As part of the Vatican’s war on “modernism” in 1899, Pope Leo XIII condemned as heresy the set of principles known as “Americanism.” But, by 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, the Church had begun to embrace such supposedly odious ideas: pluralism, the separation of church and state, the primacy of conscience, the preference of experience over dogma, and—for that matter—freedom of the press. This was a historic reversal of the Church’s panicked nineteenth-century repudiation of, in Pope Leo’s words, “modern popular theories and methods.”

Now five Catholic Justices on the Supreme Court are reversing the Church’s reversal. (Neil Gorsuch, who is now an Episcopalian but was raised and educated as a Catholic, joined his five colleagues in overturning Roe v. Wade.) These Justices are undermining not only basic elements of American democracy, such as the “wall of separation,” but also the essential spirit of Catholicism’s great twentieth-century renewal. It’s no secret, of course, that the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, which had been summoned by the […]