One element of the church that Pope Francis was elected to lead in 2013 was an ideology that might be called the "American" model of Catholicism--the troubling result of efforts by intellectuals like Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus to remake Catholicism into both a culture war colossus and a prop for ascendant capitalism.
After laying the groundwork during the 1980s and armed with a selective and dishonest reading of Pope John Paul II's 1991 encyclical
Centesimus Annus, these neoconservative commentators established themselves as authoritative Catholic voices throughout the 1990s, viewing every question through a liberal-conservative ecclesial-political lens. The movement morphed further after the 9/11 terror attacks into a startling amalgamation of theocratic convictions, which led to the troubling theo-populism we see today.
The election of the Latin American pope represented a mortal threat to all of this, and a poisonous backlash was inevitable, bringing us to the brink of a true "American schism." This is the drama of today's Catholic Church. In
Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis, Massimo Borghesi--who masterfully unveiled the pope's own intellectual development in his
The Mind of Pope Francis--analyzes the origins of today's Catholic neoconservative movement and its clash with the church that Francis understands as a "field hospital" for a fragmented world.
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