Opinion: Reclaiming the culture that made us Catholic

For too long, Catholics in the United States—myself included—have treated the Church as an extension of our political identities, a sociological distortion that has carried the language, loyalties, and resentments of the culture wars straight into the sanctuary.

The result is a Catholic community that is, I think, no longer a true community at all, one increasingly unable to pray together, disagree together, or even imagine one another charitably. Friendships have fractured within parishes over presidential politics or minor policy disputes, as if our baptismal identity were secondary to the partisan labels we carry.

Both sides bear responsibility for the current climate. A recent essay in the National Catholic Reporter, which claimed to call for a truce, actually ends up demonstrating the very divisiveness it lamented. Unfortunately, the piece could not resist caricaturing one of the Church’s most generous philanthropists as an “avatar” for the Catholic “conservative plutocrats”—a needless swipe that only deepens the resentments it claims to diagnose. And to reinforce the caricature, the author concluded that these wealthy “plutocrats” seem “unwilling to question contemporary spread‑eagle capitalism and its vicious results,” a sweeping claim that substitutes ideological suspicion for genuine engagement.

But to be fair, this same National Catholic Reporter writer has accused those he calls “liberal Catholics” of “following secular liberalism, turning to academic theologians as an alternate source of magisterial authority at a time when academic theology was losing touch with ecclesial reality.” He suggests that “It is easy to find a liberal theologian who is well-versed in the gender ideology of Judith Butler but important work on, say, Augustine, is left to conservative theologians.”

Liberal Catholic academics of the past, such as theology professors Lisa Sowle Cahill of Boston College and Cathleen Kaveny of Notre Dame—who formed the Alternative Magisterium of the past—served on Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s National Catholic Advisory Committee, advising him on how to present his pro-choice platform in ways that would be palatable to Catholics.

The divisions have not healed, and the polarization will not end until we all stop using the Faith as a proxy for our politics and begin rebuilding the shared Catholic culture that once made disagreement possible without rupture. That culture—rooted in the sacraments, parish life, and a common moral imagination—was never perfect, but it provided a grammar for unity that our current ideological sorting has all but erased. Recovering it is not nostalgia; it is the only path forward.

What this reveals is not simply bad behavior on the left or the right, but the deeper loss of a common Catholic framework that once kept our disagreements tethered to something larger than our political instincts. When Catholics no longer share a thick culture of the sacraments, parish life, and a coherent moral imagination, we inevitably fall back on the only identity structures our society still offers: partisan ones.

In that vacuum, even well‑intentioned commentary becomes an exercise in scoring points rather than seeking truth, and Catholics of every persuasion begin to treat one another as ideological opponents rather than fellow members of the Body of Christ. The problem is not that we disagree—Catholics always have had disagreements—but that we no longer possess the cultural or spiritual habits that once allowed disagreement to coexist with communion.

If polarization is the symptom, the remedy must be the slow, deliberate rebuilding of a shared Catholic culture. And that culture must be sturdy enough to hold real differences without collapsing into suspicion. That work begins at the parish level, where most Catholics encounter the Church. Parishes must once again become places where people pray together, serve together, and learn the faith together across political lines.

This means forming priests who can create liturgies and homilies that draw people into a common sacramental imagination and create spaces where Catholics of different generations and backgrounds encounter one another as neighbors rather than ideological categories. It also means recovering the practices that once shaped Catholic life—regular Confession, Eucharistic devotion, shared meals, corporal works of mercy—because these habits form a moral imagination that politics cannot easily colonize. A Church that prays and serves together is far harder to divide.

In the months after my own recent loss, I discovered the quiet strength of a parish‑based grief support group—a space untouched by the political tensions that divide so much of Catholic life. Sitting with others who were carrying their own sorrows, I was reminded how deeply the Church’s understanding of death, hope, and communion can bind people together when ideology is set aside. That simple, non‑political gathering made me appreciate again the wisdom of a Catholic perspective on suffering and the promise of eternal life—truths that unite us far more profoundly than any partisan identity ever could.

We also have the benefit of a new generation of priests who do not carry the partisan baggage of the Vatican II-era and the past battles over the years that immediately followed. Parishes are increasingly being led by younger priests who tend to be more conservative. The National Study of Catholic Priests by the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America has shown clearly that progressive Catholicism is producing few priestly vocations.

This is not a cause for conservative triumphalism, but it is a pastoral and cultural reality the Church must take seriously. This newer generation of priests—whatever their political inclinations or instincts—is stepping into a Church marked by fragmentation. And they deserve seminary formation that equips them to be bridge‑builders. They need seminary mentors who can help them read the signs of the times without being captured by the politics of the moment. They need the sort of formation that deepens their pastoral imagination, strengthens their capacity to listen across differences, and teaches them how to shepherd communities where the people in their parishes do not vote in the same way. If they can learn to lead with humility, they can become the kind of pastors who draw people together rather than drive them apart.

Seen through a sociological lens, the polarization tearing at the Church is not primarily a battle over doctrine but a breakdown of the shared culture that once held us together. When Catholics lose the habits, symbols, and communal practices that form a common identity, politics rushes in to fill the void. The task before us, then, is not to win arguments but to rebuild the social and spiritual fabric that makes communion possible: parishes where people know one another, priests formed to lead without partisanship, and communities shaped more by the rhythms of the liturgical year than by the news cycle.

If we can recover that thicker Catholic culture that is rooted in sacrament, relationship, and a sense of belonging that transcends ideology, we will rediscover what it means to be one Church.