US Catholic Church needs to give Trump a wide berth

One of the most impenetrable conundrums in modern politics is the extraordinary grip that President Donald Trump has exerted on the minds and hearts of the American electorate. Now, even the dogs in the street assent to the obvious truth that of all American presidents in history, Trump will be regarded as the president most spectacularly unsuited to that role. Ironically, while Trump attempted to label Joe Biden as ‘the worst American president ever’ that accolade will, I suspect, be his forever. Period.

It will sit more comfortably with his reputation than the Nobel Peace Prize which he childishly imagined he deserved and which the actual recipient – a Venezuelan winner, Maria Machado who, to curry favour for her country’s freedom after the American invasion of her country – handed over to him. A gesture like the UK’s prime minister, Keith Starmer, gifting Trump with a visit to the King of England, in order to buy off Trump’s excessive tariffs.

As a man absolutely bereft of shame and suffering from what psychologists have collectively diagnosed as a malignant form of narcissism, Trump was left with even less dignity than the hapless Starmer and Machado.

Recently Trump, to placate the demands of his irrepressible ego, including the aggravated attention to which narcissists are prone, decided to establish a ‘Board of Peace’ (and take the chair himself) in an apparent effort to challenge the UN’s Security Council. It was, Mary Robinson charitably concluded, ‘a delusion of power’.

Further embellishing his penchant for irrepressible delusion and no shame in inverse proportions to normal standards, Trump effectively gifted the chair of ‘Board of Peace’ to himself for life and is charging interested countries – including Russia and Belarus – $1billion dollars a go for membership.

Incredibly, Catholics comprised a significant section of the American electorate that Trump successfully charmed into supporting him and his ‘Maga’ (Make America Great Again) policies. To the embarrassment and shame of the Catholic Church, in the 2024 presidential election, the Catholics who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020, switched their votes to Trump - an individual without any apparent moral compass - and experts credit Trump’s victory in 2024 to those votes.

It was another perplexing and mortifying exposure of Catholic responsibility even sponsorship of Trump’s outrageous ideas and demented policies.

And when, on the very day of his inauguration as President, Trump issued a series of executive orders around immigration, capital punishment, humanitarian aid, racial justice and climate change, the gap between what Catholics believed and what Trump proposed was inconveniently and shamefully exposed. Was this, Catholics were left asking, what we had voted for?

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, then head of the US Conference of Catholics Bishops, described Trump’s proposals as ‘deeply troubling’ and predicted that they would have ‘negative consequences, many of which will harm the most vulnerable among us’. It was the first significant official rebuff Trump received from the Catholic Church and indicated the first evidence of the fragmenting of his Catholic support.

Even though after the election a buoyant Trump had circulated through social media an AI-generated image of himself wearing a white papal soutane and carrying a mitre, and had chosen high profile positions for the Catholic J.D. Vance (vice-President) and the Catholic Marco Rubio (Secretary of State) as if to lay official claim to Catholic support, the tide of support from Catholics was about to turn against him.

Archbishop Broglio’s prediction of the ‘negative consequences’ of Trump’s policies soon became ominously accurate as the anarchic Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the father of 14 children with four mothers, was given the job of effectively eliminating American humanitarian aid including closing down the US Agency for International Development (USAid), which resulted in saving billions of dollars for the US exchequer and causing the deaths of incalculable thousands of the poorest children in the world. A policy of official largesse - notably the reduction of taxes for wealthy Americans - was paid for with cuts to programmes for low-income families.

The devastation caused by Trump, Musk and their acolytes was not unremarked on by the American native, Pope Leo XIV, who robustly challenged the Trump social focus by pointing out that the care of the poor was central to Catholic faith, that Catholic charities for so long at the coal-face of care of the poor had been systematically undone by the withdrawal of government aid and what the writer, Stephen Schneck summarised in the Tablet as the withdrawal of ‘vital services for those who can’t afford groceries, child-care programmes, meal deliveries for senior citizens, mental health services and much more'.

Even more stringent, more robust and more noted was the Catholic bishops’ criticism of the US official immigrant policy and its inhumane consequences. Last November, the bishops trenchantly criticised Trump’s signature domestic policy saying that the brutality aimed at immigrant communities ‘disturbed and saddened’ them. On January 9, 2026, shortly after the invasion of Venezuela, Pope Leo condemned a growing ‘zeal for war’ and called for a revision of the US foreign policy. And, taking their cue from the Pope’s address, on January 19, three Catholic cardinals - Blaise Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington and Joseph Tobin of Newark - observed: ‘We seek a foreign policy that respects and advances the right to human life, religious liberty and the enhancement of human dignity throughout the world, especially through economic assistance. We renounce war as not a normal instrument of (US) national policy. The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace. Pope Leo has given us the prism through which to raise the moral foundation for American policy to a much higher level. We will preach, teach and advocate in the coming months to make that higher level possible’.

The statement by the three cardinals is, in effect, a clear declaration that the Catholic Church in America is now taking a road not travelled by Donald Trump. It is not before time that the Catholic Church in America has decided to give Trump and his toxic virus a wide berth.