In March 2024, the Catholic and Episcopal bishops of our nation’s capital, Cardinal Wilton Gregory and the Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde, appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” There, in a quote quoted around the internet, Cardinal Gregory described the faith of then-President Joseph R. Biden, our second Catholic U.S. president, by saying:
I would say that he’s very sincere about his faith. But, like a number of Catholics, he picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts. There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a “cafeteria Catholic,” you choose that which is attractive, and dismiss that which is challenging.
In other words, a “cafeteria Catholic” is someone who picks and chooses which parts of the Catholic faith to focus on and which to ignore. Or, to be more precise, a cafeteria Catholic picks which church teachings they assent to and chooses to dissent from those they disagree with.
The phrase cafeteria Catholic almost sounds quaint in our current political climate. We live in a time when Catholic culture wars have reached such a fever pitch that critics are just as likely to bypass the cafeteria altogether and simply condemn their coreligionists as heretics headed straight to Hell.
If only cafeteria Catholic was the worst thing we might be called. Not all uses of the term are made in such bad faith, though.
There are a few ways one might defend the label. One popular—and, I must say, cathartic—approach is to flip the script, like Thomas Reese did in a column for National Catholic Reporter where he points out that all Catholics, no matter their spiritual or political beliefs, show symptoms of cafeteria Catholicism. It is often the case, in other words, that the kind of Catholic who hurls the accusation is also picking which elements from their faith they deem eternally binding and which they choose to callously disregard. Another approach is to embrace the label as a positive self-identification, even a term of endearment. Isabella Moyer, in a piece several years ago for U.S. Catholic, and Daryl Grigsby, in a National Catholic Reporter essay, have both done a great job encouraging more Catholics to feast from the banquet of our big tent tradition.
I want to offer a third approach. To borrow a sporting phrase, sometimes the best defense is a good offence. Rather than conceding the terms of the debate, I want to interrogate what those who wield the phrase as a weapon take Catholicism to be in the first place. Because, to put it bluntly, most Catholics in most times and places have not understood their faith to be universal assent to official church teachings, forever and ever Amen. Funnily enough for those insisting on the orthodoxy of such an approach to faith, that’s a peculiarly modern idea.
When President Biden, or those serving folks at the U.S.-Mexico Border at Annunciation House, or, you know, any random Catholic who happen to vote or behave wrong is accused of being a cafeteria Catholic, they, effectively, stand accused of Catholic-ing wrong; of being “bad Catholics.”
Cardinal Gregory himself puts this in sharp relief in the aforementioned interview, in which he contrasts cafeteria-Catholic Biden with what a “good” Catholic response to the political circumstances might look like. “Especially in terms of the life issues, there are things that [Biden] chooses to ignore,” Gregory said in the interview. “Or he uses the current situation as a political pawn rather than saying, ‘Look, my church believes this. I’m a good Catholic, I would like to believe this, rather than to twist and turn some dimensions of the faith as a political advantage.’ ”
In other words, a good Catholic believes what the church believes. A good Catholic assents to what the Magisterium teaches. In a word, a good Catholic does not pick and choose, they obey.
Now, admittedly, there is a certain intuitive common sense to this idea. Catholics are people who believe what the Catholic Church teaches, right? There are problems with this line of reasoning, however.
First, this is simply not how most religious people live and move and have their being. Despite the modern emphasis on belief as the end-all be-all of religion, the doing of religion tends to take precedence for most people. Most practicing Catholics wouldn’t have the theological wherewithal to explain every iota of catechetical teaching and how it’s changed over 2,000 years, but if you asked them how to pray at Mass, they could show you.
Second, from a sociological vantage point, if a cafeteria Catholic is someone who does not agree with each and every church teaching, then nearly all U.S. Catholics today are cafeteria Catholics.
Ryan Burge drives home this point in a post on his Graphs About Religion Substack responding to Cardinal Gregory’s “Face the Nation” interview. Focusing on three of the big “life issues,” Burge notes that only 0.9 percent of U.S. Catholics agree with all the church’s teachings on abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty.
This data point, like Cardinal Gregory’s quote, made waves among Catholics who relished the opportunity to call out their cafeteria coreligionists. Less cited were Burge’s final two paragraphs that reflected, astutely: “A common thread that runs through the discourse about religion is often focused on purification. . . . ‘If only we could return to the pure tenets of the faith,’ is a constant refrain. But, often that’s harkening back to an era that I’m not sure ever existed.”
This is an important observation. Those who label their siblings in Christ cafeteria Catholics are harkening back to an era that never actually existed. The phrase is fundamentally nostalgic and, when it comes to nostalgia, politics is never far afield.
Thia leads us to our third problem: the historical contingency of cafeteria Catholic itself. Most Catholics in most times and places have not assumed that the defining feature of their Catholicism is whether they assent to official church teaching or that to be Catholic is effectively a shorthand way of saying, “I am obedient to the teachings of bishops and popes.” This is the hallmark of a significant shift in Catholic history, one with roots in a global Catholic revival of the early 19th century in which, among other things, the Vatican sought to centralize religious practice and consolidate power.
This modern Catholic emphasis on papal authority and obedience to that authority reverberated down through the centuries to the moment when cafeteria Catholic first came into use in the final third of the 20th century. While the Second Vatican Council attempted to move the church away from this consolidation—from Latin to vernacular in liturgy, from clericalism to the vocational role of the laity—this aggiornamento was always a contested one, deepening rather than reconciling divisions within the church about what it meant to be Catholic. In an attempt to return to a bygone if also brief era, conservative Catholics used it to delegitimize their liberal opponents, specifically on issues of sexual ethics and reproductive politics, and especially with regard to contraception, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights. Cardinal John O’Connor lambasted New York Democrats Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro as “cafeteria Catholics,” as did their Republican opponents. It is not a coincidence that Cardinal Gregory in 2024 and Cardinal O’Connor in 1984 both fixated on issues of “life” (read: sexual ethics and reproductive rights).
Cafeteria Catholic has its roots in the Catholic debates after the Second Vatican Council, and, even more significantly, post-Humanae Vitae (On the Regulation of Birth) world.
In his book Catholicism and American Freedom (W.W. Norton), historian John McGreevy points out that “with the world’s bishops altering so many Catholic traditions [in the 1960s], from the use of Latin in the liturgy to the role of laypeople, changes in the teaching on contraception became imaginable, even expected.” Indeed, Pope John XXIII appointed a special commission to study whether to change church teaching on birth control. Nine of the 12 bishops and 15 of the 19 theologians voted for a change. Pope Paul VI disregarded the commission’s report and, instead, issued Humanae Vitae and reiterated church teaching on contraception as an intrinsic moral evil.
In response, many Catholics choose to ignore the encyclical altogether. This “picking and choosing” eventually won many of them the derisive moniker of cafeteria Catholic. Yet, as historian Peter Cajka argues in Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties (University of Chicago Press), when Catholics dissented from church teaching and “followed their consciences,” they did not do so without precedent. Indeed, they followed in the footsteps of no less than doctor of the church St. Thomas Aquinas—a point Bishop Budde iterated in response to Cardinal Gregory in that “Face the Nation” interview.
To quote St. Thomas, the “bond of conscience is also greater than that of the command of the superior.” This medieval Thomist insistence on moral self-determination makes life complicated and unpredictable for modern Catholics, to be sure. “A modern Catholic,” Cajka contends, “is both subversive and submissive.”
So what is Catholicism? The category of cafeteria Catholic asks no more and no less than this question. Does being Catholic mean assent and obedience, above all else? Does it mean following one’s conscience? Does it mean finding our way in the world within this big, old, sometimes bold, other times broken, but ultimately beautiful tradition? Perhaps it’s all of the above. What we can say for sure is the notion that anything less than full universal agreement with bishops’ and popes’ pronunciations makes you a picky eater in the buffet line is a relatively new and quite limited conception of our tradition.
So, what kind of Catholic am I? Well, I’m the grandson of two Italian American Catholics whose lives revolved around their parish and a number of para-parish groups, including the Catholic Family Movement and the Glenmary Missions. My Nana was a liturgist and religious education teacher. She was also a mother of five who “didn’t pay any mind” when the pope declared that contraceptives were an intrinsic evil.
My Papa was the cantor at his small-town parish to his dying days. He was also a man who insisted that if the Eucharist was truly the body of Christ, then no one should ever be denied it—period. And on top of all that, as a proud Italian American, I’ve never quite been able to separate the soppressata from the saints’ statues when I close my eyes and think of my Catholicism.
Does this make my Nana and my Papa and me cafeteria Catholics? Maybe for some. But for us, it always seemed like enough to just call ourselves Catholic.
Image: Unsplash/Ulysse Pointcheval
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