The tragedy of all-pervading Church politics

In the Catholic Church in the United States, one of the most important Churches in the world, the structures of ecclesial conversation have all but broken down.

We're not talking about being political in the elevated sense of the word -- that is, committed to the ecclesial community as well as to the polis. Rather, the Church has become politicized in the sense that political divisions among its own members tend to dominate everything.

They dominate not only the crafting of careful public statements by those who work in and for the Church, but also the very process of forming ideas, worldviews and opinions.

The Church has become politicized in a way that reflects the slogan of Charles Maurras, one of the heroes of the neo-integralist Catholics:"la politique d'abord!".

It's not politics in the sense of day-to-day politics. It's politics in the sense that the political order comes first as key to all other questions: ecclesial, theological and spiritual.

It also comes at the expense of all other questions. It's not about how to avoid tripping a wire. Indeed, political survival is now the very wiring of Catholic leadership and is much more decisive than possessing intellectual, spiritual or even managerial skills.

Examples of how politics has taken over completely within the Church

One recent example of the ruthlessness of this primacy of the political are the December 31departures of a senior journalist and the editor-in-chief of the US-based Catholic News Agency.

The news came just one day after the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) announced a number of changes to its television and radio programming including the ouster of Gloria Purvis, an outspoken champion of racial justice and host of the "Morning Glory" radio show.

On one level this is an egregious example of the fact that, in American Catholicism today, Black Catholics continue to pay the price for anti-racism work.

But on another level, it demonstrates how politics has taken over completely, when a conservative Catholic media conglomerate like EWTN thinks it can get away with so blatantly signaling its position on the issue of racism in a country where Trump and his Catholic supporters will likely refuse to leave the stage even after Joe Biden is inaugurated president on January 20.

Another example of the primacy of politics in current American Catholicism is the way the US bishops have dealt with Donald Trump's threats to democracy during his presidency, his failed re-election campaign and in the aftermath of Biden's clear victory.

The silence of the shepherds

As a national body, the bishops have said nothing about how Trump -- a president many of them saw as an ally in the "culture wars" -- has posed a threat to the Republic.

Their silence is due, in part, to a kind of constitutional agnosticism. It is also partly out of fear that they might send a political message too uncomfortable to stomach for Catholics who voted for Trump. And it's due, in good measure, to the political sympathy many of the bishops have for the outgoing president.

In Trump's assault on the rule of law, with flagrant attempts to overthrow an election and institute authoritarian rule, the US Catholic leaders' efforts to remain neutral show a detachment that absolves the extremists.

They also display the culture limitations and lack of leadership in the generation of clerics currently in power in the Church.

But such ecclesial politicization is evident not only in the Church in the United States. It's a problem wherever the Church has become complacent to the threat of ethno-nationalism. It is a problem both of political and theological culture.

The fatal alliance of faith and political power

On the one hand, it is clear that the damage done by Christian nationalism cannot be repaired from within a religious framework alone, as Victoria J. Barnett wrote recently.

Catholics in America must recognize the fatal alliance of faith and political power. Civic reconciliation must begin with the clear repudiation of religiously driven nationalism and hatred, with a discernment in the public square that is politically visible.

On the other hand, there also has to be a de-politicization of the internal debate in the Catholic Church.

In Catholicism today, the chaos at the level of political conscience is the result of inverting the roles of the Church's ecclesial-sacramental life and its media-virtual existence, with the latter now imposing its language and morality upon the former.

"This new media ecology threatens the unity of the Church, as it replaces Catholic ecclesial notions of communion with an imported secular model of cultural identity that reduces ritual and doctrine to tools to mark difference," wrote Catholic theologian Vincent Miller in an essay published in 2015.

"At its extreme, unity is reduced to the mere internal result of the external marking of difference," he said.

The serious threats of ecclesial politicization

This is the framework -- not sacramental, but political -- in which American Catholics understand the bishops' threat to impose sanctions on President Biden's access to the Eucharist.

It manifests how such an ecclesial politicization threatens to destroy the Church's sacramental orientation.

It also extinguishes the Church's ability to deal with internal differences in a way that is not dominated by a superimposing partisan framework, including the way Catholic politicians deal with the abortion issue.

As Terry Eagleton wrote in his book Hope Without Optimism, the true calamity is the extinction of the word: when language is obliterated, hope is extinguished and meaning collapses.

The problem of polarization in the Church is not just due to the extremism of the positions.

It is also related to the fact that the current model of the Church is the result of the projection of political faiths on an ecclesial screen. The notion of Church unity has been reduced to expectations of political uniformity.

On top of all the huge challenges facing an institutional structure struggling to make sense of itself in the wake of momentous and all-encompassing changes nationally and globally, it is urgent for the Catholic Church to assume a new matrix of understanding that gets rid of the mantras of right-wing ideologues that have led to this perilous politicization of the faith.

Catholicism did not start in the 1980s. There is a deep Catholic past from which we can and must draw.

In order to be truly counter-cultural, Catholics must be able to offer a sophisticated critique of modernity, and not some dubious "Catholic spin" on the critique leveled by such non-Catholic cultural warriors as Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro. The either-or lens offered by those playing theology as a blood sport has done enough damage already.

In the Catholic Church in the United States, one of the most important Churches in the world, the structures of ecclesial conversation have all but broken down.

And it's here, unfortunately, where Pope Francis' promise of synodality looks like nothing more than a mirage.

Follow me on Twitter @MassimoFaggioli