With Donald Trump returning to the White House in January, the bishops of the United States will once again be recalibrating their expectations and approach for an incoming administration.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio speaks with reporters at a press gaggle at the USCCB plenary assembly June, 2023. Credit: The Pillar.
The president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy Broglio put out an initial statement on the result, saying the “bishops look forward to working with the people’s elected representatives to advance the common good of all,” and followed it up with a brief statement to Vatican News offering some brief reflections on where the bishops’ work will actually lie.
Broglio’s diplomatic response to the result contrasts somewhat with just over four years ago, when the conference’s then-president, Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, issued a statement the morning of President Joe Biden’s inauguration, warning that the incoming administration’s agenda would advance “moral evils” on several fronts.
That starkly worded assessment triggered considerable pushback within the Church — the Holy See’s Secretariat of State attempted to bottle it up before it could be released, and Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich led a group of bishops opposing the “ill-considered statement” and criticizing his sense of “internal institutional failures” which saw the statement go out at all.
But with several aspects of the Trump platform set to put the administration at odds with the bishops, will Broglio’s statement Wednesday herald a new, more moderate tone from the bishops?
Or are future sharp exchanges from and among the bishops inevitable as the new government gets going?
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A lot has changed in four years, and there are several key differences between January 2021 and 2025 which make at least some abiding change of tone from the bishops likely.
This first and most obvious is that, unlike Joe Biden, Donald Trump is not a Catholic, and so the U.S. bishops are not facing exactly that same “unique” situation identified by Archbishop Gomez of dealing with a president who campaigned for policies manifestly at odds with basic moral teachings of the Church and also on his personal Catholic faith.
That having been said, there is plenty in the platform on which Donald Trump ran to attract the bishops’ principled objections and pastoral concern — if they are inclined to share them.
The bishops, as a body, have held fast to their billing of abortion as the preeminent social concern for American Catholics.
And while there were arguments to be made, as even Pope Francis suggested, that on this issue Donald Trump represented the choice of a “lesser evil” between the two candidates during the election, the fact remains that the incoming administration has pledged itself to safeguarding access to legal abortion at the state level.
Juxtaposing Trump’s position with a hypothetical Harris administration is a reasonable exercise before the election, but now that he’s set for a second term, many Catholics will be watching to see how strongly the bishops speak out — individually and as a conference — about the returning president’s commitment to allowing “abortion where everyone wanted it from a legal standpoint.”
And while Trump is not a Catholic, his incoming vice president JD Vance is — publicly so. And the erstwhile senator from Ohio has gone on the record in support of legal protections for access to the abortifacient drug mifepristone, which according to the USCCB is the effective cause of “over half of abortions in the U.S.”
Vance said in August that “Just because the Catholic Church teaches something, doesn’t mean you necessarily as a legislator need to affect [sic] that to public policy.”
That is a position which many U.S. bishops have pointedly disputed in recent election cycles. Indeed, in his Inauguration Day message four years ago, then conference president Archbishop Gomez pointedly noted that “we are Catholics first, seeking only to follow Jesus Christ faithfully and to advance his vision for human fraternity and community.”
And, while abortion and life issues may loom “preeminently” in the bishops’ collective political calculus, that is not to suggest that no other issues meet or merit their attention.
During the previous Trump administration, the bishops, individually and as a body, often opposed the administration on issues like the imposition of the death penalty and immigration.
The platform on which Trump and Vance were elected stated that “we must deport the millions of illegal Migrants [sic]” who are currently in the country — and the prospect of mass deportations, to say nothing of the arrests and detentions which would need to precede them, would surely merit serious concern from the bishops.
For the time being, the bishops’ conference has adopted a studied and explicitly apolitical tone.
In the statement released by Broglio on Wednesday, the archbishop congratulated Trump on his election while noting that “the Catholic Church is not aligned with any political party, and neither is the bishops’ conference.”
“No matter who occupies the White House or holds the majority on Capitol Hill, the Church’s teachings remain unchanged, and we bishops look forward to working with the people’s elected representatives to advance the common good of all,” Broglio said.
The archbishop closed his message with a prayer and a petition for “the dignity of the human person, especially the most vulnerable among us, including the unborn, the poor, the stranger, the elderly and infirm, and migrants.”
While Broglio reminded Catholics that “as Christians, and as Americans, we have the duty to treat each other with charity, respect, and civility, even if we may disagree on how to carry out matters of public policy,” there was no talk of “moral evils” in the administration agenda — even if many of the same issues highlighted by Gomez in 2021 are present in substance in the Trump 2024 platform, though not all to the same degree.
Some commentators will likely seize on Broglio’s conciliatory tone as evidence of crypto-Republican sympathy by the conference leadership, contrasting it with Gomez’s sharper assessment of Biden four years ago.
But Broglio is also a different kind of conference president than was Gomez, with a different background — having spent many years working in the Vatican’s diplomatic service, the department most agitated by Gomez’s Inauguration Day message four years ago.
And the USCCB is, to a great extent, a changed body since 2020 — following contentious and at times personally acrimonious exchanges over political issues in 2021, the conference moved many of its assembly sessions behind closed doors, in a bid to foster more fraternity and fewer public disagreements.
But, as the new administration begins to bring its agenda off the page and into action, many will be watching to see how direct the bishops are prepared to be in calling out actions which offend life or human dignity.
The answer to that question may determine how much consensus the conference can keep among its members, or if it will endure a new round of ecclesiastical partisanship.
