 months have confirmed many Vatican officials in these convictions. Two episodes have been key: the sexual abuse crisis in the American Catholic church, and the Iraq war.

On the crisis, many Vatican observers have been shocked at what they see as the punitive and unforgiving response to priestly misconduct in American culture. Certainly no one in the Holy See defends the sexual abuse of minors, and most realize that the Church left itself vulnerable because of its history of covering up wrongdoing. Still, the clamor for permanent removal from the priesthood of men with even one offense, potentially decades in the past, seems excessive to many in Rome. Even more puzzling was the decision of the American bishops in Dallas to craft policy based on this unforgiving standard. One Vatican cardinal recently asked a delegation of Americans visiting Rome, “How could your bishops adopt a policy so removed from the gospel?”

The war has similarly awakened traditional reservations. When Vatican officials hear Bush talk about the evil of terrorism, and the American mission to destroy that evil, they sometimes sense a worrying kind of dualism. The language can suggest a sense of election, combined with the perversity of America’s enemies, that appears to justify unrelenting conflict.

In the view of some in the Vatican, underlying both the harsh American response on sexual abuse, and its dualistic approach to foreign policy, is the legacy of Calvinism. The Calvinist concepts of the total depravity of the damned, the unconditional election of God’s favored, and the manifestation of election through earthly success, all seem to them to play a powerful role in shaping American cultural psychology.

After Cardinal Pio Laghi returned to Rome from his last-minute appeal to Bush just before the Iraq war began, he told John Paul II that he sensed “something Calvinistic” in the president’s iron determination to battle the forces of international terrorism.

Recently I was in the Vatican, and happened to strike up a conversation with an official eager to hear an American perspective on the war. He told me he sees a “clash of civilizations” between the United States and the Holy See, between a worldview that is essentially Calvinistic and one that is shaped by Catholicism.

“We have a concept of sin and evil too,” he said, “but we also believe in grace and redemption.”

Vatican officials, it should be noted, are not the only ones to detect a strong Calvinist influence in American culture. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago made a similar statement during the Synod of Bishops for the Americas in November 1997. George said that U.S. citizens “are culturally Calvinist, even those who profess the Catholic faith.” American society, he said, “is the civil counterpart of a faith based on private interpretation of Scripture and private experience of God.” He contrasted this kind of society with one based on the Catholic Church's teaching of community and a vision of life greater than the individual.

One can of course debate this line of cultural analysis. Right or wrong, however, it is widely held in the Vatican, and has been strengthened by reflection on both the sex abuse crisis and the war.

This does not mean relations between the United States and the Vatican are in dire straits. The Vatican is realistic enough to understand that if it wishes to exert influence on world affairs it needs to work with the Americans, and the Bush team continues to desire the moral legitimacy it believes Vatican support can lend its policies. At a personal level, Bush’s emissaries to the Holy See, especially Ambassador James Nicholson and his staff, are liked and respected in the apostolic palace. None of this is likely to change.

What seems increasingly clear, however, is that this is not destined to be the “special relationship” enjoyed by American and Britain, allies linked by a common history, language, and worldview. This is a dialogue between two institutions with some common interests, but also divergent cultures that will from time to time flare up into sharp policy differences.

No one should be shocked, in other words, the next time Civiltà Cattolica takes America to task.

Don't you think this Calvinist analysis of what makes American culture tick is way overdone? Interestingly, the descendents of the Calvinists (New Englanders and their diaspora) tend to be somewhat liberal, and somewhat less hawkish and judgmental, then the population at large. It is the the scions of the Caviliers that tend to be the flag wavers, along with a chunk of the American Catholic community. Something is missing here. What is missing is how this culture was shaped by our geography, and the rather non random personality types who immigrated here.

Anyone familiar with the intellectual history of the West since the beginning of the 18th century cannot be surprised at any of this.

The hostility of the Church to the Enlighetnment and the English philosphers upon whose work political and social system of the United States is grounded throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, was consistent and thorough-going. It's hostility to the spread of classical liberal ideas in Europe in the early 19th century was profound, as the article suggested.

The Church was almost at war with the liberal Savoyard monarchy in Italy from the beginning, and its hostility unremitting after the French pulled their troops out of Rome in 1870 and left the Pope to his fate. It was only the fascist Mussolini who reconciled the Italian state with the Vatican, which has never mentally recovered from the loss of its temporal power.

The Church made common cause with the Anglo-Saxon powers against communism after World War II, but has always been, and remains, unreconciled to the separation of Church and State, and to the notions of individual liberty and freedom of religion that are central to the American experience. Not only that, the Church was always hostile to capitalism, and has always been more comfortable philosophically with feudalism and later 'Christian' socialism and a command economy -- much more in line with the Great Chain of Being of the medieval Catholic philosophical synthesis.

The United States does have a history of anti-Catholicism, but it was primarily based on the accurate perception the the Church disliked everything America stood for: Protestant Christianity, religious liberty, individual liberty, and economic liberty.

I think in this case the term "Calvinist" in Vatican thinking is their short-hand for "Protestant." However, I don't think the reference to America's essential Calvinism is entirely misplaced.

While New England, and many New England Protestants, are now liberal, you should recall that New England, especially the heavily Democratic states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island (Vermont is an odd exception) have large Catholic populations who constitute the mainstay of the Democratic party there. While there are liberal WASPS, there is also a strong representation among New England Republicans of old stock Protestants.

In the South, the majority of the population outside of Texas and Louisiana is probably still Protestant, but they are hardly all Epsicopalian descendents of English royalists who fled Cromwell - the "Cavaliers" of Southern Myth. In fact, the Calvinist Presbyterians (strongly Scots) are strong in the South, and are the Methodists and Baptists, who come out of dissenting traditions from the Church of England similary to that of the more Calvinist Puritan Congregationalists of New Engand.

You make a lot of good points, but in my experience, the Yankee Wasp Republican descendants tend to be "Rinos," as am I to some degree, and I am from that tradition. That being said, and acknowledging that the South has boatloads of Scotch Irish (quite where to plug them into this matrix I am not sure), I really think that the American ideology has more to do with its unique experiences, than European religious ideological echoes.

I might add, that in New England, the partisan diffences these days between Protestant Yankees, and Catholics, is very marginal. Both favor the Democrats, except in New Hampshire, where both favor the Pubbies by a slim but discernable margin (a vote with your feet thingie), and in Maine, where chaos reigns, and where nobody can figure the place out from a psephological perspective.

The Scots Irish were primarily Protestant (Presbyterian - Calvinist) Scots who were settled in Ireland after Cromwell's suppression of the Irish rebellion, and came to these states originally through the Carolinas and Georgia. They, in fact, made up the strongest strain of actual Calvinism in the South.

I think it's the combination of our European religious heritage (recall, all but the Virigina colony and Dutch New York were originally settled by religious dissenters from the Church of England), the ideas of the English philsophers (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, etc.), the unique English poltical tradition of Magna Charta, the Revolution and the English Bill of Rights, combined with the unique experience in the wilderness of America, that formed our uniquely American consciousness.

Colonists from other nations - French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese - also came to the Americas and had very different worldviews and created vastly different social and economic systems. The only one even close to ours was the Dutch experience in New York, which ended too early to really see how it would have played out. The Dutch colony did lack the sense of equality that took root in New England, but was probably more tolerant than all but Rhode Island.

Interesting post and a good thread.

My question is, what is the attitude of the Orthodox Church towards the administration and the war in Iraq (and the United States in general)?

As an institution, the Orthodox Church is similar to the Roman Catholic Church, but its differences -- it was never a political power in Western Europe, it was a step removed from the Protestant Reformation, etc -- make me curious about its thinking on these matters and how it compares to the Catholic Church's. Is the Orthodox Church troubled by American "Calvinism"? Does it worry about things like American unilateralism and its effect on international law?

Good point about the influence of the mother Home Counties. Britain had a certain heritage, that carried on. Beyond that, it is a matter of weighting the various factors which you mention, that causes me to dissent in part (I acknowledge that all you mention were factors). I give the greatest weight to the frontier, and the geographic impact of America as a whole (rich and bountiful, with a lot of elbowroom, and on impact of at once both adopting and defeating Native American culture and peoples), and to the British philosophical tradition, that was only in part a construct of Calvinism, and not the most important part. Which of the two was most important? I'm not sure.

George said that U.S. citizens “are culturally Calvinist, even those who profess the Catholic faith.” American society, he said, “is the civil counterpart of a faith based on private interpretation of Scripture and private experience of God.” He contrasted this kind of society with one based on the Catholic Church's teaching of community and a vision of life greater than the individual.

I don't see what is wrong with being a Calvinist-tainted Catholic. Individualism is what made this country a strong country ---individual responsibility versus collectivism.

>>Because Bush is a pious person who’s not Catholic?<<

Amazing how the Vatican is so silent on the now-officially-confirmed breaking of so many commandments by the only Catholic President.

The Vatican is like the UN -- looking for absolute power well beyond its actual basis for same. That's why they have thrown their lot in with the desire for a World Government. The only pure biblical government is socialism.

I think if there had been a different pattern by the original settling ---the Spaniards in the area of the 13 colonies and the British in the area of Mexico and South America ---we'd see a total reverse of how things are ---it would be people headed south over the Rio Grande escaping crushing poverty.

I can see how climate affected the Indians who were here ---the Indians in Canada and the colder states of the USA were more nomadic ---but that didn't make the British more nomadic. I can see some climate considerations in explaining why some Indians in Mexico had cities and irrigation ---although some groups like the Tarahumaras still live in the stone age ---but in a warm climate. I don't think climate explains why Canadians are wealthy compared to Mexicans ---since it was the reverse before the Europeans came.

Is this a perv's lament??? Puzzling?? Tie a damn stone to your leg and through yourself into a lake. How's that for puzzling??

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