Captivating Catholicism

American conservatives who crossed the Tiber precisely to wield the Pope's authority now spend much of their energy explaining why the Pope is wrong.

On a humid Saturday evening in May, in a red-brick building on Capitol Hill, thirty young men and a few women sat down to politely argue. Most of them were adult converts to Catholicism, and they were united in their admiration for America’s most visible Catholic convert, Vice President J.D. Vance. They belong to the Cicero Society, a debating club that meets on the Washington campus of Hillsdale College, a small conservative Christian school in Michigan known for sending its graduates into Republican politics. The members wore tweed. One carried a cane he did not appear to need. They followed ancient parliamentary rules, addressing one another as “the gentleman” and “the lady,” stamping their feet to signal approval and hissing to signal disapproval. A reporter named Nate Weisberg sat in and described the evening for New York Magazine, in an article titled “The Young Catholic Elite Poised to Take Over MAGA.”

The question they debated that night was whether Christianity is conservative. The side that won argued No. A Christian, they concluded, cannot be content to preserve a society as corrupt as ours; until the country’s laws are remade along Christian lines, a serious Christian must be a radical. One speaker put it in a way that would puzzle most Americans: “Christian ends sometimes require progressive means.” He was not endorsing Bernie Sanders or AOC. By “progressive means” he meant that the right should be willing to seize institutions and rebuild them by force, the way the radical left has been willing to do — a method borrowed from the enemy and aimed now at Christian and conservative goals.

These are not people withdrawing from the world to pray in private. They want political power, and they want to use it to make the United States more Catholic in its laws and its public life. The politician who makes that goal feel possible for them is Vice President J.D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, at age thirty-five, and placed his faith at the center of his 2026 memoir. Some in the room say they hope the club will grow into a staffing network for a Vance administration they expect will govern the country in the near future.

These young converts embody a paradox about the current Catholic Church in America. By ordinary measures, that Church is shrinking. Infant baptisms have fallen by more than half this century. Catholic weddings have dropped further still. Catholic school enrollment is down by roughly a million children. And yet Catholicism has never held more power on the American right. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic. So is much of the Trump cabinet, and so is much of the legal and intellectual machinery of the conservative movement. These gains have been fueled by millions of dollars from wealthy conservative Catholic donors prepared to keep spending to grow their influence. Ambitious young people in Washington have noticed, and a significant number of them have concluded that the road to power and success in the nation’s capital now runs through the Catholic Church.

The stranger thing is a contradiction at the center of the movement. These converts came to the Catholic Church for its authority — for a two-thousand-year-old teaching office that does not bend to the fashions of the age and that confidently hands down the truth from above. What they converted to was an idea of the Church: a fixed fortress of order and permanence that would stand against an ever-changing and liberalizing world and confirm what they already believed.

But what they actually joined was the living Catholic Church, which in the person of Pope Leo XIV — the first American ever elected to the office — says almost the opposite of what they believe about nearly every pressing question of the day: immigration, war, the environment, capital punishment, unregulated markets, and the government’s duty to provide healthcare, education, and care for the poor. Converts who were drawn to Catholicism by its authority now spend much of their energy explaining why the Pope is wrong.

The situation is a puzzle, and it looks brand-new, a product of the Trump years. But it is not new. The road these young people are walking — the road by which English-speaking conservatives have reasoned and yearned their way into the Roman Catholic Church — is nearly two centuries old, and it runs in a pattern anyone can trace once they know to look. I have watched people walk it myself.

Crossing the Tiber

I had a friend in college, in the 1970s, who made this crossing long before J.D. Vance or the Cicero Society existed. He did it in two stages: first out of the agnosticism he had grown up in and into the “high church” wing of the Church of England, with its old ceremonies and vestments and incense, and then, a few years later, the rest of the way into Rome. There is a shorthand term for it. To become Catholic is to “cross the Tiber,” the river that runs through Rome. My friend crossed the Thames first and then the Tiber. He wanted then what the young people in that Washington debating club want now — cathedrals and candles and plainchant, an ancient liturgy, a Church old enough and weighty enough to stand against a present he found thin and disposable. He was drawn by the same beautiful idea of the ancient and forever certain Catholic Church as these young adult conservatives in Washington. What set him apart came later. When the actual Church asked hard things of him, he obeyed. He surrendered the Book of Common Prayer, and his individual judgments on what God required of him, and he submitted.

The critic Susan Sontag argued that a style can carry a set of commitments its admirers never openly state. The style of these young Catholics tells you which Church they love. The tweed, the Latin, the reverence for cathedrals and old liturgies all express a longing for a Church that is fixed, hierarchical, certain, and grand — a fortress of permanence in a dissolving age. The attractions of that idea of the Church did not begin with the Cicero Society. It has a history nearly two centuries old, and to understand it we have to follow it back to the man who walked this road almost two hundred years ago.

John Henry Newman was one of the most admired English churchmen of the nineteenth century, an Oxford scholar and Anglican priest with a following among the brightest students of his day. In the 1830s he led what became known as the Oxford Movement, an effort to recover the ancient character of the Church of England — to show that it was a true branch of the one historic Church, holding the same sacraments and the same apostolic authority as Rome, older by far than the Reformation, and lacking only the Pope. His whole early project was to rescue the Church of England from modernity by proving that it was already Catholic. He called this middle position between Rome and Protestantism the Via Media, the middle way. The Via Media was his own idea of the Church, and it was the idea he would have to give up.

In 1841 he published a pamphlet, Tract 90, arguing that the Thirty-Nine Articles — the Reformation-era statements of official Anglican belief — could be read in a sense compatible with Catholic teaching. It was a last attempt to hold his theory together, and the theory did not survive his own scholarship. Studying the early Church’s bitter fights over the nature of Christ, Newman kept seeing the Anglican position sitting where the ancient heretics had sat, and Rome standing where the whole Church had stood against them. A single sentence of St. Augustine’s, written about a fourth-century schism, lodged in him and would not leave: securus judicat orbis terrarum — the settled judgment of the whole world is not to be doubted. If the verdict of the universal Church was the test, then the small, national, separated Church of England stood on the wrong side of it.

The book he wrote as he worked this problem through, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, is the record of a man reasoning himself out of the Protestant church he loved. Newman argued in it that Christian teaching genuinely develops over time, unfolding and maturing across the centuries while remaining continuous with what came before, so that the later doctrines of Rome are the early faith brought to maturity. Having convinced himself, he acted against his own comfort and his own affections. In October 1845 an Italian missionary priest, Dominic Barberi, received him into the Roman Catholic Church at Littlemore, outside Oxford.

That act cost him nearly everything. He lost the Oxford he loved, his university fellowship, and friendships that never healed. And Rome, once he arrived, did not embrace him. A powerful faction of Catholics — the party historians call the Ultramontanes, who wanted the maximum possible authority gathered into the hands of the Pope — found Newman too English, too individualistic, too attached to the rights of conscience. For much of his Catholic life he lived under suspicion. When the First Vatican Council defined the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870, the definition was aimed, in part, at men like him, who put great value in individual conscience. Vindication came only at the very end. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII made him a cardinal, an old man honored at last for having been right and patient. The Catholic Church declared him a saint in 2019.

Like the conservative Catholic converts at the Cicero Society debate, Newman came to Rome because he was looking for the home of an enduring truth. But unlike these new conservative converts, Newman submitted. He entered a communion that did not welcome him and bent to an authority that treated him with suspicion for decades, because he had come to believe that the Church had the right to teach and that he had the duty to obey. He had held his own idea of the Church, the Via Media, and when the evidence destroyed it he did not cling to the idea; he submitted to the Church that actually existed. His most quoted line is the one his supposed heirs now use to justify defying the Pope. Raising an imagined toast in 1875, he said he would drink “to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.” People cite this as though Newman were placing his private judgment above Rome. He meant almost the reverse. Conscience, for Newman, was the faculty that binds a person to the truth, and the truth had bound him to obey the Church. Once his conscience convinced him that the Roman Catholic Church was the true Church founded by Christ, his own sense of moral integrity demanded his submission to the Pope as an act of obedience to God’s own voice within him.

After Newman, the road to Rome filled with travelers coming for the Church’s trappings and tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Catholicism still carried a whiff of the exotic and the forbidden in Protestant England, a set of aesthetes and decadents was drawn to its incense and its drama — Oscar Wilde, received into the Church as he lay dying in 1900, and lesser figures like the artist Aubrey Beardsley and the poet Lionel Johnson. In the twentieth century came the novelists: Ronald Knox, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and above all Evelyn Waugh, who converted in 1930 and gave the whole sensibility its monument in Brideshead Revisited, a novel about a doomed Catholic aristocratic family and the strange persistence of grace. When the Second Vatican Council modernized the Mass in the 1960s and replaced the old Latin liturgy with worship in the vernacular, Waugh felt the change as a personal grief. He wrote his objections. Then he stayed, and obeyed, inside the Church that had wounded him, and died on Easter Sunday in 1966 after hearing Mass one last time in the old rite. The same pull drew Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the greatest poets in the English language, who converted under Newman’s influence in 1866, became a Jesuit, burned the poems of his youth as a kind of sacrifice, and lived out a hidden, obedient, often anguished life. These men were drawn to Catholicism by the beauty of the Church, but when the Church asked hard things of them, they obeyed it.

The conservative pull of Catholicism — its antiquity, its authority, its ornate beauty, its promise of a stability more permanent than the anxious modern self — is embodied most famously by G.K. Chesterton, and no figure is more revealing of the young men now claiming him. Chesterton, the huge, jovial English writer who entered the Catholic Church in 1922 and created the priest-detective Father Brown, is the patron saint of the tweedy convert. His contemporary admirers have attempted to mimic his manner and discarded most of his convictions. Chesterton spent his Catholic years defending the poor against the rich, distrusting empire, and promoting an economic idea he called distributism: the belief that property and productive wealth should be spread as widely as possible, into as many small hands as possible, against both big business and big government. The young men who wear his kind of hat and quote his paradoxes now serve the politics of billionaires.

The sheer number of these conservative converts, and the fact that they are arriving now, call for explanation. The usual explanation blames the Second Vatican Council, the great assembly of the world’s Catholic bishops from 1962 to 1965 that modernized Catholic worship and practice and that traditionalists have mourned ever since as the moment the Church went soft. That story misses something important. The same post-Council Church that the traditionalists blame is the Church that spent forty years advertising for exactly these converts and building special doors for them to enter.

The Catholic Church Welcomes Refugees from a Liberalizing Protestantism.

Pope John Paul II, who reigned from 1978 to 2005, planted a flag. In Veritatis Splendor (1993) he defended the existence of unchanging moral truths against a modern culture he saw dissolving into relativism. In Evangelium Vitae (1995) he set the Church against abortion and euthanasia and proclaimed a “culture of life.” To a conservative Protestant watching his own denomination make concession after concession to liberal ideas, Rome looked like a fortress that would hold. In 1998, in Fides et Ratio, John Paul told the world that faith and reason were partners rather than enemies, which spoke straight to the clever young person who had assumed that religion was for people who could not think.

A whole machinery of welcome grew up for these refugees from an ever-liberalizing Protestantism. Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor who became a Catholic priest, founded the journal First Things in 1990 to house a conservative alliance of Catholics and like-minded Protestants. A genre of convert memoirs turned the crossing into a public drama others could follow step by step. Then came Pope Benedict XVI, who reigned from 2005 to 2013 and spoke directly to the lovers of the old beauty. In 2007, in a decree called Summorum Pontificum, he freed the old Latin Mass for wider use and told the young traditionalists that their hunger for it was legitimate. In 2009 he created a formal structure, the Ordinariate, that let entire groups of Anglican clerics become Catholic priests while keeping their marriages and the liturgy they loved, the very prose of Thomas Cranmer carried whole into the Catholic Church.

For forty years, then, Rome said to refugees from liberalizing Protestantism: your church has surrendered to the spirit of the age. We have not. Come to us. Millions came. But the invitation was to join the whole Church and to receive all of its teaching, not only the parts that felt grand, fortress-like, and conservative. The Church that John Paul and Benedict held out was at once a fortress and a cross. The same John Paul who condemned abortion also condemned the death penalty and unbridled capitalism and the mistreatment of the poor and the migrant. Evangelium Vitae and the Sermon on the Mount came from one Gospel and one Church. The grand fortress was the Church they imagined, but Rome offered the fortress and the cross and trusted that converts knew they were embracing both.

The Church Teaches the Dignity of All Human Life.

Consider what the Catholic Church now asks of these converts who crossed the Tiber to escape liberalism. The Church asks the faithful, including its converts who fled from liberal Protestantism, to embrace the whole of Catholic teaching, including its view of the dignity of all human life. Pope Francis — and perhaps even more so Pope Leo XIV — have reminded the faithful of the centrality of the Church’s commitment to the sanctity of every human life from conception to natural death. It is because of this unwavering and inclusive commitment to life that the Church opposes abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and unjust war as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This perspective, rooted in Catholic social teaching, seeks to unify the Christian response to diverse social issues under a single premise: that all human life has inherent dignity and is sacred.

The convert who crossed the Tiber cheering the first of these has to reckon with the rest. He must reckon with a Church advancing toward sainthood the cause of Dorothy Day, the anti-war, anti-capitalist friend of the poor who was arrested more times than she could count; with a Church that in 2018 revised its Catechism to call the death penalty “inadmissible,” closing a door Catholic teaching had long left ajar; and with a Church that increasingly doubts whether any modern war can meet the ancient conditions for a just one. In 2023, in a document called Fiducia Supplicans, Pope Francis permitted priests to bless people in same-sex relationships — taking care to bless the persons and not the relationship, a distinction that satisfied no one and enraged the very converts who had crossed the Tiber to escape a liberalizing Protestantism in the first place.

Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, elected in 2025, has spent his first year preaching the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, where Christ says the nations will be judged by how they treated the hungry, the stranger, and the prisoner — “the least of these.” Leo has called the treatment of migrants in the United States impossible to square with any honest claim to be pro-life, condemned an economy that “kills,” and denounced the American and Israeli war on Iran, reminding the faithful that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war. In his first encyclical he declared that wealth and technology must be treated as a common good rather than hoarded by a corporate few, insisting that “instead of waiting for the benefits of growth to reach the poor eventually, decisions need to be taken to ensure that growth becomes inclusive from the outset,” and calling for “just laws and methods of redistribution.” Set these teachings in front of the American Catholic right, and its devotion to the Church looks less like the loving submission of John Henry Newman and more like the angry protest of Martin Luther.

There is a word, ultramontane, for the Catholic who gives the Pope the maximum possible deference; it means “beyond the mountains,” beyond the Alps, looking always to Rome. On the questions that discipline their liberal culture-war enemies — abortion, sexuality, the meaning of marriage — these converts are perfectly ultramontane, quoting the Catechism like men who believe every word of it. But on the questions that touch how the powerful and the wealthy treat what Christ called “the least of these” — the migrant, the condemned prisoner, the poor — the same converts suddenly discover that a papal statement might be merely prudential, or mistaken, or a private opinion, or a sign that the Pope himself has misunderstood the faith. What they want from the Church is a weapon for their politics. They did not cross the Tiber in search of salvation. Its authority is honored when it agrees with their politics and ignored when it does not. Their politics governs their faith, and not the other way around.

The Barron Doctrine.

Limiting the Pope’s authority is an old move — French kings and German emperors built whole doctrines on it for centuries — but these converts have a newer and more convenient instrument. Let us call it the Barron Doctrine, after Bishop Robert Barron, who has become a favorite Catholic cleric of the Trump administration. The Barron Doctrine is a broad extension of the doctrine of prudential judgment that draws a hard boundary between universal moral teaching and its application to policy. The Church may teach the moral law; the state applies it to particular cases; and how the state applies it lies beyond the Church’s competence to judge. “It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life,” Barron has said.

Conveniently for the new conservative converts who came into the Church at least in part to wag their fingers at sinners, the Barron Doctrine — as actually practiced by its adherents, including Bishop Barron — does not prevent the Church from making moral judgments about particular policies in the areas of sexual matters and cultural warfare, including abortion, same-sex marriage, and the enforcement of strict lines separating the two legitimate genders, while removing war, immigration, the death penalty, and the treatment of the poor to the untouchable realm of prudential judgment.

J.D. Vance, the avatar of the tweedy conservative Catholic convert, has given the clearest demonstration of this incoherent but greatly useful view of papal authority, because he has frequently applied it in public to defend the actions of the Trump administration. Early in 2025, defending its drive to turn away migrants, Vance reached for a concept from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas called the ordo amoris, the “order of love” — the ancient idea that our obligations of charity are ordered, that we rightly care for those closest to us before those far away. He used it to argue that Americans owe their care to fellow citizens before strangers at the border. Pope Francis wrote a rare public letter to the American bishops correcting him, gently and unmistakably, pointing to the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the man who fulfills the law is exactly the one who crosses every line of nation and tribe to help a stranger bleeding in the road. Later, when Pope Leo condemned the administration’s mass deportations as inhumane and contrary to the Gospel, Vance warned the Pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

These converts fled a Protestantism that, as they saw it, kept revising the faith to suit the times, and they crossed the Tiber for an authority that would stand fixed against the age. Then that authority turned and asked hard things of them — mercy toward the migrant, restraint in war, doubt about the executioner, care for the poor, the sharing of wealth, the good of creation before profit — and in that moment they did the one thing their conversion was supposed to have made impossible. They set their own judgment above the living Church and told the Pope, and the public, that the Pope had the faith wrong. The certainty that Rome has gone astray, that one’s private conviction outranks the Chair of Peter, is precisely the Protestant instinct they had claimed to leave behind. When Newman came to disagree with his own Church, he submitted. These converts conclude that the Pope is in error and set out to correct him.

The Sin of libido dominandi, the Lust to Dominate and its Cure.

At the root of it is a sin that St. Augustine, whom Vance has taken as his patron, gave a name to sixteen centuries ago. In The City of God he calls it the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate — the hunger to rule over others that he identifies as the driving passion of the earthly city, the counterfeit of the City of God, which is built instead on the love of God. Augustine saw this lust as the defining passion of political life, so it should not surprise us to find it in a Washington debating club whose members, cosplaying Chesterton and dreaming of a Vance administration, mean to rule the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.

St. Augustine also shows the path away from this sin. It is the ordo amoris — the order of love — that J.D. Vance deeply misunderstood and misappropriated. The lust to dominate happens when a person loves themselves and power more than they love God and their neighbor. The cure is that, through God’s grace, a person comes to love God first, their neighbor second, and material power last.

My old friend, who crossed the Thames and then the Tiber half a century ago, loved in that order. Like the great St. John Henry Newman before him, he bent to a Church that asked hard things of him and sought to rule nothing at all. The young men in tweed have converted instead to a Church of their own imagining, a grand fortress that flatters them, despises those they despise, and asks nothing of them that they do not already wish to give.