The United States and the Catholic Church share some intriguing similarities: both are global in reach, exert significant influence over hundreds of millions of people, and (perhaps most interestingly) make serious teleological claims. Such claims have not necessarily clashed, for they appeal to different social and moral aspects of humanity. At their best, they can be complementary empires of promise.
Though in the case of the U.S., the expression of such promise has, at least since the 1890s, been transferred with considerable firepower. And because there has been a large Catholic population in the U.S. since the mid-19th century, the Catholic Church has taken particular interest in how those Catholics have operated in a nation dominated by Protestants and a republican system of government. Over that same period, the U.S. and the Catholic Church have often partnered to address wars and ideological foes. Profound social, cultural, and moral issues have been debated in the relationship between these two institutions—what the Italian journalist Massimo Franco has called “parallel empires.” We might wonder, then, what it means when the leaders of these two empires meet.
This will reportedly take place March 27 when President Barack Obama visits the Vatican. According to Jay Carney, White House spokesman, the president expects to discuss an issue at the center of the pope’s agenda: material inequality. In his pastoral statement Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), Pope Francis linked growing inequality around the globe to the violence that consumes the attention of world leaders. He wrote that we “have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. . . . . Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”
