According to CatholicVote president Brian Burch, Catholics played a decisive role in securing Donald Trump’s second term in office. This somewhat historic mobilization might seem like a no-brainer given the church’s view on issues like abortion and gay marriage, but the Right was not always a natural home for a lay Catholic. Alongside its conservatism on these issues, Catholic social teaching is quite radical, compelling Catholics to support state redistribution of wealth, employee ownership, and trade union organizing in service of what it calls the “universal destination of goods.”

There is after all a reason why people like the archbishop of Cincinnati, James McNicholas, began an extensive training program to develop a base of “‘labor priests” who would be capable of supporting strikes throughout the 1940s — often alongside the Communist Party — or why Father José María Arizmendiarrieta in Spain, founded the world’s largest cooperative, Mondragon. It’s the same reason the Vatican remains the world’s most unionized country: because, as Dr Anthony M. Annett points out in Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy, the church is doctrinally committed to it.

Today “Trad Caths” (Traditionalist Catholics) have successfully marketed the most reactionary elements of Catholic teaching to the wider alt-right and “manosphere” — selling the church as a kind of safe space for right-wing cultural conservatism, at least in the West. For a generation of conservative young people tired of losing the intellectual arguments against gay marriage and women’s rights online, an authoritative rather than a rational basis for their cultural conservatism may sound appealing. Woven into this is an aesthetic rejection of liberal individualism and a veneration of precapitalist social relations. And Trad Caths’ involvement in the church in turn changes the overall dynamic of church discourse, creating something of a feedback loop.