Whither the US Catholic Bishops after the Election?

Responding to a Second Trump Administration

Former President Donald Trump won a close victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in a presidential election that, as expected, came down to just a handful of swing states. These results suggest that Catholic voters in those swing states, polled last month by the National Catholic Reporter, played a decisive role in determining the outcome. As I noted last week, 50 percent of the poll’s respondents reported an intention to vote for Trump, while 45 percent intended to vote for Harris, a somewhat larger margin than Trump’s margin of victory in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Nevada.

In a recent interview on EWTN, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), attributed Trump’s victory among Catholic voters to a concern for human dignity, particularly on the issue of abortion, and concern for the economy. Opposition to abortion certainly played a huge role in cementing the support of many Catholics for Trump, both in his first term and in this year’s election. And I would argue that frustration with the Biden administration’s handling of inflation was probably the primary factor leading persuadable voters, including Catholics, to put their support behind Trump. So, Archbishop Broglio has a point.

Still, Broglio’s account papers over some of the moral complexities of this year’s election and moral ambiguities in the Catholic vote. Most strikingly, on the campaign trail Trump has called for “mass deportations” of millions of undocumented immigrants, regardless of their criminal history or connections to their community, which could, as some advocates admit, even include family members with legal status and natural-born U.S. citizen children of immigrant parents. Trump’s plan also calls for the creation of several new detention camps to house immigrants detained for deportation. In remarks made in September, Pope Francis referred to Trump’s immigration stance as “anti-life,” a term he also used to describe Harris’s position abortion, and Trump’s positions lay well outside of what could be considered the prudential application of the principles for immigration policy laid out by the USCCB. Nevertheless, according to the NCR poll cited earlier, 76 percent of Catholic voters leaning toward Trump said they supported him because of his stance on immigration. So, here is at least one instance where many Catholic voters pulled the lever based on reasons contrary to Catholic teaching, a reality Broglio seems hesitant to admit.