The Emergence of the Post-Liberal Catholic Priest

Reactions to the “2025 National Study of Catholic Priests” conducted by The Catholic Project at Catholic University of America, demonstrate the failure of many in the Catholic commentariat even to grasp this important shift.

A major recent survey suggests that a new generation of Catholic priests is breaking free of the restrictive political labels of “conservative” and “liberal,” recognizing that the claims of our Faith transcend such increasingly anachronistic branding.

The study, conducted by The Catholic Project at Catholic University of America, demonstrates that newer cohorts of Catholic priests refuse to be constrained by a political regime that, in both its conservative and progressive forms, is corrosive of Catholic witness. Responses to the “National Study of Catholic Priests: Wave 2” (the “Wave Two Study” or “Study”) suggest that younger priests are resistant to the left/right continuum of American politics.

A paradigm shift among newer priests

The Catholic Project describes itself as “an initiative from Catholic University [of America] to foster effective collaboration between the clergy and the laity of the Church in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis.” But with its Wave Two Study, the initiative has broadened its scope to include a wide range of concerns related to the shifting profiles of Catholic priests in the United States. The survey does not reveal newer priests’ suspicion of one extreme of the political spectrum in favor of the other. Rather, it suggests that they are uncomfortable with the political liberalism to which practically all Americans subscribe, especially as that liberalism has distorted Catholic witness.

It is not my purpose to summarize the findings of the survey, which can be found in multiple places, including here, here, and here. Rather, my goal in this column is to suggest that the survey reveals a paradigm shift among newer Catholic priests, away from the constraints of the liberal continuum with which Americans, including most American Catholics, identify.

In my 2024 book, Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America, I suggest that we Catholics must resist situating ourselves on the left-to-right continuum of American liberalism. From the far left to the far right, Americans subscribe to the same basic moral anthropology and political philosophy of the so-called English Enlightenment. This philosophy asserts that we are atomistic individuals, bearing possessive individual rights claims against one another, and existing in a state of a war of every man against every man.

Rejecting the Catholic principles of teleology, solidarity, and common good, for example, liberalism reduces politics to protecting individual pursuits of self-interested goods, making no judgments about what goods ought or ought not be pursued, so long as individual liberty is preserved.

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