Here is a link to Prof. Massimo Faggioli's latest column in the magazine "Commonweal” (New York City)

 

European history shows how political messianism can destroy the souls of churches. Could that happen in the United States?

There was once a “civil religion,” a shared system of myths, symbols, and rituals that provided an inclusive and unifying moral framework for the political-religious project of America. But the “political religion” now emerging with the second term of Donald Trump is different: nationalist and exclusivist in character, embracing a dark idea of Christianity that distorts the Gospel. Between the 1920s and 1940s, the papacy learned the cost of this kind of political Christianity the hard way. Today, the Vatican finds itself in a particularly delicate position, especially with a U.S.-born pope rightly worried about the Church’s unity. The Vatican knows that the political-religious upheaval in the United States could have long-term effects not just on American Catholicism but on the global Church. The difficult relations between right-wing American Catholicism and the Vatican under Francis might not have been a one-off exception, but rather the establishment of a precedent.