Theologian says Biden exit marks end of ‘conciliar Catholicism’ in US

ROME – An Italian theologian has asserted that U.S. President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race effectively marks the end of “conciliar Catholicism” in America, in favor of a “populist and substantially racist” version of the faith largely opposed to the agenda of Pope Francis.

The analysis by Marcello Neri, a veteran theologian who’s also a visiting professor at the Vatican-sponsored Pontifical Theological Institute “John Paul II” for Marriage and Family Sciences, was published Sunday by Settimana News, a digital platform sponsored by the Dehonian Fathers.

“Biden’s renunciation of the Democratic candidacy for the next presidential elections symbolically closes the season of American Catholicism inspired and moved by Vatican II,” Neri wrote, adding that although Biden is Catholic, he never received “a real endorsement from the American bishops.”

Instead, Neri claimed, what he called the “silence” of the American bishops after the Jan. 2, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol signaled the end of the “long democratic season” triggered by Vatican II in favor of becoming “a bastion of Catholic truth in selective and functional terms.”

“Biden represented the last gasp of a non-individualistic and non-partisan social Catholicism, imbued with gentle tones and ways as it unfolded within the country’s events, capable of holding and supporting the complexity of the American social fabric without becoming rigid in identity positions which ultimately end up leaving a portion of the population alone in coping with human and social life,” Neri wrote.

The Republican choice of J.D. Vance, a social conservative who converted to the Catholic church in 2019, represents a transition to a new type of American Catholicism which “assumes the burden and responsibility of presenting itself as the driving force of Catholic suspicion towards the Vatican (in particular of Pope Francis),” Neri said.

Born in 1942, Biden was 23 years old when the Second Vatican Council closed in December 1965 and thus in a position to remember the changes it tirggered in Catholic life. At 39, Vance wouldn’t be born for another two decades, so for him Vatican II is a chapter in church history.

“This non-conciliar Catholicism is intimately imperialist,” Neri asserted, “supporting pockets of resistance to Francis’ pontificate with millions of dollars, to make them its vassals in a project that transforms the Catholic universalism of the church into a global mega sect (whose headquarters is found in the United States).”

This new brand of identarian Catholicism, Neri asserted, is “populist and substantially racist in many of its expressions.”

“It’s a Catholicism in which there’s no room for the joy of the Gospel, but only for rage and resentment – ably manipulated by that part of American society that sees in Trump the messiah who will make American great again,” Neri wrote.

So far, Neri’s commentary represents one of the few substantive responses to the Biden withdrawal from Catholic voices in or around the Vatican.

As of Monday morning Rome time, the news had not yet been reported by the Vatican’s official media platforms. The newspaper of the Italian bishops, Avvenire, carried two pieces, one of which reported Biden’s announcement while the other analyzed Vice President Kamal Harris’ electoral chances.