When the U.S. bishops gather next week for their annual fall plenary assembly, you can be assured that politics will be a major topic of conversation among them.
Around the water cooler — or during the meeting’s beloved ice cream break — the bishops will certainly be talking, like most Americans are, about this week’s presidential election, and what it portends for the future of our country.
And given the fracas of Inauguration Day four years ago, there may well be some impromptu discussion on the floor of the assembly about how the conference intends to engage with the incoming administration, and what kind of tone the bishops will set.
Formally, the bishops have committed themselves at prior meetings to discuss “after the election” a path forward for the prospect of significantly revising, or rewriting, their “Faithful Citizenship” guidelines for voting and Catholic engagement in public life.
It is not actually clear whether the bishops will discuss the document in Baltimore. If they do, it will be behind closed doors. And while they have planned to begin conversation on the matter, some bishops have told The Pillar there is little appetite now for an almost certainly charged conversation sure to divide the episcopate.
But whether they talk about “Faithful Citizenship,” there will be one obvious topic that most bishops will likely hope to avoid discussing: incoming Catholic vice president JD Vance’s defense of a proposed federal insurance mandate for in vitro fertilization, and what they’re expected to do about it.
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In July and August, even before he was picked as the vice-presidential candidate, Vance said directly that he supports legal accessibility for mifepristone, an abortifacient pharmaceutical responsible for more than half the abortions in the U.S. — known colloquially as the “abortion pill.”
While the drug has other uses, Vance offered his unqualified support for its legal protection specifically in the context of a discussion about its application for abortion. Amid a Catholic backlash and widespread media attention, the senator’s office did not offer any clarity to those comments, or indicate that his support pertained to its other uses.
For some Catholics, Vance’s support for legally protecting an abortifacient — approved for the purposes of causing abortions — seemed to be a morally untenable position for a faithful Catholic to hold.
While the senator had previously expressed his opposition to abortion, he gave an interview standing in favor of legal protection for the pharmaceutical which causes the majority of abortions in the United States.
Some defenders argued that Vance’s support for the accessibility of mifepristone came in the context of his position that abortion policy should be a matter for states to decide, and could thus be acceptable for a Catholic.
But in late August, Vance supported a new Donald Trump idea which seemed to many to be in more clear contrast with Catholic doctrine.
On Aug. 29, Trump told NBC News that his administration would be “mandating that the insurance company pay” for in vitro fertilization, “under a mandate.”
The idea of an insurance mandate for a medical technology objectionable to Catholics was immediately evocative of the Obama-era Department of Health and Human Services contraception mandate, which launched a years-long religious liberty fight from the U.S. bishops, and litigation from Catholic universities and religious orders, including the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Nevertheless, Vance, by then the vice-presidential candidate, was sent by the Trump campaign to defend the proposal, telling CNN Aug. 30 that the proposal was part of Trump’s desire to help people “afford to have families.”
Vance explained Aug. 30 that Trump’s IVF proposal was part of his policy effort to “make it easier for women to choose life, to bring new life into the world.”
“I’m sure everybody who's watching has dealt with somebody, a friend or a family member, who is struggling with infertility. It’s a terrible, terrible problem that a lot of young families suffer in silence. I think all Donald Trump is saying is that we want to help those families.”
The IVF proposal, Vance said, was just “part and parcel of a broader view that if we want to have more families in this country… we have to empower young women and young families to make those choices and to have access to what they need.”
The choice Vance referred to — the one for which Trump proposed an insurance mandate Vance defended — is a technology by which embryonic human life is created, and then destroyed, as an “inherent” part of the process, according to experts.
Even while Vance argued that there could be some conscience carve-outs for religious organizations, he explained that IVF is a “needed medical treatment” and that “we want women to have access” to it.
It is possible, perhaps even likely, that Trump’s IVF proposal was just an ephemeral bit of campaign hot air, which will never come up again. Trump’s campaign was the kind that seemed content to float policy ideas relatively freely, with many of them perhaps unlikely to merit serious discussion inside the White House. And a cadre of bishops is likely hoping that’s true — that IVF plan will be memory-holed by the Trump team, and promptly forgotten.
For his part, Vance may be hoping that too.
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In the next four years, the U.S. bishops’ conference is sure to release scores of press statements criticizing the administration’s positions on immigration, refugee status, Ukraine, the federal death penalty, and a host of other issues over which there will be stated tension between the episcopate and the White House.
But those statements won’t define most of the relationship between the USCCB and the Trump White House.
On a practical level, many bishops expect that the Trump administration will be helpful to the Church and to believers on other central issues: on developing conscience protections for doctors and Catholic hospitals, on religious liberty questions pertaining to Catholic schools, on the prospect of tuition tax credits, and on a pressing immigration problem for Catholic clergy and religious, which could be fixed in short order by the incoming administration.
In short, even while Trump himself has moved away from social conservatism on numerous moral issues, a large portion of the bishops’ conference expects that Trump, and his political appointees in various federal offices, will be far friendlier to Church’s institutional needs than would have been a Harris administration, and that Trump’s administration will remain the “lesser of two evils” on the conference’s stated preeminent priority, abortion.
In some respects, they may well be right.
But their expectation — that Trump’s administration is on “our side” on their preeminent policy priority — likely influences the way bishops talk about and even think about Trump; and it may well — with or without their awareness — temper or mute criticisms they might otherwise make of his comportment, his vulgarity, and even the serial sexual assault allegations he’s faced.
On policy, as long as he restores the Mexico City policy and upholds the Hyde Amendment, many bishops will defend Trump’s stated position that abortion regulation is a matter of state regulation only — especially given that “returning it to the states” was long part of the rhetoric in support of overturning Roe vs. Wade, which Trump’s judicial appointments accomplished.
As things stand, a majority of bishops in the conference are accustomed to being at odds with Trump on immigration and the death penalty, while being aligned with him, or at least closer to alignment with him, on other “life issues” — and that shapes the nature of their relationship to him.
That approach was perceived in the first Trump administration to allow for the prospect of “getting things done,” or at least having influence among the administration’s officials — and many bishops are likely hoping the second Trump term will follow the same pattern.
The bishops’ conference says, of course, that it is a non-partisan body, but in practice, many bishops have felt more comfortable historically working with Republican administrations, because of their common cause on abortion. While Trump has now made clear that abortion policy is a transactional issue for him, and no longer even an especially needed transaction, the bishops are still hoping that they’ll have friends and willing collaborators among his political appointees — and so long as they limit their criticisms of Trump and his administration to a limited set of issues, they probably will.
But the “IVF mandate” plan would challenge all that.
If Trump went forward with that proposal — touching so concretely on their stated preeminent priority, the defense of unborn life — the bishops would almost certainly push back, and vociferously enough to alienate administration allies, whether or not the plan included some religious liberty exemptions.
In fact, an IVF mandate might become the final straw in a long-standing working relationship between bishops and the GOP, predicated on a historic alliance on human life.
But while pushing back on Trump would be about policy, if Vance became the administration’s IVF surrogate, the situation would become decidedly more personal.
Vance is a Catholic, whose 2019 conversion was publicly known, and who has been clear that his faith is important to him. Some bishops have told The Pillar already that they hope he will be a meaningful channel of communication between themselves and the administration.
If Vance takes up the IVF issue, insisting perhaps that he is personally opposed to it but unwilling to impose that on other families, the bishops who opposed President Joe Biden’s abortion advocacy, and who called for “Eucharistic coherence” during the Biden administration, will be in a corner in which they had not previously imagined finding themselves.
They will likely be in that corner alone. Bishops who spoke out about Eucharistic coherence and canon 915 with regard to Biden got a great deal of public support from practicing Catholics. If they brought up the same ideas regarding Vance, their cheering sections could be decidedly smaller.
For his part, Vance, presumably, has no wish either to be at the center of a “Eucharistic coherence” debate; few practicing Catholics would. And while the bishops themselves have long insisted that some Democrat politicians see a political upside to facing ecclesiastical discipline — allowing them to be portrayed as heroic or courageous — Vance’s Catholic base would probably not see sanctions that way, while the “post-religious right” would not likely care.
Still, to some Catholics, if the IVF mandate idea proceeds apace, either bishops will take up the Eucharistic coherence conversation about Vance — and alienate a relationship many of them are hoping to nurture — or their position on Biden will be framed as nakedly partisan, rather than pastoral or theological.
In short, dealing with Vance on the IVF mandate would become a litmus test of the bishops’ own integrity on Eucharistic coherence — and one that most are very likely hoping they’ll avoid.
But apart from lobbying the Trump administration to forget about the IVF mandate, the bishops and their conference have no control over whether this issue will become an acute ethical and credibility crisis for them.
As with many things pending now in American life, all of that will depend upon what Donald J. Trump chooses to do next.
