It’s hard not to see Cardinal Robert McElroy’s appointment to head the Archdiocese of Washington apart from the election of Donald J. Trump. These leaders are converging in our nation’s capital at a critical time for the church and the world.
In his statement following the announcement, Cardinal McElroy kept his focus on the people he had served in the Diocese of San Diego since 2015. “I have never in my life felt more welcomed, more supported or more rewarded than I felt sharing my ministry with the priests, the women religious, and the faithful parishioners of our diocese,” he said.
News of the appointment made me think of Cardinal McElroy’s address in 2017 in Modesto, Calif., given during a conference of the World Meeting of Popular Movements. He was already two years into his tenure in San Diego, a diocese located on the U.S.-Mexico border. (I covered the event for a different publication from America.) It is worthwhile to revisit the address, as it came less than a month after President Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
The 700 or so advocates and community organizers present for the speech received it warmly. They clapped, cheered and even took to their feet to express their approval.
Cardinal McElroy structured his remarks around “see, judge, act,” a method developed by the Belgian Cardinal Joseph Cardijn and popularized by the bishops of Latin America.
“In the United States, we stand at a pivotal moment as a people and a nation, in which bitter divisions cleave our country and pollute our national dialogue,” Cardinal McElroy said, voicing words that remain true eight years later. The divisions can make it difficult to “see, judge and act on behalf of justice.”
Cardinal McElroy, who often quoted Pope Francis in the speech, called the pope’s encyclical “Laudato Si’” a document that sees reality as it is. He cited it as a model for the “agents of change and justice” gathered in Modesto. His words that day stand in contrast to the rhetoric used by Mr. Trump on the campaign trail and during his first term in office.
“Never be afraid to speak the truth,” Cardinal McElroy said. “Always find your foundation for reflection and action in the fullness of empirical reality. Design strategies for change upon ever fuller dissemination of truths, even when they seem inconvenient to the cause.”
Mr. Trump is often criticized for embellishing, distorting or outright ignoring facts. For example, as a private citizen, he supported efforts to reduce climate change in 2009, but in 2014, he called it an “expensive hoax.” During his interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast less than two weeks before Election Day, he acknowledged climate concerns but then focused only on clean air and clean water.
The fundamental political question, Cardinal McElroy said in Modesto, is whether the economy will “enjoy ever greater autonomy” or operate within a structure that “seeks to safeguard the dignity of the human person and the common good of our nation.” Catholic social teaching, he said, favors “strong governmental and societal protections for the powerless, the worker, the homeless, the hungry, those without decent medical care, the unemployed.”
Mr. Trump, on the other hand, vowed on the campaign trail to enact vast deregulation in numerous industries, from health care to energy. Indeed Mr. Trump may also disagree with Cardinal McElroy on the role of the free market. The cardinal said in 2017 that governments should structure the market “to accomplish the common good.”
However, Mr. Trump and Cardinal McElroy may share some points of agreement on the centrality of work itself. Mr. Trump has repeatedly promised to bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States (though the results in his first term were mixed).
“For Catholic social teaching, the surest pathway to economic justice is the provision of meaningful and sustainable work for all men and women capable of work,” Cardinal McElroy said in Modesto. “Work is thus profoundly a sacred reality. It protects human dignity even as it spiritually enriches that dignity.”
Rather than focus on economic prosperity, Cardinal McElroy underscored rights named by Catholic social teaching: food, work, medical care, decent housing and the protection of human life from conception to natural death.
“Catholic teaching sees these rights not merely as points for negotiation, provided only if there is excess in society after the workings of the free market system accomplished their distribution of the nation’s wealth,” he said. “Rather, these rights are basic claims which every man, woman and family has upon our nation as a whole.”
To defend those rights requires action. At the time, Cardinal McElroy named two necessary actions: the need to disrupt and to rebuild.
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. 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, women and children as forces 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.
In considering these words today, Catholics may very well be called to “disrupt” certain actions of the second Trump administration, especially if Mr. Trump makes good on his promise to carry out the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in our nation’s history.
Rebuilding, on the other hand, will require those who live in this country to build solidarity with one another, which the cardinal described as “the sense that all of us are called to be cohesive and embrace one another and see ourselves as graced by God.”
Perhaps such “rebuilding” could offer an area for common ground today. In his acceptance speech, Mr. Trump said, “It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It’s time to unite.” Perhaps Mr. Trump and Cardinal McElroy could agree on certain issues, like expanding the child tax credit and support for Catholic education.
Mr. Trump, it should be said, may choose not to engage Cardinal McElroy and, consequently, with Catholic social teaching during his term. But that would be a missed opportunity for the president. Catholics make up one-fifth of the U.S. population, and they favored Mr. Trump over Kamala Harris, 56 to 41 percent, according to exit polling.
Mr. Trump should see the support he received from Catholics not simply as a means to win an election but as the beginning of an open-ended conversation. With an open heart, Mr. Trump could learn a lot from Cardinal McElroy. It would be a mistake for the president not to engage with him. If he does, I am sure Cardinal McElroy will be ready for the dialogue.
