The Rise of the Catholic Right
How right-wing billionaires are attempting a hostile takeover of the U.S. Catholic Church
TIMOTHY BUSCH IS A WEALTHY MAN with big ambitions. His version of the prosperity gospel, Catholic in content and on steroids, is a hybrid of traditionalist pieties wrapped in American-style excess and positioned most conspicuously in service of free market capitalism.
Busch’s organization, the Napa Institute, and its corresponding foundation are among the most prominent of a growing number of right-wing Catholic nonprofits with political motivations. Such groups, some more extreme than others and all on the right to far-right side of the political and ecclesial spectrum, have in recent years muscled in on territory that previously was the largely unchallenged domain of the nation’s powerful Catholic bishops...
Busch’s Catholic Right brand of American libertarianism aligns with some far-right leaders based in Italy who oppose Pope Francis and appear interested in joining forces to fashion an alternative to official Catholic leadership structures, which in this country means the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
The Napa Institute—with its mission, according to its tax forms, to “equip Catholic leaders to defend and advance the Catholic faith in the ‘next America’”—is one of several Catholic nonprofits that have become forceful players within the church and at the intersection of religion and politics, and one of the most active. Some groups are aggressively involved in aligning Catholic thought with libertarian economic theory while others are devoted to defining Catholicism for the culture by exceptionally conservative theology and practice.
Newer groups—including the Napa Institute, Legatus (launched by Domino’s Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan), and the Acton Institute—use the nonprofit designation to push an extreme libertarian economic agenda. Their devotion to individualism, unrestricted capitalism, and diminishment of government services, especially to the poor and marginalized, runs counter to the central tenets of Catholic social teaching.
“I think we’re in a kind of brave new world where these groups really are setting themselves up as authorities above the authorities,” said Stephen Schneck, former director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America (and a Sojourners board member). “I don’t know how else to say that. They’re challenging the legitimacy of existing structures of authority and trying to fill that space with their own agenda and their own people.”
The decline of the bishops
The eruption of independent groups may not have been that surprising in the Protestant world where evangelical leaders and their movements, taking up issues on the margins of society and church, often exercised a degree of suspicion about mainline denominations.
In the rigidly hierarchical Catholic world, on the other hand, dissent was often smothered beneath the rubric of Catholic unity. Since its founding in 1917 (as the National Catholic War Council) to ensure Catholic support for World War I, the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference has been one of the most powerful religious organizations in the country. Until recently, the Catholic clerical culture, particularly at the bishops’ level, was able to present a united and authoritative front when speaking on social and political issues.
The phenomenon of independent organizations challenging the established Catholic authority emerged in the 1980s, just as the U.S. bishops were at the apex of their power as a teaching body, addressing major issues of the day. In 1983, the bishops released a far-reaching pastoral on modern warfare, the result of broad consultation with lay experts. They followed in 1986 with a pastoral letter titled “Economic Justice for All,” a document anchored in a century of Catholic social teaching and highly critical of President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies—and completely unwelcome to the 1980 vice-presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, David H. Koch.
The ascendancy of the Catholic Right, Schneck said, is rooted in the bishops’ letter on economics. Countering the pastoral letter, he said, marked “the beginning of the conservative efforts to create their own magisterium [teaching authority] on the side.”
Attacking Pope Francis
During previous pontificates, Busch was all-in on loyalty to the pope and the teaching authorities of the church. In the era of Pope Francis, however, he has associated himself with right-wing Catholic efforts to discredit the pope using the largely debunked accusations of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal ambassador to the United States. In one of several letters criticizing the pope, Viganò urged Francis to step down.
The case could be made that Viganò is merely a disgruntled employee striking back at the home office. When Francis visited the United States in 2015, it was Viganò who arranged the awkward surprise meeting between the pope and Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky who refused to sign marriage licenses of same-sex couples. Viganò was later removed from the diplomatic post by Pope Francis, under a cloud of controversy.
But Viganò’s complaints—including accusations that Pope Francis ignored warnings about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was removed from active ministry in June after numerous allegations of sexual abuse over 50 years—rose above the level of an unhappy bureaucrat. Viganò shared his letter ahead of time with several far-right Catholic leaders, including Busch.
Viganò’s letter calling for the pope’s resignation was distributed through a subsidiary of EWTN, the largest religious media network in the world with a claimed reach of a quarter-billion households in 140 countries. EWTN, which was launched in the early 1980s by nun-magnate Mother Angelica, who was committed to promoting “traditional social values,” also owns the Catholic News Agency and the National Catholic Register newspaper, through which Viganò’s accusations against the pope were distributed.
Viganò has since moderated his claims, and they have been strongly refuted by Vatican officials, but Busch told The New York Times that the archbishop “has done us a great service. He decided to come forward because if he didn’t, he realized he would be perpetuating the cover-up.” Later, Busch added, “Viganò has given us an agenda. We need to follow those leads and push that forward.”
A right-wing phenomenon
Since their emergence in the 1980s, right-wing Catholic groups, with their deep alliances among the bishops themselves, have achieved a prominence that essentially makes them an alternative to the U.S. bishops’ conference. Schneck said that it has become “increasingly difficult to identify the line between this conservative Catholic deployment of organizations and the official institutions of the church in America.”
In a bizarre turn, we now have Catholic groups accusing the pope of betraying the church and calling for him to resign, as well as initiating what amounts to hate group activity against gays and others in church settings. Money, and the power of U.S. nonprofits, has given extreme-right Catholics new means of communicating to the wider world what they think the Catholic narrative should be. That generally, but not always, is confined to sexual issues—abortion, gay rights, the rights of divorced and remarried people within the church.
Schneck believes there is a qualitative difference today in the challenge to the structure of Catholic hierarchy than there was in the 1980s. “Then, they were trying to respond to the letter on the economy, but they weren’t challenging the authority of the bishops, they weren’t challenging the authority of the pope,” Schneck said. “They weren’t really trying to involve themselves in religion as much as trying to push the church in the direction of being more accommodating to capitalism and free market solutions.”
Today, he said, “These groups are increasingly trying to change the church itself.”
TIMOTHY BUSCH IS A WEALTHY MAN with big ambitions. His version of the prosperity gospel, Catholic in content and on steroids, is a hybrid of traditionalist pieties wrapped in American-style excess and positioned most conspicuously in service of free market capitalism.
Busch’s organization, the Napa Institute, and its corresponding foundation are among the most prominent of a growing number of right-wing Catholic nonprofits with political motivations. Such groups, some more extreme than others and all on the right to far-right side of the political and ecclesial spectrum, have in recent years muscled in on territory that previously was the largely unchallenged domain of the nation’s powerful Catholic bishops...
Busch’s Catholic Right brand of American libertarianism aligns with some far-right leaders based in Italy who oppose Pope Francis and appear interested in joining forces to fashion an alternative to official Catholic leadership structures, which in this country means the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
The Napa Institute—with its mission, according to its tax forms, to “equip Catholic leaders to defend and advance the Catholic faith in the ‘next America’”—is one of several Catholic nonprofits that have become forceful players within the church and at the intersection of religion and politics, and one of the most active. Some groups are aggressively involved in aligning Catholic thought with libertarian economic theory while others are devoted to defining Catholicism for the culture by exceptionally conservative theology and practice.
Newer groups—including the Napa Institute, Legatus (launched by Domino’s Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan), and the Acton Institute—use the nonprofit designation to push an extreme libertarian economic agenda. Their devotion to individualism, unrestricted capitalism, and diminishment of government services, especially to the poor and marginalized, runs counter to the central tenets of Catholic social teaching.
“I think we’re in a kind of brave new world where these groups really are setting themselves up as authorities above the authorities,” said Stephen Schneck, former director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America (and a Sojourners board member). “I don’t know how else to say that. They’re challenging the legitimacy of existing structures of authority and trying to fill that space with their own agenda and their own people.”
The decline of the bishops
The eruption of independent groups may not have been that surprising in the Protestant world where evangelical leaders and their movements, taking up issues on the margins of society and church, often exercised a degree of suspicion about mainline denominations.
In the rigidly hierarchical Catholic world, on the other hand, dissent was often smothered beneath the rubric of Catholic unity. Since its founding in 1917 (as the National Catholic War Council) to ensure Catholic support for World War I, the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference has been one of the most powerful religious organizations in the country. Until recently, the Catholic clerical culture, particularly at the bishops’ level, was able to present a united and authoritative front when speaking on social and political issues.
The phenomenon of independent organizations challenging the established Catholic authority emerged in the 1980s, just as the U.S. bishops were at the apex of their power as a teaching body, addressing major issues of the day. In 1983, the bishops released a far-reaching pastoral on modern warfare, the result of broad consultation with lay experts. They followed in 1986 with a pastoral letter titled “Economic Justice for All,” a document anchored in a century of Catholic social teaching and highly critical of President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies—and completely unwelcome to the 1980 vice-presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, David H. Koch.
The ascendancy of the Catholic Right, Schneck said, is rooted in the bishops’ letter on economics. Countering the pastoral letter, he said, marked “the beginning of the conservative efforts to create their own magisterium [teaching authority] on the side.”
Attacking Pope Francis
During previous pontificates, Busch was all-in on loyalty to the pope and the teaching authorities of the church. In the era of Pope Francis, however, he has associated himself with right-wing Catholic efforts to discredit the pope using the largely debunked accusations of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal ambassador to the United States. In one of several letters criticizing the pope, Viganò urged Francis to step down.
The case could be made that Viganò is merely a disgruntled employee striking back at the home office. When Francis visited the United States in 2015, it was Viganò who arranged the awkward surprise meeting between the pope and Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky who refused to sign marriage licenses of same-sex couples. Viganò was later removed from the diplomatic post by Pope Francis, under a cloud of controversy.
But Viganò’s complaints—including accusations that Pope Francis ignored warnings about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was removed from active ministry in June after numerous allegations of sexual abuse over 50 years—rose above the level of an unhappy bureaucrat. Viganò shared his letter ahead of time with several far-right Catholic leaders, including Busch.
Viganò’s letter calling for the pope’s resignation was distributed through a subsidiary of EWTN, the largest religious media network in the world with a claimed reach of a quarter-billion households in 140 countries. EWTN, which was launched in the early 1980s by nun-magnate Mother Angelica, who was committed to promoting “traditional social values,” also owns the Catholic News Agency and the National Catholic Register newspaper, through which Viganò’s accusations against the pope were distributed.
Viganò has since moderated his claims, and they have been strongly refuted by Vatican officials, but Busch told The New York Times that the archbishop “has done us a great service. He decided to come forward because if he didn’t, he realized he would be perpetuating the cover-up.” Later, Busch added, “Viganò has given us an agenda. We need to follow those leads and push that forward.”
A right-wing phenomenon
Since their emergence in the 1980s, right-wing Catholic groups, with their deep alliances among the bishops themselves, have achieved a prominence that essentially makes them an alternative to the U.S. bishops’ conference. Schneck said that it has become “increasingly difficult to identify the line between this conservative Catholic deployment of organizations and the official institutions of the church in America.”
In a bizarre turn, we now have Catholic groups accusing the pope of betraying the church and calling for him to resign, as well as initiating what amounts to hate group activity against gays and others in church settings. Money, and the power of U.S. nonprofits, has given extreme-right Catholics new means of communicating to the wider world what they think the Catholic narrative should be. That generally, but not always, is confined to sexual issues—abortion, gay rights, the rights of divorced and remarried people within the church.
Schneck believes there is a qualitative difference today in the challenge to the structure of Catholic hierarchy than there was in the 1980s. “Then, they were trying to respond to the letter on the economy, but they weren’t challenging the authority of the bishops, they weren’t challenging the authority of the pope,” Schneck said. “They weren’t really trying to involve themselves in religion as much as trying to push the church in the direction of being more accommodating to capitalism and free market solutions.”
Today, he said, “These groups are increasingly trying to change the church itself.”