Think Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom are the only ones looking to hamstring and "Trump-proof" the incoming Trump administration?
It looks like Pope Francis has decided to get in on that act, too.
According to the Catholic Standard:
Pope Francis on Jan. 6, 2025 named Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of San Diego, as the new archbishop of Washington. As the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal McElroy succeeds Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who has served in that role since 2019. On Jan. 6, Pope Francis also accepted the resignation of Cardinal Gregory as the archbishop of Washington. As required by Church law, Cardinal Gregory had submitted his resignation to the pope two years ago after he turned 75 on Dec. 7, 2022.
The appointment and resignation were announced in Washington, D.C., by Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States. The date of the installation for Cardinal McElroy as the eighth archbishop of Washington has not yet been set. Until his installation, Cardinal McElroy is the archbishop-elect of Washington, and Cardinal Gregory, who is now 77, will serve as the apostolic administrator of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, which includes 655,000 Catholics, 140 parishes and 90 Catholic schools located in Washington, D.C., and the five Maryland counties of Calvert, Charles, Montgomery, Prince George’s and St. Mary’s.
Why would he do that? Did Trump's popularity with Catholic voters have something to do with it? Was Trump's decision to have New York's Cardinal Dolan lead the prayer at his inauguration on Jan. 20 serve as his trigger?
I don't know. But according to The Pillar, a website of Catholic affairs news, it happened like this:
McElroy’s appointment follows a lengthy and contentious process to find a successor for the Washington archdiocese, which involved a protracted standoff between some American cardinals and the apostolic nunciature.
The Pillar has previously reported that following a meeting in October in which McElroy joined Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Newark to meet with Pope Francis during the synod on synodality in October, Francis was said to have decided against appointing McElroy.
Instead, Francis tasked former Washington archbishop Cardinal Donald Wuerl to identify a suitable candidate.
Wuerl, sources close to the process have confirmed to The Pillar, suggested Bishop Shawn McKnight of Jefferson City, with Cardinal Gregory also signing off on the recommendation. However, in the weeks following the presidential election result, which saw Donald Trump reelected to the White House, Francis agreed to revisit McElroy’s candidacy.
So it definitely came about because of President Trump's victory, as the passage reads, a long period of battling-bishop contention, until reality set in that Trump was taking the White House.
This, despite Pope Francis advising Catholics to vote their consciences (which they did), since he, supposedly, didn't take political sides.
A tweet from the pope's official biographer, who is close to him, suggests that, actually, the pope did take sides:
Wonderful news. Cardinal McElroy has a brilliant mind, a pastor’s heart, and a prophetic gut. A perfect appointment in the Trump era: the Gospel sine glossa to counteract the perversion of Christian nationalism. https://t.co/PSuJTfwKhq
— Austen Ivereigh (@austeni) January 6, 2025
Did the pope put a notable pro-lifer in that slot so close to the White House, the press corps, the bully pulpit to the country, when Joe Biden took office, and got busy jailing pro-lifers, letting churches burn, siccing the FBI on Latin Mass enthusiasts, prosecuting the Little Sisters of the Poor for not wanting to buy abortion insurance, bankrolling and promoting abortion around the world, shoveling untold cash to Planned Parenthood, and trying to halt conscience exceptions for medical personnel who did not want to perform the grisly act of abortion; helping to birth some babies and save the lives of some, while ripping others out of wombs in shreds or screaming, cutting them up and selling them for spare parts, as all in a day's work?
Of course he didn't. The last prelate for the diocese was a leftist, too. He just wasn't as vocal.
The progressivism of San Francisco's Cardinal McElroy is pretty significant.
He doesn't like home schoolers, for one, particularly not Catholic ones.
The Pillar notes:
He's big on LGBTQ+ rights, too, which is bound to annoy Catholics when he starts laying out rainbow flags on the altars for Mass, or if he starts speaking out in favor of intact males in women's locker rooms or transgender athletes walking off with all the medals in women's sports. Many Catholics argue that he was complicit in hiding child abusers from the long arm of the law, but the evidence is not entirely clear.
But Israel is the bad guy in his book:
According to OSV News, published in the leftist Jesuit-run magazine America:
Two U.S. prelates are urging an “immediate and total” ceasefire in the war that has convulsed the Gaza Strip for more than 100 days, while condemning Hamas and urging the release of Israeli hostages taken by the Palestinian militants.
In a Jan. 17 joint statement, Cardinal Robert W. McElroy of San Diego and Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, said the “tens of thousands” of deaths resulting from the Israel-Hamas war and the risk of wider escalation “calls us as Americans to press for a national policy which is focused unswervingly” on ending the conflict.
He's also in favor of giving nominally Catholic abortion promoters Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi Holy Communion at Mass, so they can use it to scarf up Catholic voters for their pro-abortion candidacies at election time, seemingly as good upstanding Catholics to voters, what with the bishops giving them Communion and all, during elections.
The Pillar reported the logic behind it this way:
But while McElroy’s remarks may be viewed as a call for the Church to open communion to all regardless of their sinful status, the cardinal does not state that explicitly.
He instead speaks of “comprehensive inclusion” in Eucharistic reception — language easily open to the concept of full and open eucharistic reception for all.
In that regard Cardinal McElroy is scoping out new theological territory, since few mainstream Catholic theologians have made a such a call explicitly, even if it has now become more commonplace among Protestant thinkers.
Of course, McElroy isn’t the only recent person of note in the Church to allude to such a theology as a general principle. But he might be among the most direct.
He was big on COVID lockdowns, shutting down churches and demanding all parishioners, regardless of their tolerance for vaccines, or their opposition to using a vaccine derived from the cells of aborted babies, to be vaccinated for COVID before coming to Mass.
McElroy's also in favor of open borders, a Trump platform cornerstone, which provides billions in taxpayer cash to illegal immigration advocates such as Catholic Charities., He was almost certainly selected for this slot to browbeat Trump from the pulpit when the mass deportations of illegal border crossers start, if not excommunicate J.D. Vance and much of the Supreme Court.
Standards are different for Republicans who want rule of law, and Democrats who promote abortion.
The New York Times certainly thinks that's what this is about:
In December, as Mr. Trump promised to crack down on immigration once again, Cardinal McElroy and 11 other bishops from California issued a statement in support of “our migrant brothers and sisters.”
“We want to assure you that we, and our mother, the Church, stand with you in these days of anxiety,” they wrote, promising “to advocate for your dignity and family unity.”
Which is kind of weird. Millions of families live in dignity in Honduras, Brazil, and other places that ship illegal migrants. He seems to be saying that there's no such thing as human dignity in any life outside the U.S. by this statement.
I know he's been on this for awhile, though. A few years ago, I recall McElroy's picture on the front page of the local Catholic newspaper Southern Cross, holding up a sign saying "justice for immigrants" as if Americans were the bad guy here for wanting immigrants to enter the U.S. through legal means, same way we do when we visit other countries.
So he will be there to point the bony finger at Trump over illegal immigration, even as Catholic Charities rakes in millions from the feds to enable illegal immigrants, many of whom go on to rape and murder Americans. No mea culpas there. What a picture that will be.
To be fair, he's not an unalloyed villain. He's actually a pretty nice man and seems to take the pope's command to pastorality seriously. He's refrained from political statements most of the time, though he has issued a few doozies. Perhaps he will be a good cardinal and show respect for the will of the voters who think differently.
But the odds seem pretty high that he will serve as the pope's catspaw, making anti-Trump statements that the pope, as head of state, won't want to make.
It looks like the pope is playing the same game Joe Biden is, trying to hamstring the administration, which was supported by a huge majority of Catholic voters. Why he's doing that here, and not in, say, Argentina, where the leader the Catholics elected there is even stronger an antisocialist than Trump. is unknown, except to say that a lot more is at stake for the pope in the states.
All the same, it's disgusting. The pope should not be stooping to Joe Biden's tactics in attempting to allow the current wokester political structure to remain there forever. Joe Biden is not a model for anyone.
Image: U.S. Institute of Peace, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed
