Pope Elevates Anti-Trump Cardinal to be Archbishop of Washington In Time for Inauguration
On Monday, Pope Francis elevated Cardinal Robert McElroy to the position of Archbishop of Washington DC. The announcement coincided with Trump’s certification by the U.S. Congress as president. It was also the anniversary of the Jan. 6 rally protesting the election of President Joe Biden in 2020.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to serve the Catholic community in our nation’s capital and for the confidence His Holiness has placed in me, but I have truly loved the last ten years I’ve spent as bishop of San Diego,” McElroy said in a statement, according to the Washington Post. “I have never in my life felt more welcomed, more supported, or more rewarded.”
“The Catholic Church teaches that a country has a right to control its borders and our nation’s desire to do that is a legitimate effort,” Mcelroy said at a press conference. “At the same time, we are called to have a sense of the dignity of every human person.”
He added that a mass deportation program of illegal aliens would be “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”
The pope appointed Mcelroy as the Bishop of San Francisco in 2015 and, in 2022, appointed him Cardinal.
Mcelroy has expressed partisan political views in the past. As a bishop, he opposed withholding communion from pro-abortion Catholic politicians in 2021. Ironically, nearly 60 Catholic House Democrats released a “statement of principles” warning Catholic Bishops that the Church may lose its tax-exempt status unless they toe the left-wing party line. The Democrats’ letter claims to express their “commitment to the dignity of life and their belief that the government has a moral purpose.”
This became a partisan issue in 2019 while Biden campaigned for the presidency. Biden was refused communion at Saint Anthony Catholic Church where Father Robert E. Morey serves as pastor. Morey refused to give communion to Biden, a lifelong Catholic, based on his abortion advocacy.
Morey criticized the appointment, describing Mcelroy as “corrupt.”
“The blatant corruption of Pope Francis and the US Cardinals is on full display with the appointment of a McCarrick clone to the same archdiocese where his evil reigned twenty years ago,” Morey tweeted. “All of us who love Jesus Christ and His Church must speak out against these wolves of the hierarchy. We cannot remain silent in the face of this blatant corruption.
“Once again I call on my brother bishops to speak up and say NO to this constant undermining of the Truth that is Jesus Christ. We all need the voice of St John the Baptist as we call out the brood of vipers in the Vatican, ‘Repent and believe in the Gospel.’ We must not remain silent as another flock in the Church is burdened with a corrupt hireling for a shepherd.”
After a meeting with Pope Francis in 2021, Biden said the Pontiff told him to continue receiving Communion despite his position on abortion. He later received the sacrament at a Rome church.
McElroy joined Pope Francis in vocally opposing plans by the U.S. President Trump to build a wall along the Mexico–United States border to limit illegal immigration. One month into Trump’s first term in office, McElroy, a bishop at the time, notably said in a speech before a February 2017 conference of faith groups in California, “Well now, we all must become disruptors.”
“We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families. We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need. We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men, women, and children as forces of fear rather than as children of God,” McElroy said.
In March 2018, Trump visited California to view prototypes for the wall. After the visit, McElroy said:
“It is a sad day for our country when we trade the majestic, hope-filled symbolism of the Statue of Liberty for an ineffective and grotesque wall, which both displays and inflames the ethnic and cultural divisions that have long been the underside of our national history.”
Mcelroy has held liberal beliefs throughout his career. In 1983, McElroy was one of three priests who drafted a report for the archdiocesan Priests’ Senate entitled “Ministry and Sexuality in the Archdiocese of San Francisco” that stated that “the homosexual orientation is not held to be a sinful condition” but called homosexual persons to “[live] out the demands of chastity within that orientation,” endorsing a gradualist approach that “assists the person toward a progressive assimilation of the church’s ethical values.”
President Biden will be meeting with the Pope when he travels to Rome later this week.
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