Public Health and the Politics of Catholic Practice: The Narrative Divide Between “Good Religion” and “Bad Belief”

COVID-19 highlighted the diversity of Catholic experience in the US when some communities experienced disenfranchisement because of public health mandates and others actively supported these policies. What factors shape how Catholic parishes experienced stay-at-home and risk mitigation public policies, as well as how public health actors and the public perceived Catholics? To examine these questions, I engage secularism studies and narrative medicine to analyze 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork I completed with two different Catholic congregations. One congregation utilized a narrative framework very similar to public health professionals to interpret their pandemic experiences and engaged in risk mitigation efforts above and beyond what public health policy required. The other parish was traditional, practicing the Latin Mass, and did not narratively interpret COVID-19 similarly to public health actors. They experienced conflict and disenfranchisement. Public health actors discursively labeled the first church as “good religion” and the second as “bad belief.”