Mois : décembre 2024

« Amid the daily atrocities faced by Ukrainians, questions about justice are inescapable, » Jakubowska-Krawczyk told NCR.

The result was a groundbreaking exhibition, also called « God’s Justice, » featuring over 50 new sacred artworks. After opening in September at Lviv’s Museum of Folk Architecture and Life named after Klymentiy Sheptytsky, the collection has traveled to Poland and next year will be in Germany.

Western Ukraine’s tradition of icon painting is a testament to the region’s role as a cultural and religious crossroads. Western Ukraine’s Greek Catholics, who use Eastern Orthodox-style worship but also belong to the global Catholic Church, often use icons in worship and prayer. Lviv’s connections to the Latin-rite Catholic Church date back to the period before World War II when the city was part of Poland.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine experienced a religious revival. In 2005, Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University founded a sacred arts program, the Radruzh Iconography School, to train artists to restore church buildings that had been abandoned or used for secular purposes under communism.

Today, the International Iconography Workshop helps the broader church learn about Ukraine’s Greek Catholic traditions. Graduates of the Radruzh Iconography School also exhibit their work at ICONART Gallery, a contemporary art space in Lviv whose owners are also workshop curators. ICONART continues to show work by participants in this year’s « God’s Justice » exhibition, including young icon artists Olya Kravchenko (37, from Lviv), Albina Yaloza (46, from Kharkiv), and Roman Zilinko (45, from Ternopil).

Contemporary icon painters, according to theologian Fr. Grzegorz Michalczyk’s essay in the exhibition catalogue, intervene at the limits of the church’s liturgy. Michalczyk, a diocesan priest in Warsaw and chaplain to the artistic community, says that Psalm 109, for example, gives voice to a powerful but natural desire for vengeance. However, the version used in the liturgy does not include these images. When the liturgy does not have the courage to confront ugly yet natural human impulses, Michalczyk writes, art can provide a cultural space for people to ponder how we should respond ethically to our own suffering.

Many artists responded to the workshop prompt by portraying the Archangel Michael with scales in one hand and sword in another. Others also portrayed St. George slaying the dragon, showing how Christian heroes defended themselves against an alien and seemingly undefeatable occupier.

Yaloza’s « Who is Like God, » is a linocut print produced in black-and-white, except for the flaming ochre of the central figure’s hair. This man’s over-the-top brawn and his impossibly sharp forehead and nose are hallmarks of Yaloza’s comic book-inspired aesthetic. Like Archangel Michael, the man grasps a sword and seems ready to plunge it downward into an unknown, unseen foe outside the icon’s frame.

For Yaloza, the question « Who is Like God » recalls the Deuteronomistic injunction, « Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. » The eternally other God has claimed revenge as God’s own. The etched feather design framing the central figure suggests he’s an angel. But this avenging figure could still be human? We don’t actually see if the feathers are attached to his shoulders.

Many of the artists in « God’s Justice » use natural media and « naive » imagery. Kateryna Haneychuk used acrylic on a rough-hewn board to portray a full chalice. Straight lines cut across the vessel in the foreground. There are items associated with the crucifixion: thorns, nails, even a ladder. But they also look like missiles, bullets and the other tools of industrialized warfare. The perspective is flat, evoking not only the traditional aesthetic of Eastern iconography but also how violence erases psychological depth from human experience.

Many artists were preoccupied by the horror of Russia’s July 2024 missile attack on a Kyiv children’s hospital. Images of Mary with child are repeated throughout the exhibit, but the portrayals refuse sentimentality. Natalya Satsyk’s « Solicitude, » plants a pregnant Mary’s legs into a flat landscape, but the soil is dry and barren like charcoal.

The icons testify to the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine, as well as losses both personal and collective. Artists in Ukraine’s historical Catholic heartland are confronting the rising anger in their own society not only by healing the psychic wounds of war, but also by calling the faithful to a deeper conversation about how to sustain faith amid widespread suffering.

But the International Iconography Workshop also testifies to the friendships and institutional partnerships that tie Ukrainians with their neighbors in Poland. The exhibitions, according to Jakubowska-Krawczyk, are merely the final fruits of friendship as well as mutual empathy and support that transcends denominational and national boundaries.

All year long, Trump ran as the anti-politician and it worked. Other politicians would get tripped up on the various inconsistencies of his policy proposals. His penchant for saying outrageous, and outrageously ugly, things would end a normal politician’s career. It never harmed him. It only confirmed the Trump brand.

He may be the most dangerous American since Sen. Joseph McCarthy or Charles Lindbergh, yet he manages somehow to be liked by many and even idolized by some.

Even those who detest him were forced to define themselves in terms of their relationship to him. Vice President Kamala Harris spent much of her campaign, and most of the closing ad buys, talking about Trump, not herself, the threat he posed rather than the promise she offered.

It is not clear exactly how the Catholic vote shifted in 2024. The same pollsters who told us the race was exceedingly close are the ones telling us how Catholics voted.

Actual vote totals, however, are hard data. The Morning Call analyzed 10 precincts with significant Latino populations in two Pennsylvania counties, Lehigh and Northampton. The percentage of Latinos in those precincts varied from one-third in Freemansburg to Allentown’s eighth ward, sixth district, which is nearly 80% Latino. Trump improved his margins over 2020 in all 20 precincts. 

The Democrats were hobbled first by an incumbent president who had achieved many policy victories, but failed to convince the American people that those legislative achievements were improving their lives. President Joe Biden thought he could run on his record, and maybe the result would have been different if he stayed in the race. It is a counterfactual, so it is impossible to know. He looked old and tired, and it is hard to see how more campaign stops and a second debate might have made him look young again.

Harris was catapulted to the top of the ticket, but had not fine-tuned her campaign pitch during a hard-fought primary. The Democratic Party, as a whole, had not wrestled with its identity, which is the great benefit of a primary contest. It is noteworthy that two members of the ultra-progressive « Squad » lost their bids for reelection in the Democratic primaries, with Jamaal Bowman losing in New York and Cori Bush losing in Missouri.

House Democrats got the message. On Dec. 17, they selected veteran Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York by a vote of 131-84. Democrats also selected Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig to be ranking member on the House Agriculture Committee. Part of Craig’s pitch was that she would be the only ranking member from a non-coastal state.

Two issues that are especially associated with Catholics played a significant role in 2024: abortion and immigration.

Ten states had referendums on abortion rights. In seven states, the abortion-rights side prevailed, and in 3 states, the anti-abortion side won. Voters tend to support abortion rights when they face the issue squarely in a referendum, but it is not a winning issue for either abortion-rights or anti-abortion candidates because most voters make up their minds on other issues. Besides, this year, transgender rights seems to me to have replaced abortion as the leading issue in the culture wars.

Immigration has become a different kind of totem, one that harkens back to some of our country’s uglier historical moments. For the past four years, conservative media have harped on the issue.

When Trump wasn’t blaming Biden and Harris for the shaky economy, he was blaming immigrants, as was his sidekick, Vice President-elect, and Catholic convert, JD Vance. The main economic problem confronting most voters, inflation, is not impacted an iota by immigration. Trump made immigrants a scapegoat nonetheless.

It is remarkable to me that the two issues, abortion and immigration, which unite something like nine out of 10 U.S. bishops, are matters on which the church has lost whatever influence it once had. More on that Monday, when we undertake a year-in-review look at the church.

The American people have good reasons to be angry about the political leadership of the past several decades, and that anger drove American politics in 2024. The war in Iraq, followed by the economic meltdown of 2008, highlighted the limits of expertise, political and otherwise. The working class continues to struggle, economically and culturally.

Neither party showed much of an appetite for overcoming polarization, and so the politics of the center did not hold. It is sad and shocking that a charlatan like Trump successfully made himself the vehicle for popular anger, but it is not surprising.

As 2024 comes to an end, there is so much we do not know. But we do know this: Our politics reflects some deep divisions within our society, and the only answer that politics achieved in 2024 was a weak and dangerous one. The American people bet that Trump will fix things. But will they like Trump’s fixes?

As such, they have also become, as a political entity, a fairly reliable bellwether. Catholics have voted for the winner in presidential elections in all but two since 1960.

So, in one sense, this year’s news about the Catholic voter was not unusual. The candidate who won their votes, however, was anything but usual. By his public and private conduct, through criminal and civil proceedings, Donald Trump has shown himself to be a man without a moral core. He is, in that regard, an unprecedented spectacle in presidential politics.

His authoritarian bent and desire to overthrow an election while inciting an insurrection demonstrate an approach to public life that Catholic social tradition as well as the U.S. Constitution would deem repugnant. The Catholic voter may have helped decide things in civil society this year, but that vote raises deeply unsettling questions within the Catholic world.

Self-interest at the core

In his masterful work American Catholicism, historian Msgr. John Tracy Ellis established that Catholics in the United States, from the very earliest, voted their personal and group interests regardless of the wishes of hierarchy. Perhaps the most notable of the « wise precedents » set by John Carroll, the first archbishop in the United States, was « his insistence that the Catholic clergy should hold themselves aloof from politics, » Ellis wrote. 

That was pretty much the case until the time of the book’s publication in 1955. That predated the U.S. bishops’ decision to promulgate election guidance for Catholics under the title « Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship. » It was before the bishops essentially aligned themselves with the Republican Party by elevating the issue of abortion in that document to a « preeminent priority. »

While those early American Catholics voted as a bloc, the interests motivating their politics were not the venal individual concerns that can skew today’s elections. They emerged from the needs of immigrants desperate to make a way in a new culture that was often quite hostile.

That their motivation also sometimes emerged from less-than-noble purpose is evident in their alignment with those opposed to the abolition of slavery. In the main, however, they voted for the party that opposed those who expressed hatred for Catholics, they voted for the party that extended a hand to immigrants, and they voted for the candidate who appeared most likely to help them become integrated into and prosper in their new culture.

Perhaps the greatest display of unity in a vote occurred in 1960 was the election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president.

Since then, a gap has grown in the Catholic vote. Columnist and Catholic intellectual E.J. Dionne’s 2000 essay for the Brookings Institution was headlined with the phrase that has become a definitive, indispensable analysis: « There Is No ‘Catholic Vote.’ And Yet, It Matters. » Translation: Catholics no longer vote as a bloc but they most often help decide the winner. 

In that essay, Dionne quotes a Republican pollster describing Catholics as « the most maddening electoral group in American politics » and « the demographic bloc that drives pollsters, pundits and politicians of all stripes to distraction. »

Self-interest can, at times, take on a moral cast, further complicating the analysis. For conservative Catholics, abortion has been an issue that has gathered them in support of Republicans even when most of the rest of the party platform would pose a challenge to Catholic teaching.

Liberal Catholics find refuge in the Democratic Party and can take its greater alliance with a host of Catholic teaching, abortion excepted, as a kind of moral rationale.

« Being a Catholic liberal or a Catholic conservative inevitably means having a bad conscience about something, » wrote Dionne.

Even that seems not to be the case today. NCR columnist Michael Sean Winters, author of the 2008 book Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats, tackles the Catholic dilemma in his end-of-year analysis of 2024. Winters found a connection between two electoral events: Abortion-rights forces won the day in seven of 10 state initiatives on the November ballot and the victory of a Republican ticket that included Vice President-elect JD Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, who spread vicious, and easily provably false, tales about immigrants.

« It is remarkable to me that the two issues, abortion and immigration, which unite something like nine out of 10 U.S. bishops, are matters on which the church has lost whatever influence it once had, » Winters wrote.

NCR senior correspondent Heidi Schlumpf came to a similar conclusion in her post-election report on exit polls from the November election: « Two sobering trends about politics and religion are becoming clear: Religion doesn’t seem to motivate Catholic voters, nor do views about abortion, an issue Catholic Church leaders have made a priority for decades. »

Is there a Catholic witness?

The Catholic voter no doubt will continue to be an essential, if maddening, consideration for pollsters and analysts into the foreseeable future. How long it will be a relevant consideration could eventually become a question, given the church’s changing demographics, including the continuing loss of young people.

For now, though, with history as precedent, we should drop all expectations that the Catholic voter will somehow be a harbinger of some moral or religious purpose. Much of the recent analysis pins the Trump win on economics, not abortion or even concern for the preservation of democracy.

The bracing challenge is in realizing that for the result of that recent vote, there is no historical precedent. While the analysis is that Catholics have increasingly over decades drifted into the Republican Party, this year’s election was not about what was historically the Republican Party. Informed by his first term, this year’s election was an endorsement of Trumpism.

The bitter irony is that Trump, a person of privilege since birth who lives in his own oceanside resort and has kept company with the wealthiest of the wealthy for decades, managed to connect with the fear and anger of those most alienated in society. Not a small portion of his strategy involved stoking fear, spreading lies about immigration and immigrants, demeaning those who dispute him, and promising vengeance against opponents.

We know from the first term that he is like an acid poured onto the soft tissue that binds what we’ve come to realize is a fragile democracy. He also has a fondness for authoritarian strongmen, U.S. enemies among them, and an expressed disdain for some long-term loyal allies.

In the face of all of that, the question becomes not about what the Catholic voter represents but whether the Catholic citizen can make a difference. At what point does complicity in this destructive Trump phenomenon become an uncomplicated betrayal of Catholic teaching and democratic ideals? At that point, will Catholics find common cause beyond the interests that drove their votes?

While foreboding, it also seems inevitable that we will find out whether the common and predictable role of the Catholic voter can become a robust and uncommon Catholic witness in the unscripted and perilous democracy drama that is about to begin.