NYT reports on how and why evangelical Gov. Mike Pence left the Catholic Church

The New York Times has a nicely reported article on Republican Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence’s turn from Catholicism to evangelicalism.

Still, it was not easy for him to leave behind the church in which he had been raised. After graduation, he worked as a Catholic youth minister and even considered becoming a priest. He described himself for years as “an evangelical Catholic.” Friends say he wrestled with how to square his religious past and his religious future.

“He was part of a movement of people, I’ll call it, who had grown up Catholic and still loved many things about the Catholic Church, but also really loved the concept of having a very personal relationship with Christ,” said Patricia Bailey, who became close to Mr. Pence when she and her husband, Mark, worked with him at a law firm in Indianapolis in the mid-1980s.

[…]

By the mid-1990s, Mr. Pence and his wife were attending an evangelical church in Indianapolis. Years later, the break from Catholicism still stung his mother, Nancy, according to Father Davis, who has been the priest at her church, now called St. Bartholomew, since 1997 and has grown close to her.“

You could see Nancy just shake her head about it,” Father Davis said inside the rectory before Mass on Saturday. “She was disappointed. She had hoped he could find his way back to the church.”

Source: Mike Pence’s Journey: Catholic Democrat to Evangelical Republican – The New York Times

I’ve been interested the label “evangelical Catholic.” Last week, I told The Washington Post that 1) there’s no such thing and 2) it’s a label of political convenience.

Jacob Lupfer, a religion blogger, said the term conflates “two distinctive traditions in the name of political expediency. And though they claim to be concerned about theological rigor, they create considerable confusion…Just because a few Catholics and evangelicals subscribe to the same conservative magazines does not mean there’s such a thing as ‘evangelical Catholicism.’”

But Pence is different from politicians like Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio who remain practicing Roman Catholics even as they publicly embrace evangelical Protestant theological distinctives. It seems that Pence no longer has any connection to the Catholic Church at all.

If Pence rejects the Church’s doctrine and sacraments, hopefully he will not sow confusion during his 3-1/2 months in the spotlight by using the term “evangelical Catholic.”