By Christina Deardurff
Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, newly appointed bishop of Washington, DC (photo: Diocese of San Diego)
Pope Francis announced January 6 that Cardinal Robert McElroy, 70, the former ordinary of San Diego, California, and a vocal critic of Trumpian policy regarding the U.S. borders, would be the new bishop of Washington, D.C. The announcement came on the same day Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States was certified.
Cardinal Wilton Gregory
Was it a coincidence? Perhaps. But what is clear from reports on the selection process to fill the Washington post left vacant by the retirement of Cardinal Wilton Gregory, 77, is that McElroy, though long championed by the coterie of progressive U.S. bishops led by Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, was not a clear choice — and even one seriously questioned by U.S. papal nuncio Archbishop Christophe Pierre.
After Trump’s victory, the Vatican still wanted to preserve amicable relations with the White House, especially in light of the Pope’s and Trump’s common desire to bring about peace in both Ukraine and the Middle East.
Brian Burch, nominated by President Trump as the next US Ambassador to the Holy See (photo: CatholicVote.org)
That is, say reports, until Trump’s decision to nominate conservative CatholicVote.org founder and Trump cheerleader Brian Burch, 43, as US Ambassador to the Holy See. It was then that McElroy emerged as the clear favorite for the Washington, D.C. spot.
Aggressive and Undiplomatic?
According to Catholic news outlet The Pillar after it spoke to a Church official,“The official said that the appointment of Burch was perceived at the [Vatican’s -Ed.] Secretariat of State as ‘aggressive’ and ‘undiplomatic.’
“It ended expectations for a kind of ‘new beginning,’” he said. At the same time, sources close to the process told The Pillar Cardinal Cupich privately represented the nomination as antagonistic towards Pope Francis personally, requiring an appointment for Washington in response.
“The result was Pope Francis reversing his previous decision and opting for McElroy, The Pillar was told.”
Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Pope’s nuncio to the US
Burch has criticized Pope Francis in the past — for example, taking him to task for his 2015 remark that good Catholics need not “breed like rabbits,” and again, eight years later, calling the Vatican’s Fiducia Supplicans (which condoned blessing same-sex couples) a cause of “massive confusion” in the Church. He also said that the Pope exhibits a “pattern of vindictiveness and punishment” which “seems to fly in the face of what he says about being an instrument of mercy and accompaniment.”
Nevertheless, Burch, a graduate of the Catholic University of Dallas with a degree in philosophy, is a faithful, practicing Catholic and family man with nine children who has undeniably built an effective and thoroughly Catholic organization over the past 20 years.
“Brian Burch is a man of substance, not a mere internet bomb-thrower,” said Stream contributor Peter Wolfgang. “He has accomplished real things in the real world. Would it be so bad if Burch did — unofficially — represent to the Holy See a U.S. Church that often feels itself to be misunderstood by the present pontificate?”
Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich (right) and San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy (left)
Sending a Message
Secular news outlets like MSNBC saw an explicit Vatican challenge to Trump in the appointment, saying, “The Pope is sending a message to the incoming president… The Catholic Church is not going to stop fighting for the rights of immigrants even as a demagogue promising mass deportations prepares to enter the White House a second time.”
Though Catholic commentators were usually more circumspect, even the international Catholic journal LaCroix said the appointment “carried undeniable political weight.”
McElroy, of course, has been an outspoken foe of Trump’s policies, particularly regarding open borders and mass migration, which Trump has already begun to address with the beginning of his promised large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants.
On January 6, McElroy opined about the issue, saying that while a country has the right to control its own borders, “At the same time, we are called always to have a sense of the dignity of every human person. And thus, plans which have been talked about at some levels of having a wider indiscriminate massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”
Grasp of Catholic Teaching “Tenuous”?
Unfortunately, Cardinal McElroy’s ideas of what does and does not constitute “Catholic doctrine” have been questioned by many. Theologian, former professor and Catholic podcast host Larry Chapp points out that when it comes to sexual morality, McElory’s grasp of Catholic teaching is a bit tenuous.
McElroy, he says, “has not hidden his desire for major changes in Church teaching on issues including the ordination of women to Holy Orders and the entire edifice of Catholic moral theology in matters relating to sexuality. He has also proposed a model of Eucharistic discipline that would open the reception of Holy Communion to those Catholics who live in what a traditional moral theology would consider a gravely sinful state. That list would include sexually active cohabitators, the divorced and civilly remarried, and ‘LGBTQ’ Catholics.”
Chapp also observes, “Cardinal McElroy is also on record, in a now famous essay in America magazine, as saying the Church needs to drop the distinction between those who have a same-sex orientation while remaining chaste, and those homosexuals who are sexually active: ‘The distinction between orientation and activity cannot be the principal focus for such a pastoral embrace because it inevitably suggests dividing the L.G.B.T. community into those who refrain from sexual activity and those who do not.’
“All of which implies that Cardinal McElroy does not consider such sexual activity to be of much moral and/or spiritual importance,” he concludes.
McElroy’s Other Baggage: Clergy Sexual Abuse Cases
Pope Francis greets then-Bishop Robert W. McElroy of San Diego (photo: Vatican Media).
Another reason Chapp calls McElroy a “controversial cardinal with heavy baggage” is McElroy’s record in San Diego of declaring the bankruptcy of the diocese, often leaving clergy abuse victims out in the cold when it came to pecuniary compensation.
In fact, McElroy’s record of handling sexual abuse claims is not good: he apparently ignored the warnings of the late psychologist Richard Sipe, an expert on clergy sexual abuse, about then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s repeated abusive behavior.
More disturbingly, he is also accused of not only ignoring, but attempting to cover up, complaints about a diocesan priest who was grooming young women for Satanic ritual violation. One of the young women, Rachel Mastrogiacomo, did not allow herself to be put off by the diocese and pursued justice through both church and legal channels over a period of years — with indifferent success.
The priest in question was finally convicted of ritual sexual abuse and laicized, but did no prison time and has gone on to active involvement in the Protestant church.
This all happened under then-Archbishop McElroy’s watch; he failed to act when Mastrogiacomo reported the priest to the diocese, as she later found out other young women had done also.
As the recently retired holder of the Fr. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Dr. Janet Smith, remarked in her recent article on the case, “The story makes quite inexplicable the appointment of McElroy to the cardinalate for a Church that claims to care about victims.”
Whose Diocese Is It, Anyway?
Will sparks fly between the Archbishop of Washington, DC and the Trump administration over the next four years? Almost certainly.
Will Cardinal McElroy prove to be a sound choice to head the diocese of the nation’s capital? One group of voices that seems to have gotten short shrift in answering this question are the Catholic faithful who actually live in his diocese.
As one commenter observed, “I wonder how the good people of the Archdiocese feel knowing their Arch bishop was selected based on politics, and not the needs of the local community?”
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