Why America’s Catholic Bishops Started Sounding Liberal

Not so long ago, when U.S. Catholic leaders said something political, they tended to sound like conservatives. American bishops’ most prominent policy statements focused on three issues: same-sex marriage, contraception, and—above all—abortion. Their frequently stated opposition to all three put them at odds with not just the left but also many Catholics. It even created tension with Rome.

Since Donald Trump’s reelection, however, the Church in the United States has been sounding more liberal. Its teaching hasn’t changed, but the president’s second term has shifted the bishops’ attention. The most urgent political concern for America’s Catholic leaders is no longer abortion; it’s immigration.

The issue has featured in their agenda for a while. After all, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that wealthy countries should welcome refugees and economic migrants “to the extent they are able.” But now immigration dominates U.S. Catholic leaders’ public messaging.

In November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops published a rare “special message” decrying the Trump administration’s “indiscriminate mass deportation.” The day of Trump’s State of the Union address, 18 bishops from border states urged the administration to implement a range of reforms and to honor migrants’ right to apply for asylum. Following the government’s crackdown in Minnesota, bishops gathered in the state to support migrants and denounce mass deportations. USCCB lawyers told the Supreme Court last month that the president’s plan to revoke birthright citizenship would be an affront to human dignity.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The Catholic Church and the Trump administration are not getting along]

Sensing the Church’s growing emphasis on immigration, Democrats recently invoked Catholic teaching to criticize the GOP. A few years ago, that sentence would have read like it had a typo.

Tension between Church leaders and Republicans has only risen since the start of the war with Iran. Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., has said that the government’s decision to attack did not meet the Church’s criteria for a just war. After the White House posted footage of missile strikes mixed with scenes from action movies, Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, issued a statement calling the video “sickening.” And last week, Trump rejected Pope Leo XIV’s repeated calls for a cease-fire.

Chieko Noguchi, the spokesperson for the USCCB, acknowledged that shifting national politics can affect which issues the bishops prioritize, but she told me that they will “speak up” to defend the sanctity and dignity of human life “no matter who occupies the White House.”

Indeed, Catholic teaching frequently crosses the U.S. partisan divide, and this is hardly the first time that American bishops have been critical of conservative views. In 1983, the USCCB advocated for a halt to nuclear-weapons testing and production, opposing the stance of the Reagan administration. Three years later, as the GOP pushed for economic deregulation, the bishops published a letter arguing that free markets alone can’t ensure fairness or human dignity.

In the same period, American bishops challenged the left on abortion, even though the issue wasn’t as central for the U.S. hierarchy then as it would later become. One of the most outspoken Catholic opponents of abortion was Cardinal John O’Connor, who served as the archbishop of New York from 1984 to his death, in 2000, and who often addressed the issue in public forums.

As abortion took up more of the American political discourse, the Church gave it greater emphasis. In 2004, the bishops debated whether to deny Communion to John Kerry, the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major party since John F. Kennedy, because of his support for legalized abortion.

For the next 20 years, the bishops focused much of their public advocacy on right-coded concerns: restricting abortion, regulating other issues of sexual and medical ethics, and protecting religious freedom. Until this past November, the previous time the USCCB published a special message was in 2013, when the group condemned the Obama administration’s “coercive” mandate compelling employers to offer health insurance that covered contraception. Two years later, the president of the USCCB called the legalization of same-sex marriage a “tragic error.” In 2019, the conference approved an introduction to a voter guide that identified opposition to abortion as the group’s “preeminent priority.”

The bishops amplified their criticism of the left after the election of Joe Biden, the first Catholic president in 60 years. Their rebukes centered on abortion, a principal issue in Biden’s campaign. On the day of his inauguration, in 2021, the USCCB’s leader lamented Biden’s support for “policies that would advance moral evils.” Legalized abortion was the first such policy he mentioned.

Echoing the 2004 debate about Kerry, a committee of U.S. bishops discussed in 2021 whether to instruct priests to deny Communion to Catholic politicians who supported legalized abortion, including Biden and Nancy Pelosi. They decided against it, but only after the Vatican, then under Pope Francis, intervened to warn them about the division it would cause.

Francis’s opposition to abortion was unequivocal—he once likened it to hiring a hit man—but he complained that some Catholics overemphasized the issue. In 2013, he suggested to an interviewer that the Church had become “obsessed” with abortion. The pope devoted more time to promoting causes favored by liberals, such as environmental sustainability and social justice.

But no concern was more important to Francis than immigration, and he encouraged U.S. clergy to focus on it. Last year, less than three months before his death, he sent the American bishops an extraordinary open letter urging them to defend migrants.

As the bishops have recalibrated their priorities in response to changing national politics, the U.S. hierarchy and Rome have become more aligned than they were for much of Francis’s pontificate.

In September, Pope Leo, Francis’s successor and the first American pope, told reporters that being truly “pro life” requires opposing not only abortion but also the “inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States.” He later endorsed the bishops’  “special message” on immigration, calling it “very important.”

U.S. bishops may have the support of the Vatican, but they may also have put themselves at odds with the majority of their flock. A poll from November found that 54 percent of Catholics support “the detention and deportation of unauthorized immigrants on a broad scale.” Although that support might have waned since the Trump administration’s campaign in Minneapolis, the finding mirrors the disconnect between bishops and laity over abortion: 57 percent of Catholics think the procedure should be legal in all or most cases, according to a January survey by the Pew Research Center.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: What I lost when I gave up my Catholicism]

Unsurprisingly, then, some Catholics have pushed back against the Church’s criticism of Trump’s immigration policies. Kelsey Reinhardt, the head of the conservative advocacy group CatholicVote, argued last month that bishops have focused on migrants’ rights and Christians’ duty to help them “while treating enforcement as morally suspect by default.” Such teaching, Reinhardt wrote, has left “many Catholics thinking they must choose between fidelity to the Church and the basic belief that laws matter.”

Noguchi, the USCCB spokesperson, pushed back on the critique. “The bishops have emphasized repeatedly that human dignity and national security are not in conflict,” she told me. “Both are possible if people of good will work together.”

Those who want Church leaders to soften their message on immigration will almost certainly be disappointed. Leo’s most powerful statement on the subject could come on July 4. Despite the hopes of many American Catholics, Leo will not mark the country’s 250th anniversary in his native land. Instead, he will spend the day on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, a way station for migrants seeking asylum in Europe.

The trip will be one of the clearest demonstrations of continuity between Leo and Francis, who made Lampedusa the destination of his first papal trip. There, Francis embraced the cause of immigrants, a message that Leo—and the Church in the U.S.—are poised to repeat.