The Bishops, the Billionaires, and the Catholic Far-Right
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Brad speaks with Mary Jo McConahay, who tells the story of how the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have become one of the most formidable and reactionary forces in America — by campaigning to alter democratic institutions under the guise of religious liberty, and allying with major right-wing contributors such as the Kochs. But as McConahay details, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In an investigation reminiscent of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, she uncovers an ominous and long-term political strategy of attacking secular, liberal democracy by waging war on democratic norms and institutions. Playing God was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the books helping to make sense of the current political moment.
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Starting this week, we'll be doing a monthly sit-down with Dr. Matthew Taylor, the leading scholar on the New Apostolic Reformation and the creator of Charismatic Revival Theory, to talk about all things related to the New Apostolic Reformation.
The first episode will debut soon.
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New tonight, a South Carolina church is making national headlines after a priest denied communion for former Vice President Joe Biden.
It happened over the weekend at St.
Anthony Catholic Church in Florence.
Biden attended services during his campaign stop on Sunday.
That priest said he had to refuse communion for Biden because of his stance on abortion.
You may have heard news reports like this one about Joe Biden being denied communion.
There have been other instances of Catholic politicians like Nancy Pelosi being threatened with the same fate.
It's easy to write off these as the work of rogue priests, reactionaries in red parts of the country trying to make a point.
But what if they are the expression of a larger far-right movement within American Catholicism?
What if they're the downstream manifestation of a far-right dynamism gaining momentum among Catholic bishops in the United States?
What if these leaders are not just threatening politicians over abortion, but aligning themselves with far-right Christian nationalist ideals in order to remake the country in a patriarchal retrograde image?
Today I speak with veteran journalist Mary Jo McConaughey about her new book, Playing God, American Bishops and the Far Right.
McConaughey began covering Guatemala and Central America as a correspondent in the 1980s.
Her book tells the story of how the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have become one of the most formidable and reactionary forces in America.
By campaigning to alter democratic institutions under the guise of religious liberty and aligning with major right-wing contributors such as the Kochs, the bishops must be included in any conversation about Christian nationalism in the United States.
Mary Jo and I spoke about the fall of Roe, the ways COVID revealed the extremism of the American bishops, the influence of billionaires like Charles Koch, and the work of Leonard Leo, the mastermind behind the Federalist Society's court picks and the man setting his sights on American education.
For subscribers, we have an extra segment on Ginny Thomas and Paul Weyrich, two Catholics who've influenced our government from behind the scenes in immeasurable ways.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mary Jo McConaughey.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Mary Jo, thanks for joining me.
Thank you for inviting me.
One of the things you say right at the start of the book is just how many folks that the U.S.
Catholic bishops lead.
And before we jump into their actions, their hot button issues over the last decade, can you just give us a clue about that?
I'm sure there's people out there that realize that the Catholic Church is immensely powerful, that there are many, many, many tens of millions of Catholics in the country.
But I don't think a lot of people stop to ever think, you know, the U.S.
Catholic bishops lead how many people?
Well, there are some 72 million Catholics in the United States.
It's the largest single religious grouping in the United States.
The important thing Politically, is that they vote.
They vote more than the average Americans.
So anything that has an influence on them becomes important even beyond their numbers.
When we talk about Catholic bishops, we're talking about people that have so much authority and so much influence on the people in their regions, in local diocese, in the small town parishes across the country.
You really chronicle in this book how the U.S.
bishops are in many ways out of step with the global Catholic Church and with many Americans in terms of their politics.
I think many folks listening, including Catholics, We'll have an idea in their mind about some of the ways that that works, that they've heard about refusing communion to Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi.
They might think of what's going on with reproductive rights, or some of them might have heard of Bishop Strickland being at CPAC.
But two things really stick out at the beginning of the book, Roe v. Wade being overturned and the global pandemic in 2020 and beyond.
Would you help us understand how those two phenomena really illuminate the right-wing politics of the U.S.
bishops?
The very, very conservative majority of the United States Catholic Bishops Conference, which is made up of 274 men, most of them white, most of them past middle age,
They have tried, as part of their agenda, to keep Holy Communion, which is a central part of the belief system of Catholics, tried to keep it from politicians who do not stand against abortion.
So you're talking about like Dick Durbin, who is a very, very pro-immigrant.
Senator, and of course, the bishops are pro-immigration.
And you're talking about the President of the United States, Joe Biden, who is a kind of, you know, model Catholic in many ways.
And they want to keep communion from him.
They wanted to keep it from, well, they still do.
My own bishop here in San Francisco forbade it to Nancy Pelosi.
And these are indications of how they run against The spirit and the very word of Pope Francis, who has said that he has never denied the Eucharist to anyone.
Very often, the U.S.
bishops seem to take a stand that is either ignoring the words of Pope Francis or outright against him, such as on communion.
More and more, as we look at them, you can see their Support of Christian nationalism, even with regard to the COVID epidemic, which was really an eye-opener in terms of the way so many bishops not only flew in the face of Pope Francis by
Arguing against vaccination, whereas Pope Francis said vaccination was an act of love, of charity toward others.
Or by inviting, rather mandating, that people go to Mass, even before the epidemic was over, with masks or without.
My own Archbishop has said that, gee, he had a strong constitution, so he wasn't going to get COVID.
Now, these are all elements that attack the authority of the government and, of course, you know, the health authorities.
And that is one element of Christian nationalism, which it tends to attack the governing authority so as to make it weaker.
Now, Strickland, you mentioned Bishop Strickland.
Went even farther than that by supporting, during the COVID, supporting really outrageous, gossipy information about COVID.
And he supported a priest who said that to vote Democratic was not Catholic.
That is, you couldn't do both.
And Strickland, this is one of the ways that bishops kind of get away with things.
They support what other people say, but don't come right out and say it themselves.
This is something that we've seen with President Trump lately.
That is, he will repost Elements of information that is false information that is reposted and can say to a judge without irony, I didn't do that.
I just reposted it.
Why do you think, and you cover this in the book in some detail, but why do you think that this group of bishops, as you say, of course all men, mainly white, mainly past middle age, why are they so quick to disagree publicly with Pope Francis in ways that I think are surprising given the nature of the Catholic Church and the role of the Pope?
In that hierarchy, there just seems to be a willingness to openly contradict Pope Francis.
What are some of the reasons behind that?
Look, the Pope is the first non-European prelate of the Catholic Church in centuries.
I believe that there has something to do with the U.S.
vision of Latin America, from which the Pope comes, as our quote-unquote backyard.
And what are we doing taking instructions from someone from there?
But I think probably way more important is that the bishops since the 1980s have come to identify with the Republican Party.
And that means supporting capitalism.
This is the largest capitalist country in the world.
And while Pope Francis says, you know, business, commerce, these are good things, unfettered capitalism is not a good thing.
It injures those who are most vulnerable in our world.
He also is extremely and very elegantly against fossil fuel production and the kind of mining and destructive development that hurts the most vulnerable people in the world.
And you have among the bishops Those whose diocese own fossil fuel production areas and rent it out, but most importantly, they have just shunned the Vatican's request to disinvest from fossil fuels.
And, you know, Francis just won't let it go.
And so the bishops pretty much have stood against these very important elements of the Pope.
Most of them still have been Nominated, or named rather, by the previous popes.
Popes whose attitude has been just a little bit different from Francis.
And they just don't go along with this person who is so different from previous popes.
I should say, you know, that the bishops of the United States have not always been this way.
In the 1980s, the Catholics were particularly prophetic.
At a time when Ronald Reagan was promoting Star Wars and nuclear proliferation was in the cards, they came out very boldly against it.
They came out against the U.S.
support for these dictators in Central America who were killing thousands of unarmed people in the insurrections there.
And I know for a fact That they came down because I was there.
I was a journalist at the time.
And the bishops would come down and go to these places and find out exactly what was happening on the ground.
And they came out with a tremendously important paper that said the United States should not be supporting the dictators of Central America.
Most important, perhaps, for the U.S.
scene, they came out with an important, in the 1980s, an important stand against neoliberalism, neoconservatism, against the economic structures that made a huge gap between the rich and the poor, emphasizing the indignity of it.
So, we've had some strong bishops.
After that, though, the bishops began to really focus on abortion as the be-all and the end-all in the political realm.
And that threw them into bed, if you'll excuse the expression, with the Republicans.
Who made it in 76 part of their platform, anti-abortion.
If someone reads your book and they don't know anything about the Catholic bishops in the United States, they will find that some of the most conservative bishops are in places they would not expect, like San Francisco, like Los Angeles.
And there's also prominent gatherings and events in some of the parts of the country one, again, would not expect.
One of those being Napa.
So we're talking about wine country.
We're talking about one of the wealthiest places in the country.
We're talking about a place that is saturated with natural beauty and an epicurean lifestyle.
A place where people go to vacation and yet the Napa Institute is a kind of key cog in the machine that connects the Catholic bishops to the far right.
Can you give us just a little window into what the Napa Institute is and what it does?
The Napa Institute is a meeting every summer in that glorious area that you described in the wine country, and it's run by Tim Bush.
Bush is a billionaire, business partner of Charles Koch, another billionaire, of course.
And they are inspired, that is Bush and his group, are inspired by bishops like Chaput, the bishop from Los Angeles you mentioned, and the bishop from San Francisco, a bishop from Colorado, all of whom are on the board And the idea is to kind of meet and greet, hobnob with each other, bishops, people who are trying to start various conservative apostolates.
And they are all against what they call a trend to secularization in U.S.
culture, which they say threatens Catholic voices.
In the public square.
They are traditionalist.
Every day at the Institute's meeting, there is a traditional Latin mass, which is something that the Vatican II meetings said ought to be a thing of the past.
And Bush, who runs this, is one of the most influential Catholics in the country.
They plug it as spiritual renewal, but it's really politicized religiosity.
And, you know, it's not any more confined to the wine country.
In the past three or four years, they have expanded tremendously to make a conference center, not a conference center, but rather a sort of think tank center at Notre Dame.
And a kind of lobbying perfect location in Washington, D.C.
All of this is aimed at legislation.
So they are very, very interested in youth and very interested in the new seminarians, young priests on their way to becoming priests.
They lay on wonderful trips for them going here and there, but all infused with this traditionalist Catholicism that is not the Catholicism of Pope Francis or of the rest of the world.
That is, these bishops are anomalous.
Tim Bush is not the only billionaire to make an appearance, and I'm wondering if just very quickly you might help us understand why the Koch family is such a prevalent part of a story and a church when the Kochs are notoriously not religious people and are certainly libertarian, but not Catholic, not really Christian, yet every time I seem to talk about I end up talking about the Koch brothers, the John Birch Society, and so on.
So, how do they fit, at least Charles, into this story?
Charles Koch is nothing if not brilliant, and he knows that the agenda of the most far-right U.S.
bishops and the most far-right laymen are his own, and he has particularly aligned himself with people like Bush and has gone into the Catholic education system in a big way, giving money to dozens and dozens of Catholic universities.
And with the money comes, even though it's denied by Koch, comes a certain degree of control.
One of the big, big donations he made, tens of millions of dollars to the only pontifical university in the United States, is meant to give the Catholic version of capitalism.
Well, excuse me, but there's not a Catholic version of capitalism, or a Catholic version of communism, or any of the other isms.
But the idea of shaping the new business class with their principles can handily be done, for instance, at Catholic universities.
I would say that Coke keeps popping up wherever the ultra-conservative Catholics are popping up because they speak the same language.
They want the same things.
You really give us a picture of how between the Napa Institute and the whining and dining of young seminarians and priests and the opening of business schools and programs by Coke at a place like the Catholic University of America, you're capturing the young hearts and minds of both the lay and priestly Catholics throughout the country.
And it really is a brilliant, if not insidious plan to capture a new generation.
No, no, I was just going to say, Brad, and it's not a new plan.
It began in the 1980s, and I outline in my book how it began, and it's very conscious, and the fruit of it is really being produced now.
That is, that they planned.
To have a political, religious, social movement for which the Republican Party was an instrument.
It's not that the Republicans adopted them.
They adopted the Republicans as the best vessel for their agenda.
And that's where we are today.
It's such a fantastic way to put it.
The Republicans did not adopt them.
They adopted the Republicans.
That's a line that I think everyone should hold on to.
And I want to turn now to what you dubbed the unholy trinity of Leonard Leo, of Clarence Thomas, and of Ginny Thomas.
I want to start here.
I think a lot of people out there have heard about the Federalist Society and in their mind it simply represents a conservative legal entity that tries to get justices who have a conservative legal philosophy and politics on the bench.
But even just a quick reading of your book reveals that Leonard Leo, the man who really is at the helm of the Federalist Society, has a much more traditional, highly conservative, Catholic vision for the Federalist Society and therefore for the United States judiciary.
Would you help us connect those dots?
Yes, as a pious, very traditionalist Catholic, Leonard Leo has a certain agenda, including that first and foremost one that we were talking about, to get Roe vs. Wade overturned.
I would say that with the nominations of the Supreme Court justices under Trump, and remember Leonard Leo was the Supreme Court whisperer who advised Trump on these nominations.
And with the federal courts now, which are just packed with Leonard Leo's nominations, I would say that's now behind us.
What he has done in the last several months, in the last couple of years, is now turning his money and his attention toward Media and education, to be able to create the same kind of quote-unquote federalist societies among media professionals and among education professionals.
And this is moving very quickly.
I believe they think they pretty much have the judiciary now.
And now are moving toward the media and education.
I think that explains that largesse of Koch going to the universities.
I think it explains partly, I mean, I could be wrong on this, but my hunch is that, you know, this wonderful news service, the Catholic News Service, which was part of the bishops conference, but was very independent and had very good news reports, the bishops have eliminated its domestic coverage so that they can no longer cover the Supreme Court, for instance.
So that means that all of these archdiocesan newspapers have no practical way of getting the material from this, I would say, free and fair news service.
There are other more conservative Catholic news services, but that one is gone now.
So So, media, education, that's where it's going now with regard to Leonard Leo and his energy.
There's another billionaire involved here, of course, because Leonard Leo is doing all of this with the donation of $1.5 or $1.6 billion that he received in order to carry out this mission.
Once again, every time I talk about the far right and religion, I end up talking about many, many billionaires who seem interested in creating society in their image.
And we would not have Leonard Leo.
We would not have a United States judiciary in the state that it is without those billions of dollars.
And as you say, it's almost as if that's a done deal.
And they're now looking to the next part of their plan, which is just absolutely terrifying.
And it's very important to see how he is using this money also for voter suppression efforts, because as Paul Weyrich, who we mentioned before, where much of this religious right began, often said, I don't want people to vote.
The more people vote, The less our conservative issues have a chance to be voted in.
And so voter suppression is something that if you look at this web of Leonard Leo's efforts, many of them are dedicated to voter suppression, you know, insisting on photo IDs or insisting on more limits to voting.
And so that is the direction in which this 1.6 billion is going.
And it's perfectly logical for someone who's a billionaire to give money, if they're thinking like him, to someone like Leonard Leo, because he is very, very successful, and the billionaire who gave Maria Said the money to him knows that it will be money well spent.
There's whole other chapters in your book about the leader of Domino's, Mr. Monaghan, and we don't have time to get in, but if you are not already piqued by the number of billionaires we've talked about today, then you need to get the book and dive in to all of the great reporting and historical details of the Domino's empire and how it's being used to support these far-right issues through a Catholic lens.
Let's turn to Clarence Thomas.
I will tell you that I think those of us who do this kind of work, journalism and scholarship, know that Clarence Thomas is a devout Catholic.
I'm clear in that I don't think the average American knows that.
I really don't.
I think when they see Clarence Thomas, they don't realize that he is one of the Catholic justices.
They also don't know that he met Leonard Leo way back in 1991, and they have been friends and colleagues since then.
Tell us a little bit about Clarence Thomas and how his Catholicism influences his understanding of the law and the United States.
Clarence Thomas was a Catholic because he grew up super, super poor.
And when he was seven years old, he was put with his grandfather in a house that had a proper bathroom.
He had a proper bed.
His grandfather was a Catholic.
Very unusual for a black person in the South where they lived at the time.
And Clarence Thomas embraced it wholeheartedly.
Thomas as a child embraced Catholicism wholeheartedly.
Like all of us, he had his ups and downs with it.
But, you know, remember that if you're practically a cradle Catholic, it comes with a culture.
It comes with family.
And he was also very influenced by his family, that is his grandfather, whom he took to be a person that lived the American dream without any help from The government.
And this is the same with his friend Leonard Leo, whose Italian tailor grandfather rose in a company where he worked and was an example of the American dream.
Being Catholic, both of them, and being traditionalist Catholics, they have a fundamentalist point of view.
You know, in this Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe, I think it's very important for people to read Clarence Thomas's agreement with the majority, because he said this isn't enough.
We must go ahead to cases that allow contraception, that allow same-sex intimacy.
and allow same-sex marriage.
These are all bugaboos of super-traditionalist Catholics, and that's where Clarence Thomas is headed.
You know, I called that chapter The Unholy Trinity because I think you've got to remember that Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginny Thomas, represents something that Catholics, who are lay people, who agitate for these issues, They're very important in the mix.
And Ginny Thomas really plays her part.
The three of them together represent pretty much the right-wing Catholic laity and how it helps to bring success to the most right-wing bishops' agenda.
Quickly on Ginny Thomas, I think, again, fascinating figure, is not a cradle Catholic, is a convert, is somebody who's raised Protestant in the Midwest, and yet converts in conjunction with her relationship with Clarence Thomas.
I've said this before, I'm happy for you to correct me if you think this is wrong, but there are marriages among Highly powerful people in every society that are perfunctory.
They help families get ahead, they help people economically, they help one person get status.
The Thomases do not seem like that to me Mary Jo.
They seem like two peas in a pod who have a very similar vision for what politics and American society should look like.
And going all the way back to 2010, it seems as if Congress was warning the Supreme Court about Ginny Thomas's activism and her lobbying.
She opened what, by all accounts, was a lobbying firm.
So to have a Supreme Court justice married to a lobbyist who then became part of the advisory board for TPUSA, which claims to have helped get thousands of buses to January 6th, It all seems problematic to many of us, but to the Thomases and the Leos and to their supporters, this is exactly what should be happening, especially for a lay Catholic woman like Ginny Thomas.
Is there any way to explain the allure of Ginny Thomas as a lay Catholic woman to many on the far right, Catholic or Protestant?
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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You can find Mary Jo McConaughey's Playing God anywhere you get your books.
