Donald Trump Is on a Collision Course With the Catholic Church

About six months into the second Trump presidency, Republicans are charting a collision course with the Catholic Church. Stark and growing differences between their views on migrants, the poor, technology, and other issues could put the spiritual home of tens of millions of American Catholics in direct conflict with the political framework of the party that runs the U.S. government.

As House and Senate Republicans advanced a budget that ripped some cords out from the social safety net while giving ICE, the federal government’s masked police force, the kind of money that could stand up another nation’s military, religious sisters from more than 60 congregations protested inside and outside the Capitol. Bishops, meanwhile, sent letters pleading with lawmakers to reject the budget on the grounds that it harshly punished the poor and undocumented.

In one of the most recent examples, Cardinals Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C. and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey led the list of signatories to an interfaith letter to U.S. senators condemning the budget for how it will “sow chaos in local communities,” “be used to target faith communities,” and “harm the poor and vulnerable in our nation, to the detriment of the common good.”

“Its passage would be a moral failure for American society as a whole,” the letter said.

Such denunciations are atypical. And they provide the latest illustration of the stress Trump has placed on major institutions: media, law, academic, and now ecclesial.

I asked multiple Catholic senators about the letter before they voted on the budget last week. All claimed to have no knowledge of it, including Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), who is both a Knight of Columbus and a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre—memberships that suggest he’s a bit more than a casual Mass-goer.

As Congress delivered the budget to Trump’s desk—after mounting little resistance to it—McElroy tried to speak out more forcefully and urgently. In an interview, he told CNN reporter Christopher Lamb that the administration’s deportation policy “is simply not only incompatible with Catholic teaching, it’s inhumane, and it’s morally repugnant.”

“It is a mass, indiscriminate deportation of men and women and children and families, which literally rips families apart, and is intended to do so,” he added.

As a cardinal, Pope Leo occasionally expressed his disapproval of Vance and Trump on social media, but he has refrained from making similarly direct political statements since his election to the Throne of Saint Peter. But, nevertheless, remarks the pope has made over the past few weeks have often cut against the Trump administration’s priorities. And while we must not interpret this to mean that the Church is explicitly calling out Trump, it’s reasonable to point out that the Church’s priorities appear to be increasingly at odds with the policy orientation of the White House.

The disagreements go beyond immigration. Pope Leo condemned Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities within hours of the attack being made public, saying, “Every member of the international community has a moral responsibility: Stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable abyss.”

Pope Leo has even come down on AI, drawing contrasts between cold, impersonal, and surprisingly limited algorithm-driven systems and the profundities of the human mind.

“Our personal life has greater value than any algorithm, and social relationships require spaces for development that far transcend the limited patterns that any soulless machine can pre-package,” the pope said in June, continuing:

Let us not forget that, while able to store millions of data points and answer many questions in a matter of seconds, artificial intelligence remains equipped with a “static memory” that is in no way comparable to that of human beings. Our memory, on the other hand, is creative, dynamic, generative, capable of uniting past, present and future in a lively and fruitful search for meaning, with all the ethical and existential implications that this entails.

Trump’s not really one to take ethical and existential implications into consideration when crafting policy. That goes for AI, too. He has signed executive orders bolstering the AI industry and made its further development a major priority for America’s tech sector. There was even a draft provision in the Republican budget that would have prohibited states from regulating AI for the next decade. However, a bipartisan duo in the Senate struck the big tech handout from the budget just before the chamber voted to pass it.

There’s one person I’d love to ask about all this: Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. Official White House statements have noted that Vance is the “first Catholic convert to serve as Vice President.”

Since he became vice president, though, Vance doesn’t appear to have ventured out for regular Mass attendance. The only times he’s been documented going have been during his travels to Italy on official business. He was seen in St. Peter’s Basilica during a Good Friday liturgy, and he was also at Pope Leo’s inaugural Mass in St. Peter’s Square in May. Stateside, Vance has kept his distance, abruptly cancelling plan