Conservative U.S. Catholics Gain Sway --- Adherents revive old practices, grow more assertive as Church enters new era

"On Easter Sunday, hours before his death, an ailing Pope Francis roused himself to share a brief meeting at the Vatican with U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

For Francis, it was to be a final encounter with a conservative wing of American Catholicism that is flourishing and increasingly assertive at a time when the Church, more broadly, is struggling.

The Pope's passing on Monday morning has thrown open a global succession race to lead the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. Yet it has also focused attention on the Vatican's fraught relationship with an American flock that is undergoing cultural and theological changes that echo the rightward shift in the nation's politics in the MAGA era.

Personified by Vance, who was baptized in the Catholic Church in 2019, at age 35, adherents to this conservative style are reviving old practices, including the traditional Latin Mass and women wearing veils. While their numbers may still be small among the universe of Americans who identify as Catholic, they are increasingly influential, say observers -- in the struggle for the Church's future and that of the nation.

The conservatives are more likely to be kneeling in pews on Sunday and managing parish affairs while others stay home. Their worldview has found purchase in the Trump administration's policies -- be it the introduction of sweeping tariffs or its mass deportation of immigrants who entered the country illegally. And they are building a network of universities and media outlets to educate future cadres.

"Vance is one of a legion of young people who have followed the same path from atheism to radical suspicion and rejection of liberal culture to a form of Augustine-inspired Christianity," said David Deane, a theologian who gave a recent lecture on Catholicism and the new right. "The seminaries are increasingly populated by young men who think like this."

Their ascendance made for an unusually tense relationship with a Pope who emphasized compassion and humility. Before Sunday's meeting, Vance had engaged in an unusually tetchy back-and-forth with the Vatican over the Trump administration's deportation policies.

"For [conservatives], Pope Francis was a shock. And it became more of a shock when he started talking about gays, divorce and capitalism," said Massimo Faggioli, a church historian at Villanova University. "It was a relationship that was damaged from the beginning."

The appointment of a liberal successor, Faggioli warned, risked further estrangement. One possibility he cited was a "liquid schism" in which the two parties don't suffer a formal rupture but increasingly look past one another. "The fear is that it basically could become a Catholic Church that is independent from the Vatican," Faggioli said.

Stephen P. White, the executive director of the Catholic Project, a research initiative at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., likened that possibility to an "Anglicization" of Catholicism -- or a fracturing of the Church on national lines.

The Catholic Project offered a stark measure of the conservatives' rise in a 2022 survey of more than 3,500 U.S. Catholic priests. Among those ordained since 2020, it found, some 80% identified as "conservative/orthodox." Those identifying as progressives and liberals were facing a "virtual collapse."

"Among priests, it's a massive shift," said White, who views the conservative Catholic renewal as "a piece of the populism that seems to be spreading not just in the United States but over most of the Western world."

Since the 1960s, the Catholic Church has swung from the adoption of more liberal principles in the Second Vatican Council to the 35 years of conservatism espoused by Popes John Paul II and Benedict.

The 2013 appointment of Francis, an Argentine celebrated as the first Pope from "the global south," marked a pivot toward a more pastoral approach that emphasized flexibility and compassion over doctrine. He made headlines by approving the offering of "blessings" for same-sex couples and talking about divorce and climate change.

Behind the scenes, the conservatives were gathering strength in America, bound together by a conviction that liberalism in its many guises -- political, social, theological -- has run aground. While it may have generated material wealth, they say, it has undermined communities and wrought the social "carnage" that President Trump invoked during his first inauguration in 2016.

For the Catholic Church in particular, they believe that a project to embrace modernity instead yielded empty pews and confusion. In its place, they want to build a post-liberal world that is rooted in traditions of the past.

"For a lot of progressives, they think that if the Church could just accommodate the modern world, it will stop its decline. But everywhere the Church has accepted the modern world and its contemporary values, it's died," said Timothy Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school of theology that emphasizes a return to the rigors of scripture and tradition.

Augustine, which produces education materials and online content, was founded in 2005 and set up in a Denver office park. Last year, it paid around $20 million for a 284-acre campus outside of St. Louis that Boeing had used as a retreat and executive training center.

By contrast, St. Louis' archdiocese had to close or merge dozens of parishes two years ago due to declining attendance and a scarcity of priests.

"You judge a tree by its fruit," said Gray, as he reflected on the institute's growth from his perch in a library lined with carved wooden panels harvested from a 16th-century English monastery.

Other conservative hotbeds include Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan.

Many of their students are embracing practices from an ancient, unreformed Catholicism that had seemed to be fading into obsolescence. The most striking may be the traditional Latin Mass, codified in the late 1500s and practiced into the 1960s, and which Francis had discouraged. In it, the priest keeps his back to worshipers so as to face God and speaks in Latin -- while in the contemporary Mass that superseded it, the priest faces the congregation and gives the worshipers more opportunities to pray out loud in response.

"People go to Mass for a glimpse into heaven," said Michael Knowles, who produces a podcast and videos that offer commentary from a Catholic perspective and are hosted by the MAGA-aligned Daily Wire media company. "If the Mass gets more focused on me, if the music becomes more quotidian and casual, if the sacraments are not treated with due reverence, it teaches in a sometimes imperceptible way that one need not really go."

According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey, 19% of Americans -- or some 53 million adults -- identify as Catholic. That's down from 24% in 2007. After a decadeslong slide, that decline appears to be leveling off.

A more salient statistic may be church attendance. At least half of Catholics turned up weekly in the 1970s, compared with only about a quarter today, according to Ryan Burge, an Eastern Illinois University professor who tracks religious data.

Long a political bellwether, Catholic voters were virtually split in their choice for president in 2020, according to AP VoteCast.

 They broke sharply for Trump in the most recent election, supporting him by an 11 percentage point margin.

The pope's American critics were largely diplomatic during his recent illness -- but on the fringe some were more explicit in their desires for a successor. One is Bishop Joseph Strickland, an ardent conservative and Francis opponent, who the Vatican removed two years ago as the Church's leader in Tyler, Texas. "Certainly, we pray for him," Strickland told Newsmax last month, "but we need the new Pope to be someone who is much clearer -- really, frankly, stronger in the tradition of our Catholic faith."

Francis had expressed his own discontent. In 2023, he complained of a "very strong, organized reactionary attitude" against him in the U.S. Church, adding: "I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless."

In December, Trump chose his U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican: Brian Burch, a staunch critic of Francis who founded a Wisconsin group called CatholicVote that helped to mobilize support for Trump, entwining MAGA and faith.

Francis, in turn, appointed a liberal cardinal, Robert McElroy, as the Archbishop of Washington, D.C.

Immigration became a fault line between the camps. Days after his inauguration, Vance accused the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of supporting illegal immigration because it allowed them to reap millions of dollars in federal aid.

In February, Pope Francis issued an extraordinary letter correcting Vance after the vice president cited a theological argument about "the hierarchies of love" to try to justify the Trump administration's deportation policies. (No, the pope chided Vance in so many words, compassion did not end at the border or hinge on a migrant's legal status.)

It's unclear just how much influence American conservatives will wield in the global contest to select a new pope. During his tenure, Francis stocked the College of Cardinals that will eventually determine his successor with loyalists who share his more liberal outlook. Still, America is home to the world's fourth-largest Catholic population, and it's a big source of wealth for a Vatican under financial strain.

In Denver, Father Michael Nicosia is co-pastor at St. Paul, an ecumenical Catholic church that bills itself as "radically inclusive." The onetime advertising executive had attended seminary in Rochester, N.Y., in the 1990s, then overseen by one of the most progressive bishops in the country.

"The danger is the certitude they harbor," Father Nicosia said of those Catholics he calls "retroactive" conservatives. "From my sense, in these times of conflict and cultural change, many people find comfort in an exclusive church that offers absolute, universal answers," he said.

Denver turns out to be a touchstone for conservative Catholics. Pope John Paul II chose the city as the site of his August 1993 World Youth Day festival, overlooking traditional Catholic bastions like Boston, New York or Chicago. The idea was to seed a new evangelism.

Among those in the audience was a 24-year-old Tim Gray, who was then leading a Catholic youth group from Rapid City, S.D., and can still recall the thunder of stamping feet in Mile High Stadium as the pope's helicopter approached.

Gray grew up in a family he described as "culturally Catholic" -- going through the motions of the faith but without conviction. In high school he discovered scripture. He studied at Franciscan and then returned to Colorado to help found the Augustine Institute. "We felt like a lot of Catholic institutions had lost the sense of their roots," he explained.

The idea appealed to Madeline Joerger, 24, who came to Augustine for graduate school after earning her degree in education at Benedictine College. She plans to teach at a Catholic school. "We have 2,000 years of tradition," Joerger said. "We have to have something to say beyond the modern world."

Her classmate James Luppino, 27, saw himself as part of a grassroots reaction to a prevailing culture that many found wanting. "An effect of the modern secular world has been a loss of meaning for a lot of people," he said.

"The way to renew the Church is not to change the Church's teaching to try to be popular," Gray said. "It goes back to what Jesus said: if salt loses its tastiness, it's not good for anything but to be thrown out. I think what's interesting about this new movement is, it's salty."”

1. Conservative U.S. Catholics Gain Sway --- Adherents revive old practices, grow more assertive as Church enters new era. Chaffin, Joshua; Zitner, Aaron.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 22 Apr 2025: A1.