American Catholics and American Jews are not happy campers. And neither, it seems, are America’s evangelicals

This conversation didn’t happen, but it could have:

Monseigneur Vivaldi: “Have you read that Pennsylvania grand jury report? Over three hundred priests accused of sex abuse! We’ve hit rock bottom! It can’t get any worse than this!”

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: “Hold my beer.”

Yes, Viganò’s now notorious letter is rockin’ the church in ways that it hasn’t rocked for centuries—that is to say, in public.

The American press, which consistently applies a “see no evil” approach to reporting on the papacy, responded to the once in a millennium news of Pope Benedict’s resignation with a “Gee, I never saw that coming” shrug, as if a champion athlete retired at age 35 instead of hanging around to the ripe old age of 38.

Underneath and within the Catholic Church itself, of course, there was an immense amount of subterranean grinding—the socio-cultural equivalent of the San Andreas Fault processing a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Pope Francis was greeted with open arms, outwardly—“We have a pope! We have a pope!” along with lots of talk about the canonization of John Paul II, because what’s more Catholic than a canonization, and what better way to take people’s minds off their troubles?

Well, wiseguy secularized atheists like myself were not paying much attention, but a lot of Catholics were paying attention, and the more they got to know Pope Francis, the less they liked him. Earlier this year, Ross Douthat published To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, coming pretty close to accusing the vicar of Christ of being, well, the Anti-Christ.

“This is a book about the most important religious story of our time: the fate of the world’s largest religious institution under a pope who believes that Catholicism can change in ways that his predecessors rejected, and who faces resistance from Catholics who believe the changes he seeks risk breaking faith with Jesus Christ.”

Ross in his wrath rather reminded me of one of Melville’s Polynesians, who erects a wooden statue to pray to, earnestly seeks its blessing, and then when the god fails to come through, knocks it off its perch and gives it a few solid kicks. Ross, if God allows a bad man to become Pope, maybe there isn’t one! (God, I mean.)¹

Well, Ross in his wrath was surprising enough, but the Archbishop’s assault is more than any mere Protestant could have predicted.² Viganò’s announced goal of forcing Pope Frederick’s resignation would mean two resignations in a row. Is that any way to run the Church?

I don’t think so. I think a Catholic Church that forces the resignations of two popes in a row is not the Catholic Church. It’s something else. I’ve felt for a long time that the “European” Catholic Church in the U.S. will shrivel and the American Catholic Church will become exclusively a Latin institution. The Irish and the Italians, who have sustained the American Catholic Church throughout the twentieth century, will find they have more in common with their secularized Protestant neighbors than with the Hispanic hierarchy that is starting to emerge. However brightly the current fires blaze—and they’re certainly going to blaze brightly indeed—I think the future is already set.

Okay, that takes care of the Catholics. What about the Jews? My thinking about the Jews springs from a single article in the New York Times, “The West Bank Model Is a Failure”, a remarkably even-handed—and all the more damning for being so—account of all the faults of Israeli domestic policies as they affect Palestinians living on the West Bank. What makes this article remarkable is that it was written by Marty Peretz.

Ninety-nine percent of the American people have no idea who Marty Peretz is,³ but for the one percent who do, Marty’s name is definitely one to conjure with. For decades, Marty was the owner-publisher of the New Republic, perhaps the most famous intellectual journal in the U.S. During Marty’s long tenure, the New Republic functioned as the premiere organ of liberal neocon opinion, working against the New Left and all its works. Marty’s well-heeled arrogance and favoritism (he married an heiress but seemed to have an eye for stunning young lads) alienated everyone who didn’t make the A team.

Marty was, naturally, a vociferous supporter of the invasion of Iraq, and the multiple disasters that sprang from that corrupt enterprise helped destroy his influence among the younger generation of chin-strokers. The New Republic changed hands in 2010 and Peretz, as far as I could tell, lapsed into silence. But now he’s back, and talking about Israel as he’s never talked before. And if Israel has lost Marty, it’s lost all of American Jewry west of Orthodoxy.

The Times has published a number of articles in the past few years by American Jews deploring the ever rightward shift of Israeli policy in both religious and political affairs, leaving most American Jews feeling more and more left out. It was no secret that devotion to Israel was, in effect, a secular religion for many Jews. Now that mainstay is fading, even as the level of intermarriage of non-Orthodox Jews and non-Jews has reached 71%. Many Jews, I think, used to believe that “assimilation” was so far from being even remotely possible, however “assimilated” they might appear and behave, something so airy and light as to be a mere shadow’s shadow, not worth even a moment’s worry and thought. And now it seems to have happened, perhaps a decade back, while no one was looking.

But wait, there’s more bad news for the Jews: the lawsuit challenging Harvard with discriminating against Asians. However the particulars of that suit are settled, it’s a very good bet that the percentage of Asians at the Ivies is going to increase. It’s also a very good bet that the Ivies will be very, very reluctant to let the admission rates for blacks and Hispanics fall below their shares in the national population. Which means that something else will have to give, and that something else will very likely be the massive overrepresentation of Jews in those schools.

Six years ago, Ron Unz published a long study in the American Conservative, “The Myth of American Meritocracy”, accusing the Ivies of discriminating in favor of Jewish applicants and to the disadvantage of Asians. (As a Jewish graduate of Harvard, Unz was fairly well inoculated against charges of favoritism.) According to Unz’s article, about 25% of undergraduate students in the Ivies were Jewish, even though Jews constitute only about 2% of the total U.S. population. Asians constitute perhaps 5.6% of the population. In coming years, we’re likely to see the Asians take over as the “brains” of America. This will be softened by extensive intermarriage, but it will be noticeable. Without Harvard or Israel, where will America’s Jews turn?⁴

The real support for Israel among American voters, it seems, will rest almost entirely with the Evangelicals, who have their own troubles, #MeToo, of course, but even worse is the split caused by Donald Trump, who is giving the evangelicals more than anyone ever gave them, for a very ugly price. As a convinced secularist who does not believe any supernatural value system can ultimately sustain itself,⁵ I think it likely that “conscience evangelicals”, who have the stomach to see Trump as he is, will inevitably find themselves drawn away from religion towards secular liberalism, and the “true believers” who remain will grow inevitably more corrupt.

It isn’t emphasized enough how much the wrath of the Moral Majority and the other politicized evangelical groups that emerged in the 1970s was prompted by the ever-increasing efforts of the federal government to enforce the desegregation of southern schools, particularly the decision in the Carter Administration by the IRS to deny tax-exempt status to de facto segregated private schools, something Ronald Reagan promised to undo. Once Reagan was elected, one of the favorite causes of evangelicals was maintenance of good relations with our anti-communist and pro-apartheid pals in South Africa.⁶ While the moral fervor of many evangelicals was, and is, impressive, and touching, the intellectual substance of the faith has always been painfully thin. True believers had best prepared for a bumpy ride.