Those poor Catholics, I really feel sorry for them. They were all-in for Donald Trump and MAGA, until he started deporting Latin American immigrant Catholics. Now, they’re not so sure.
One thing Catholics liked about Trump was his homophobia. Catholics are notoriously anti-gay. Following their Vatican leaders, they consider homosexuality to be “intrinsically disordered,” and they support hate policies that would effectively eliminate gay people from public life and strip them of their rights. (This is despite Pope Francis’s query, “Who am I to judge,” nice-sounding words that changed nothing within the church itself.) The fact that so many Catholic priests are closeted themselves, with histories of sexual abuse, is conveniently overlooked by Catholic leaders like Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, who for decades has waged an unrelenting war again the LGBTQ spectrum of Americans, as if he—an alleged celibate—were the Torquemada of modern American sexual practices.
So Catholics voted for Trump twice. But then Trump followed through on his threat to deport undocumented immigrants, and now Catholics are thoroughly flummoxed. Latin Americans represent the most hopeful group of American Catholics. While the religion is losing White adherents, the new Brown immigrants are embracing the faith. So what are they supposed to do when their chosen leader embraces the xenophobic lie that Mexicans are “rapists and criminals” and he’s sending them to concentration camps in such “shithole nations” as South Sudan and El Salvador?
Well, that fault line in the Catholic religion, between conservative resentment and liberal compassion, has now become a steaming fissure. And Cordileone is right in the middle of it. Trump just appointed him to his [Trump’s] so-called “Religious Liberty Commission.” The commission vows “to end the anti-Christian weaponization of government and unlawful targeting of Christians.” Never mind that there is no “threat to religious liberty” in America, or that Christians are not being unlawfully “targeted.” Far from it: conservative Christians now control the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court. What the hell else do they want? The fact is, Americans are free to practice whatever religion they want, or none at all. The truth that Americans have grown increasingly secular over the decades is not a “problem” for government to “solve,” it’s for the churches to figure out and correct. This particular brand of government overreach is yet another example of Republican-evangelical efforts to intrude into every bedroom and turn America into a theocracy.
The commission itself is stacked with conservative Roman Catholics, such as Cordileone. This is Trump’s payback to them for the money and votes they delivered. We’re now going to experience a government-led campaign of investigation and terror, gestapo-style, as Cordileone & Co. investigate all American institutions, looking for evidence of “anti-Christian” activity. Of course, when Trump claims he’s ensuring that “Americans can freely practice their faith without government interference,” what he really means is that his Americans—which is to say MAGA—can impose their version of “truth” on the rest of us, who may not believe in the same “truth.” That is the definition of a theocracy. Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission” will thus become the American version of Iran’s mullahs, where government is based on the principle of wilayat al-faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist), and religious leaders, including the Supreme Leader, hold ultimate authority. Here in America, the supreme leader will be, of course, Donald Trump, an individual never known to have any religious beliefs prior to discovering that he needed the support of evangelicals and Catholics to seize power. That’s when he discovered the Bible, and allowed photographs of himself being hands-on touched by self-described “Christians.” He probably bathed himself in disinfectant after those germ-laden encounters.
And what of the new Pope, Leo XIV? We don’t yet know what he’ll turn out to be, now that he’s the Top Guy. Just as Supreme Court Justices sometimes surprise their appointing presidents, Leo could turn out to be more liberal and more condemnatory of authoritarianism regimes like Trump’s than even Francis was. Or he could shift rightward. It’s interesting that the most MAGA of American Catholics are fearing the worst. As The Guardian just headlined, “Maga Catholics are on a collision course with Leo XIV. They have good reason to fear him.” The most nazified of Trump Republicans, like the disreputable Laura Loomer, already are calling Leo XIV “uninformed, anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.” The Guardian has got it exactly right: MAGA promotes not the teachings of Jesus but “a repudiation of the foundational Catholic commitment to universality, expressed through compassion for the stranger and a sense of the world as a shared common home.”
And that is the dilemma on the horns of which Catholics are currently impaled. Do they stick with MAGA world in its repudiation of LGBTQ rights and war on undocumented Latinos? Or do they adhere to their historic “compassion for the stranger” and part ways with Trump in order to support their ethnic and religious brethren? As a non-Catholic, I don’t know. But it will be interesting to see how American Catholics sort this out this schism.
Steve Heimoff