How will Pope Francis and the Catholic Church navigate a second Trump presidency?

Analysis by Christopher Lamb, CNN

(CNN) — Following Donald Trump’s election victory, two senior figures in the Catholic Church gave very different reactions.

In one corner was Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the president of the United States Catholic Bishops’ conference, who soon after the result was interviewed by Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), a Catholic media outlet known for being sympathetic to Trump.

Broglio, who is archbishop for the military services, seemed relaxed about the election result and spoke about why he thought Catholic voters had swung behind Trump. He raised no substantive concerns about Trump’s proposals to deport migrants, despite Pope Francis making welcoming migrants a persistent theme of his pontificate.

Striking a different tone was Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s secretary of state. He diplomatically wished President-elect Trump “much wisdom” following his victory, urged him to be a president for the “whole country” but pointed out that Trump did not have a “magic wand” to solve global problems. Parolin warned against “going to extremes” on migration, saying the Vatican supports solving problems in a “humane manner.”

The different responses point to the challenge facing Pope Francis and the Vatican as it seeks to navigate the second Trump presidency. All of this has become even trickier terrain given the swing in support for Trump by Catholic voters along with a church hierarchy that has historically sided with Republicans on issues such as abortion, religious liberty, and gender identification. Ahead of the 2024 election, the bishops once again insisted that abortion is the “pre-eminent priority.”

While the pope has spoken out strongly on abortion, he has refused to engage in a “culture war” approach. His continued refusal to do so, along with his insistence on a merciful, open church that welcomes LGBTQ people, has seen him face unprecedented attacks from inside the US church. Some of the anti-Francis opposition often overlaps with support for Trumpian politics.

Now there’s a new difficulty. CNN exit polls showed that Catholics made up roughly 22% of the electorate nationwide in the 2024 election and that Trump won them by about 58% to 40% against Vice President Kamala Harris. The polls show a heavy swing to Trump from 2020, when President Joe Biden narrowly won over Catholic voters 52% to 47%. Trump also carried swing states with high concentrations of Catholic voters, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin.

Trump and Francis divided on key issues

Nevertheless, Trump and Pope Francis’ visions couldn’t be further apart. While Trump proposes mass deportations of migrants, Francis describes driving migrants away as a “grave sin” and their exclusion “criminal”. Where Trump pushes a more isolationist “America first” foreign policy, including confrontation with China, the Vatican has recently signed a four-year extension to its agreement with Beijing over bishop appointments which is understood to give Chinese officials some say over who the Pope appoints in the country.

And where Trump is a climate skeptic, Francis has made protection of the natural world a major theme of his pontificate.

While there are likely to be tensions, the Vatican will also seek out points of agreement with the Trump administration, the most obvious one being the war in Ukraine, where the pope has called for a negotiated peace and which Trump has pledged to end.

During the last Trump administration, however, there was a full-blown diplomatic row when then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized the pope’s approach to China and was denied an audience with Francis, while in the lead-up to the 2016 election the pope described Trump’s plan to build a wall on the US-Mexico border as “not Christian”.

“The Holy See always tries to work with elected leaders, no matter who they are, but there is certainly a space between what Pope Francis sees as important moral issues and the way President Trump has spoken about those same issues,” Fr. James Martin, editor-at-large of Jesuit media outlet “America” and a member of the Vatican’s department for communications, told CNN.

“The clearest example is the way the pope speaks about the infinite human dignity of migrants and refugees and the way President Trump refers to them as animals.”

Before the election, the pope criticized both Harris and Trump, saying that US voters had to choose between the “lesser of two evils.” But it was telling that he said that both policies from Harris that were pro-choice, and from Trump that he said were chasing away migrants were “against life,” a distinct approach from the US bishops’ leadership who placed abortion as the “pre-eminent” concern.

Catholic Church in US ‘more conservative’

When President Joe Biden became the second Catholic US president, several bishops pushed for him to be denied communion due to his pro-choice stance. Yet JD Vance, the incoming Catholic vice-president, who was received into the church in 2019, so far has been given a far easier ride despite his support for Trump’s rhetoric on migrants.

“The failure to condemn when you are in such an authoritative position is a huge signal to Catholics,” Mary Jo McConahay, a Catholic journalist and author of “Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and the Far Right,” told CNN.

McConahay says that in the 1980s the US bishops had developed a “prophetic voice,” speaking out on nuclear weapons and the Reagan administration’s support for autocrats in Central America. Her book charts the rightward shift among the US hierarchy which has been combined with opposition to Francis.

“There are wonderful exceptions, but the leadership (of the bishops) remains, I would say, comfortable with president-to-be Trump’s manner and policies,” she said.

Martin points out that the “move to a more conservative church in the US” has been a “gradual process” which began with the appointment of largely conservative bishops during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. “It was not an overnight phenomenon,” Martin added.

During his pontificate, Francis has sought to restore the balance, particularly through his choice of cardinals, and during Trump’s second term of office is expected to appoint a new Archbishop of Washington DC, a crucial appointment.

Bishops in the US have also spoken out strongly on migration and McConahay points out that on this topic they are largely in line with Francis. Migrants are, of course, the lifeblood of the Catholic Church in the US, as shown by the Los Angeles archdiocese, the largest numerically and the most ethnically diverse in the country. The question is whether bishops will now speak up boldly and consistently against Trump’s policies. “This is where the rubber is going to hit the road,” McConahay said.

Ironically, if Trump does start deporting migrants and cutting public funding for Catholic charities, the US bishops could end up much more closely aligned with Francis’ agenda. The hopes that Catholics placed in Trump’s anti-abortion stance have been dashed as he stepped away from the issue during the election.

“(It) may be that a Trump presidency pushes the US hierarchy closer to Pope Francis and the Vatican,” David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, New York, told CNN.

But Gibson says the church in the US is now facing an “existential crisis” given that Catholic leaders had been so aligned to Republicans based on pro-life causes.

“It’s as critical a moment for American Catholicism as it ever has been,” he said.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet the Pope in the Vatican. While the Biden administration and the pope had their differences, Francis and the Catholic president had a warm relationship. Blinken will bid the pope farewell as the beginning of an uncertain new era beckons.

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