The Catholic Church and the Trump Administration Are Not Getting Along
In mid-October, Catholic clergy arrived at the doors of the makeshift ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois, in hopes of bringing the Eucharist, the central sacrament of the faith, to those inside. As Father David Inczauskis walked alongside the procession, he felt a spark of hope: Maybe ICE really would allow a delegation from their group to offer Communion to people in federal custody. Hundreds of people walked with Inczauskis and fellow clergy, bearing signs invoking scriptural themes alongside images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a dazzling icon of the Virgin Mary as she appeared to an Indigenous peasant in the 16th century in what is now Mexico. Some helped hold aloft the gold-and-white canopy that protected the monstrance, a vessel for displaying the body of Christ.
Catholics believe that the Eucharist is not a mere symbol but the actual flesh of Jesus, which appears to have meant nothing to ICE. “We had done all of this preparation for weeks. It seemed like we had done all the right things. We just prepared for every scenario,” Inczauskis told me. “And we were told no, and we had to sit with that and the humiliation of that.” On Saturday, Inczauskis walked with another procession to the same location—only this time minus a worshipper, he later told me, as ICE had in the meantime arrested one of the people who had held up a banner depicting the mother of God.
[Luis Parrales: What the border-hawk Catholics get wrong]
The procession was one of many such actions carried out by Catholics across the country, a sign of both Catholic solidarity with the targets of the Trump administration’s deportation regime as well as the expanding conflict between President Donald Trump’s policies and the Catholic faith. Although the MAGA movement is home to its share of outspoken Catholics (J. D. Vance, Steve Bannon, and Jack Posobiec, for example, as well as recent influxes of young converts) its anti-migrant attitude directly contradicts Church teaching about the dignity and love that the faithful owe to foreigners and refugees. Because the expulsion of immigrants is as central to the MAGA movement as the Catholic Church’s insistence on universal human dignity is to its very Catholicity, the conflict between the two philosophies is significant and rapidly deepening. But the clash is not merely abstract; in Trump’s America, it is now playing out on streets, in courtrooms, and in churches—directly affecting whether people are treated humanely or cruelly, whether their dignity is respected or brazenly denied.
Catholics nationwide have pushed back against Trump’s immigration agenda, showing up at demonstrations and prayer vigils outside ICE facilities and continuing charitable work with migrants and refugees. Catholic clergy have become especially visible members of this resistance. Anna Marie Gallagher, the executive director of CLINIC, a Catholic immigration-law organization serving hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year, told me that priests and others have been accompanying immigrants to court check-ins, which ICE has used as an opportunity to round people up for summary deportation. In “some of our parishes or dioceses across the country,” she said, “bishops and priests are going to court with people. And what we’re seeing is that ICE is not necessarily detaining in high numbers in situations like that.”
Some of these encounters have grown tense. Father Fabian Arias, a New York City priest who has joined immigrants in court for the past 20 years, was present on September 25 when an ICE official shoved a woman to the ground as she pleaded for answers about her husband, who had just been apprehended. Arias was disturbed by the scene, later telling Scripps News that he worries for the safety not only of the immigrant families he works with but also of their supporters.
Leaders higher up the Church hierarchy have likewise rejected Trump’s anti-migrant mission and are fighting it. Earlier this year in San Diego, Bishop Michael Pham led a delegation of faith leaders to immigration court on World Refugee Day, after offering a homily explicitly addressing the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants and refugees. “I believe most refugees, immigrants, and migrants over the years, whether documented or undocumented, come to the United States seeking opportunities for a better life and success,” Pham, whose family fled South Vietnam in 1980, said. “It is concerning to observe the current situation in the United States,” he added, noting that “families are being separated as a result of policy aimed at deporting people who are called criminal.” Church officials have also adjusted spiritual expectations for Catholics facing the threat of deportation. Since ICE has been capturing people exiting churches after services, the Diocese of San Bernardino released its faithful from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass to help protect them from detention.
These are not the actions of a few rogue believers, but rather reflections of Church teaching. During the 12 years of Pope Francis’s papacy, he repeatedly stressed themes of love and respect for migrants, making a point at the end of his life to address Trump’s position on migration head-on. “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” he wrote in a letter to the American bishops. “With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.”
[Francis X. Rocca: The papacy is forever changed]
Conservative Catholics hoped Pope Leo XIV would be a better ally to the right wing than Francis had been. But Leo has powerfully reaffirmed Francis’s position on welcoming migrants and treating them with respect. “Someone who says I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” Leo told journalists in September, suggesting that animosity toward immigrants is a violation of one of Catholicism’s most sacred codes. Leo has since encouraged the American bishops to fiercely defend the dignity of newcomers to this country, and warned in an address late last month at the Vatican that “with the abuse of vulnerable migrants, we are witnessing, not the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather grave crimes committed or tolerated by the state.”
Earlier this week, the pope had even harsher words for Americans carrying out Trump’s agenda. “I think there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made,” he said, lamenting the fact that “many people who have lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what’s going on right now.” Leo also insisted that American authorities allow pastors to see to the spiritual needs of detainees—a sign of support for initiatives like the Eucharistic procession to the Broadview detention center. (A journalist later solicited the White House for comment on the pope’s statements, and was reportedly told that “the pope doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”)
The Trump administration has rejected the Church’s message altogether. In January, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement condemning the administration’s stated intention of pursuing immigrants at churches and schools, contending that “turning places of care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need, while endangering the trust between pastors, providers, educators and the people they serve, will not make our communities safer.”
Confronted with their remarks on an episode of CBS’s Face the Nation that same month, Vance accused the bishops of merely scheming to enrich themselves. “I was actually heartbroken by that statement,” he said. “I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” When Vance defended the administration’s position on immigration during a Fox News interview in January, he invoked the ordo amoris, a Catholic concept that he said justifies loving immigrants less than Americans. Francis specifically chastised Vance in one of his final missives, writing, “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
[Elizabeth Bruenig: ‘A very Christian concept’]
Francis’s pointed remarks pared the dispute down to its spiritual core: The Catholic faith in particular is explicitly meant to belong to everyone, regardless of ethnicity or nationality; the Church takes itself seriously as the body of Christ, which unites the faithful in a mystical blood relation. These bonds, and the universal offer of kinship, are the foundation upon which Catholic politics are built. Historically, critics of Catholicism have questioned whether American Catholics could be trusted to serve both Church and country, or whether they would privately maintain primary loyalty to the pope. (Thus John F. Kennedy swore in a 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Organization that he believed in an America “that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source.”)
This notion has generally been treated as an anti-Catholic slander, but it’s also more insightful than its originators may have known. Observant Catholics do have dual loyalties, and it seems obvious to me that one’s religious duties preempt and surpass those due to one’s nation or tribe, for the simple reason that one’s place in eternity takes priority over one’s place in this temporal world. The hope of any Catholic should be that the two sets of duties never conflict, and for everyday people they generally do not. But the Trump administration’s “America First” philosophy actually has arrayed the demands of the faith against the intentions of the law of the land—and if America is first, then Christianity is second.
Christianity is a love story, and the love Christians are called to show their neighbors is not perfunctory and pale, but passionate and sincere. This is a tremendously difficult discipline—punishing, even, because tribalism comes so naturally to human beings, as do hatred and violence. Catholicism does not mandate open borders, but the scale and brutality of Trump’s crackdown leave little for Catholics to endorse, and point toward a deepening rift between MAGA philosophy and Catholic belief, with heightening stakes and no clear terminus. Leaders inside the Church already recognize this, though conservative elected officials are doing their best not to. Speaking during a recent roundtable, El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, an ally of Leo’s, recently suggested that the time will come when Catholics considering cooperation with Trump’s deportation regime will “have to make that difficult moral choice to say in conscience, ‘I can no longer do this.’”
