Pope Francis Makes Trump Critic New Washington Archbishop

Pope Francis may be provoking Donald Trump with his new choice of a church leader in America’s capital. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP Photo

President-elect Donald Trump appears to be experiencing some memory issues in recalling the ways of Washington, as evidenced by his confusing indecision over his party’s basic legislative strategy for implementing his agenda. But there’s about to be one irritating presence in our nation’s capital that he didn’t experience before: a new Catholic archbishop of Washington who is sure to make some negative noise about the administration’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Pope Francis’s appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy as the highly visible prelate of the church in Washington is already being interpreted as a shot across the bow of the Trump administration, given the new archbishop’s outspoken views on immigrants’ rights. Formerly the bishop of San Diego with extensive experience along the southern border, McElroy drew attention for a speech he delivered upon Trump’s initial election as president in 2016 on a quasi-nativist platform:

During the past months the specter of a massive deportation campaign aimed at ripping more than ten million undocumented immigrants from their lives and families has realistically emerged as potential federal policy. We must label this policy proposal for what it is — an act of injustice which would stain our national honor in the same manner as the progressive dispossessions of the Native American peoples of the United States and the internment of the Japanese.

For us, as the Catholic community of the United States, it is unthinkable that we will stand by while more than ten percent of our flock is ripped from our midst and deported. It is equally unthinkable that we as Church will witness the destruction of our historic national outreach to refugees at a time when the need to offer safe haven to refugees is growing throughout the world.

McElroy went on to express the hope that Trump would advance a less radical immigration agenda than he threatened to initiate as a 2016 presidential candidate, and in fact he did not go as far as many feared (though to a considerable extent that was because his party lost its trifecta in the 2018 midterms). But now, with an explicit mass-deportation program having been Trump’s most emphatically repeated policy pledge during his 2024 comeback bid, Cardinal McElroy will almost certainly be preaching and teaching in a jurisdiction where the dislocation of even more undocumented immigrants (and particularly the refugees whom Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance demonized so vividly during the campaign) is treated as a very high priority, if not one that can be accomplished overnight.

Indeed, Vance may be called upon by Trump to lead a counterattack against McElroy if the archbishop does openly criticize the administration’s immigration agenda. The new veep, a recent convert to Catholicism, has embraced what he calls a “postliberal” strain of the faith that is culturally conservative and (typically) hostile to the liberal reforms in theology and church practice with which Francis is closely identified. A pope who strongly believes in battling climate change and poverty as a religious obligation, acting through an American cardinal of distinctly progressive views on immigration, might serve as a red flag to Trump, and Vance is his most likely Catholic defender. It could be a fateful clash: Trump made significant gains among U.S. Catholics in 2024, winning them by 10 percent, according to AP’s Votecast snapshot of the vote, after running even with Joe Biden’s co-religionists in 2020.

If there is a sort of culture war between the administration and Francis’s chief representative in the U.S. capital, McElroy should be up to the challenge. The National Catholic Reporter’s chief political columnist, Michael Sean Winters, calls him “the leading intellectual of the U.S. church” with a particular expertise in articulating a sympathetic understanding of American democratic principles as compatible with Catholic teaching and practice. Says Winters, “This most articulate defender of Catholic social teaching will be living up the street from Trump, able to challenge all the myriad threats the new president brings to human dignity and decency, and to call out the Democrats when they advocate policies that affront that dignity too.”

You get the sense that Francis’s latest American appointee may soon overshadow the traditionalist bishops who have so often spoken for the Church on social and political matters, making opposition to abortion, contraception, and LGBTQ rights the preeminent Catholic priorities in the public square. Like his ally the pope, who has unsettled Catholic conservatives around the world, the cardinal archbishop of Washington could play an important role in rousing the consciences of those of the faithful who are tempted to identify with the angry, nationalist Christianity so prevalent in the MAGA movement.