From the magazine Damian Thompson

The Pope’s revenge: why the new Archbishop of Washington is such a controversial choice

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson
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EXPLORE THE ISSUE 25 January 2025
issue 25 January 2025

For an 88-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English, Pope Francis is a surprisingly partisan observer of American politics. For most of his life he was, like a typical Argentinian, viscerally but vaguely anti-American.

Robert McElroy’s nickname among Catholic conservatives is ‘the wicked witch of the west’

But by the time he became Pope in 2013 both he and the Democratic party had embraced the ideology of the globalist left. And so they became allies. In 2016, Francis gave his blessing to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Catholic front organisations, motivated not just by a shared obsession with anti-racism and climate change but contempt for Donald Trump.

On 20 January 2021, just before Joe Biden was sworn in as America’s second Catholic president, the Pope publicly undermined Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, who as president of the US bishops’ conference had drafted a statement praising Biden’s piety and social conscience but deploring his hardline support for abortion. The bishops’ statement was reportedly spiked until after the ceremony on the orders of the Vatican.

Naturally the Pope is horrified to find Trump back in the Oval Office. This time, however, the Vatican didn’t try to harvest votes for his opponent. There was little point, given Kamala Harris’s history of baiting Catholic judges, her embrace of gender ideology and her decision to boycott the Al Smith dinner, the major charity event in the US Catholic Church’s calendar. In November Trump extended his lead among Catholics from five points in 2020 to 15.

But if Francis could do nothing to stop increasingly conservative US Catholics from supporting his arch-enemy, he could at least punish them.

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