The Archbishop of New York Should Know Charlie Kirk Was No Saint

It is a modest walk from the Cardinal’s residence of New York Timothy Dolan, near the Saint-Patrick cathedral, at the studio of Fox and friends in Midtown Manhattan. For Dolan, the distance seems to have been shorter over time. In his latest appearance on the popular right-right talk show show, he drew attention for calling Charlie Kirk, the founder killed from Turnout Point USA, “A Moderne St. Paul”.

The remark deserves to be noted for several reasons. The first is that she is absurd on her face. Dolan is the chief of 2.8 million Catholics in the second largest archdiocese in the country, a prelate once thought of being the first pope born in the United States. For the uninitiated, St. Paul is an imposing figure of Christianity as we know him, a Pharisee of the first century who converted on the road to Damascus and preached throughout Asia Minor and Europe. Dolan certainly knows the epistles of Paul, the writings addressed to the communities to which he exercised his ministry; The readings on their part are a standard part of the Catholic liturgy. Again, he is a cardinal – he surely knows the qualities of holiness. Did he really believe Kirk embodied them? Many Christians and Catholics, while condemning the murder of Kirk, also felt obliged to note his toll of racist, homophobic, transphobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric and implacable pro-Gun plea. These include black church, as well as religious orders such as the Catholic Sisters of New York Charity, who also criticized Dolan directly: Kirk’s “harmful words do not reflect the qualities of a saint,” they said in a statement. “Compare Mr. Kirk to Saint Paul risks confusing the real witness of the Gospel and giving excessive sanction to the words and actions that hurt the people itself that Jesus calls us to love.”

Dolan should Know all these things. The charitable explanation is that he has chosen his words carefully. He is famous, and a widely seen morning talk show is only his kind of scene. He has already prey to his own verbal irrepression – even on Fox, where he once let go that “Donald Trump takes his Christian faith seriously”. But there is another possible explanation (which links to the second reason why his bizarre Paean is so remarkable): Dolan knew exactly what he said and was happy to transmit it on behalf of the most reactionary elements of the Church. St. Paul was one of the first Christian martyrs, beheaded to the Emperor Nero. The Maga movement seized the murder of Kirk to claim it as a martyr to his cause. The vice-president (and the Catholic convert) JD Vance called Kirk “a martyr for the Christian faith” during the commemorative gathering of Kirk in Arizona. Now, by directly connecting Kirk to one of the most important figures in the history of Christianity, Dolan provides Catholic coverage authorizing an ethnontalist program with clearly authoritarian objectives.

It is fair to wonder why a Catholic cardinal who spoke (although too quietly for some) on the inhuman immigration policies of the Trump administration would allace with this lot, and why so many other Catholics – public characters and ordinary people in the benches – sow the same thing. But there is, unfortunately, a large historical precedent. Before the Second World War and even after, the Catholic authorities have often opposed the democratic forms of the government while emphasizing affinities with authoritarian forms. A mixture of ideas that included “fierce anti-communism, a beating of the underlying beat of anti-Semitism, and skepticism about democratic policy existed in the Catholic world in the 1930s,” said historian John T. McGreevy in notes in the world in the world in Catholicism: a world history of the French Revolution at Pope Francis.

The institutional church and many of its local leaders supported fascist dictators in Spain (Franco) and Italy (Mussolini), and although Catholics are generally more suspicious about Hitler, they did not reject it at the beginning. The Secretary of State of the Vatican Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) congratulated Hitler to “speak against the Bolshevists”, writes McGreevy; When the church signed the diplomatic pact with the Nazis in 1933 known as ReichskonkordatPacelli said that “Catholics have dodged a Kulturkampf [culture struggle] Many worse than in the time of Bismarck. “McGreevy also documents” enthusiasm for Mussolini “among American Catholics, including a Southern Dakota bishop who compared he duce to George Washington. Isolationism and support for the policies of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.

The liberal political order has forged in the post-war years, as well as the reforms of Vatican II (including support for religious freedom and an injunction not to “use coercion to force anyone to embrace the Christian faith against its own will”), showed that Catholicism and democracy could in fact coexist, and even prosper together. The striking memories of the destruction caused by nationalist energies have maintained the governments of the emerging authoritarian movements. But with the constant decline of democratic institutions during this century and the rise of populist movements in Italy, Hungary, in the United States and elsewhere, this order has been effooche. In American Catholicism, this was accompanied by a vocal criticism of the late Pope Francis by Catholics Archconservator – who found him insufficiently engaged in the doctrine of the Church – with a rhetoric echoing the language of right culture on various questions, in particular with regard to LGBTQ people. (So ​​far, the Pope born in the United States Leo XIV seems to have escaped their anger.)

And yet, a more or less traditional figure like Dolan would seem a strange necklace for the faithful of Maga, even granted the requirements of politics. Such an arrangement can be partly drawn to the American bishops of the informal pact made with evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity in the campaign against abortion beginning in the Reagan era, which was formulated in the rhetoric of confrontation and struggle.

Even today, afterDobbsThe opposition to abortion should be the pre -eminent priority for Catholic voters, according to the American Conference of Catholic Bishops. In this environment, a new version of Catholic fundamentalism has gradually found the purchase – enhibiting certain similarities with the previous and more fringe movements of the 20th century, as detailed by Mark Massa in its new essential book, Catholic fundamentalism in America. The difference is that these movements generally sought to distinguish themselves from Catholicism First – the Medisors within the Church itself in a quixotic struggle against modernity and commitment with secular society. An exception among these was the Jesuit priest of the middle of the century, the father. Leonard Feeney of St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which Massa attributes for making a “paradigm” for an “anti-modern, reactive and sectarian impulse [that] is very lively in the 21st century and shows no signs of disappearance. »»

This impulse finds the expression of today’s integral movement, which seeks to impose a Catholic doctrine on American society as a whole via a theocratic monarchy which would be the only arbiter of the common good in civil society. He and other conservative Catholic activities are well funded and have institutional bases in places such as the Catholic University of America and Notre-Dame, to the judge of the Supreme Court of the Faculty of Law, Amy CONEYT, sat at the faculty. The reactionary Catholics, including those who have links with Opus Dei, have also helped shape the 2025 project, the Plan for authoritarian policies of the second Trump administration. The Maga movement benefits from a large and powerful megaphone in the form of Catholicvote, which contributed more than $ 10 million to help elect Trump in 2024 and whose founder, Brian Burch, is now the American ambassador to the Vatican.

All this means that Doirk’s comments on Kirk cannot be overlooked or seen outside the course of history. Fox is the propaganda arm of the Trump administration, and the impatient presence of Dolan in its studios suggests the degree to which powerful figures inside and associated with the shape of the American Catholic Church – and are absorbed by the ethnunizationalist program of the Maga regime. In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, this impious and totally non -Christian alliance seems to consolidate.