Zeitschrift ThQ - Leseprobe 1 der aktuellen Ausgabe 4/2025

Zusammenfassung
Der Artikel analysiert die sich entwickelnde Beziehung zwischen der katholischen Kirche und der Demokratie in verschiedenen Regionen der Welt. Der erste Teil konzentriert sich auf den Weg der katholischen Tradition hin zur Demokratie im letzten Jahrhundert. Der zweite Teil untersucht die unterschiedlichen Herausforderungen für die katholische Kirche in verschiedenen Teilen der Welt. Der letzte Teil befasst sich mit der ganz besonderen Situation des Katholizismus in den USA während der aktuellen Neudefinition der amerikanischen Demokratie im Zeitalter von Donald Trump und seiner ethno-nationalistischen Bewegung, in der Religion eine Schlüsselposition einnimmt. Hierbei wiederum kommt dem US-Katholizismus als der größten Kirche des Landes, die eine entscheidende Stimme im Kampf gegen den progressiven Liberalismus hat, eine besondere Rolle zu. Darüber hinaus gibt es enge Verbindungen zwischen der Zukunft der Demokratie in den USA, der katholischen Kirche in diesem Land und dem weltweiten Katholizismus.

Abstract
The article analyses the evolving relationship between the Catholic Church and democracy in different areas of the world. Part one focuses on the Catholic tradition‘s path towards democracy over the last century. Part two addresses the very special situation of Catholicism in the USA amid the ongoing redefinition of American democracy in the age of Donald Trump and his ethno-nationalist movement, in which religion has a key position. Here, US Catholicism, as the largest church in the country with a decisive voice in the fight against progressive liberalism, plays a special role. Furthermore, there are close links between the future of democracy in the United States, the Catholic Church in that country, and Catholicism worldwide.

Schlüsselwörter/Keywords
Demokratie; globaler Katholizismus; Konstitutionalismus; Postkolonialismus
Democracy; global Catholicism; constitutionalism; post-colonialism

1. Introduction

At sixty years from the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, Catholicism is one of the global moral agents called to respond to, and is impacted by, the crisis of democracies all around the world. In the first quarter of the 21st century the international order created in the mid-20th century has been disrupted. Disruption is evident within political contexts (crisis of representative systems, rise of authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, and diverse global rivalries), social ones (epidemic of loneliness, collapse of intermediate bodies between state and individual), and economic realities (income disparities and a declining middle class). Global Catholicism, too, is in a state of disruption as it reshapes both in response to these global phenomena and as consequence of long-term demographic trajectories.
Disruption entails also a global theological crisis: the political theologies, fruit of the Second Vatican Council, which in turn was a development made possible by the reckoning of the Church with the rise of the nation state in the 19th century, the tragic experience of the first half of the 20th century and the struggle with authoritarianism, have to cohabit and contend with new forms of integralist theologies or new justifications of resurgent illiberal and ethno-centric ideologies. These phenomena take different shapes in different areas of global Catholicism but also within one same continent, as the “Synodal Process” (since 2021) showed us.
Given the early 21st century rise of nationalism and populism in the Anglosphere and elsewhere, in Europe and in the West the fear would be a repeat of what occurred in the 1930s when the Church’s fear of communism and social disorder pushed ecclesiastical hierarchies into the arms of nationalist, authoritarian, and racist political regimes. But in different continental areas there are different challenges that make a unified response difficult even from the theoretical point of view.

2. Crisis of democracy and global Catholicism

One of the ironies of the present moment is that Catholicism is called (or feels itself called) to come to the defense of democracy (and the values attached to it) despite the fact that Catholic teaching is a very recent, ambivalent, and cautious “convert” to the modern secular faith in democracy. But by the end of the 20th century the Catholic Church had become identified with a religious tradition and an institutional system able to come to terms, in its own way, with the ideas and the institutions of political modernity. It was a settlement that had become more stable, at least at the level of official teaching of the Church and the international activity of the Holy See, since Vatican II.
The Catholic support of the European project after World War II was reflected in the words and actions of Pius XII and the most important politicians of the Christian Democratic parties governing Europe after 1945. It was a critical part of the transition from the nationalist, romantic roots of the theological ressourcement between the mid-19th century and the 1920s/30s to the post-1945 internationalist and multilateral idea of modern politics.

Between the 1960s and early 21st century, the Church embraced decolonization and the spread of constitutional democracy in nation-states. At the same time, in the context of the Cold War the Catholic Church managed to avoid being completely identified with the North Atlantic world order. The major transition of this period was from “colonialism and missions” to “theological inculturation and ecumenism” in the context of the social and political realities of secularization in its various expressions. From the point of view of the political culture of Vatican II, the internationalist culture of John XXIII’s last encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) and of the last document of Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes (1965), was a turning point for the doctrine of the state and government in Catholic theology as well as a response to the most powerful internationalism of the second half of the century, Communism. Vatican II gave warrant to a Catholic theology that both opened the Church to the world and slowly left behind the Eurocentrism that had shaped Catholicism for centuries. It started with what John XXIII called for in the opening speech of the Council, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, on October 11, 1962, “a new order of human relations.”

The disappearance of the Soviet Union and Communist-dominated regimes in 1989–91 and the following decade gave a reinvigoration to a Western-led process of globalization and democratization. But the Catholic social doctrine’s warnings against a free-market, “end-of-history” hangover have not been heeded. The early 2000s and the aftermath of 9/11 saw the attempt to import in Europe the US-born neo-conservative ideology, companion to the “war on terror”, a mix of free market and culture-war mindset. Neo-conservative Catholics became utterly confused and shocked when in March 2013 the conclave elected pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit “street priest” from Argentina.
Today, at the turn of the first quarter of the 21st century, a new moment in global Catholicism seems evident. There is the chronological and geographical extension of the narrative of the revanche de Dieu to the map of religions beyond Europe and the Middle East. The spread of “strong religions” mixed with ethno-nationalism in other continents and countries had notable effects on spaces where Catholics are a small minority and entailed intra-ecclesial fractures. It also dispelled expectations of some Catholic progressives who saw dynamics of globalization as making hoped-for outcomes inevitable. The issue of the relationship between Catholicism and democracy – or, in starker terms, the bona fide of Catholic leaders when it’s about liberal and constitutional systems – is back on the table.

The first quarter of the 21st century has produced developments in the relationship between the Church and democracy that were not expected at the end of the 20th century. The coming of age of global Catholicism – first of all in terms of de-Westernization of its leadership and their cultural and theological backgrounds and orientations – is happening at a time of global disruption. Populism and authoritarian ethno-nationalism are present everywhere in a variety of forms: the North Atlantic, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and all the major regions of Asia. Threats against social and political rights (including religious liberty as well as ones that the Church might not support as much) are “signs of the times” that require theological discernment and engagement by church leaders in various particular contexts around the world.

3. The end of the European-Western matrix

Once, Western European and North American Catholics alike, not to mention Australians and New Zealanders in their own way, could look at the Atlantic and try to claim some superiority over Catholics of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It was part of a larger “Western bias”, which started from the assumption that people operate in the same way regardless of local culture and which proceeded from Westerners as an object of study and example. Europeans could point to their generous welfare system created by Christian Democrat politicians after the World Wars and their social welfare system, so much closer to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Catholic social teaching than the turbo-capitalism on the other side. North Americans could feel themselves superior for the fact that the United States was not like Europe in that their politicians and they themselves saw theirs as a “Christian nation.” Crises in the social and political models on both sides of the Atlantic have disabused the illusion of one side being more Christian or healthier than the other.

There is a particular European problem for the relations between Catholicism and democracy. In the second half of the 20th century, the ecclesiastical, institutional, and theological foundations for the democratic culture of European Catholicism relied on the post-1945 development of political systems in Western Europe, on Vatican II for the alignment of Catholic teaching with that development, and with the participation of Catholics in the Cold War and the defeat of Communism in Eastern Europe. At the turn of the first quarter of the 21st century, the political and intellectual elites of the Christian-Democratic parties that guaranteed that compact do not exist anymore in most European countries, or they have migrated to other political parties with more transactional and instrumental relationship with the Church and Catholic social teaching. Catholic politicians in power in Europe now tend to be on the side not of the defenders, but of the critics of that status quo of the post-1945, post-1965, and post-Cold War liberal order. Political theology in European Catholicism is far less reactive than in the Americas towards this change in the world order. European theologians had assumed that the democratic question had been solved forever, but now they must deal with the reopening of the question of the future sustainability of the “European social model”. Furthermore, they have been exposed to the influence of “post-liberal” theologians (from the USA and the UK) that deepens the problem of the alienation between mainstream post-Vatican II Catholic theology on one side and new, populistic political parties and styles of leadership on the other side.
Secondly, there is a newly visible divide between Western and Eastern Europe, where Catholicism is not immune from the temptation of the Orthodox Churches to find refuge in new forms of Constantinism. In the entire European continent, in different ways, the sociological retrenchment of “Vatican II Catholicism” has given room, especially in the church of the “peripheries” (like in Scandinavia), to new kinds of ways of being part of the Church that come through conversion/reversion, migration, and/or active membership in one of the new lay movements.

All over the old continent, the post-conciliar lay-run Catholic movements represent a non-political version of Catholicism when it comes to their internal structures of government, their presence in the public square, and their contribution to the Catholic tradition. The theology of democracy is not very high in the list of concerns of these new representatives of 21st-century European Catholicism: it’s a different theological culture from the one embodied by the mid-20th century generations of Catholics in politics. But their rise represents anyway the substitution of the first and second generation of post-Vatican II Christian-Democrat Catholic lay leaders: now there is a new kind of lay membership and leadership less invested in public life. Paradoxically, the clerical voices (especially the bishops’ conference) seem to be more courageous than the Catholic laity in their defense of European democratic systems against the rise of populist and extremist political parties and movements.

All this contributes to the lack of self-assurance of a contemporary European Catholic theology of democracy, compounded by the post-colonial discrediting of the mythology of the European Catholics’ heroic march towards democracy thanks to the resistance during World War II and the conversion to social and progressive constitutionalism after 1945. This is the price to pay for the long silence of liberal theology about the long history of the collaboration between European Catholicism and colonialism. But it is also the fruit of a moralistic post-modernist, anti-historical fury against the theological and ecclesial tradition. All this has made European Catholicism and its political theology largely irrelevant to churches in other continents, and perhaps also to itself.

Within Europe is emerging an uncertainty about the once taken for granted assumption that Catholicism had become favorable to political democracy at Vatican II and that turn was definitive and irrevocable. The end-of-the-century crisis of many Christian Democratic parties in Europe had theological roots and consequences: the disappearance of that “broad set of ideas, that would only find their more defined forms alongside the institutionalization of Christian Democratic parties after World War II” means today the resurgence of possible alternatives (authoritarianism being one of them) — also among Catholics politicians, voters, and clerical leaders — to that “Catholic modernity” that tamed the challenges caused by the end of the ancien régime. This means the eclipse of an era of convergence, in the second half of the 20th century, between the official Catholic teaching in favor (with some qualifiers) of democracy and the lived political culture of lay Catholics. The last few years tell the story of a dramatic reversal of roles. The problem today is not, as it used to be, with orientations expressed by the magisterium, but with the political sympathies of many Catholics who have grown more skeptical about liberal democracy.
This is not just an inversion of roles between the magisterium and the politically active lay Catholics compared to the 19th and 20th centuries. The emergence in Europe of right-wing political parties that invoke Christianity for an anti-immigration agenda is source of uncertainties for European Catholicism: not only for the political theology on the continent, but also for what it says about the success or failure of the Church in forming future generations of European Catholics.

4. Catholicism and democracy in the Catholic Global South

In Europe, Catholicism has been present since the birth of the democratic polities. The present phase in the globalization of Catholicism entails distancing of Catholicism from its historic heartlands, not only theologically and spiritually, but also politically and ideologically. This distancing happens in an accelerated way in the 21st century, at a time when democracy in the West is identified with the neo-liberal economic paradigm — no longer the “politics of making promises” but the “politics of breaking promises”.

This has consequences on the relations between Catholicism and democracy also outside of the “old continent”. Global Catholicism is now in an interconnected world dominated by powers with limited historical connection with the Catholic Church in its institutional and cultural expressions, such as Russia, China, and India, or where old connections have become much weaker, as in Europe and United States. The situation in non-European countries important for Catholicism, whether in Western Africa, the Philippines, Brazil, Venezuela, or others, does not promise a new wave of democratization. Global Catholicism confronts very different political realities moving forward.

Latin America has been justifiably celebrated, especially during pope Francis’ pontificate, as an ecclesial and theological source for inspiring the synodal reform of the Church: the ecclesial synodality proposed by Francis to the whole Catholic Church would not have been possible without the experience of the Latin American Church since Vatican II. At the same time, during the same pontificate of Francis, Latin America has not been an exception from the global phenomenon of “democratic backsliding”: some countries (El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela) have experienced periods of authoritarian governments, in other countries (Brazil, Peru) the situation of democracy is dangerously unstable and fragile. The Catholic Church in the continent is challenged by the rise of new forms of neo-Protestant Christianity (especially Pentecostal) whose commitment to the values and institutions of constitutional democratic is uncertain to say the least.

In Latin America there are prominent voices that now articulate — from within the progressive side — a new critique of the central role that the social justice stance plays in the action of the episcopates in the public square. Differently from the late 20th century, in the eyes of global Catholics the Latin American Church is no longer undisputably seen as the carrier of the hope of a solution to the problem of the relations between the Church and the aspiration to justice of men and women in our contemporary world. The crisis of democracy in many countries in Latin America means also a crisis for the theology expressed by that part of the world. It’s a problem deeper than the effects of the “de-Catholicization” of Latin America as it is mixed with the emergence of political alliances between left-wing leaders of the “global south” and anti-Western leaders in other continents, whose liberal-democratic credentials are problematic in the eyes on Western elites.
In Asia and Africa, with the rise of China, India, South Africa, and other global powers, a multipolar world has now become a reality in which hopes for coexistence between religion and democracy have remained largely unfulfilled: this affects also local Catholic cultures. Human rights and democracy are currently being radically called into question in the name of religion in all regions of the world by authoritarian and neo-imperial identity politics. Catholic Churches have become, like in Myanmar and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, important voices in the defense of democracy against authoritarianism. But the 21st century tells also the story of disillusionment with the expectations of the “third wave” of democratization (described by Samuel Huntington in 1991) and of the role of the Catholic Churches in it. Religion is, in other cases, at the service of political power, and often away from the democratic discourse that Catholic social teaching has accepted, in its own way, since 1945.

But even in democratic systems, majoritarianism (ethnic and religious) represents a challenge to the trust expressed by Vatican II that the Catholic Church could coexist with political modernity and collaborate with all kinds of actors. These situations could pressure local churches to develop their own political identity of advocate of human rights and fundamental freedoms, but also, in more unfavorable power imbalance situations, to “de-politicize” their churches. This carries also intra-ecclesial consequences: a Western-shaped Catholic theology is often identified with liberal and modernizing agendas around feminism or gender and thus could be dismissed as “neo-colonial” arrogance and indifference to the specificities of local ecclesial realities. This could diminish not only the potential of local Catholic Churches to be active in public life and weaken the political consciousness of Catholics. It would also reinforce particular systems of hierarchical relationship between clergy and laity – and all this in churches that are playing and will play a growing role in global Catholicism.

5. Catholicism and the Crisis of Democracy in the USA

A case to itself is the United States of America. The history of relations between Catholicism and the United States in the last two centuries is that of a slow and difficult rapprochement and then inclusion in that national political project — with neo-imperial traits, but aware of the promises for an inclusive constitutional democracy. The Second Vatican Council and the 1960s marked the “coming of age” of US Catholics, in the belief that America would continue on the trajectory of democracies.

But the ten years from Donald Trump’s entry into the field in 2015 and his first presidency (2017–21) to the beginning of his second presidency (since 2025) tell a different story. The religious and political public identity of American Catholics had become tied to the values of an American political-constitutional order: rule of law, religious freedom, overcoming racism. All this now is at risk of collapse or at least of a radical reshaping as an ethno-nationalist, illiberal democracy.

Collateral to the return of integralist and fundamentalist movements within militant voices in the Catholic Church, the Trump-Vance duo (president Donald Trump and vice president JD Vance, a practicing Catholic) involves a redefinition of American Catholicism and influences the public perception and mission of the church in the United States and in the world. After the brief interlude of the presidency of Joe Biden (the second Catholic president of the USA, 2021–25), American Catholicism has not yet been able to present itself, especially in its national leaders, with a qualifying and unified voice in the face of the regime change underway. Trumpism is a movement that sees in its leader something like a national political messiah and channels the now normalized neo-reactionary ideologues (e. g. Curtis Yarvin) that have become travel companions of Silicon Valley titans as well as the politicians funded and endorsed by the new masters of the universe and the digital multiverse.

Against this, the influential voices of American Catholicism are publicly divided if not opposed to one another, often ambivalent on the virtues of liberal democracy, and in some cases openly relieved by the return of Trump to power in January 2025. This phase of involution of American democracy under the sign of authoritarianism sees US Catholics in a central position both electorally and culturally: perhaps a “second coming of age”, very different from that of sixty years ago. An anniversary of Vatican II of a different sign, which poses a particular challenge to the pontificate of Leo XIV, elected on May 8, the first pope born in the USA.

The Catholic Church of Paul VI in Italy, of John Paul II in Poland, of Benedict XVI in Germany and of Francis in Argentina had learned something from the past and had a clear anti-authoritarian stance — at least at the time of the papal election of one of their bishops. For Leo XIV’s Church in the USA in the age of Donald Trump — it is not clear. Since 2015 there has been in the USA a division within the US episcopate, but also within the whole Catholic community, about Trumpism. One would look in vain for statements from the US bishops’ conference about the preference of Catholic teaching for democratic and constitutional systems over authoritarianism, for the rule of law over Trump’s threats to jail political opponents.

In November 2024, in the first presidential election after the mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 (which Trump called “a day of love”) the problem of the constitutional agnosticism of American Catholics became clear. This was nothing new in US Catholic history. Already Fr. Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the Popular Party in Italy, who had to flee to the USA during Mussolini’s regime, had already noticed the reluctance of American Catholics to take a position against fascism. More than a problem of personal relations between Sturzo and the American Catholic clergy, one can see clearly important differences with one of the foremost public Catholics, Fr. John Ryan – and even more with the populist and antisemite “radio priest” Fr. Charles Coughlin – on the question of democracy and fascism, and the role of the Church in confronting fascism. In the words of Peter D’Agostino, in the first half of the 20th century, the US Catholic clergy’s effort to show the American hierarchy “strategizing to be ‘modern and democratic’ fails to take stock of the intense affection American Catholics harbored for the monarchical nineteenth-century papacy and its indiscriminate condemnations of every variety of European liberalism”.
This silence is not just a political problem for the survival of American democracy. It also opens an entire set of theological issues. The crisis of liberalism in America has been declared by both the right and the left, in different ways. This has ignited a compensatory move towards “social Catholicism” which has left unaddressed the question of participatory and constitutional government. Pope Francis’ pontificate represented a shock for the conservative Catholic establishment in the USA. Especially in the encyclical Fratelli tutti (2020), Francis, while respecting the autonomy of the political dimension affirmed by Vatican II, made clear the impossibility of limiting the mission of the Church to the private or to welfare or educational activities.

The election of Leo XIV in May 2025 could be a turning point in this awareness of US Catholics — as long as Catholic leaders are clear on the differences between Leo XIII and the intransigent roots of 19th-century “social Catholicism” on one side and the world of today of the 21st century on the other side. In this moment that some see of a neo-Thomist “Leonine revival”, it would be important in America to rediscover the critique of a certain ideology surrounding the emphasis on the “social doctrine of the Church” of a Thomist thinker like Marie-Dominique Chenu. But that is not the kind of Thomism that is on the rise in US Catholicism and its transnational networks.

Within Western Catholicism, and especially in the Anglosphere, the voices dissenting against the modern transition to liberal democracy and in favor of a neo-confessional regrouping are no longer marginal, taken for exhausted and incapable of future. The liberal democratic system based on religious liberty as a human right is threatened precisely in the North Atlantic where it came from, at least for 20th-century Catholic theology. The collapse of democracy in the hands of authoritarians and ethno-nationalists represents a real threat and its disfigurement has already taken place, for example in the USA of the presidencies of Donald Trump.

This is a real challenge for a globally engaged, historically sensitive Church, well aware of how global disruptions can go terribly wrong. Traditionalist and neo-integralist Catholics who reject “the liberal order” tend to put Vatican II, European Catholicism, and the European Union together in one category of secularist anti-Christian globalization. Advocates of the “make America great again” ideology choose a nationalist, pre-global Church and an idea of the state as opposed to the larger framework of a globalized ecclesial context and a European political union. They are opposed to a more complex world, politically and theologically, and to contemporary consensus towards vulnerable life, marriage, family, subsidiarity, immigration, peace, and war. The political philosophy of new Catholic right in power in the USA resembles what Friedrich Nietzsche called “misarchism”, a world view that combines aversion to government, as the entity that regulates social life, together with the support for a robust state apparatus that enforces — even manu militari — order and traditional morals. This opposition puts back into question the post-19th century, post-Syllabus of Errors, post-integralist Catholic idea of the common good and its perception of political power, in particular the Church’s perception of the sovereignty of the nation-state and of international/supranational institutions. Sometimes this “misarchism” uses Catholic theological neo-traditionalism as it reveals a no longer covert theocratic desire that takes away freedom, whereas the authentic Catholic incarnational and sacramental view of the world encourages freedom and human flourishing.
On the other hand, little help seems to come from progressive political theology in Catholic circles and academia. In the USA, political theology has become more and more a version of political theory and social justice advocacy, often with little attachment to, and resentment against, the Catholic tradition and Catholic social doctrine. The post-colonial or de-colonial radical critique of liberalism has also morphed into the critique of the 20th-century liberal theological Catholic argument in favor of democracy. This re-positioning and alienation of Catholic political theology from both the ecclesial conversation and the rest of Catholic theological discourse make difficult to invoke tradition/magisterium of Vatican II and the post-Vatican II period as the response against the resurging prophets of neo-integralism and illiberalism in Trump’s America.

Overall, the situation of the USA and of US Catholicism of President Trump and Vice President JD Vance now might mean not just a dramatic detour away from the promise of an inclusive, multi-cultural American nationalism. It could mean also the end of an “American Catholic exception” — the accomplishment of the inclusion in the American democracy of a religious tradition, Catholicism, that was foreign both to the Anglo-Protestant origins of the country and to the genealogy of democratic constitutional thought. This could take away from US Catholicism its democratic credentials in the eyes of the rest of global Catholicism and lead the global Church in a direction different from the one opened by John Courtney Murray SJ and the document he contributed in a decisive way, Vatican II’s declaration Dignitatis humanae on religious liberty. The metamorphosis that is taking shape in the theological and cultural DNA of the Church in the USA concerns and affects global Catholicism in unique ways.

6. Conclusions

The Catholic Church is one of the last global institutions with the gravitas, platform, and resources to speak truth to power. The ecclesiastical structure resists the push to introduce democratic ways of governing itself but yet is one of the firmest voices for a democracy not just procedural in nature, but at the service of the whole people in the one human family. Among the major religious traditions, Global Catholicism remains, both at the level of the Holy See and the churches at the national levels, a uniquely influential voice in the defense of the values of constitutional democracy (equality among citizens, religious liberty, respect of the rights of minorities, etc.). At the same time, the Catholic Church has kept its ability to critique of the contradictions of liberalism in the grips of the technocratic paradigm.
The work of Catholics for the common good requires engaging a process of massive, epochal transitions in our sense, experience, and idea of the relationship between Church and democracy. There is a global transition: from a European and Western model of political system to a global one where constitutional liberal democracy is no longer the master example. There is an ecclesial transition: from the post-Vatican II period to different models of post-Vatican II church, not just in different areas of the world, but also within one same local church. There is a crisis of legitimacy of the church in its ecclesial leaders, structures, and ecclesiological foundations which has become a re-writing of the relations between church and state in favor of the latter. The crisis of recognition typical of the age of the 20th century until Vatican II (ecumenism, democracy, science) has morphed into crises of recognition at multiple levels today which define the key issue of inclusion and exclusion (gender, race).

It would be naïve to separate the current Catholic conversation on ecclesial synodality from the sensibility of the homo democraticus — men and women steeped in the culture of human rights, communicative dissent and, most of all, egalitarianism of dignity. However, this is happening in a larger global context where the connection between the Church and the culture of participation and inclusion takes significantly different shapes. In this time of upheaval in the relationship between Catholicism and democracy, the need to react against the temptation to find refuge in authoritarianism could lead some liberal Catholics to rediscover the virtues of non-liberal Catholic thinking. For example, Joseph Ratzinger’s political theology provides, compared to both integralism and “radical orthodoxy”, a more doctrinally sustainable conservative political theology that does not dismiss or reject liberal-democratic institutions outright. A partially different, and more viable alternative for the global Catholic Church, would be a rediscovery of what Vatican II and the post-Vatican II magisterium as a whole have to say about democracy. It would not be a retrenchment, rather a recognition how much has been done and how much is left to do.
In the last three decades since the 1990s and especially during Trumpism since 2015, Catholicism in America, the center of the liberal and democratic world order, has been divided by an involution of the theological and political cultures of its new political elites and court theologians: from a neo-conservative and post-liberal critique of the Western consensus to an extremist critique advocating for an anti-liberal system based on an integralist theology which puts at risk the survival of constitutional democracy. It remains to be seen if, when and how this political and theological drift coming from the USA, once the leader of the Western world, will reach Europe and other continents.



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