During the Obama and Biden years, opposition to same-sex marriage, contraception, and abortion was the Catholic Church in America’s calling card. But in the Trump era, that has changed — and the Church is sounding far more liberal, according to The Atlantic‘s Francis X. Rocca.
The Church’s “teaching hasn’t changed, but the president’s second term has shifted the bishops’ attention. The most urgent political concern for America’s Catholic leaders is no longer abortion; it’s immigration,” writes Rocca, who adds that it “dominates U.S. Catholic leaders’ public messaging.”
In November, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) posted to YouTube a special pastoral message “addressing their concern for the evolving situation impacting immigrants in the United States,” and advocating for “a meaningful reform of immigration laws and the recognition of the fundamental dignity of all persons, including immigrants,” the bishops wrote.
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It was the first time in a dozen years they had posted a special pastoral message. The last time had been in 2013, criticizing what they called the Obama administration’s “coercive” mandate requiring employers to include contraception in their employees’ health care coverage.
Last month, on the day of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, 18 border-state bishops “urged the administration to implement a range of reforms and to honor migrants’ right to apply for asylum,” Rocca wrote. “Following the government’s crackdown in Minnesota, bishops gathered in the state to support migrants and denounce mass deportations. USCCB lawyers told the Supreme Court last month that the president’s plan to revoke birthright citizenship would be an affront to human dignity.”
It’s not just immigration that has the U.S. Catholic Church at odds with the Trump administration and the GOP, it’s also Trump’s war against Iran.
“Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., has said that the government’s decision to attack did not meet the Church’s criteria for a just war. After the White House posted footage of missile strikes mixed with scenes from action movies, Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, issued a statement calling the video ‘sickening.’ And last week, Trump rejected Pope Leo XIV’s repeated calls for a cease-fire.”
For decades, the Catholic Church in the U.S. had focused on abortion, but in 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court found that same-sex couples have the same rights and responsibilities to marriage as do different-sex couples, the USCCB called it a “tragic error.”
Rocca writes that “no concern” was more important to the late Pope Francis than immigration, and “he encouraged U.S. clergy to focus on it.”
Last year, Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, “told reporters that being truly ‘pro life’ requires opposing not only abortion but also the ‘inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States.’ He later endorsed the bishops’ ‘special message’ on immigration, calling it ‘very important.’”
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