If Protestants have problems holding public office in a constitutional republic because they feel compelled to bring their personal and private (as opposed to public) views into politics, then imagine the challenges that Roman Catholics have. Say hello to Paul Ryan who continually receives complaints that he is departing from 100 years of Roman Catholic social teaching. (And boy oh boy do they have social teaching, though I have yet to see Pope Francis weigh in on Ferguson, Missouri.) Michael Sean Winters has a bead on Ryan as a libertarian and Winters knows that libertarianism is antagonistic to the gospel — though I don’t think Winters has Trent in mind:
It is unclear to me whether or not these Catholic apologists for the GOP will give Ryan’s policies the cover he needs. Unlike Sen. Rick Santorum, who made social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage his calling card for many Catholic (and evangelical) voters, Ryan rose to prominence on the strength of these economic views that are clearly at odds with the Church. Already, it has been heartening to watch Ryan’s fetish for Ayn Rand become his Saul Alinsky: a radical association that causes people to question the intellectual heft and judgment of the candidate to whom the radical is tied. But Weigel and company have been working to force (think round peg, square whole) their economic views into compliance with Catholic social teachings for some time, and their influence has a long reach.
Still, one suspects these GOP Catholics mostly preach to the GOP choir. The real Catholic swing voter is more likely to listen to the counsel found in the Gospel of St. Matthew: “Whatever you do for these the least of my brethren, you do for me.” And, on that score, Ryan is a tough sell.
Michael Brendan Dougherty, to the right theologically and politically of Winters, has a different estimate of Ryan:
No longer is Paul Ryan the P90X-ripping, budget-slashing devotee of Ayn Rand that Democrats gleefully caricatured as someone who wanted to push grandma off a cliff. Today he’s the geeky white guy dancing badly at a black church, and then biting his lip and nodding to signal how much he is listening, and learning. He’s putting in an effort to expand his horizons personally. He is undergoing a political conversion, or at least a conversion on political rhetoric.
Quite literally, Paul Ryan experiences a kind of Come-To-Frank-Luntz moment when someone asks him who he is talking about when he refers to some people as “takers.” Ryan had in the past adopted the language of “makers and takers” to describe people who are paying more in taxes than they receive in benefits, and people who are receiving more benefits than what they pay. Ryan says this language was just in the air at the time he adopted it. And it was. A Nation of Takers was the scorching title to a sobering (and sober) book by Nicholas Eberstadt about the shape of America’s entitlement state. Eberstadt’s book is exactly the kind of doomsday look into the spreadsheets that Ryan was getting into then.
Today, Ryan won’t disavow the math, exactly, but he has discarded the implied insult he attached to it.
Irrespective of Ryan’s adherence to the church’s social teaching, isn’t the demand especially from the Roman Catholic left a replay of what Houston’s Baptist ministers feared about John F. Kennedy? If a Roman Catholic legislator or executive or justice is supposed to be obedient to Roman Catholic social teaching, the teaching of the papacy, doesn’t that suggest that Roman Catholics are supposed to be submissive to a foreign prince? Not to mention the application of Roman Catholic teaching to public life in the United States through federally elected officials seems to be a breach of religious disestablishment? (And doesn’t that ironically make the Roman Catholic left, who are generally supportive of Vatican 2’s teaching on religious freedom and don’t care a lot for a hierarchical church, another iteration of Roman Catholic traditionalism which stands for the authority of the papacy and bishops?)
One additional irony here is the way that Roman Catholics in the U.S. — at least some of them — expect folks like Ryan to adhere closely to church teaching but they don’t have the same expectation for Roman Catholic theologians. Paul Griffiths ruffled a few feathers last summer when he asked Roman Catholic theologians to follow the lead and authority of their bishops. That seems only fair if so many are going to fault Ryan for departing from church teaching about economics (even though the performance of the Vatican Bank Institute for Religious Works suggested that the bishops didn’t know economics so well). But then again, in an area where the church could enforce its teaching — at its teaching institutions — the will is not there, which so far is no different from Paul Ryan’s bishop who apparently gives the Congressman a long leash. (How Jason and the Callers keep up with all this audacity is anyone’s guess.)
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