A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the Rise of Neoconservative Catholics

Their efforts to do so were multilayered, with questions related to Cold War politics, US foreign relations with Central American dictatorships, the economy, abortion, and the state of American culture being perhaps the most contentious subjects. Throughout these debates neoconservative intellectuals voiced their opposition to positions staked out by the Catholic bishops of the United States and to other schools of thought within American Catholicism.

While policy questions were an important component of Catholic identity, a more fundamental disagreement was reflected in the neoconservative concern that a significant fraction of church leadership had embraced a misguided ecclesiology, one that misconstrued the relationship between the church's mission and political life. In this book, Todd Scribner, of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, traces out the contours of these disagreements by focusing on neoconservative Catholic thought and identifying the distinct manner in which they addressed matters of grave importance to the post-Vatican II church.