I know you must be tired of all my Pope Francis blogging, but the new pope is really shaking things up on the American religion front. He’s also getting some excellent writing out of Ross Douthat. Today Douthat offers both a positive and a negative case for why a more liberal pontificate might be just the thing needed by conservative US Catholics, who may have grown too comfortable in the last two papacies.

For one, he says, it could remind those Catholics — and non-Catholics as well — that Catholic Christianity is not the Republican Party at prayer, and never has been. And for another, it might cure conservatives of what Douthat calls “the recurring Catholic temptation towards papolatry.” Excerpt:

This temptation was sharpened for many Catholics by John Paul II’s charisma and Cold War statesmanship and then Benedict’s distinctive intellectual gifts, and by their common role as ecumenical rallying points for orthodox belief inan age of heresy. But if the tendency is understandable, it’s also problematic, because the only thing that Catholics are supposed to rely on the papacy for is the protection of the deposit of faith, and on every other front — renewal, governance, holiness — it’s extremely important for believers to keep their expectations low.

At various points during the last two pontificates, of course, it’s been liberal and heterodox Catholics who have consoled themselves with precisely this perspective, and with the belief that (as the writer Paul Elie put it, in an Atlantic article on the election of Joseph Ratzinger) “much of what is best in the Catholic tradition has arisen in the shadow of an essentially negative papacy.” But conservative Catholics need not agree with the liberal theological program to recognize that there is truth to the underlying insight. The papal office has been occupied by many more incompetents than geniuses, and there’s a reason why so few occupants of the chair of Peter show up in the litany of the saints.

Douthat also quotes from a smart Slate piece on Francis’s airplane interview, written by TAC colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty, who is a Traditionalist Catholic. Some Trads have the reputation of being bitter-enders regarding Francis, but MBD is not like that. He strikes me as having a wise critical distance from Francis, a distance that will probably serve him well as an analyst of this papacy — and a distance that many conservative Catholics lacked during the charismatic John Paul’s papacy. I bet we will see liberal Catholics and media fellow travelers turning as naively uncritical of Francis as many conservatives were naively uncritical of John Paul. Popes may come and popes may go, but Mottramism is a perennial temptation to all factions in the Church (and not just in the Church; for example, the GOP is also a prisoner of the Reagan narrative).

In fact, I would love to read a conservative or traditionalist Catholic — hey Ross! hey Michael! — do a thoughtful retrospective on liberal Catholic criticism of John Paul and Benedict, to separate the truthful and useful insights these dissenters had on the weaknesses of those papacies, from the mass of forgettable ideological flak. Of course, if Catholics are headed into an activist liberal papacy with Francis, the US Catholic Right will find itself as unlistened-to by the US Catholic Left, and ignored as sour-grapey special pleaders, as the Catholic Left was by their ideological counterparts under the past two popes. Still, if only as an intellectual exercise, I would love to read a thoughtful observer on the Catholic Right think and write about what the Catholic Left got right about the Wojtyla-Ratzinger papacies.