Catholics for Trump

By Betty Clermont | 12 January 2025
The Open Tabernacle

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

“Evangelicals helped Trump in states he was mostly going to win anyway. Catholics? Now we’re talking about Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. And that was the election.”

The prelate of Wall Street, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, will lead the opening prayer for President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. “Cardinal Dolan, the archbishop of New York, announced he would take part in the inaugural ceremonies during an interview with the local news channel WPIX on Dec. 24.

Two days earlier, “Cardinal Dolan said in an interview with Fox “Sunday Morning Futures” host, Maria Bartiromo, Dec. 22, 2024, that he had discussed matters of faith with Trump, a nondenominational Christian. The cardinal has said in the past that the former president ‘takes his Christian faith seriously.’ ‘I believe that President Trump may have had a bit of a rekindling. Alleluia, because I don’t know how anybody can be president of the United States without a deep faith,” Dolan said as reported by the National Catholic Register.

U.S Bishops support for Trump

“The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where – outside of responses to Trump’s stated plan for mass deportations – not much has been said. Bishop John Stowe, in a recent conversation with Crux, said that reality isn’t surprising considering how American Church leaders have handled the presidency of Joe Biden over the last four years,” the National Catholic Reporter noted on Dec 3, 2024.

“An inauguration day statement from Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, then-USCCB president, warned the Biden administration would advance ‘moral evils,’” because Biden was pro-choice, the National Catholic Reporter stated.

In contrast, after Trump’s election, “the majority of American bishops have either not commented on the election publicly, or issued a generic statement about the importance of civility, unity, and democracy,” according to ncronline.org

Because it was widely reported in the U.S. mainstream media, many readers think that a “liberal,” and therefore anti-Trump, Pope Francis appointed the “liberal,” and therefore anti-Trump, Cardinal Robert McElroy as Archbishop of Washington D.C. on Jan. 6. McElroy and the pope are both considered to be “liberal” by the media because of their position on immigration.

After “wishing success for President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration,” McElroy stated during an online press conference, “The Catholic Church teaches that a country has the right to control its borders. And our nation’s desire to do that is a legitimate effort. At the same time, we are called always to have a sense of the dignity of every human person. And thus, plans which have been talked about at some levels of having a wider indiscriminate massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine. So we’ll have to see what emerges in the administration.”

After Trump’s 2016 election, Pope Francis said, “Yes, each country has the right to control its borders, who comes and who goes, and those countries at risk – from terrorism or such things – have even more the right to control them more, but no country has the right to deprive its citizens of the possibility to talk with their neighbors.”

While McElroy was vocal in demanding humane treatment for immigrants, unlike religious leaders of other faiths, not he nor any Catholic official has offered any of their properties be made available as a sanctuary where “cooperation with the national government effort to enforce immigration law” would be limited.

As to the “culture war” issues, the U.S. media fails to mention that McElroy has never supported legalizing abortion. Or that, as regards his opposition to same-sex marriage, while that in his role as bishop of San Diego, he wrote that “LGBTQ Catholics, like all people, are called to lead lives of chastity,” as reported by Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic Resource.

“When the Vatican in 2023 released a document giving priests permission to bless Catholics in irregular relationships, including same-sex couples, in a speech last year, Cardinal McElroy reminded priests in his diocese that they had no obligations to bless Catholics in same-sex relationships,” Outreach reminded its readers.

As to the U.S. mainstream media’s lauding Pope Francis as “liberal” during his entire almost twelve-year reign, let us not forget that this pontiff agrees with the Republican Party’s “culture war” issues.

ABORTION

“Pope Francis agreed that abortion is the ‘preeminent‘ social and political issue during a Jan. 16, 2020, meeting with U.S. bishops.” The pope said “Do we always want to simply eliminate those who are inconvenient?’” Bishop W. Shawn McKnight related to Our Sunday Visitor publication.

Shortly before the January 2021 legalization of abortion in Argentina up to the 14th week of pregnancy for any reason and after, only in cases of rape or if the mother’s health is in danger, Pope Francis sent a handwritten letter to a group of women in Buenos Aires: “Is it fair to hire a hitman to resolve a problem?” Even to save the life of woman, the pope has stated on multiple occasions that every abortion is equivalent to the action of a “hitman.”

LGBTQ

On March 15, 2021, the Vatican issued a document approved by Pope Francis stating that “blessings” of same-sex marriages are “not legitimate,” as homosexual unions are “not ordered to the Creator’s plan.” The pontiff has said that same-sex marriage is an “anthropological regression.”

Even worse, Pope Francis said that transgender persons constitute the very “annihilation of man as image of God.” He compared transgender persons to “nuclear arms;” both are “a sin against God the Creator.”

Finally, also unreported by the mainstream media, “critics said McElroy has been an institutional defender of sex abuse in the Catholic Church … Hundreds of children were raped and sexually abused by priests in the San Diego diocese, and many are now seeking justice. These victims have suffered pain for a lifetime because of their horrendous sexual abuse by San Diego priests,” said attorney Morgan Stewart. McElroy put the San Diego Archdiocese into bankruptcy last year “hoping to delay or deny compensation to more than 500 victims,” the attorney told the local news, NBC San Diego.

Catholic Voters Supported Trump

“Evangelicals helped Trump in states he was mostly going to win anyway. Catholics? Now we’re talking about Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. And that was the election.” F. H. Buckley wrote in an article published on Dec. 19, 2016.

“Multiple polls have shown that Trump gained Catholic support from 2020 to 2024, including in the swing state of North Carolina,” the Deseret News reported on Dec. 5, 2024.

“Exit polls from The Washington Post showed that Trump’s share of the Catholic vote jumped nine percentage points from 2020 to 2024, from 47% to 56%, as the Deseret News previously reported.”

“Using its VoteCast survey, The Associated Press reported that Catholics were one of few religious voting blocs to make a notable shift in 2024. Among non-Catholic religious voters, VoteCast found that Trump generally fared about the same against Harris as he did against Biden,” the AP reported.

Trump Chooses Catholics for His Administration

“President-elect Donald Trump may be known for his close relationship with evangelical Christians, but it’s Catholics who figure prominently on the list of picks he’s made so far for high-profile positions in his administration,” noted the Deseret News in an article dated Nov. 25, 2024.

A review by the newspaper found that at least eight of the 22 people tapped so far to fill top advisory roles come from a Catholic background, including Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

In addition, other Catholics chosen to serve in Trump’s Cabinet and other parts of his administration, include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as secretary of Health and Human Services; Rep. Elise Stefanik, as ambassador to the United Nations; former Rep. Sean Duffy as secretary of transportation, John Ratcliffe, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Brendan Carr, currently serving as the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), was nominated to be the commission’s next chairman, as reported by the National Catholic Register on Nov. 18, 2024.

Similarly, the mainstream media usually omits mentioning that, of the six supermajority Supreme Court justices, five are Catholic including two of the three justices appointed by Trump.

In other words, if anyone is expecting truth about Pope Francis and the American Catholic Church, it can only be found in fringe sources of news.

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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