“Did you know the Pope ate dinner there last year?” my friend said.
I was out with a few friends when we walked past a restaurant where Pope Leo went last summer (perks of living in Chicago!).
She laughed and added, “We should go in and press some rosaries against the walls!”
I noticed another friend who isn’t Catholic giving us a look. “You Catholics are so weird,” she said with an affectionate laugh.
We laughed too.
“It’s true,” I said. “We can’t deny it.” We Catholics are odd ducks in all kinds of ways, from our love for saints’ relics to our Saturday evening Mass “counting” for Sunday.
But in today’s America, it’s all too easy to forget that we aren’t supposed to fit in.
We used to be a lot weirder, and it’s time to reclaim that as a badge of honor.
Trying too hard to fit in
There was a time when being Catholic in America meant being really, really different. We knew we were children of a God who said, “You do not belong to the world. I have chosen you out of the world” (John 15:19).
Our great-grandparents’ faith set them apart from the Protestant establishment. The WASP elite viewed them with suspicion and prejudice. (WASP is a 1960s acronym for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.)
Our grandparents' ultimate allegiance wasn't to American political machinery, but to something far more important and longer-lasting: the universal Church and her teachings.
And that wasn't easy.
There was a time when just being a Catholic priest in NYC was a criminal offense legally punishable by death. And if you haven't heard about the American Party, better known as “the Know-Nothings,” you're in for a discovery.
But somewhere along the way, we lost our nerve.
I think of the Irish immigrants who built Notre Dame's football dynasty. They weren't trying to blend in but proudly proclaimed their Catholic identity on the national stage.
When the Fighting Irish took the field, they carried the hopes of every Catholic family who had been told they didn't belong in polite American society. They were weird, and they were winning.
Even John F. Kennedy, for all his political savvy, had to defend his Catholic “weirdness” during his presidential campaign. The fact that his Catholicism was seen as problematic reveals how distinct Catholic identity once was from mainstream American political thought, and not even that long ago.
We need to put our faith above our politics
Somewhere between those defiant, even dangerous, early days and today, American Catholics became obsessed with fitting in. We wanted so desperately to prove we were just as American as our Protestant neighbors.
So we began molding our faith to match our politics rather than the other way around. We traded in our complex but beautiful and true Catholic social teaching for the tidy partisan packages of America’s political parties.
The result? Today, many Catholics sound more like cable news pundits than disciples of Christ, cherry-picking which Church teachings align with our preferred political tribe while ignoring the rest.
Both sides have forgotten that Catholic social teaching is a seamless garment, not a lunch buffet.
We belong to a 2,000-year-old global faith that transcends national borders and political parties. Our loyalty shouldn't be to red or blue, but to the timeless truths of the Gospel that often make both sides uncomfortable.
It's time to make Catholicism weird again. Not weird in a frivolous sense, but weird in this way: Authentic Christian witness always looks strange to a world obsessed with power and picking sides.
The establishment didn’t trust our ancestors because their loyalty lay with something higher than American politics.
Maybe it's time we remembered that being viewed with a little suspicion by the political powers isn't a bug but a feature. When we're perfectly comfortable in a political party, we've compromised too much.
Let's embrace the fullness of our faith, which doesn’t map neatly onto either side of American politics, but calls both sides to reach for something better.
Let’s make Catholicism weird again.
