America’s Catholic bishops take on Donald Trump

The president’s pro-life position has not let him off the hook

POPE FRANCIS suggested this week that he was confused by President Donald Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme, which has shielded nearly 800,000 young people who entered America illegally, as children, from deportation. “I heard the president speak: he presents himself as someone who is pro-life”, the pontiff said on September 11th, during an in-flight press conference en route from Colombia to the Vatican. “If he is a good pro-life believer, he must understand that family is the cradle of life and one must defend its unity.”

The pope was of course being disingenuous. The president campaigned for election as a pro-life Republican, but as he was a pro-choice Democrat not long before, there is some reason to question his views on the issue. The pope also suggested that Mr Trump’s ostensible reason for scrapping DACA, which was introduced by Barack Obama, was bogus. Mr Trump said it was up to Congress to settle this issue. To the contrary, said the pope, “I think this law comes not from parliament but from the executive. If that is so, I am hopeful that it will be re-thought."

The pope, who has made the plight of migrants a chief concern of his papacy, has criticised the president before. Last February he attacked him explicitly—“a person” who thinks about building walls is “not Christian”, he said. More surprising is the extent to which America’s senior Catholic clergy, in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), have also started attacking the president.

Though the USCCB does not officially endorse political candidates, it seemed in the run-up to the election to back Mr Trump over outspokenly pro-choice Hillary Clinton. This reflects its uncompromising and increasingly-political focus on personal morality; the pope, by contrast, tends to stress the importance of social justice, a different strain in the Catholic tradition. Lobbying by American bishops has in particular become more strident since 2009, when many signed the Manhattan Declaration, an agreement between socially conservative Catholics and Protestants that they would work together for traditional family values—that is, against gay marriage and abortion.

The clergy’s tacit approval of Mr Trump probably won him some crucial votes in a tight election. Catholics, who constitute a quarter of all voters in America and tend to swing between the Republicans and Democrats, backed Mr Trump by a small margin; he won a bigger majority of white Catholics. But while conservative evangelicals, who gave Mr Trump more resounding support, have since stuck by him, Catholic leaders appear to be peeling away.

In recent months the bishops have castigated Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act (which they did not back either due to its provisions for birth control). After the recent white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, which the president appeared reluctant to condemn, the USCCB established a special committee against racism, an issue it explained that had “become especially urgent at this time”. The bishop’s previous pastoral letter on racism was in 1979. “Fortunately the relationship with Trump was a marriage of convenience rather than a love affair”, says Thomas Reese, a Catholic priest and commentator.

The bishops are most critical of Mr Trump’s immigration policies, starting with his several attempts, almost immediately after he took office, to reduce the number of Muslims entering America. On September 5th the USCCB described his decision to rescind DACA as “reprehensible”.

Their shift from tacit support to opposition reveals two things about the Catholic church. First, the bishops’ strong line on immigration is to a degree self-interested, given the steep growth in the number of Hispanic Catholics living in America. A third of Catholics in America are now Hispanic according to recent research by the Public Religion Research Institute—including a majority of those under the age of 30. The church considers representing their interests to be its pastoral duty. A more cynical view, recently articulated by Steve Bannon, a former architect of the president’s tough line on immigration, and a Catholic, is that the bishops want to be sure congregations don’t get deported. “They have an economic interest in unlimited immigration, unlimited illegal immigration”, he said.

The USCCB fired back, arguing that justice for immigrants is central to Catholic teaching. This creates an impression that the American church, including many senior bishops who have been privately critical of the pope, may be starting to align itself more forcefully with his priorities. By bringing together abortion and fairness to immigrants, two issues that are not often seen as connected, in his airborne press conference, the pope was also tacitly encouraging that shift. His comments were aimed not just at the president and the Catholics who voted for him. They were intended to subtly reshape the moral priorities of Catholic America.