Visiting historian sees role for Vatican in balancing political narratives

Henkels Family College Professor of History Brad Gregory was in Dunedin to deliver the Burns Lectures at the University of Otago. Professor Gregory agreed with a New York Times opinion piece that argued, following the election of Pope Leo XIV, Donald Trump is no longer the most important American in the world.

But the professor took issue with an article in the same newspaper about the conversion to Catholicism by now-US Vice President J.D. Vance.

“I read that article, and I was filled with disgust and disdain because it made it seem like there’s this intrinsic connection between Catholicism and Trumpism. There isn’t,” Professor Gregory said.

“I basically said as a Catholic intellectual and professional historian, I want to take issue with the impression created by this article.”

Professor Gregory said that Trumpism or Project 2025, a political blueprint published by a group of conservatives, are not the ways to deal with environmental issues or the socio-economic discrepancies in the US. He also critiqued the notion of integral Catholicism, which is getting some attention in the US.

“So, this idea that we really have to reintegrate church and state and it has to be a uniform society, then everything will be fine,” he explains. “No, we tried that in the Middle Ages. It was a disaster.”

Historians are mortified by what’s going on in the US, he said.

“We know too much. We know what this looks like and how it’s likely to play out. It’s horrifying.”

Anybody who thinks these are promising ways to address the real problems of the US, he wrote in a letter to the editor at the New York Times, should read up on Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain – what he called the Catholic fascisms of the 20th century.

The titles of the Burns Lectures delivered in the last week of May were: “Christians, Consumption, and Climate Change: Christianity between the Last Ice Age and the Anthropocene”; “Subverting the Way of the World: The Oblique Radicalism of Jesus of Nazareth”; “Accommodating the Way of the World: Making Room for Mammon, Making Peace with Rome”; “Extending the Way of the World: Western Christianity from Constantine to the Anthropocene”.

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How we got to here | Otago Daily Times Online News (By Tom McKinlay/Otago Daily Times)

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Brad Gregory | Department of History | University of Notre Dame (University of Notre Dame)