The Contradictions of Catholic Neoconservatism

Abstract

This chapter details the rise and fall of perhaps the most unusual bloc within the neoconservative movement: the Catholic neoconservatives. It traces how Michael Novak's best seller The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) caused Catholic neoconservatives to shift American Catholic discussion of economics to a defense of “democratic capitalism” as the purest distillation of Catholic social teaching. This argument was reinforced when another Catholic neoconservative, George Weigel, seized the public image of John Paul II for political purposes with the publication of Weigel's biography Witness to Hope (1999). Once the neoconservatives were able to speak for conservative Catholicism in America, they rallied American Catholic celebrities to their positions on foreign interventionism, support for multinational corporations, and Jewish ultranationalism. Integral to this campaign was the success of Catholic neoconservatives in fashioning an American Catholic understanding of political philosophy, starting with the social teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In The Hemisphere of Liberty, Novak dwells on a statement made by the English Catholic classical liberal Lord Acton in order to present St. Thomas as the “First Whig.” This was part of an arduous effort to reconcile medieval political philosophy with the neoconservative understanding of Anglo-American liberalism.