ROME — Pope Francis has named progressive San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy — a vocal Trump-basher — as the next archbishop of Washington D.C.
Shortly after Trump’s first-term inauguration in 2017, then-bishop McElroy urged an audience of social justice warriors to disrupt Trump’s efforts to fulfill his campaign promises.
In a 20-minute address to the U.S. regional meeting of the World Meeting of Popular Movements, McElroy said that “President Trump was the candidate of disruption. He was the disrupter.”
“Well, now we must all become disrupters,” he said.
While recognizing the deep divisions cutting across the nation, McElroy urged his hearers to resist the temptation to unite under the president and rather to oppose him at every turn.
“We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families,” McElroy said. “We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies, rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need. We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men and women and children as sources of fear rather than as children of God.”
“We must disrupt those who seek to rob our medical care, especially from the poor. We must disrupt those who would take even food stamps and nutrition assistance from the mouths of children,” he said.
The crowd of nearly 700 “community organizers and social justice ‘protagonistas’” interrupted the bishop’s address nearly two dozen times with cheers and applause.
McElroy’s hostility toward Donald Trump stands in stark contrast to his warm support for Joe Biden, a Catholic who rejects Catholic teaching on abortion, school choice, conscience rights, and transgenderism.
Throughout his tenure as president, Biden has promoted the abortion industry and fulfilled his campaign promise, cited in a Planned Parenthood ad, to do “everything in my power” to defend and expand abortion rights.
Using arguments first proposed by disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, McElroy argued in 2021 that Biden should be permitted to continue receiving Holy Communion despite his rabid advocacy for abortion rights.
“The Eucharist is being weaponized and deployed as a tool in political warfare,” the prelate stated in an essay for the Jesuit-run America magazine, by those who insist that Catholic political leaders who actively promote abortion should not be allowed to receive Communion.
Catholic Canon Law establishes that those who obstinately persevere in manifest grave sin “are not to be admitted to holy communion,” a stipulation that many Canon lawyers say applies to Catholics who publicly promote the expansion of abortion rights.
In his defense of Biden, McElroy argued that public support for abortion does not make a politician a bad Catholic.
“I feel compelled to address one very sad dimension of the election cycle we are witnessing — the public denial of candidates’ identity as Catholics because of a specific policy position they have taken,” Bishop McElroy said in an address prior to the 2020 presidential election.
“Such denials are injurious because they reduce Catholic social teaching to a single issue,” the bishop continued. “But they are offensive because they constitute an assault on the meaning of what it is to be Catholic.”
McElroy has a history of downplaying the importance of abortion, insisting that it is no more important than other issues such as climate change.
In 2020, McElroy made the astonishing assertion that while abortion is a great evil, “the long-term death toll from unchecked climate change is larger and threatens the very future of humanity.” Currently, some 45 million babies die every single year from abortion.
Both abortion and climate change are “core life issues in the Catholic Church,” the bishop said during a public lecture at the University of San Diego, but neither should be identified as preeminent.
In 2019, McElroy resisted efforts by the U.S. bishops to declare abortion to be the “preeminent” moral issue for Catholic voters.
At the annual bishops’ meeting, McElroy said he disagreed with language singling out abortion as the “preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself,” saying it was contrary to the teaching of Pope Francis.
Francis has called abortion a “scourge” and compared the act of abortion to hiring a hit man to take out a child.
Cardinal McElroy has also run afoul of his fellow bishops for his opposition to Catholic teaching on the immorality of gay sex, a position that also caused consternation among the lay faithful.
In 2023, the redoubtable bishop of Springfield, IL, publicly accused McElroy of “heresy” for his rejection of the Church’s basic moral teaching.
“Unfortunately, it is not uncommon today to hear Catholic leaders affirm unorthodox views that, not too long ago, would have been espoused only by heretics,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki stated in an essay in First Things.
It is “deeply troubling to consider the possibility that prelates holding the office of diocesan bishop in the Catholic Church may be separated or not in full communion because of heresy,” Paprocki wrote, because they “reject essential truths of the faith.”
While never explicitly mentioning his name, Bishop Paprocki directly cited Cardinal McElroy and took him to task for his suggestion that gay sex is not sinful and that any Catholic should be able to receive the Eucharist, even if in a state of grave sin.
Both of these opinions stand in stark contrast to the Church’s longstanding teaching, going all the way back to Saint Paul.
Both the cases “in fact involve heresy, since heresy is defined as ‘the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt after the reception of baptism of some truth which is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith,’” stated Paprocki, who is himself a prominent canon lawyer and chairman-elect of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance.
The Catechism teaches that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” and are “contrary to the natural law” and therefore “under no circumstances can they be approved,” Paprocki observed.
For his part, Cardinal McElroy has insisted that Catholic Church teaching should be modified to offer a more positive view of gay sex. He finds especially troubling that Catholics consider gay sex “intrinsically disordered.”
“I’ve said for some years,” McElroy argued in an interview with America magazine, “that the intrinsically disordered language is a disservice.”
“It’s a terrible word and it should be taken out of the catechism,” he declared.
McElroy also proposed abolishing the distinction between “orientation and activity,” when talking about homosexuality, since “it inevitably suggests dividing the L.G.B.T. community into those who refrain from sexual activity and those who do not.”
In this way, the cardinal seemed to suggest there is no difference between the temptation to sin and yielding to sin.
Pope Francis elevated Bishop McElroy to the rank of cardinal in 2022, earning him kudos from the leader of a dissident Catholic LGBT advocacy group who proclaimed McElroy “the kind of prelate our church needs.”
On January 6, Vatican News announced that the pontiff has named McElroy to replace Cardinal Wilton Gregory as archbishop of Washington, D.C.
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