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. On 7 January he announced that Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the retiring Archbishop of Washington, would be succeeded by Cardinal Robert McElroy, the current Bishop of San Diego.
This Pope is one of the most relentless score-settlers in the history of the papacy. It’s a character trait he shares with the 45th and 47th President of the United States – an unpleasant one, to be sure, though sometimes it’s hard to keep a straight face at the sight of such old men taunting their enemies like schoolboys.
Making McElroy the archbishop of the nation’s capital, however, is more than an act of petty revenge. No one in the American Church has benefited more from Francis’s vengefulness than McElroy, who will be 71 when he moves to Washington in March. He has been the Bishop of San Diego, a suffragan see of the metropolitan archdiocese of Los Angeles, since 2015. Unlike José Gomez, therefore, he does not have the title of archbishop.
There’s nothing unusual about a pope promoting a middle-ranking bishop to a major see such as Washington (which has no ‘DC’ in its title because it spills into neighbouring states). The oddity is that since 2022 Bishop McElroy, who ministers to 1.3 million Catholics, has been a cardinal, while his boss, the Mexican-born Archbishop Gomez, shepherd of 4.3 million Catholics, has failed to receive a red hat in any of Francis’s ten consistories. As a result – incredibly – the Catholic Church in the United States has still to acquire its first Hispanic cardinal.
The elevation of McElroy shows Francis at his most authoritarian. McElroy is the most left-wing member of the US hierarchy. His nickname among Catholic conservatives is ‘the wicked witch of the west’. He detests Trump, opposes immigration reform, supports women’s ordination, cancels Latin masses and opposes ‘dividing the LGBT community into those who refrain from sexual activity and those who do not’. He also thinks the Church focuses too much on abortion. He is, however, careful to express his opinions in the dad-dancing jargon of ‘synodality’ adopted by ambitious clerics under Francis. Amusingly, he claims that Harvard taught him to write with ‘greater clarity and elegance’. One shudders to think what his prose was like beforehand: his recent lectures on ‘radical inclusion’ remind one of Mark Twain’s description of the Book of Mormon, ‘chloroform in print’.
Although McElroy has always been conspicuously pro-Francis, he nearly didn’t get the Washington job. According to the Pillar, an American Catholic news website to which high-ranking clerics in Rome leak stories, the Pope decided against appointing McElroy after his nuncio to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, advised him that he would be too ‘polarising’.
But last month, Trump announced that he had selected Brian Burch, founder of the uncompromisingly pro-life (and pro-MAGA) organisation CatholicVote, to be his ambassador to the Holy See – at which point Francis made the tit-for-tat appointment of McElroy to Washington.
Non-Catholics understandably feel that the Church, by electing Francis to a position of supreme authority, only has itself to blame. But in fact there is a reason why all Americans, including the Trump administration, should feel uneasy about the nomination of Cardinal McElroy.
Washington is the nation’s most corrupt diocese, thanks in part to its former archbishop ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a serial abuser of seminarians. After his retirement in 2006, Benedict XVI, having heard rumours about the bed-hopping ‘Uncle Ted’, ordered him to keep a low profile.
McCarrick was spectacularly rehabilitated by Francis, who sent him around the world as his unofficial emissary. During these years he helped negotiate the Vatican’s notorious pact with Beijing; only when he was charged with child abuse did the Pope laicise him. Now, aged 94, McCarrick is too senile to stand trial. Many bishops and two popes were warned about McCarrick, though the Vatican has kept all the most sensitive details secret. What we do know, however, is that in 2016 America’s foremost authority on clerical sex abuse, the late Richard Sipe, wrote to Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, with whom he had previously discussed the matter, telling him that ‘I have interviewed 12 seminarians and priests who attest to propositions, harassment or sex with McCarrick.’
The Pillar alleged that: ‘After he received that letter, McElroy declined to meet with Sipe again. Even when Sipe hired a process server to hand-deliver a letter, McElroy turned down a meeting – saying later that Sipe’s apparently desperate behaviour indicated he was untrustworthy.’
McElroy later said that Sipe’s ‘information’ was passed on to Rome, but we still do not know whether that information consisted of the letter, or who was responsible for sending it on. At any rate, there was no ‘radical inclusion’ for Uncle Ted’s victims until the Vatican was forced to remove him from public ministry in 2018.
Cardinal McElroy’s responsibility for this state of affairs is impossible to assess because he has said so little. And that, rather than any point-scoring between Francis and Trump, is why his appointment to Washington is a disgrace.
Damian unpacks what the Trump administration could mean for religious freedoms in America with Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the US-based Conscience Project, and The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Gray on the latest Holy Smoke podcast:
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