The American Catholic Church is Shrinking Because of Bad Politics

By Betty Clermont | 2 November 2025
The Open Tabernacle

(Image by Ramon Perucho from Pixabay)

“For every 100 people who join the Catholic Church, 840 leave….No other religion has nearly as bad of a join/leave ratio,” wrote the author of an article in crisismagazine.com based on the March 2025 Pew Research Center survey about U.S. Catholics.

Although “20% of U.S. adults self-identify as Catholic, only 21% of those Catholics say they attend Mass weekly” that Pew survey stated. That equates to “only 3.8% of all Americans being practicing Catholics,” crisismagazine.com noted.

Compare that to the “41% of Catholics who said they attended church at least once a week,” in the March 2008 Pew Research Center survey, twice as many as the current report.

Since Pope John Paul II’s alliance with Pres. Ronald Reagan, the American Catholic Church has become more rightwing.

Indeed, Peoria Bishop Daniel R. Jenky compared Pres. Barack Obama to Hitler and Stalin as reported by thecatholicpost.com. “In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path,” the bishop declared.

“Apocalyptic” is how president-elect Obama was described less than two weeks after Election Day by Cardinal James Francis Stafford then head of a Vatican bureau, as quoted by baltimoresun.com.

“In democracies we elect public servants, not messiahs,” stated Archbishop Charles Chaput in February 2009, as quoted by rockymountainnews.com.

Yet the current American episcopate has been unanimously silent regarding Pres. Donald Trump’s cruelty and corruption.

Attracted by this rightwing tilt, “Roughly six-in-ten White Catholic registered voters (61%) say they identify with or lean toward the GOP, while 36% identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party,” the current Pew report noted.

Also, “more than half of the priests who were ordained since 2010 see themselves on the conservative side of the scale,” stated The Catholic Project’s landmark report issued in October 2022 and reported by ncronline.org in November 2023.

Unlike other American religious groups, no U.S. bishop, archbishop or cardinal has ever declared any of his properties as a sanctuary for immigrants even though “Currently, the Catholic population is 36% Hispanic” according to the current Pew report. “Among Hispanic Catholics, 58% were born outside the U.S., and 22% were born in the U.S. to at least one immigrant parent,” the report stated.

“A coalition of more than two dozen religious groups is suing the White House over its policy allowing immigration officers to arrest suspected illegal immigrants in houses of worship” the independent Catholic News Agency reported on Feb. 11, 2025. “The 27 religious groups include the Mennonite Church, the Episcopal Church, the Friends General Conference, and several Jewish groups including the New York-based Rabbinical Assembly.”

On July 28, 2025, “A coalition of Protestant denominations – including several synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America along with Quaker churches, Baptist churches, and community churches –  filed a lawsuit to challenge a policy from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration that makes it easier for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to arrest suspects at churches and other sensitive locations,” The Nation reported as posted on ncregister.com.

One U.S. hierarch is even an enthusiastic MAGA supporter. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the prelate of Wall Street, is openly pro-Trump. He led the opening prayer for Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, and offered a prayer for Trump during the Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration ceremony. “The cardinal said that Trump ‘takes his Christian faith seriously,’” the Catholic News Agency reported.

According to factcheck.org:

In December 2023, “Kirk said it was ‘true’ that he described Martin Luther King Jr. as ‘a bad guy’ and ‘also true’ that…he said the 1964 Civil Rights Act ‘created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon.’”

On Oct. 26, 2023, “Kirk argued in one episode of his podcast that ‘Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open border, neoliberal quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits…And it’s not just the colleges. It’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.””

In the Oct. 31, 2022, episode of his show, after Nancy Pelosi’s husband was almost beaten to death with a hammer, Kirk said “If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out.”

Pope Leo’s Vatican Leans to the Right

Since his election on May 8, Pope Leo has leaned to the right. “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.

“Mary Rice Hasson received the Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice from Pope Leo, 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 EPPC Board of Directors. The Catholic “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, as the latimes.com stated.

Alito declared:

  1. “Justice is what everyone has a right to, it is what they are due.”
  2. “The authority to make the laws rests with Congress and Congress.”
  3. ‘The responsibility of the executive [branch], headed by the president, is to enforce the law.”

Alito is one of the six Supreme Court Justices – all raised as Catholic – whose decisions have greatly damaged our Democracy.

The six justices stated on Sept. 8, 2025, that people – based on their “apparent race or ethnicity”; “[s]peaking Spanish or English with an accent”; “presence at a particular location”; and “the type of work one does” – can be stopped and questioned by federal immigration agents.

Although Congress has authority over the following, in June 2025 “the Supreme Court conservative majority gave the green light to the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal workers, the removal of openly transgender service members from the U.S. military and deportation of noncitizens to third countries with no due process.

“The same six Supreme Court justices endorsed a radical theory that gives Trump total control of the government,” stated milwaukeeindependent.com on Oct. 16, 2025. “The justices’ unitary executive theory claims that whatever [Trump] does that is executive in nature the president alone should personally control it…These have included Trump’s efforts to remove thousands of government workers and fire several prominent officials, such as members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the chair of the Commission on Civil Rights.”

In another sign of Pope Leo’s embrace of the rightwing, through EWTN’s linear and digital coverage, the Eternal Word Television Network will serve as the exclusive media partner providing news coverage, broadcast, and digital streaming across the U.S. and around the world 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 according to the Oct 20 reporting on ewtn.com.

This is a clear effort by Pope Leo’s Vatican to increase EWTN’s viewers even though the Eternal Word Television Network has supported Trump and his legions since 2016. Although the vast majority of pro-lifers are sincere, as sycophants to the MAGA worldview, this network portrayed Trump and his legions as “prolife”!

“USAID cuts have caused more than 330,000 deaths worldwide,” BU Professor Dr. Brooke Nichols stated in a July 1, 2025, article. “As of June 26, 332,553 people have died worldwide, including 224,575 children [due to] the impact of Trump’s dismantled USAID programs.”

“Nearly 1,900 people are suspected to have died of mpox, many of them children…The U.S. government had promised to donate nearly 800,000 mpox vaccine doses to African countries experiencing an outbreak of the rash-causing disease…The loss of the mpox shots comes after President Donald Trump cut back foreign aid programs and closed the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administered most of them,” according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention as reported by politico.com on July 17, 2025.

“The abrupt and broad-scale funding cuts to global health aid from the U.S. in 2025… is projected to result in an additional 2.5 million pediatric TB cases and 340,000 pediatric TB deaths between 2025 and 2034,” a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) as reported on October 17, 2025.

Do as I say, not as I do

Pope Leo XIV says a lot of nice stuff but look, instead, at what he does and fails to do.

He has not directed any American bishop, archbishop or cardinal including the two new men he has appointed as U.S. bishops or the eight U.S. bishops he has raised to archbishop to offer immigrants sanctuary in their properties.

He did not denounce Dolan’s comparison of Charlie Kirk “to one of the greatest and most prolific Christians to have ever lived” regardless of Kirk’s bigotry, anti-Semitism and cruelty.

He met with MAGA VP JD Vance behind closed doors giving “hope for better relations.”

He agreed to increase the number of viewers of EWTN’s MAGA-endorsing programming.

He gave the radically rightwing Mary Rice Hasson the Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice.

He did not denounce Alito’s breathtaking hypocrisy at his own “Jubilee of Justice.”

“As world media and leaders normalize [Trump’s] erratic behavior, Pope Leo XIV must resist and keep his distance. I urge you: never sell out your authority!” wrote veteran journalist Robert Mickens on October 21 on the ucanews.com website. “To be clear, history’s first U.S.-born pope never named any individuals,” Mickens noted although “the president of Leo’s native country is far and away the most prominent world leader today who spreads lies and fake news in an attempt to manipulate others.”

Pope Leo is never going to criticize Trump by name.

American men who feel a vocation to the priesthood but who love Democracy will not enter the seminary. Catholic Latinos will be attracted to those religions who are protecting them.  And American Catholics who love Democracy are going to continue to feel ill at ease in their Church and will continue to drift away.

The American Catholic Church will continue to shrink.

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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