The Vatican may have fired a warning shot at U.S. Catholic conservatives, The New York Times reported, when two close associates of Pope Francis published a claim that alliances of "hate" were made with evangelical Christians to support President Donald Trump.
The charges that American Catholic conservatives have moved too closely to a politically-polarized position were made in July’s Vatican-vetted journal La Civilta Cattolica. The journal’s editor has promoted the article nearly every day since it was published.
"Religion has had a more incisive role in electoral processes and government decisions over recent decades, especially in some U.S. governments," Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa wrote in La Civiltà Cattolica.
"It offers a moral role for identifying what is good and what is bad. At times this mingling of politics, morals and religion has taken on a Manichaean language that divides reality between absolute Good and absolute Evil. ... Today President Trump steers the fight against a wider, generic collective entity of the 'bad' or even the 'very bad.' Sometimes the tones used by his supporters in some campaigns take on meanings that we could define as 'epic,'" they wrote.
Catholic Culture.org said Spadaro is the journal's editor and a regular adviser to Pope Francis, while Figueroa is an Argentinian Presbyterian pastor who Pope Francis recruited to start an edition of L'Osservatore Romano for that country.
Catholic Culture.org said La Civiltà Cattolica is vetted by the Vatican before publication, but the Times said it’s not clear if the article was approved by Pope Francis directly. The article mentions Trump advisor Steve Bannon along with former Republican Presidents Ronald Regan and George W. Bush.
Conservative Catholics pushed back. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput called the authors "useful idiots," per the Times.
Liberal Catholics, like Massimo Faggioli, a professor of historical theology at Villanova University, told the Times that the Civiltà Cattolica article would "be remembered in church history as one of the most important to understand the Vatican of Francis and the United States and American Catholicism."