Pope Francis
Credit: (Andreas Solaro/AFP

It’s not surprising that the apparently Vatican-approved denouncement of the conservative Catholic-Christian alliance that has come to dominate U.S. politics ruffled some feathers. What is surprising is the sheer amount of denial and obfuscation that the article in La Civiltà Cattolic by Antonio Spadaro and the Marcelo Figueroa has engendered.

After all, as Vatican expert Massimo Faggioli told the New York Times, the article is a landmark in the history of relations between the Vatican and the U.S. church. According to Faggioli, it signals the Vatican’s recognition that the U.S. Catholic Church “has become different than mainstream European Catholicism and mainstream Latin American Catholicism” and is now in “the hands of the religious right.”

But that, according to Catholic conservatives, is a ridiculous conclusion. They argue that Pope Francis and his allies just don’t understand the traditional role of religion in politics in the United States.

Thomas Williams, the former priest who has been called Breitbart’s man in Rome, called the article “rambling” and “bigoted.” He charged that it “caricatured white southern evangelicals as […]