Robert George
What does a clash between a Catholic Vice President and the Pope reveal about authority, war, and theological responsibility?
In this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer sits down with renowned Princeton University Professor Robert George to unpack what’s happening at the intersection of Catholic faith and American political power. From six Catholic Supreme Court justices to the growing appeal of traditional religion among young people, from the proper limits of papal authority to the alarming rise of antisemitism in traditionalist Catholic circles, this conversation spans two millennia of church-state entanglement to illuminate this American moment.
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Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, recording on Wednesday May 20th, 2026.
My first academic love in college, and then for the first couple of years of graduate school, was early and medieval Christianity. I was fascinated by the emergence of the Church and its divergences from its Jewish forebearers, by the dynamics of how the Church evolved in those first few centuries in relationship to the parallel rise of rabbinic Judaism, and then by the growth of the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy. And most of all, I think I was interested in variations on a key theme, namely what it meant for the Church to be engaged with empire, opposing empire, and gradually even enmeshed in empire.
A core founding myth of the church, of course, is its staunch opposition to empire. The key text to this effect is Matthew 22:21. Jesus is asked by the Pharisees whether it is lawful to pay taxes to the empire, trying to trap him in an act of disloyalty. Jesus responds by asking them who is on the coin? “Why, it is the emperor.” To which he proclaims famously, “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; and to God what is God’s.”
In evading the question, Jesus seems to be signaling a piece of doctrine. The Kingdom of heaven is not the Kingdom of earth, and the Church’s mission is to build the former and not the latter. Or maybe it’s even more than that. Maybe the separation between the earthly emperor and the divine King of Kings is absolute. Perhaps in his wisdom Jesus is masking the depth of his antipathy he feels towards empire. Either way, this image endures as a hallmark idea for another time.
We could explore how the Rabbis deal with the same question with their own twist. There’s a famous text in Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5 that also talks about the image of the empire on coins, but that’s for another time. But I will say that Judaism formed its own ambivalent and complicated identity towards empire that, I would argue, is less absolute than the Gospel of Matthew, probably better expressed by the prophet Jeremiah’s declaration that Jews should pray for the welfares of the cities to which they have been exiled, and by the prayer for the Czar in Fiddler on the Roof, that “God keep the Czar far away from us.”
But back to the Church. After the 4th century and the conversion of Constantine, the Church becomes empire. In my study of the papacy in the Middle Ages, at the peak of its imperial power, I was fascinated by the political and theological implications of that merger of oppositions. I wonder whether, for some Catholics, the decline of papal formal power from the 14th to the 19th century is distancing from the mechanics of states, whether it brings some amount of theological relief, re-situates the Church outside of the many formal constructions of temporal power, restores its core commitment to spiritual power—which is the site of its strengths, and, ultimately, of its dreams.
It seems to me that in 2026 America this is getting pretty blurry again. Our country has six Catholic justices of the Supreme Court—five conservative, one liberal. And the sixth conservative himself was raised Catholic even now as he now practices as an Episcopalian.
This is a kind of a political earthquake in American religion and politics. It’s unimaginable a half-century ago, and reflects, I think, a larger conservative turn towards conservative religion in ways that seem to want to bridge the gap between how Catholics dream of both the Kingdom of Earth and the Kingdom of Heaven.
Most recently, the administration here, most prominently Vice President Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, went head to head with no less than the Pope himself about the merits and the morality of the US war with Iran. Pope Leo XIV said that disciples of Christ are “never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” He said that “God’s heart is torn apart by wars, violence, injustice and lies.” And, maybe most importantly, that he has no fear of the Trump administration. To which Vance replied publicly, “in the same way that it’s important for the Vice President of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
That’s a wild statement for a lot of reasons. It seems more likely to make the reverse argument. The same way that I, as Vice President of the United States, am careful when I speak about theology, the Pope should be careful when he speaks about issues of public policy. But no. And I’m not a Catholic, of course, but I found this utterly astonishing. I don’t have another word for it.
I can imagine if Vance had replied to the Pope by quoting Matthew. Let the Pope speak his mind on matters of spirituality, and let us who are an empire run the Empire. But Vance instead tried to constrain the very work and autonomy of the Pope when it comes to theology itself. I wonder what it means to be a Catholic who speaks that way publicly to the Pope, and what kind of Catholicism it ultimately represents—and for those of us who are not Catholics, what this dynamic might teach us about the nature of religion today in this secular, divided, multi-faith realm in which we actually live.
I’m really honored to be joined today by Professor Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which he founded back in 2000. The New York Times called Professor George the most influential conservative Christian thinker in the country. There is a lot for me to say from his bio, but I will just say this: He is the recipient of not one, not two, but 23 honorary degrees. A Michael Jordan of honorary degrees. Thank you so much for being here on the show today, and for joining us today for this discussion.
Robert: It’s my pleasure. Thank you, Yehuda.
Yehuda: First of all, I want to get your assessment, just as a critical interlocutor about my reading of the kind of spiritual imperial divide and where we are in that story for Catholics today, whether we are still in a kind of recession from the heyday of, let’s say, 1200 in the Middle Ages, the height of papal power, to something different and whether you think that this story is kind of getting muddled again.
Robert: I’m not sure that it’s getting muddled again, but certainly popes do not exercise the kind of temporal power that they did in one point in history. Not at the beginning, as you rightly point out. One of the interesting things about Christianity, and Catholicism in particular is it’s a universalistic religion. Its claims are universal claims. It is not the religion of a particular people. That’s kind of different than most religions historically.
Yehuda: Sure is.
Robert: So there was, from the beginning. a kind of separation of the concept of temporal power from spiritual authority. They were not merged together as they are, you know, in most religions, in most times, in most places.
But then indeed, there did come a time when I think the word you used is the word enmeshed. And I thought that was the right word. When the spiritual authority of the church became enmeshed with the empire, with temporal authority, and that grew to the point at which popes were and the church more generally was exercising an enormous amount of temporal authority.
I think that was a bad idea for a whole lot of reasons. It was not the original idea of Christianity, but over time, as you rightly point out, that power has eroded in some ways. The spiritual authority of the Church at different times in the modern period has grown, and that growth, I think, would not have been possible had the Church and especially the highest office, the Pope, retained temporal authority.
For example, I think that the spiritual authority and the moral authority of Pope John Paul II during his long pontificate was very much enhanced by the fact that he commanded no armies. No one thought that he was in this for political gain or personal ambition. When he spoke in defense of democracy or condemning anti-Semitism or any of the other causes that were central to that pontificate, people knew that he was speaking on spiritual matters. He was—the authority he had was this authority as a spiritual leader, not as a temporal leader, nor was he trying to advance any particular political cause or political agenda, nor was there some personal ambition behind it. He wasn’t Napoleon.
So yeah, I think the basic story as you outlined it is sound.
Yehuda: Just to geek out for a second, what was the theological justification for the papal enmeshment in temporal authority? Is it simply that Catholics may have believed that in bridging the gap between these two things, they were actualizing the possibility of kingdom of heaven on earth, right? By becoming empire they were making that possible? Were they ignoring the notion that the Church is supposed to be anti-imperial? Like what was going on to justify Papal States, the Papal armies, all of that massive story in the Middle Ages?
Robert: Well, there was still, in theory at least, a separation of temporal and spiritual authority. The Pope crowned the emperor, but the Pope wasn’t the emperor. Now, at the same time, the Pope exercised temporal authority over actual land, over actual territory. In fact, you had the Papal States until sometime in the 20th century, I believe.
So in theory there was never a justification for merging temporal and spiritual authority. But I think the basic idea—and it’s an idea that’s been revived by so-called Catholic integralists in political theory these days—it’s not the official position of the church itself. But nevertheless, there’s a movement within Catholicism that says there needs to be a tighter integration of spiritual and temporal authority, because everyone should be concerned about the highest and the most ultimate things, and that everyone includes the state. So the state should be more closely and meshed with, integrated into the church, and the church into the state, than the church has been in recent decades.
But as I say, that’s not the position of the Pope. That’s not the position of the bishops of the world. It’s certainly not the position of the American bishops.
Yehuda: And I think it’s not a position that you hold too, either.
Robert: No, it’s not a position to which I’ll hold.
Yehuda: Do you think that that’s what’s basically going on with the powerful juxtaposition of Catholic power within the Republican Party, people of prominence? Is that what’s taking place? Are these all integrationalists, the Supreme Court justices? The fact that—
Robert: Oh, no, no, no.
Yehuda: So what is the story of how this has become, effectively, the state religion of conservative Americans, and especially those who are not just voting for conservative values, but actually representing them in public office?
Robert: Well, that’s interesting. I’m not sure that I agree with the premise there, Yehuda. Catholics today are the swing voters. If a majority of Catholics vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, which they sometimes do, he’ll likely win. If the majority vote for the Republican, he’ll likely win. By contrast, Evangelical Christians, Protestant Evangelical Christians are overwhelmingly Republican. I think in the last election they voted between 70 to 80% for President Trump.
Jewish Americans have, historically—this is starting to change a little bit—been consistent Democratic voters. So neither the Jewish community nor the evangelical Protestant community are the swing voters. The Catholics are the swing voters.
And even if you look at the teachings of the Catholic Bishops as they pertain to matters that have a political valence in the United States, the Catholic Bishops are sometimes on what counts as the conservative side and sometimes on what counts as the liberal side. From their own theological perspective, it doesn’t matter whether it’s conservative or liberal. Those are categories that are imposed from the outside, and you slot someone into conservative or liberal depending on what views they hold.
But from the point of view of the bishops, what their job is is to teach the Catholic position on these things, to teach the Catholic view of—whether it’s immigration or abortion or whatever it is. And if the world counts that as conservative, okay, it’s conservative. If the world counts that as liberal—which it does on immigration, for example—then okay, that’s liberal.
Yehuda: That makes sense from the standpoint of the Catholics and the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, but I’m trying to observe it just from the perspective of what seems like the electoral plausibility. I’m trying to understand why it almost seems obvious that Vance has to convert to Catholicism on the verge of running for national office. What’s going on there? Why is it the case that there are six Catholic Supreme Court justices? And again, basically unimaginable at a previous era in American history. What’s changed about that feature of Catholic identity that makes it seem like it’s so deeply connected to Republican political power?
Robert: Well, there’s a lot right there to sort through. Let me begin, though, with something that you brought up toward the end. It is almost unthinkable, would have been unthinkable 50 years ago—
Yehuda: Yeah, Kennedy.
Robert: —that six Supreme Court justices were Catholics.
When I was a boy, back in the Middle Ages, you know, it was just understood that the Supreme Court had one Jewish seat, one Catholic seat, and one Black or African American seat. That was it. At one point recently, the Supreme Court had six Catholic members and three Jewish members.
Yehuda: I know.
Robert: We now finally have a Protestant member, but in the old days they were all Protestants, and then they became six Protestants, or seven usually, because the Southern seat was all, usually, effectively a Protestant, like Hugo Black in the New Deal and post-New Deal era. So things have really changed.
I mean, both the Protestant and Jewish community are much better integrated into American life, including American political life, than would have been imaginable for my grandparents and just about unimaginable for my own parents. So yeah, there has been a very big change there.
But again, the Catholic vote, if there is such a thing as the Catholic vote, is a swing vote, and it’ll sometimes swing Democratic, sometimes swing Republican.
As far as the justices are concerned, I think it is just a coincidence that—
Yehuda: Really?
Robert: I, I do—that there are six. I mean, any of the five Catholic justices who are consistently conservative, any of them could have been a Protestant or a conservative Jewish judge.
Yehuda: You don’t see any kind of political commodification of becoming Catholic?
Robert: I don’t, I doubt that—well, I mean, Justice Thomas, when he was appointed, was a Protestant. He had been brought up as a Catholic. He had left the Catholic Church. He’d become a Protestant and then later, while sitting on the Supreme Court bench, returned to the Catholic faith.
I don’t think in a single case did the Catholic faith of any of those justices figure in the decision. I’m very confident that Justice Kavanaugh, when he was nominated by President Trump, President Trump didn’t think, oh, you know, I got to find myself a Catholic. I think the same is true of Justice Alito.
Now, there might have been a difference with Justice Scalia, but not the fact that he was a Catholic. I think that what counted for Justice Scalia is that he was Italian. Of course, most Italians are Catholic.
Yehuda: They’re Catholic, yeah.
Robert: I’ve never met Vice President Vance in person, but I did once talk with him at considerable length on the telephone, and I believe it was before, just before he entered politics, so before he’d become a United States senator from Ohio. I had read his book, Hillbilly Elegy. And I grew up in the heart of Appalachia. I grew up in West Virginia. I was born and brought up there. And so I know that culture very well. And I was very impressed by JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy. So I was glad to talk to him.
But he reached out to me and it wasn’t to talk about the book. He reached out to me because he was considering, then, becoming a Catholic. And I guess someone must have suggested to him that it might be useful in his reflection to have a chat with me. So he called me, and I spoke to him from my office in Princeton. As I say, it was a considerably lengthy conversation, and it was not about politics at all, not a bit. And it wasn’t about political issues in which Catholicism might figure one way or another. It was really deep, the kind of deep existential inquiry about meaning and value, and the concept of God, and the authenticity of the Bible, and early Christianity, and how one could reasonably judge the contemporary Catholic Church to be in continuity with early Christianity, that little Jewish sect that then became this large worldwide religion.
I refer to Christianity, by the way, Yehuda as the other Jewish religion. Christianity is fundamentally a Jewish religion. Most Catholics don’t understand that. Most Catholics don’t even understand the Catholic Mass because they don’t understand the Jewish roots of the Catholic tradition. I don’t know if you’ve ever attended, perhaps for a funeral or something like that, a Catholic Mass, but right in the heart—
Yehuda: Oh, I went to Midnight Mass at the Vatican.
Robert: Oh, okay, well then you have heard it, although probably in Latin if you’re in the Vatican or in Italian, not in English.
Yehuda: That’s the best thing.
Robert: Right at the heart, the whole congregation, one voice proclaims, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God Almighty.” No, Catholics aren’t aware of this, but of course, every Jewish person, you, yourself, for example, when you were at that Mass, heard “Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh.” You were very familiar with that prayer. And the whole concept of temple sacrifice and so forth. You don’t understand the Catholic Mass unless you understand the Jewish roots of the religion. Those Catholics don’t, so they don’t really understand their own liturgy.
But in any case, back to Vice President Vance. We had a deep conversation about all of those things. I can tell you for sure, just on the basis of that conversation, when he was thinking about becoming a Catholic, it had nothing to do with politics. He couldn’t have been asking me the questions he was asking me, probing the issues he was probing, if he was just interested in like, okay, how do we become a Catholic? Because, I don’t know—
Yehuda: It’ll get me the nomination.
Robert: Let’s say, you know, the Ohio electorate is predominantly Catholic or something. I want to appeal to the Catholic vote.
Yehuda: I can’t help but sense that one of the things that’s taking place in American religion right now, though—and I see this also in the Jewish community, with the kind of growing attractiveness to Orthodox Jewish modalities.
Robert: Oh, we see it on our campus. You definitely heard Princeton.
Yehuda: Right. In some ways, this is what Chabad has helped to do. And I hear this actually for a lot of liberal Jews around the country who were members of a Reform and Conservative congregation, and now they go to Chabad on Shabbat. It hasn’t dramatically altered their Jewish practice, but it’s like that’s the congregation that they want to go to.
I can’t help but feel like there is a growing attraction to the most lowercase-x conservative expressions of religion encoded with a certain type of, for lack of a better word, authenticity.
It’s one of those horrible words because it doesn’t—
Robert: I get it.
Yehuda: It’s only a relative term, and it’s a subjective relative term, but it does feel a little bit like that’s what’s taking place in some parts of the Jewish community, and it seems to echo a little bit with what’s taking place among conservative Christians as well.
Robert: No question about it. No question about it. I see it in the Jewish community here at Princeton, I certainly see it in the Catholic community. I’m sure it’s true in the Protestant community as well. You’ve probably read that great work, very small book, but that great work by Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who became a psychologist.
He wrote a magnificent little book called Man’s Search for Meaning. I think it’s a powerful book. And he gets on to a big truth, which is that we’re meaning seekers. We’re meaning seekers. And we also—and this is connected to our meaning seeking—we long for transcendence and for a sense of the transcendent. What is beyond our unique little selves that we’re nevertheless a part of and nested in, in some way.
And I think after a considerable period of secularization and me-generation ideology and a focus on getting our desires gratified, and you know, looking out for our own satisfactions and selfish interests, people across the spectrum are looking to those traditions of faith, and the most traditional manifestations of those traditions of faith for meaning and for transcendence. And you do see it everywhere.
Our wonderful Chabad rabbi here at Princeton, whose name is Eitan Webb, he’s a very dear, dear friend of mine. Rabbi Webb once told me that, well, you know what my goal is, is just to get every Jewish student to practice one more mitzvah, follow one more commandment, you know, not all 500 and something necessarily. It’d be wonderful if they would. But, but, you know, it’s a success, we’ve served God, if we get our Jewish students to do one more thing. And he’s very successful. You know, Jewish students are flocking to our Chabad house, which is now two houses, because it’s grown so much—
Yehuda: Yeah, of course.
Robert: They’ve had to increase. And we see the same thing with Christianity, certainly with Catholicism.
Now, I myself, I’m a conservative Catholic. I mean, I myself see this as a very positive thing. I urge my students to look to these great traditions of faith and especially to the more traditional versions of these.
Now, on the other hand, there’s a danger, I see it in the Catholic community with identifying the faith with political matters or cultural matters that have no necessary connection to the faith. They’re contingent, but they can easily come to be regarded as part of the faith.
For example, within Catholicism, the Latin Mass. Latin Mass is beautiful, Latin language is wonderful. But if you kind of go wacky on this stuff, you’ll think that the only valid mass could be in Latin. I’ll let you in on a little fact. As far as we know, Jesus didn’t speak Latin. You know, the Mass recalls the Last Supper of Jesus in the Upper Room, the Passover Seder. You know it was not in Latin. It was not in Latin, I can guarantee that.
And then there’s some dark things. I mean, and again, I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush here, Yehuda. The vast majority of people who are interested in traditionalist Catholicism and in the Latin Mass and so forth, they’re not anti-Semites. And yet we’re seeing now something that I didn’t think I would ever see, which is in some very ultra-traditionalist circles, there’s a revival of anti-Semitism, especially among men and especially among young men, not so much among women and especially not young women. Young women think that’s really creepy and they’re distancing themselves from the boys who fall into that.
Now, again, I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush.
Yehuda: No, I see it.
Robert: I’m not saying that traditionalism sets you up to be an anti-Semite. The Church has condemned in the most unequivocal terms, beginning with Nostra aetate, the great document of the Second Vatican Council, it condemned anti-Semitism in no uncertain terms, indeed, affirmed the continuing validity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, as Saint, now Pope John Paul II proclaims, he covenant of the Jewish people with God is unbroken and unbreakable. The Christians don’t replace the Jews, which was something widely believed among the Catholics prior to the Second Vatican Council, which had been completely repudiated.
But now you see in some circles that kind of mentality coming back. God bless the US Catholic Bishops who are being wonderful about pushing back against that. I don’t know if you happen to see the videos.
Yehuda: Yep. They’re standing in the breach.
Robert: Yes, they’re standing in the breach. The video they released was magnificent. The spokesman for the bishops was the Archbishop of Portland, Oregon, Alexander Sample. And it was a magnificent statement of the authentic Catholic teaching against anti-Semitism, affirming the covenant of the Jewish people with God, rejecting so-called replacement theology. But the fact that he has to make that statement tells you that they’re worried about these undercurrents.
Yehuda: Yeah. Yeah. I want to come back to anti-Semitism, especially as relates to Israel in a little bit if we can.
But I’ll just put my own kind of cards on the table, which is I don’t identify as a conservative, politically, I identify much more as a liberal. And I feel engaged in a project of trying to argue that traditional religion can be wedded to liberal values as effectively as it can be to conservative values.
And I think the place where that feels validated is, you know, you used an example of anti-Semitism, you used an example of the Latin Mass, as kind of indicators that people are appropriating, kind of social values, or extra-Christian values, to associate them with conservative religion.
The more complex areas are like immigration policy, where it’s actually kind of amazing to me for Catholics, even theologically conservative Catholics, to line up with really hostile attitudes towards the immigrant. I just, that’s very hard to kind of fathom.
But you see, there’s also a little bit of a herd mentality, which is, if we identify with these conservative values in one place, as it relates to religion, we’re naturally going to gravitate to what we see as conservative values in the context of American politics. So it’s a stand in the breach. It feels like that must be an impossible place to be.
Robert: That’s interesting, yeah. If you’ll let me tease you a little bit, Yehuda, about being a liberal. I was once speaking at a conference, an Orthodox Jewish conference, and while I was listening to an Orthodox rabbi from the West Coast. He was quite well known in those days, Rabbi Daniel Lapin. I don’t know if that name means anything to you.
Yehuda: I know all the rabbis.
Robert: Okay, so Rabbi Lapin opened the speech by saying, “I’ve got some bad news and some good news. Let me give you the bad news first. The bad news is that the majority of our fellow Jews continue to be liberal. But the good news is we’ve found a cure. It’s called Judaism.”
Yehuda: Oh, boy. Come on.
Let’s go back to Vice President Vance and this recent episode. So I’d love for you to, like, explain a little bit what this represents as a Catholic viewpoint, maybe the most generous reading that you could offer, and then we can give a kind of critical reading. I feel like I can’t be wrong to be completely astonished when a Catholic vice president of the United States claps back at the Pope the way that he did.
Robert: Yeah, the most generous reading is this: Traditionally, Pope’s have been very circumspect in their teaching. They did not hold press conferences. They did not talk to the press gaggle on the back of the plane on a trip or a pilgrimage somewhere. They spoke only after very careful preparation and usually in writing, not orally and certainly not off the cuff.
Now, why? Well, it’s because when you’re Pope, you speak with a certain authority, but your authority is limited. You have no special authority to speak on whether it’s going to rain tomorrow. You’re not a weatherman and you have no special authority to speak on, say, whether we should have an income tax, a progressive income tax, or a flat tax, or have neither but have a sales tax or VAT or or something like that.
There are lots of areas in which you don’t have any special authority, but you’ll be interpreted by Catholics and others as having or purporting to have authority if you issue proclamations in these areas, even if the proclamations are off the cuff comments to a press gaggle in the back of a plane, which then the Vatican press office has to clean up afterwards.
I mean, this was a big problem during Pope Francis’s pontificate. You know, he’d say things to the press on the plane that weren’t even in line with Catholic teaching and then the press office afterward would have to clean up.
So the generous or charitable reading of that offensive-sounding—no question about offensive-sounding—comment of JD Vance’s, he was warning the Pope that when you speak about theological things, it shouldn’t be off the cuff. It shouldn’t be to some press gaggle. You know, it should be carefully thought out, ideally in some kind of a document, you know, with properly sourced in the whole thing. That’s the charitable reading.
The uncharitable reading is that he was trying to tell the Pope how to be Pope. Not only, you know, like don’t speak off the cuff, but, you know, you don’t understand Catholic theology and I do. You know, he became a Catholic two weeks ago. He certainly knows more than—but, uh…
Yehuda: Yeah, he’s certainly not the Pope.
Robert: This has become a real problem, by the way, with people who became Catholics two weeks ago and are telling them telling the Pope and the bishops what Catholic doctrine is. Candace Owens does this. You know, not that convert Catholics don’t have the same rights to speak on Catholic matters as other people, but I have a sense that some of the people who are telling, telling the Pope and the bishops what Catholic doctrine is kind of haven’t studied it too closely. So that’s the charitable reading and the uncharitable reading of Vice President Vance’s comments.
Yehuda: I like that the charitable reading is blame the Pope.
Robert: Let me fess up. So I haven’t actually lectured the Pope, but a few years ago I was invited, along with my friend Michael Sandel, professor at Harvard, who’s Jewish. The two of us were the entertainment for an annual meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. We gave speeches there.
And I thought to myself, well, I don’t often get to lecture to the Catholic Bishops who were supposed to be my teachers. So I’m going to give it my best shot and I’ll tell them what I really think.
And I devoted the the talk—which I could dig up the text of and and send to you—to trying to explain rigorously where, under the Church’s own understanding, the bishops can speak authoritatively even on issues that could have political implications, and where they can’t, because they have no special authority—according to the teaching of the Church itself; this is all operating within the ambit of the Church’s own self understanding.
And on that occasion, Yehuda, I said you should speak boldly and as frequently as necessary on the matters on which you have a special authority, on the church’s own understanding. But when it comes to matters on which you cannot speak with any special authority because they have to do with empirical facts that you have no special access to or special insight into, I think it’s best that you not speak at all.
I think some bishops were tempted to think, well, you know, we can speak on anything, but when we speak on things on which we don’t have authority, people should understand that we’re just offering an opinion like other citizens, but when we speak on things on which we have a special authority, from the internal Catholic viewpoint, then Catholics should understand that they’re really bound by our teaching.
And I just don’t think you can rely on people to draw those distinctions. So my exhortation to the bishops was on matters on which you do not have any special authority, just don’t speak.
Yehuda: Yeah, It reminds me actually of a piece that a friend of mine, Rabbi Phil Graubart, San Diego, wrote once. This was like in the heyday of the argument about the JCPOA in the Obama administration, the Iran deal.
Robert: Yeah, yeah.
Yehuda: And he said, I don’t know when it happened that rabbis were supposed to be conversant in explaining the number of centrifuges in Iran and all of those details. But what happened was a kind of expectation that you’re really trying to speak about the moral issues of Jewish self preservation and the right to defend yourself and all of these things, and it was assumed that in order to be able to do that, you have to be an expert in those particular issues, as opposed to finding a different route to express the moral position that could implicate questions of public policy but are not the same.
And I guess the big test is going to be now, with this encyclical that’s planned about artificial intelligence. And I noticed that Vance took a very different approach of, “we welcome hearing the Pope’s thoughts and the teachings of the church on this issue,” even though obviously the president has a very clear pro AI agenda that is planned. So I guess that’ll be the test of—to what extent is this about process and form, and to what is it about substance?
My understanding is that Catholics are not entirely bound by the teaching of the Pope, that they retain some measure of the primacy of conscience, the necessity to reason on behalf of themselves. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it plays out for any particular private citizen, who on one hand has to operate with an understanding of a special divine relationship between God and the leader of the Church and also has to kind of sort things out for themselves how that’s supposed to operate?
Robert: Yeah, very important question. The great 19th century English Catholic cardinal and convert to the Catholic faith from Anglicanism, John Henry Newman in a letter that he wrote to the Duke of Norfolk, who was the ranking Catholic aristocrat in England, still is the highest standing within the aristocracy. Newman in the letter said, well, you know, I don’t much like bringing religion into after-dinner toasts, but if I’m forced to do it, well, then yes, I will toast the Pope. But conscience first.
Now, those on the more liberal side of Catholicism have interpreted Newman’s statement there to mean that, well, you know, on any particular issue, the church has its teaching, you’ve got to think it through as an individual Catholic for yourself, if you agree with the teaching, fine, you’re in good shape. If you disagree with the teaching, well, you know, you got to follow your conscience and you have to act and speak in favor of what you honestly believe. And if it’s contrary to the Church’s teaching, that’s just too bad.
I think what that leaves out on the internal Catholic understanding is the obligation of Catholics to form their consciences in line with the authoritative teaching of the Church. Which brings us back to the question of when do the bishops speak authoritatively? When can Catholics be confident that the bishops are indeed speaking the mind of Christ? And when can they not speak authoritatively because it’s outside the scope of their special spiritual authority?
It’s like the rabbis. They have no special authority about centrifuges, how they work, how many there are, anything like that. So the bishops can proclaim, and do proclaim, certainly should proclaim, the principle of profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. And that’s going to have all sorts of implications, some very direct and some more distant. But in applying that principle, especially when the implications are more distant, often there will be considerations of fact, empirical fact, historical fact, social fact, on which the bishops have no special insight or special authority.
And in those situations, as I told the bishops when Michael Sandel and I were giving those lectures on those matters, I think the churches can’t speak. All it can do is proclaim the principles and then leave it to people, individual citizens, those holding public office, to make the decisions about what follows from the principles, based on their best judgments on the matters on which the Church cannot and the bishops cannot speak authoritatively.
If something follows immediately from the principle, say, of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family, like all right, you can never make the death of another person the precise object of your act, then yes, you can proclaim that. And that’ll have implications for certain issues, abortion, infanticide, the killing of cognitively disabled people or handicapped people, the killing of non-combatants in war and things like that.
But although that principle is implicated in larger decisions about how you conduct war, where you’re justified in going to war against an aggressor enemy, very often the judgements that will control whether to go forward with this or that military operation are pretty distant from the principle. There are things that you have to know that the principle by itself doesn’t tell you that will determine the applicability of the principle to, for example, a circumstance where, let’s say our enemies, the bad guys, whoever they are, the aggressor, has placed, it’s, like, rocket launchers or missile, you know, in civilian areas, in hospitals or schools or something like that. Can you—not with a view to killing the civilians, although you know that some civilians are going to die as a result—but can you nevertheless try to knock out the military equipment or strike the terrorists or bad guys themselves, even though it will result, not because you intend it, but because it’s an inevitable side effect that you foresee and accept in the death of civilians. So those are some examples of the different kinds of cases that you would face.
The Church can speak pretty clearly and directly on that first set of questions. It can’t on the second. And somebody’s going to have to make a decision, some general or some Prime Minister or some president or somebody’s going to have to make a decision. That decision should certainly be informed by the fundamental principle, that principle of inherent dignity and equal dignity, but the principle itself can’t give you the conclusion.
Yehuda: It’s not surprising that humans gravitate towards trying to interpret broad principles in very concrete terms and then saying this is what the Catholic Church requires of me.
That’s not surprising. The psychological impulse behind it is very significant.
It still seems comparable to how kind of rabbinic halacha works, where the halacha by and large is going to give you some degree of detail about what you’re supposed to do in any particular circumstance, but it really is trying to convey the broader principles to which you’re supposed to adhere, what you’re supposed to protect against.
Robert: Exactly right.
Yehuda: And in Jewish history, the intermediate space was in the whole history of responsa, which is really where Jewish law gets formed, which is, now Rabbi, I’m asking you a very specific case in which I have a whole set of variables that the halachic tradition hasn’t addressed, unique cases, unusual circumstance, etcetera. And now can you help me decipher the relationship between the core principle that’s here and the Jewish law that I need to feel secure?
I suppose that doesn’t really exist in the Catholic Church in the same way, because if the Church is not supposed to speak in that degree of detail, it doesn’t mean that now moves down the line from the Pope, you know, to the bishops to the local priests. It actually maybe relies a little bit more on the personal conscience of the individuals who have to make that decision.
Robert: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here, And here, I think, is where the distinction between spiritual and temporal authority does really matter. It is for the temporal authority, not spiritual authority, to make the decisions on behalf of the public, as to those matters on which the Church just has no special authority to speak.
So the application of the principle of profound, inherent, and equal dignity to a concrete situation where it can only be applied by plugging in determinations of fact. Have the terrorists placed the military stuff in the hospital or not? How many civilians are likely, or non-combatants are likely to be killed if we strike at that equipment? How much danger does the presence of that equipment opposed to our own civilian, non-combatant population?
The church has no special knowledge of those things. The bishops have no special orders. The Pope doesn’t have any special knowledge. That’s going to have to be left to generals and presidents and prime ministers and politicians.
And then when it comes to the holding those people responsible, it’s the conscience of the individual citizen.
Yehuda: There are two pretty significant sites where it seems that the status quo is changing quite quickly among some conservative Catholics in positions of power. One is around kind of return of conventional anti-Semitism, good, old–school anti-Semitism that is assumed to be kind of connected to the traditional church teachings.
And in some ways that feels like it showed up a little bit with the Heritage Foundation controversy. And I believe you resigned from the Heritage Foundation over the refusal of its president, Kevin Roberts, to retract the Tucker Carlson kind of normalization of Nick Fuentes, although at this point, Tucker’s probably a worse problem than Nick Fuentes.
But the second side of it—and of course they’re linked, but they’re not quite the same—is a shifting in the status quo about the relationship to Israel. And we watched here at work we, we did a whole study seminar, watching, again, Vice President Vance speaking at a Turning Point event, shortly after Charlie Kirk was murdered, in which, you know, a young person gets up and says to Vice President Vance, why are we supporting Israel? And among the arguments that he says, he says, I thought we were America first and not Israel first. And the second thing he said, which was astonishing, is, he said, and Israel is on the side of killing Christians, so why would we be on their side?
And I, you kind of expect that the vice president of the United States representing the Republican Party, would say no, of course, we have a special relationship with Israel. Make either a theological argument, a political argument. But Vance doesn’t do that. He actually doesn’t deny the allegation that Israel’s killing Christians. And he says, you’re right, we are an America First movement. And to the extent that Israel is our ally in the pursuit of the America First agenda, we will support them. And when they deviate from that, we will no longer support them.
And I also thought that was like a crazy earthquake. Tell me a little bit about what’s happening to motivate this kind of reversal of the post-Vatican II momentand on both indexes you alluded to a little before on the kind of conventional anti-Semitism, their turn to traditional values now associated with kind of traditional postures of the Catholic Church that had tried to eradicate.
How do you understand this shift on Israel?
Robert: I don’t have a very good answer to the question. I wish I did because it vexes me sociologically. I can’t help but notice that the further away we get in time from the Holocaust and the revelation of the Nazi atrocities, the weaker the commitment of many non Jews to protection for the Jewish community becomes.
If you look at the data that I’ve seen, anti-Semitism is very rare among people who are 70 years old and older. It’s quite rare, not as rare, but still very rare, 60 to 70. Sill quite rare, 50 to 60. When you get down to 40 to 50, you’re beginning to see, wait a minute, there’s more anti-Semitism in that age cohort than in the 70 and above. And then you get down to 30 to 40. There’s even more. And 20 to 30—even more.
I grew up in the wake of World War II. My dad was a genuine World War II hero. And I’ll tell you, I mean, for us growing up, the idea that you would be anti-Semitic, that you would express animosity or animus or hatred towards Jews—that was Hitler, that was evil. It’s the last thing you want to be associated with. Had my parents heard one of us say something anti-Semitic, maybe we’d picked up at school or something, it would have been, I mean, we’ve been in big trouble.
But the further we get from the war, the Holocaust, and the revelations of what was done to the Jewish people, and the memory that what was done to the Jewish people by Hitler—as much as an anti-Christian bigot as he himself was—the soil was prepared by generations of Christian decades, centuries of Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism. And I think that had a lot to do with the Catholic Church finally in the 1960s at the Second Vatican Council, definitively repudiating anti-Semitism, affirming God’s covenant with the Jewish people and so forth.
But that was then. That was 1945, when the war ended. That was 1965, when Nostra aetate of the Second Vatican Council was promulgated. And now we’re in 2026. And the Holocaust or even the Second Vatican Council is ancient history to my students today. It might as well be the Middle Ages or, you know, Socrates’ Athens. It’s just that that was another time. And it worries me to see this erosion of… What would the word be? The healthy allergy that people had to anti-Semitism.
Yehuda: I—this is maybe out of line for me to say—but it almost feels as an observer of this, that even with all of the movement post-Vatican II, this was never going to be addressed with a set of statements, public commitments. And that it almost feels like there’s a kind of reversion to the mean. And I don’t like believing that about other faiths or people of faiths. I don’t like believing that there are endemic commitments that can’t be gotten rid of. Starting to feel that way.
Robert: Well I can tell you doctrinally there’s no going back. There was lots of bad stuff taught, but not doctrinally, including anti-Semitic stuff like Catholic Bishops and even popes. It wasn’t settled doctrine. The Second Vatican Council made it settled doctrine. The teaching on Jews and Judaism, the church’s relation to Jews and Judaism, there’s no going back on that. The Church can’t go by its own lights. It can’t go back on that.
Now that doesn’t mean necessarily you’re wrong on the sociology as opposed to the doctrine. You can have established doctrine and lots of Catholics just flout it. That happens all the time across a range of issues. They just flout it. And there are Catholics today who know perfectly well what the doctrine of the church is on anti-Semitism against it 100% sin fall and yet embrace it.
Now you find this on the left and on the right with a whole range of issues, including anti-Semitism. But that’s I suppose that’s what you were pointing to. That’s the human condition. You know, statements, I think, help. Doctrines help. They’re kind of the skeletal structure of things, in some ways, in the domain of religion. But there’s still the flesh on the bones, and the flesh on the bones matters.
Yehuda: Yeah, I’ll ask you one last question ’cause you’ve been very generous with your time, which is it seems to me that in this era of our chaotic politics are kind of id-driven President, you’ve become an unlikely… Kind of dissident in some ways—
Robert: Cheerful dissident, yes.
Yehuda: Cheerful. I mean, it’s the best kind. But you know, you played a significant role in the rise of conservative Catholic politics in this emergence of this identity. And it seems like you’ve had to make some choices over the last few years to stand up on matters of conscience and to differentiate between what the Church actually teaches and where people seem to just be following the herd. Can you just maybe tell us a little bit about what that has felt like for you?
Robert: Well, Yehuda, my views have simply not changed. I proclaim now what I proclaimed when I was a graduate student and a law student and when I started as a professor. All I’ve tried to do in my career and my scholarship and my teaching and my work is defend that proposition that I think is the Ur-proposition, the foundational principle of all sound morality.
Again, it’s that principle of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. It’s the principle that our country committed itself to in that second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, where we’re told that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” And that, in turn, has its roots where in the very first book, the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible, where we’re told that the human being, man, mere dust of the earth, mortal stuff that will someday die and dissolve, nevertheless is made in the very image and likeness of the divine Creator and ruler of all. That is the very image of God, the Imago Dei.
And it’s that principle that enables us to affirm that, despite all the differences between people—race, ethnicity, sex, all that stuff; despite all the inequalities of wealth, power, influence, intelligence, beauty, strength, the charm, talent—despite all those differences, in the most fundamental, respectable, and the most important respect of all, all of us are created equal. All of us are bearers of profound, inherent and equal dignity.
I’ve just tried in my work to defend that principle and to work out its implications more and more concretely. And if that causes me to be out of step with the mainstream of academic life, which is largely progressive and left, fine, I’m out of step. If it causes me to be out of step with people on the right these days, fine, I’m out of step. I haven’t changed.
I still think that principle is defensible, eminently defensible. And I think it’s also essential. I think if we lose our belief in our understanding, if we lose our grip on that principle, that’s the road, genuinely, to perdition.
Yehuda: I can’t thank you enough for being on the show today. Thank you so much for being with us.
Robert: Oh, it’s my pleasure, Yehuda. Thanks for inviting me on. I really appreciate it.
