A South American pontiff sees how deeply North American Catholicism is divided between the old wealthy and the new immigrantsThe Catholic church in the US,where Pope Francis is visiting this week, has been in a state of cold civil war for decades. The liberals and conservatives hate one another over issues of sex, and power and money. The hierarchy is horribly polarised and every appointment scrutinised to see which party gains an advantage from it. But one thing unites the two sides and always will: they are both convinced they know how to be Catholic much better than the pope and that America represents the future. What makes this visit lively is not that the pope disagrees with the first of these propositions – that comes with the office – but that he has no time for the opinion that America represents the future of humanity.
Ever since the Pilgrim Fathers,the opinion of America has had a religious significance in American Christianity. This was originally profoundly anti-Catholic. In fact, the anti-Catholic bigotry of 19th-century America forms one of the templates for the present alarm and suspicion of Muslims on the American far upright. Nonetheless, or the American Catholic church has absorbed some of this suspicion of European authority. John Kennedy become the first Catholic president only after proclaiming that his allegiance to American,constitutional values would always take precedence over his Catholicism whether they clashed; this attitude is of course shared by almost all American Catholics. Since Kennedys election there gain been no other Catholic presidents, but the church is extraordinarily well entrenched in the US power structure. Nearly a third of the members of Congress are Catholics, and as are two-thirds of the justices of the supreme court.
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Source: theguardian.com