What's it like to be Catholic in America? with Father Joshua Whitfield

Father Joshua Whitfield speaks on what it’s like to have a devout Catholic president, and what that could mean for Catholicism overall.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason, and I'm so pleased to welcome back to Good God my friend and colleague in ministry, Father Joshua Whitfield of St. Rita's Catholic Church here in Dallas. He is a prolific author, and mostly a pastor and theologian. And we are most grateful, Josh, that you have come to join us again, and have conversation on Good God.

Joshua Whitfield:
It's always good to talk to you, George.

George Mason:
Thank you so much. Well, we have traveled in similar circles academically, and in terms of our understanding of the faith, and all of that, but today we'll probe that a little bit. I'd like people, really, to hear a little bit about the experience of being Catholic in America. We're doing a series on Good God right now of what we call American faith, and of different religious perspectives on the ground of what it is like to be Catholic in America today. But I'd like us to start by taking us back a bit, and give us a sense, from your perspective, of what Catholics have experienced in America in this experiment in religious Liberty throughout time, and how that has played out in Catholic consciousness here in the United States.

Joshua Whitfield:
Well I think the Catholic story is a remarkable story, and it really is one of the more beautiful stories in American history, I would suggest, because it's an immigrant story. The Catholic Church, in its inception in the Americas, was a communion of European immigrants, a motley crew of Italians and Germans and Czechs, and all sorts of immigrant communities that came over to the United States. So the experience of Catholics in the 21st century, as opposed to say the 19th century, are night and day in many ways, in some ways they're the same. But it's a story of immigrants finding a new home, and developing a relationship with the social order that is still tense and fraught, but I think, positively speaking, creative.

Joshua Whitfield:
And so when Catholics came to America in the 19th century, and sometimes before the 19th century, but in these wave of immigrant Catholics, they wanted to prove themselves good Americans. And so they did their best to acclimate, they did their best to weather the storm of anti-Catholic prejudice, which they ran into at all levels of society, as you know. And they just kept going until finally, in our day, blessedly, there is no question about whether or not a Catholic can be an American. But early on when Catholics came to this land, that was not a slam dunk question, as you know.

George Mason:
Right. So let's probe a little bit about why that might be so, because I think if we go back in the history of all of this, the first wave of immigrants that came to establish this nation were Northern European Protestants, even separatists, and so there was a sense of a kind of anti-Catholic, and anti-Anglican, spirit in the sense that they were breaking away from the idea of a church state unit, the notion that had played out in history before them, and had not favored them, because they were dissenters, in a sense. And so you get a country starting out this way, and then all of a sudden you have an immigrant population of Catholics that have pretty much only known what it's like generally to be in an established church in state, and this creates a problem because of the sense of, are they going to be loyal to the Pope or to the constitution? Things of that nature.

George Mason:
And so we have Al Smith who was the four time governor of the State of New York, and ran for president in 1928 and lost to Hoover. But there was a big question back then about whether he could really do that job without having to... and then similarly with JFK in 1960, he had to make his famous speech in Houston in which he pledged loyalty to the constitution and not to the Pope. And that was a painful thing for him to have to do, and for Catholics to have to hear, wasn't it, in some ways?

Joshua Whitfield:
Yeah, and I think before Al Smith and JFK, as you rightly recall the beginnings of our country, the religious imagination at work with the very first Protestant European immigrants was almost apocalyptic. I mean, in many ways their dream was not of a democracy as we have it today, but of a new Zion.

George Mason:
Right.

Joshua Whitfield:
And so Catholicism played the role of the villain in much of early American religious imagination.

George Mason:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joshua Whitfield:
And so that's it's own story, that's woven into things like the great awakening. But by the time we get to the 20th century, say to Al Smith and the twenties, we had, relatively speaking, a liberal social order which could create space for a Catholic candidate. But it still existed within a religious imagination that in some corners hadn't changed much. So J. Frank Norris' attacks on Al Smith in the twenties are funny to read at the moment, but from this historical distance.

George Mason:
And that was the fundamentalist pastor of the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth.

Joshua Whitfield:
Right, right, right, who was an interesting person to say the least.

George Mason:
[inaudible 00:07:35] .

Joshua Whitfield:
Yeah. And so his attack on Al Smith, and any Catholic, really. He represented, Norris did a dark prejudice that had been in America for a very long time. And Al Smith's response, as far as I can tell, was to speak to a moral, common ground between Catholics and Protestants.

George Mason:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joshua Whitfield:
And to make the argument that Catholics and Protestants, when it came to basic Christian beliefs and morals, were not that different, and certainly downplayed the relationship to the Pope, because that definitely was an issue that not just far-right Protestants pointed to, but that many Americans pointed to. How would a Catholic president relate to an Italian Pope?

George Mason:
Right.

Joshua Whitfield:
And of course that, by the time you get to 1962, to Kennedy's speech in Houston, he clearly says he's going to follow his own conscience rather than the Roman Catholic pontiff, and he creates a hard distinction between his Catholic life and his public life, which worked, but that created its own issues as well.

George Mason:
Well, we find ourselves in an interesting situation today with a Catholic president who is both faithful and devout in terms of his observance, and yet also there is this struggle within the Catholic Church over his pro-choice position, for example, his advocacy of same-sex marriage, things of this nature that are at odds with Catholic teaching. And yet there's been a kind of willingness to accommodate all of that, more so than might be expected in times past. So the church is wrestling with its role right now, isn't it? In terms of how to deal with that.

Joshua Whitfield:
I think the church is wrestling with it's role, and I think President Biden brings to the fore a lot of conflicts that have been raging within the Catholic Church for a long, long time. And so just to separate, as I do, to separate the specific issue, say abortion, or same-sex marriage, or anything like that, to step back and look at a Biden presidency within the American historical context. And so you see positive and negative, from my vantage point, a very infallible vantage point. But it's a positive thing in the United States that fewer people listen to the rhetoric represented in J. Frank Norris.

George Mason:
Right.

Joshua Whitfield:
It's a wonderful thing that we have Catholics in the highest office in the land, Muslims, that we truly have achieved that level of diversity. But the challenge, of course, is what that does to the religion itself. So my great teacher, Stanley Hauerwas, didn't hold any punches. He once famously referred to JFK's election as, "A great day of shame for Catholics," Because he said that the whole Catholic world rejoiced that JFK became a president because it had been the culmination of years and years and years of Catholics trying to prove that they're good Americans. And Stanley said, "Well, what happened after that was they discovered that America has some pretty antithetical stuff within it related to the Catholic faith." He basically said, "Abortion happened," and Hauerwas said, "Abortion is not a little mistake."

Joshua Whitfield:
And so now we have a situation where we have a Catholic president who practices his faith, who is devout, but who clearly operates in opposition to clear Catholic teaching. So how do we relate to that? My fear is that the Catholicism President Biden exemplifies will project itself back on to the Catholic faith, and that's a problem. And so that's what makes me nervous about any politicians religious language, I just think that's risky to talk about the soul of America, I don't know what that means. And so it's a wonderful thing that we have a Catholic president on that one level, but it raises all sorts of problems.

George Mason:
So let's probe a little more, not so much just in terms of the Catholic relationship with the state, but to any religious entity to the state, the appropriation of spiritual language into political discourse is something that is not new. I mean, this is a very old process of trying to meld the two. But I think what you're arguing is, there's a loss of a critical distinction.

Joshua Whitfield:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

George Mason:
That has an impact on the capacity of the church, or the religious entity, to speak as a conscience into public life,

Joshua Whitfield:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

George Mason:
To hold a critical stance where it doesn't feel like it has to support a partisan political approach in order to justify its legitimacy in engaging in the public square. So I think this is the problem left and right. We've seen this problem, I think, tremendously exposed in the evangelical support of Donald Trump, and now the shoe is on the other foot.

Joshua Whitfield:
Right, right. No, I think that's right. I mean, just to state sort theology, and again, I'm a student of Hauerwas, so I'm a big believer in the idea that the church's political engagement should presuppose that the church is the church, and the state is the state. I believe that Jesus called us disciples and he preached the kingdom, and those disciples created disciples and disciples, and that's the Christian Church. And that is the piece of Christ which witnesses in a wary dark world. But ever since Constantine and various forms and fashions, we've gotten that confused. And so Christians in America, Catholics and Protestants, have a hard time distinguishing between the church and America.

George Mason:
Right.

Joshua Whitfield:
And so the language gets confused. And I think Christians engage with any sort of social order when we know that we're part of the body of Christ, that we live this radical gospel life, in sometimes harmony and sometimes conflict with the world. And that is our principle task, and that is also what is often forgotten by the religious right, and then sometimes by the religious left. And so you see Catholics today, it reminds me of that wonderful movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where the Greek father sees Greek in everything.

George Mason:
Yeah, right.

Joshua Whitfield:
Everyone's Greek, every word comes from Greek, and he's so proud that he sees that. And so every time someone says, "Well, this person's a Catholic, this person's a Catholic," it makes me nervous because there's something anti-prophetic about it. And I love the United States, and I'm happy Mr. Biden's our president and I hope for the best, but this is not the ascendancy of Catholicism.

George Mason:
Right. Right. So Stanley Hauerwas has a way of putting things, and since we're talking about him, tell people what this phrase means. He says, "One of the important gifts that the church has to offer is to remind the world that it is the world."

Joshua Whitfield:
Right, absolutely. Well, because the church is the bearer, just like our brothers and sisters the Jews, we bear the story of creation and redemption. Right. And Stanley said, "Sin is not an evident category, you have to be told you're a sinner."

George Mason:
Right.

Joshua Whitfield:
And so Jews and Christians are bearers of God's story, and it's that story which illuminates the story we called the world, which is the fallen world of sin, the wear and tear of the world. And he said that specifically, in context, when he's talking about George Bush and the Iraq war. He said, "The problem is, is George Bush thinks he's a Christian. We need to remind him that he's actually the world, because Christians wouldn't act like that." And I think you could [crosstalk 00:19:13].

George Mason:
Let's just say that by that he did not mean to put him into the category of the unsaved.

Joshua Whitfield:
Right, absolutely.

George Mason:
But by that what he was trying to say is that this is not a president acting as a Christian, he is acting as a politician, as a political leader, which is not rooted in a discipleship that is, in Hauerwas' mind at least, always non-violent, always even pacifist in terms of its engagement.

Joshua Whitfield:
Yeah, I mean, Stanley said over and over again that he didn't imagine why any Christian would want to be a president or a US Senator, or anything like that. I don't follow him to that extreme, and I don't know how much Stanley follows himself to that extreme, but the point is clear, is that there is a conflict between what being a follower of Jesus demands of us when we relate to the world, and especially when it comes to things like violence, and the way Christians sometimes have not followed Jesus to be a good president.

George Mason:
So there is a long history of social justice advocacy within the Catholic Church.

Joshua Whitfield:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

George Mason:
Engagement with society, and you as a pastor, you even have politicians in your own congregation.

Joshua Whitfield:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

George Mason:
So there is a sense of responsibility pastorally to help nurture that engagement in a way that is good for the church and good for society. How do you manage that kind of counsel, that kind of pastoral guidance? What sort of ways do you think about talking to political figures in the pew, talking to people who are involved in benevolent and charitable work, and things of that nature. Do you have some guidelines that you keep in your own mind about that?

Joshua Whitfield:
Yeah, I think the social teaching of the church is ancient and beautiful, and it simply states that we love God, and we also love our neighbor, and we don't define our neighbor in terms of citizenship or ethnicity, we define our neighbor in terms of that they're createdness, and also their proximity to us. And so our task is to see to it that we create an environment in which the poor are cared for, they're enabled to live a life of dignity. And everybody can get on board with that, and the motivations of a Catholic politician, or a Catholic person in public life, stem from this idea that acting justly and creating a just society is not just good for humanity, that is it creates a just society, but it's also good for the building up of the kingdom.

George Mason:
Right.

Joshua Whitfield:
And so I think for the Catholic politician, that the difficulty is, how do we bring the fullness of Catholic social teaching to bear? And that's one of the reasons I'm glad I'm not a Catholic politician.

George Mason:
Well, right, because while we have this conversation earlier about abortion and same-sex marriage, at the same time, while there may be a witness against a public policy from the church in that respect, yet there are, as you mentioned, the preferential option for the poor, a commitment to welcoming the stranger, and therefore immigration policy, and things of that nature, that might be a position of advocacy, on the other hand, in public life. So it's really about knowing your own story, isn't it? About having a sense of your own faith so that you're taking cues from the church, from the church's teaching first and applying them, instead of trying to accommodate the church's view to a political philosophy.

Joshua Whitfield:
Yeah, I mean, John Paul II talked about it in Veritatis splendor, the idea is that the church is rightly the teacher of conscience. And the idea is that Catholics will have done the necessary work to see that their conscience is well formed, and then they'll go out into the world and and act justly.

George Mason:
Right.

Joshua Whitfield:
Which leads me to, the Catholic social ethic is actually quite simple. We should care for the poor, we should welcome the immigrant, we should also be dead set against abortion. This isn't hard, I just have yet to see it at work in American politics.

George Mason:
Well, I go most of the way with you on these issues, not all of the way, but that's because we continue to try to struggle all ourselves even as Christians, whether Catholics or Protestants or Baptist, Separatists, or whatever the case may be, to try to figure out what is it that we think is consistent with a Jesus' ethic, and how do we apply it more broadly, and then doing so not only within our own congregations. So that's the starting place. I think we both agree that the church itself is a social order, and before you try to impose it on someone else, remember to do your own. But there's a generosity that has to be in play also in the public square. And I think that's where people misunderstand the Catholic influence, is the assumption that if Catholics get into a position of political influence, then it'll be a wholesale imposition of their views rather than a recognition that we're playing in the public square, and that's an open field.

Joshua Whitfield:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, no, I think the ancient American fear that somehow the Pope will be pulling the strings of a Catholic politician is, it's always been fantasy. And I think, take for example particular issues like abortion. The church's argument against abortion, the church would suggest, is not a religious argument at all, and they would consider it a natural and a moral argument. And they would say the same about marriage and things like that. But when the church often speaks on those issues, it's immediately categorized as religious. That's a rhetorical move that's not altogether a good one. And so I think a healthy pluralism would be for the Catholic Church and the Catholic politician to be able to articulate reasons for certain issues that are acceptable in a pluralistic society.

George Mason:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joshua Whitfield:
I think that's a good demand to put to the church.

George Mason:
Yeah. It's not enough, and we see this in evangelicalism, it's not enough simply to say, "Well, the Bible says, therefore."

Joshua Whitfield:
Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of those issues that the church clearly is "counter-cultural" on, they aren't religious arguments, and if we can accept that they're not religious arguments, but they're arguments from natural law, then I think we'd be in a healthier place. We wouldn't have solved anything, but I think our arguments would be in a healthier place.

George Mason:
Well, we only have a few minutes left, but I want to say, I'm going to go back a little bit in our conversation to, you were talking about J. Frank Norris about the attitude of that fundamentalist Baptist toward Catholics in the early 20th century. The truth of the matter is that one of our Baptist champions of religious liberty was the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, George W. Truett.

Joshua Whitfield:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

George Mason:
Who, in his famous speech on religious liberty at the steps of the Capitol in 1920, made very severe anti-Catholic arguments in order to defend his view of separation of church and state. And the lived experience, I've found, being in Texas, is that the closer get to the border of Mexico, the more being a Baptist is, is not being Catholic. I mean, it is really. In fact, in our church, Josh, when the sanctuary was built in 1966, they decided to put a cross on the top of the steeple. But it was quite a controversial thing because there were a lot of people who thought that was too close to being Catholic.

George Mason:
So we've come a long way, I think, in this, but there still is this sense, even within the Christian community, I think, that we're not always so sure about each other in terms of our siblings relationship in Christ, and then I think that extends in terms of public life and our worry about those influences. So I think that your presence in Dallas has been a gift and a blessing, to know your story, which everybody doesn't know if they haven't maybe looked into it, but you were not always a Catholic, you were a convert, and the father of four, and the husband of one. And so that's a whole interesting dynamic, isn't it?

Joshua Whitfield:
It keep me busy. But your point, I think that's beautiful, George, and again, that's one of the reasons why I love you, to be honest, because what you just said there about, we should give thanks we live in this city, we live in this society, that someone like George Mason and me can sit down and poke at each other and talk and ask questions, and that's the sort of society we need to be in.

George Mason:
Right.

Joshua Whitfield:
And so there's a lot of stuff I don't understand, there's a lot of stuff we don't agree on there. If I sat down with President Biden I'd say, "Congratulations, Mr. President, let's talk about this. Can we do it over a beer, please?" And it's that sort of society, which is true friendship, that wasn't possible in J. Frank Norris's day.

George Mason:
That's true.

Joshua Whitfield:
And so we give thanks to God for that. I mean, we're a better country in many was.

George Mason:
Right.

Joshua Whitfield:
And just to see hope in those conversations, those relationships, where we can get close to these really important issues, because there are LGBTQ people out there, there are immigrants, there are Catholics who are just trying to figure things out, there's poor folk, homeless folk. We need to see them all as friends.

George Mason:
Yes, exactly.

Joshua Whitfield:
And we need to be able to do exactly what you do in your ministry, George.

George Mason:
Well, likewise with you. And let's not neglect, before we close, to say, and then there is the Texas Rangers. [crosstalk 00:32:51]. We have a [inaudible 00:32:52] love for the Rangers.

Joshua Whitfield:
Exactly, as baseball is... you and I need to go to a game, lets just say.

George Mason:
We do, we do. Well listen, thanks so much your conversation with me. As always, I can do this all the time, and I'd be better for it, and we all would be.

Joshua Whitfield:
I pray for what you do because it's beautiful.

George Mason:
Thanks so much. Well, thanks for being on Good God, and have a great day.

Joshua Whitfield:
Thanks.

George Mason:
See you friend.

Speaker 3:
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