The Emergence of the Post-Liberal Catholic Priest

A major recent survey suggests that a new generation of Catholic priests is breaking free of the restrictive political labels of “conservative” and “liberal,” recognizing that the claims of our Faith transcend such increasingly anachronistic branding.

The study, conducted by The Catholic Project at Catholic University of America, demonstrates that newer cohorts of Catholic priests refuse to be constrained by a political regime that, in both its conservative and progressive forms, is corrosive of Catholic witness. Responses to the “National Study of Catholic Priests: Wave 2” (the “Wave Two Study” or “Study”) suggest that younger priests are resistant to the left/right continuum of American politics.

A paradigm shift among newer priests

The Catholic Project describes itself as “an initiative from Catholic University [of America] to foster effective collaboration between the clergy and the laity of the Church in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis.” But with its Wave Two Study, the initiative has broadened its scope to include a wide range of concerns related to the shifting profiles of Catholic priests in the United States. The survey does not reveal newer priests’ suspicion of one extreme of the political spectrum in favor of the other. Rather, it suggests that they are uncomfortable with the political liberalism to which practically all Americans subscribe, especially as that liberalism has distorted Catholic witness.

It is not my purpose to summarize the findings of the survey, which can be found in multiple places, including here, here, and here. Rather, my goal in this column is to suggest that the survey reveals a paradigm shift among newer Catholic priests, away from the constraints of the liberal continuum with which Americans, including most American Catholics, identify.

In my 2024 book, Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America, I suggest that we Catholics must resist situating ourselves on the left-to-right continuum of American liberalism. From the far left to the far right, Americans subscribe to the same basic moral anthropology and political philosophy of the so-called English Enlightenment. This philosophy asserts that we are atomistic individuals, bearing possessive individual rights claims against one another, and existing in a state of a war of every man against every man.

Rejecting the Catholic principles of teleology, solidarity, and common good, for example, liberalism reduces politics to protecting individual pursuits of self-interested goods, making no judgments about what goods ought or ought not be pursued, so long as individual liberty is preserved.

The data compiled by the Catholic Project’s Wave Two Study suggests that newer priests are becoming resistant to this false choice of conservative or progressive liberalism.

It is admittedly difficult to see the implications of the Study as I am describing them. This is because the survey questions themselves assume that the only measure of political concern is along the continuum of American liberalism, from “conservative” to “progressive.” All priests who responded are constrained by the form of the questions. But examining the relationship of prayer and spiritual devotion to political commitments of the various cohorts reveals that something different is going on than mere identification with variations of American liberalism.

A superficial analysis of the Study might suggest that all American priests fall within the liberal continuum. But this is a function of the constraints of the survey questions, which do not allow for answers that eschew the dichotomy of right and left American liberalism. For example, 70% of priests ordained before 1975 described themselves as doctrinally “progressive,” while only 8% of post-2000 ordinands accept this description. Of the latter cohort, 70% choose the “conservative/orthodox” label for their theological commitments. Questions about politics yield similar results. Among older priests, 61% identify as “somewhat” or “very” liberal, while only 10% of newer priests accept this label. Rather, 51% of later ordinands describe themselves as “somewhat” or “very” conservative.

Again, these responses are constrained by the form of the questions and thus yield predictable results. But a more careful reading of those results, however, suggests that newer priests increasingly do not think along that continuum. The key, I think, is in the response of various historical cohorts to questions about Eucharistic devotion. When asked about priorities in their priestly roles, 57% of priests ordained before 1980 prioritize Eucharistic devotion, compared to 88% of priests ordained after 2000. The same cohorts respectively identified immigration as having priority by 93% to 74%, respectively; poverty, 98% to 79%; “social justice,” 94% to 64%.

These numbers suggest that prioritizing the Eucharist does not come at the expense of “worldly” ministry. But they also suggest that these are not the telos of ministry. Rather, concern with social issues is the necessary implication of Eucharistic devotion. Concern for the poor and the immigrant necessarily follows Eucharistic devotion. Focusing primarily on the former never leads to the latter.

The Eucharist is political. But the politics of the Eucharist are not liberal, in either of its conservative or progressive varieties. The Eucharist is anti-liberal, or, the term I prefer, post-liberal. Of course, this is another way of saying that the politics of the Eucharist are pre-liberal. And it yields a more authentic concern for “this world” concerns, which, while important, should not dictate the role of the priest.

Put another way, the Wave Two Study suggests that younger priests do not fall into the trap of thinking that prayer and spirituality are somehow exclusive of social concern. But in order to discern what’s really going on in this shift, it is necessary to think outside the box of liberalism, with its artificial constraints and false dichotomy of “conservative” and “liberal.”

Seeing the bigger post-liberal picture

Reactions to the Study, however, demonstrate the failure of many in the Catholic commentariat even to grasp this important shift.

The release of the Study elicited such headlines as “Younger American priests more conservative, traditional, survey shows”; “Younger priests remain more conservative than older priests in U.S., survey says”; “The National Study of Catholic Priests found younger clergy more likely to be theologically orthodox and politically moderate”; and “Poll: US priests still leaning conservative.” Other headlines were more tendentious. NCRonline, for example, published a hand-wringing piece by Jesuit priest Thomas Reese under the headline, “While out of sync with lay Catholics, conservative young priests are future of US church.”

While stating an understandable conclusion from some of the responses to the survey, these headlines miss the bigger picture. Newer priests are not more “conservative” than prior generations. This is because they are largely moving beyond the noun—liberalism—that the adjective “conservative” modifies. The study does not reveal that new priests are “conservative liberals,” but rather that they “post-liberals”.

Progressive liberal commentators, especially, are not happy.

Jesuit priest Fr. Thomas Reese hysterically (and hilariously) complains that the Study “raises concerns about the future of priestly ministry in the American Catholic Church.” Illustrating his complete insulation from any thought outside the progressive Jesuit bubble, Fr. Reese concludes, “If the younger clergy aggressively push their political and theological views on the Catholic people, church attendance will continue downward, and fewer Americans will identify as Catholic.”

Of course, the precise opposite is true. Liberal Catholicism, slavishly following the lead of the American Episcopal Church, is itself the cause of the downward attendance in Catholic parishes. By every metric—parish attendance, growth of traditional orders, and seminary formation, for example—conservative Catholicism is reversing the downward trend of progressive liberalism.

But from his hermetically sealed progressive echo chamber, Fr. Reese thinks that “the theological views of younger priests are out of sync with their peers and with the Catholic population. Catholics tend to favor progressive views on married priests, gay marriage, Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, and the use of contraceptives. As a result, in coming decades, Catholic clergy will be even more out of sync with lay Catholics than the clergy is today.”

Of course, this says a great deal about Fr. Reese’s insular world, but very little about the emerging Catholic revival in the United States. The newer ordination cohorts recognize that they must lead the faithful out of the modern liberal morass, not more deeply into it.

Similarly to Fr. Reese, with the same characteristic myopia of the Catholic left, Michael Sean Winters asserts that the Study demonstrates that “younger clergy are more focused on the other wordly [sic] promises of the Gospel than its implications for social justice.” A “majority” of these younger priests, Winters tendentiously asserts, “view their role as apolitical and see the church as a refuge from a culture that they find abhorrent in its excessive vice and luxury.” To be fair to Winters, he surprisingly concedes that “a case [can be] made that the Catholic left collapsed the eschaton into a variety of social causes, some with a tenuous relationship to the revelation of God in Christ contained in the Gospel. The Gospel is many things but it is not a story of sexual liberation.” (Credit where credit is due, even though Winters does not seem to understand that he and his magazine are among the vanguard of this collapse. If you want to find “Catholic” defenses of every variety of sexual liberation, NCR is ground zero.)

What Winters cannot see from behind his opaque veil of progressive liberalism is that Eucharistic devotion is not an indication of conservative liberal priests, but rather the emergence of post-liberal priests. So-called “other worldly” devotion to the Eucharist has profound implications for political life—just not the kind of left secular politics to which NCRonline is so slavishly devoted. Thoroughly committed to the faith of American progressive liberalism, neither Reese nor Winters is equipped to understand authentic Catholic spirituality and its post-liberal moral and political implications.

By my lights, the Wave Two Study is a sign of high optimism. Seminaries and religious orders in the U.S. are showing hopeful signs of spiritual renewal and political vigor. But these priests recognize that the former leads to the latter, never the other way around. And these newer priests portend a growing dissatisfaction with the box that American liberalism—in both its conservative and progressive accents—insists that we imprison ourselves.