MCLEAN (VA)
Catholic Culture - Trinity Communications [San Diego CA]
January 11, 2025
By Peter Wolfgang
There are so many things to be said about the appointment of Cardinal McElroy to be the next Archbishop of Washington, DC that you could break those things down into different categories.
There is, first, the politics category. That is, politics seems to be the sole motivation for the appointment. According to the Pillar, Pope Francis initially resisted appointing McElroy but was persuaded to do so by Cardinal Cupich’s entirely political reasons for wanting McElroy in Washington.
Predictable consequences of the McElroy appointment to Washington: 1) He will be a prominent critic of the Trump administration. 2) He will be criticized himself in turn, because of his ties to “Uncle Ted” McCarrick. His criticism of the White House may or may not damage Trump. But the criticism of McElroy will undoubtedly damage the credibility of the Catholic hierarchy.
Exactly right. My impression is that the incoming Trump Administration is, if anything, greatly bemused by the Pope’s decision to send McElroy to Washington. If the Pope wanted a high-profile Trump critic to take on the Administration, he should have picked someone without McElroy’s baggage.
There is the pastoral category. That is, how will choosing the next shepherd of the Church in Washington, DC on purely political, not pastoral, grounds affect the flock in our nation’s capital? The Catholic Thing’s Robert Royal has some thoughts on that:
As is well known to people familiar with Washington, this is a rather traditional area for Catholicism…Pope Francis likes “making a mess” in various ways. And if one really had to predict, it’s likely he’s done so in ways beyond estimation here. The priests of Washington will not be very welcoming if the new boss tries to implement a policy he defined towards welcoming LGBTs [erasing the distinction between orientation and activity] and allowing them to receive the Eucharist.
Which brings up another category: heresy. That’s a strong accusation. But I’m not the one making it. Rather, it was one of McElroy’s own brother bishops. Upon the announcement of McElroy’s appointment, Catholic Culture’s news section captured the history in two sentences:
In January 2023, Cardinal McElroy called for “radical inclusion” for women and homosexuals—prompting criticism from Archbishop Samuel Aquila, Archbishop Joseph Naumann, and Bishop Thomas Paprocki, who later accused Cardinal McElroy of heresy.
Cardinal McElroy subsequently wrote that Catholic teaching on the grave nature of “all sexual sins” is a 17th-century innovation.
Finally, there is the category of McElroy’s connection to the disgraced Theodore McCarrick. It is mentioned above in relation to the politics of the McElroy appointment. But it is a category in and of itself. Here is how Eric Sammons puts it in Crisis:
But McElroy is far more connected to McCarrick than just ideological agreement. He is, in many ways, a perfect successor to Theodore McCarrick, someone he worked to protect. Richard Sipe, an expert on priestly sex abuse, warned McElroy about McCarrick’s proclivities in 2016, two years before they became widely known, and as far as we know, McElroy did nothing beyond a bureaucratic paper-filing in response. Further, McElroy voted against the USCCB petition pressing the Vatican for more transparency and speed in the McCarrick investigation.
This is the part that most boggles my mind. The progressive politics, the theological oddities, the pastoral indifference of a supposedly synodal Church, these things will probably always be with us. But every time McElroy’s star rises, the laity are reminded of Theodore McCarrick. That “everyone knew” and that no one paid a price. And conservative Catholics are reminded that the Catholic Left seems not to care.
When McElroy was elevated to Cardinal in 2022, I remember the chief correspondent for America Magazine tweeting, “Man, the reaction to McElroy news really demonstrates how messed up the US church is. Depressing.” I tend to think the history in the image below really demonstrates how messed up the U.S. Church is:
And beyond the U.S. too. And yes, it’s depressing.
I think the Church could have come back from the scandals of 2002 in my lifetime. It is much harder to believe that it will come back from the “Everyone Knew” McCarrick scandal of 2018. McElroy’s elevation to Cardinal, and now to Washington, is another example of why. There is no clean-up, no accountability. Nothing, no significant action of any kind, is coming out of the McCarrick scandals. Except promotions.
As for the America Magazine guy and his crowd, we have been here before. Rembert Weakland, a darling of the Catholic Left, was Archbishop of Milwaukee from the late 1970s until 2002. Upon his retirement, it came out that he was being blackmailed by his gay lover. He was paying $450,000 of diocesan funds to prevent a lawsuit. It didn’t tarnish his image on the Catholic Left. The reviews of his 2009 autobiography were all laudatory. See here and here and here and here. When Weakland died, Fr. James Martin put out a glowing tweet (for which he later apologized). Here’s more on Weakland’s “marred” legacy.
This is a pattern. Cardinal Mahoney was likely the Bernard Law of the West Coast in the matter of clergy sex-abuse cover ups. But Mahoney was a liberal and Law was a conservative. Law ended his career in disgrace. Mahoney is protected in retirement by Pope Francis, free to roam his old diocese over the objections of Archbishop Gomez. Vatican News even gave him a platform in 2021 to attack the U.S. Bishops. A year later, on the occasion of Weakland’s death, Fr. Raymond de Souza wrote of what he called “the Mahoney Pact.”
What is this thing on the Catholic Left, where episcopal malfeasance is no biggie as long as the bishop is an ideological ally? Is there any comparable phenomenon on the Catholic Right? I can’t recall First Things or EWTN saying, “Sure, Marcial Maciel and Bernard Law had their peccadillos, but they were a gift to the Church.” Much the opposite. Even the reputation of Pope John Paul II, saint though he was, was never quite the same after Maciel’s guilt became an established fact.
But these things don’t happen on the Catholic Left. Instead, it’s all “Look at those weirdos on EWTN. Did you hear what [fill in conservative Catholic name here] said on Twitter? Ha! Who’s disloyal to the papacy now, righties?”
That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. They care deeply about vanquishing their ideological foes within the Church and not much else.
And their foes outside the Church as well. And so it is that Cardinal McElroy is on his way to Washington.