How the Vatican Supports Trump’s Cruelty

By Betty Clermont | 14 September 2025
The Open Tabernacle

(Photo: Shqipe Asani / Flickr / CC BY 2.0)

“As of June 26, 2025, 332,553 people have died worldwide, including 224,575 children caused by the Trump administration’s cuts to 83 percent of USAID grants,” Dr. Brooke Nichols, associate professor at Boston University, stated in a July 1 report published in The Washington Post.

Also, “More than 14 million people could die by 2030 as a result of USAID cuts, including 4.5 million children younger than 5 years old,” stated a report by a 15-member research team published in the June 30, 2025, edition of the medical journal The Lancet.

EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network)* has supported Donald Trump and his legions since 2016. In every interview they fail to correct Trump and his legion’s blatant lies and omit their criminal and cruel actions. By encouraging more EWTN viewers, the Vatican cooperates in Trump’s cruelty.

 “EWTN Global Catholic Network announced it will serve as the exclusive media partner providing news coverage, broadcast, and digital streaming of Pope Leo XIV’s first-ever digital visit with American Catholic youth during the 2025 National Catholic Youth Conference (NCYC) on November 21, 2025,” a clear effort by the VAtican to increase the number of EWTN’s viewers

“According to the NCYC, the Holy Father is expected to address as many as 15,000 registered young people ages 14-18 gathered in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and many more watching online around the world,” as reported by the CNA Staff for the Nation.

The following is just a very small sample of hundreds of articles and TV shows of EWTN’s fawning and obsequious support for Trump and his legions.

“The GOP presidential candidate was featured on the Oct. 27, 2016, episode of EWTN’s The World Over. Raymond Arroyo, lead anchor and managing editor interviewed Trump. (Full Text Register Staff Nation October 28, 2016)

Arroyo: “When I travel the country, people say, ‘I’d like to vote for Donald Trump, but I don’t think I can look my wife and my daughter in the eye if I did so.’ They’re reacting to those Billy Bush comments (i.e. the authenticated “Access Hollywood” recording of Trump bragging about ‘grabbing women by the pussy’) and the reaction to some of these people who are accusing you across the country. What do you say to them?

Trump: “Well, that never happened – those were artificial. They were made up,”

Arroyo: “You weren’t always pro-life, but you now are determinedly and decidedly pro-life.”

Trump: “Yes, I am pro-life.”

“The US, although it represents just 4% of the world’s population, accounted for over 20% of all confirmed COVID‐19 cases and deaths worldwide that took place on Trump’s watch (The Trump Administration and the COVID‐19 Crisis by the National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins University, 2022.

“It has been estimated that hundreds of thousands of COVID‐19 deaths could have been avoided….While not responsible for everything that went wrong, President Trump was a decisive factor behind the tragically sub‐optimal US pandemic response,” the report noted.

On Aug. 4, 2020, EWTN Nightly News lead anchor Tracy Sabol conducted a White House interview with President Donald Trump:

Sabol: And if there was one message you wanted to say to our viewers, what would it be right now?

Trump: “These people are going to take all of your rights away, including Second Amendment, because, you know, Catholics like their Second Amendment. So I saved the Second Amendment. If I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t have a Second Amendment. And pro-life is your big thing.”

Two children, ages 8 and 10, were killed in a mass shooting on Aug. 27, 2025, while gathered for Mass at the Annunciation Catholic Church to mark the first week of classes at the parish school. Twenty one others were wounded, including 18 children between the ages of 6 and 15.

The killer, a 23-year-old white male, approached the side of the church and fired 116 rounds from an assault rifle through the windows. The man was later found dead in the back of the church from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Authorities are still investigating his motive.

The shooting renewed debates over America’s gun laws. “For the third straight year, firearms killed more children and teens, ages 1 to 17, than any other cause including car crashes and cancer” stated a report by the John Hopkins School of Public Health dated September 12, 2024. “In the U.S., gun death rates in this age group have increased by 106 percent since 2013 and have been the leading cause of death among this group since 2020,” the report added.

Two of Minnesota’s prominent leaders, both Democrats, seized the moment to push for change.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison: “An assault weapon ban may well have stopped him from using that weapon…We passed the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994. For 10 years, we dramatically reduced mass shootings. We allowed it to expire in 2004. And the mass shootings went right back up. It’s not as if we don’t know how to do this….

“And I can tell you, being the attorney general and having spent 12 years in Congress, there’s a powerful lobby that will insist that there be guns everywhere, anywhere, and that they be allowed to sell guns to whoever they want to sell them to whenever they want to.” Ellison said.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey: “These kids were literally praying in church. And it is on us right now, not just to sit back. It’s on all of us to take the necessary actions so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again….

“We’re not talking about getting rid of your father’s hunting rifle, but we are saying why should you be able to have assault weapons? Why do you need these high capacity magazine clips where you can reel like 30 bullets off before you even need to reload?”

Tragically, Congressional Republican will continue to make sure that assault weapons are readily available.

Immigration

On Feb. 13, 2025, on EWTN’s The World Over, Raymond Arroyo interviewed Thomas Homan. “On U.S. immigration policy, we absolutely are protecting human dignity,” Homan said.

A lifelong Catholic, Homan served as acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from January 30, 2017, to June 29, 2018. In November 2024, then president-elect Donald Trump designated Homan as “border czar” for Trump’s second presidency.

“The US government separated more than 4,600 children from their parents between 2017 and 2021. The 1,360 children who remain unaccounted for amount to nearly 30 percent of children separated during the first administration of President Donald J. Trump,” stated a report by the Department of Homeland Security dated Dec. 16, 2024.

“Trump’s cruel immigration machine is still tearing families apart. In its first five months, this administration has taken approximately 500 migrant children living in the U.S. from their homes and into government custody,” Jordan Forster, developmental neuroscientist at Yale University; Dylan Gee, professor of psychology at Yale University and Dina Francesca Haynes, executive director of the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School wrote in a reported dated June 26, 2025.

“ICE raids have turned playgrounds and classrooms into places of uncertainty and trauma. Family separation is happening in homes, schools, and courthouses across the country… A Marine Corps veteran’s wife, taken from her two-year-old and three-month-old children. A fourth-grade boy from California taken from his father and detained at a routine immigration appointment, later deported to Honduras. An asylum-seeking 9-year-old girl and her mother parted from her stepfather and 16-month-old sister and taken into federal custody.”

“During the president’s first term, the practice of forcibly separating families of immigrants faced widespread outrage and protracted legal challenges…Now, in Trump’s second administration, family separation has gone largely unchecked, as the courts and Congress abdicate responsibility and cede control of immigration policy to the executive branch,” Foster et al wrote.

This prolonged detention and parent-child separation has profound and lasting consequences on the developing brain. Children are especially vulnerable to trauma early in life, when brain plasticity is highest. Forced separation from a parent – or living in constant fear of it – triggers the brain’s threat detection systems, increasing their risk for mental health disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These consequences are linked with emotional and behavioral challenges that can last into adulthood,”

Foster et al wrote

Cruelty to Deportees

When asked about whether the administration is respecting the dignity of deportees in the EWTN interview, Homan responded: ‘We absolutely are.’

“The U.S. government sent more than 280 young men to CECOT, a Guatemalan jail notorious for torture, in secret in March and April 2025, with no notice to their loved ones or attorneys. There, they were held incommunicado and tortured,” as reported by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC),

“To date, the U.S. government has not given any of the 280+ men an opportunity to defend themselves against any alleged basis for this exile – nor have we seen a full list of the men originally sent to CECOT,” the NILC wrote.

Cruelty to Detainees

“The countless videos of apparent ICE raids show federal agents with their faces covered, wearing plain clothes without a badge or identification, prompted protesters to call the detainment ‘illegal abductions,’” because their victims had not been accused of any wrongdoing, as reported by nbclosangeles.com on June 23, 2025.

There are “images of masked men tackling and disappearing people in broad daylight” reported thehill.com on June 25, 2025.

“If you uphold the peace of a democratic society, you should not be anonymous. DHS and ICE agents wearing masks and hiding identification echoes the tactics of secret police authoritarian regimes,” Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair, Congressman Adriano Espaillat, said in a Press Release dated June 26, 2025.

Disappearances are the tools of authoritarian regimes,” the NILC wrote in their report.

“Disappeared” refers to one of the many types of Nazi atrocities. In 1941, Hitler ordered the Nacht und Nebel Erlass (Night and Fog Decree) designed to make anyone “deemed to be a threat … vanish without a trace into the night and fog. Uncertainty about the fate of those abducted sowed terror in society,” wrote Juan Méndez of Human Rights Watch.

Yet not Pope Leo XIV nor any cardinal, archbishop nor bishop has ever criticized Trump or any member of his administration by name.

Continued Support for the U.S. Rightwing

The Vatican under the current pope remains as committed to rightwing U.S. politics as all papacies have since Pope John Paul II allied with Pres. Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and turned the U.S. episcopate into allies of the Republican Party.

“Pope Leo Meets with JD Vance as U.S. Conservatives Hope for Better Relations” was the headline in The New York Times May 19 edition. The pope met with the Vice President “for a closed-door meeting at the Vatican, the first private conversation between America’s two most high-profile Catholics since the new pontiff was elected,” Elizabeth Dias reported.

On August 2, the Republican-majority Senate confirmed former CatholicVote president and founder Brian Burch to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See.

“Every Catholic Voter Needs This Book – Donald Trump and the Politics of the Common Good. Donald Trump has transformed our politics and made the GOP the party of the working class. Policies from trade to immigration and taxes are being realigned to make sure that Americans from all walks of life can live the American Dream,” as posted on the catholicvote.org website.

While not accepting an appointment as ambassador in rare, the Vatican did refuse France’s nominee, the career diplomat Laurent Stefanini in 2015. The French weekly, Le Journal du Dimanche, claimed that Pope Francis himself sought to replace Stéfanini because he was openly gay. The French government refused to back down initially, but the situation ultimately led to France dropping the bid and nominating another ambassador.

“Mary Rice Hasson will receive the Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice from Pope Leo XIV, a papal honor recognizing distinguished service to the Catholic Church. Hasson is currently a Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center,” reported ncregister.com on August 13.

“The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) is an advocacy group founded in 1976 to promote right-of-center legal and cultural policies” stated RightWingWatch.com. The infamous Leonard Leo is on the Board of Directors.

The Catholic “Leonard Leo worked at the Federalist Society and ran an array of front groups tasked with scheming to capture and control the Supreme Court funded by dark money” wrote Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. On September 9, Leo’s six appointees – all raised as Catholic – “gave a silent blessing to immigration raids in Los Angeles that target people for looking Latino, speaking Spanish and working jobs that build this country but never pay enough to live in it. The ruling permits federal agents to resume raids where people are seized with no warrant, no particularized cause for suspicion. Just skin color, language and callused hands,” latimes.com stated.

*ABOUT EWTN

“EWTN Global Catholic Network, in its 45th year, is the largest religious media network in the world. EWTN’s 11 global TV channels are broadcast in multiple languages 24 hours a day, seven days a week to over 435 million television households in more than 160 countries and territories. EWTN platforms also include radio services transmitted through SIRIUS/XM, iHeart Radio, and over 500 domestic and international AM & FM radio affiliates; a worldwide shortwave radio service; one of the largest Catholic websites in the U.S.; electronic and print news services, including Catholic News Agency, “The National Catholic Register” newspaper, and several global news wire services; as well as EWTN Publishing, its book publishing division.”

Reprinted with permission from the author.

Betty Clermont is author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America (Clarity Press, 2009).

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