As Catholic Church Enters New Era, Conservative U.S. Members Push It Right

JD Vance was the last guy to meet with the Pontiff before he died? Was he asking for the job? Imagine the Pope eventually ascending to the US Presidency? A guy can dream!

As Catholic Church Enters New Era, Conservative U.S. Members Push It Right

The conservative wing is reviving old practices and ​growing more assertive in the battle for the future of the Church—and the nation

By Joshua Chaffin and Aaron Zitner, WSJ

Updated April 21, 2025 1:33 pm ET

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. “That is a problem,” White said. “The faith is supposed to be one.”

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.” By contrast, 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.”

Gaining strength

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 Cold War 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, though, 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 and make itself more appealing to a younger generation 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 and is one of the movement’s leading lights.

Augustine, which produces education materials and online content, was founded in 2005 and set up shop 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. It is still in the process of changing the artwork—from aviation prints that celebrate the miracle of flight to portraits of saints who performed actual miracles.

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. The latter is where the Kansas City Chiefs’ kicker Harrison Butker last year delivered a commencement address in which he urged women to embrace their “vocation” as homemakers, creating a national stir.

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.

Among those who have found a sense of mystery and transcendence in the old ways is Michael Knowles, who produces a popular podcast and online videos that offer commentary from a Catholic perspective and are hosted by the MAGA-aligned Daily Wire media company.

“People go to Mass for a glimpse into heaven,” said Knowles, whose videos have garnered more than 2.2 million subscribers on YouTube. “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.”

Brittany Hugoboom, the glamorous editor of Evie, often described as a conservative Cosmopolitan, is a fan of the Latin Mass. So, too, is Megan Mlinarcik, a mother of six in Pittsburgh, who runs a Latin Mass Moms group on Facebook. While mainstream Catholic churches have been in decline for decades, her traditional parish is gaining members, she noted. Its motto: Our future is in our past.

“People would come during Covid and have stayed,” she said. The Latin Mass, which bonded Catholics across geography and generations, was a potent draw. “You can go to a Latin Mass anywhere in the world and it will be exactly the same,” Mlinarcik explained.

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, a large survey of people who voted that year. They broke sharply for Trump in the most recent election, supporting him by an 11 percentage point margin.

Once motivated by the cause of outlawing abortion, conservative Catholics now tend to be animated by a broader MAGA view that liberalism and its elites have jeopardized Western civilization and need to be defeated, said Faggioli. “[Their] real project is not to break the Church but is, forgive me, to make Catholicism great again,” he said.

The pope’s American critics were largely diplomatic during his recent illness—but on the fringe some were more explicit in expressing 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.”

Trump’s return to power escalated the feud. In December, he 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. In his book “A New Catholic Moment: Donald Trump and the Politics of the Common Good,” Burch argued that the president’s policies on trade and immigration were aligned with Catholic teaching and would give rise to stronger communities.

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

The vexed issue of 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—prompting New York’s archbishop, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, to denounce the remarks as “scurrilous.”

In February, Pope Francis felt moved to issue 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.

Pope Francis was known for refocusing the Catholic Church on promoting social and economic justice rather than traditional moral teachings. The pope’s death came after he spent weeks in the hospital earlier this year to treat a serious bout of pneumonia. Photo: Enric Marti/AP

‘Universal answers’

In Denver, Father Michael Nicosia is co-pastor at St. Paul, an ecumenical Catholic church that bills itself as “radically inclusive” and promotes “a different way to be Catholic.” 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. To his dismay, Denver’s archdiocese refers to St. Paul’s congregants as “so-called” Catholics.

“The danger is the certitude they harbor,” Father Nicosia said of those Catholics he calls “retroactive” conservatives.

Their appeal, he argued, was a kind of false nostalgia like that fueling populist political movements across the West. “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, adding: “Certitude is attractive but only an illusion.”

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 that day 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. “That was a moment where you thought: This could change things,” he recalled.

Gray was accompanied by Charles Chaput, who would go on to become Denver’s archbishop and a leading conservative voice in the American Church. Also on hand was Curtis Martin, who would create the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or Focus, an outreach group that has become a Catholic hub on many campuses.

Gray grew up outside Chicago in a family he described as “culturally Catholic”—that is, going through the motions of the faith but without conviction. It was in high school that he discovered scripture. He studied at Franciscan and then returned to Colorado to help found the Augustine Institute, starting with a single classroom. “We felt like a lot of Catholic institutions had lost the sense of their roots,” he explained.

Augustine’s graduate school trains ordained clergy and church leaders, both in person and through remote learning. The institute also produces a wealth of Catholic content—from school textbooks to slick videos featuring teens talking about how they observe Lent. Much of it is available on Augustine’s smartphone apps. Gray—who studiously avoids politics—described Augustine’s approach as trying to recover the roots of Catholicism to apply to the present.

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 over lunch in Augustine’s dining hall. “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.

When the Boeing campus came up for sale, a group of Augustine donors swung into action to come up with the funds. In addition to the facilities installed by Boeing and miles of winding trails, the property features a French-style château built by the estate’s original owner, the fur trader-turned-Gilded Age magnate Joseph Desloge. He built a matching grand ballroom to host his daughter’s debut.

Augustine has turned it into a sanctuary, where students and staff celebrate Mass. On St. Patrick’s Day, dozens gathered for a service led by Abbot Gregory Mohrman, who reminded them that the holiday was about Christ—not corned beef and Irish culture. As they sang hymns and lined up for communion, the light reflected off the river and streamed in through french doors.

“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.”

The Augustine Institute is a graduate school of theology. An earlier version of this article incorrectly described it as a seminary. (Corrected on April 21)

Write to Joshua Chaffin at joshua.chaffin@wsj.com and Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8