By David Gibson who is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. (in the NYT)
Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, is exactly the kind of Catholic that America needs.
That might sound odd, especially given that Mr. Burnham was raised Catholic but rarely attends Mass and leads the center-left party in one of the West’s least churchgoing nations. But Mr. Burnham’s Catholicism is still central to who he is as a leader, and it informs his approach to policy, which is oriented toward the common good rather than culture wars.
“Catholic social teaching underpins my politics,” he once said. In an expansive talk last year for the British religion and politics think tank Theos, Mr. Burnham called for moving from a crisis of trust between people and their government to a “culture of encounter,” a phrase he learned from Pope Francis.
That approach to politics — a “healthy ‘culture of negotiation,’” as Pope Leo XIV recently called it, that leaves no one behind — has gone missing from the American church and American politics, to the detriment of both.
For decades, Catholic politics in the United States has been more of an internecine battlefield than a search for common ground. Catholic politicians such as Al Smith, the “happy warrior,” in the 1920s, and R. Sargent Shriver, who helped found the Peace Corps and other programs in the war on poverty, in the 1960s, once found in politics a way to acceptance in society by focusing on social justice and the well-being of all.
More recently, Catholics in the political realm focused on divisive social issues such as the legal status of gay rights or abortion. (In their official political guidance, U.S. bishops called abortion the “preeminent priority” as markers to divide good Catholics from bad Catholics.) Those who didn’t measure up could be threatened with being barred from communion.
Prominent Catholic politicians including Vice President JD Vance spend time arguing with the pope about who is better at theology, while other Catholics argue over how much Latin to use at Mass. (continued on page 2)