WASHINGTON (DC)
Washington Post
January 6, 2025
By Michelle Boorstein, Anthony Faiola, Stefano Pitrelli, and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux
[This article is a substantially updated version of an article with the same title that we included in Abuse Tracker yesterday.]
McElroy, known for a pastoral approach to migrants and the LGBTQ+ community, will lead an archdiocese still bruised by a sexual abuse and mismanagement scandal.
The Vatican on Monday named one of the leading liberal prelates in the United States to run the prominent Washington-area archdiocese, sending to the nation’s capital, as a second Trump administration begins, a cleric known for a pastoral approach to migrants and for the “radical inclusion” of the LGBTQ+ community.
That approach came throughprominently as San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy made his first appearance after the announcement. Speaking at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, the new archbishop delivered a message of unity and gratitude.
He thanked Pope Francis, celebrated African Americans as “so foundational” to his new archdiocese and addressed its Hispanic community in Spanish. He also called for inclusion and stressed the importance of trying to understand the “other.”
McElroy, who for a decade has headed a diocese running the length of California’s southern border with Mexico, asked Americans to “hope and pray” that the next White House administration is successful in “helping to enhance our society, our country, our life and the whole of our nation.” But he acknowledged a possible “contrast” with the next administration’s priorities on immigration.
“The Catholic church teaches that a nation has the right to control its borders and our nation’s desire to do that is a legitimate effort,” he continued. “At the same time, we are called always to have a sense of the dignity of every human person. And thus, plans that 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.”
With a political science doctorate from Stanford University, McElroy is considered by some Catholics to be a leading intellectual closely aligned with Francis — and, by others, too direct at times on secular politics. Soon after Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration in 2017, he said “we must all become disrupters,” citing the use of the military to deport undocumented people and the portrayals of refugees as enemies and Muslims “as forces of fear rather than as children of God.”
The significance of the appointment, to an archdiocese still bruised by a major sexual abuse and mismanagement scandal that broke in 2018, drew sharp reactions.
“Pope Francis is sending a pastor, not a message to Washington,” said John Carr, a former longtime lobbyist for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on peace and justice issues. “Cardinal McElroy will be principled, not political. His priorities will be moral, not ideological. He will be civil, but not silent in challenging the administration when their policies threaten the poor and vulnerable.”
For those who have long disagreed with what they see as McElroy’s lesser emphasis on core elements of Catholicism — doctrine, tradition and sexual orthodoxy — the Vatican’s announcement was a disappointment.
“It is an appointment that we are unafraid to call terrible,” traditionalist blogger Luigi Casalini of the Messa in Latino (Latin Mass) wrote on his blog Monday. “This choice feels like a childish revenge” for Trump recently naming conservative activist and Francis critic Brian Burch to be U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.
The 70-year-old McElroy replaces Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the first African American cardinal. Gregory’s long career inside the church includes overseeing the landmark Dallas Charter, an agreement crafted after the Catholic sexual abuse scandals erupted publicly in the early 2000s. It established zero tolerance for priests.
At 77, Gregory is two years past the standard retirement age for bishops. The Vatican said Monday it had accepted that his resignation.
Gregory was brought to the Archdiocese of Washington, which includes D.C. and suburban and rural parts of Southern Maryland, in 2019 and replaced Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl. He was seen as a church loyalist and steady moderate who could restore trust after the crisis wrought by former D.C. archbishop and former cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick.
McCarrick, once one of the most popular and influential U.S. Catholic leaders, was expelled from the priesthood by Francis after multiple men said he sexually abused them as youths or harassed them as seminarians or young priests. McCarrick was charged in Wisconsin and Massachusetts but was found not mentally competent to stand trial.
McElroy is seen as formidable theologian who has fiercely defended Francis in the wake of attacks by traditionalists. He is equally viewed as a promulgator of unity who has denounced “a profound sickness in the soul in American political life” and sought to defend the country’s “core democratic consensus.”
“People are coming toward each other in the life of the Church looking first at that label: What are you? Where do you stand in the warlike culture politics of our country?” McElroy said during a panel last May.
Ned Dolejsi, who worked with McElroy as director of the church’s lobbying arm in California, said the cardinal was known for reaching out to people of various political views both within and outside the church.
“People who agree and disagree with him turn to him and seek his perspective on different things because they know he’s a brilliant man,” Dolejsi said. “I could always count on him to have conversations with all different kinds of people — to do that and do it well.”
McElroy’s strong defense of migrant rights may antagonize the incoming Trump administration, and some observers say the timing of the Vatican’s decision on the new archbishop, just two weeks before the inauguration, is no coincidence.
“McElroy’s nomination is a very clear message,” said Massimo Faggioli, a Catholic theologian at Villanova University. It “is a high-profile response to the [current] political situation in America, there is no denying it.”
Yet the cardinal may have limited influence on the national debate, according to Alejandro Bermudez, former head of the large Spanish-language Catholic news agency ACI-Prensa and former head of the conservative Catholic News Agency.
“The bottom line is that despite the significant emblematic statement of the appointment, McElroy’s real practice influence over Trump’s policies will be minimal,” Bermudez said. “The U.S. government, both at the legislative and executive level, see the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, not the Archdiocese of Washington,” as its counterpart.
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, which advocates for LGBTQ Catholics’ inclusion in the church, is optimistic. She said McElroy has in the past come up with “very creative solutions” — such as working out a way for Catholic organizations in San Diego to cover the health insurance of domestic partners, without specifying the relationship.
“Like Jesus, he found a third way,” she said Monday.
San Diego is as politically diverse a diocese as Washington, and some Catholic leaders noted McElroy’s record of speaking out on public issues — though not in a partisan way.
“In politics, he’ll offer a smart and distinctive Catholic voice, with a record of putting the poor and vulnerable first while seeking opportunities for dialogue and engagement,” said Kim Daniels, who has advised both the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishopsand now heads Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life.
He faces challenges stemming from the archdiocese’s recent rocky years. The Catholic news site The Pillar reported last month that ithas a multimillion-dollar annual operating deficit. After a news conference Monday at St. Matthew, Gregory said both the McCarrick scandal and pandemic shutdowns — when people stopped attending in person and giving dropped sharply — hurt the church’s finances. But things were improving, he added.
Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a Catholic school in Northeast D.C., praised Gregory’s pastoral nature but said that scandal had pushed some “faithful Catholics” out of the church forever and left those who remain more skeptical.
She said a new leader would need, first and foremost, to be savvy about communicating what the Catholic Church teaches.
“Especially in a Trump administration,” McGuire added. “Trump poses challenges for all of us. He claims to be pro-life, but he’s not. We need all bishops to call that out.” Moreover, “the immigration issues are huge in terms of the dignity of human life.”
McElroy’s selection places him in the nation’s capital just as Trump is moving back into the White House and promising mass deportations of undocumented migrants. U.S. bishops have been relatively quiet on the issue while waiting to see how he actually proceeds.
“I can’t think of a better candidate for the job in the nation’s capital,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a senior analyst at Religion News Service. “He is bright, articulate and clearly a big supporter of Francis and supports his concerns that the church should be on the side of the poor and the marginalized.”
McElroy, a fifth-generation San Franciscan by birth, has said he felt called to the priesthood as a boy. According to a bio on the San Diego diocese’s website, he went to seminary in high school but thought it was best to further his education outside the church. He attended Harvard University and graduated in three years with a degree in U.S. history. He then went to Stanford, where he got a master’s in U.S. history and the doctorate in political science.
He has been one of the more active U.S. bishops on hosting and supporting “synods,” information-gathering sessions where all Catholics are supposed to enter into dialogue. In 2023, he made news when he wrote in America magazine that the pope has called Catholics to “radical inclusion” — and that one way the church needs to change in response to that call is to allow more worshipers to take Communion.
Catholic tradition says people who have sex outside heterosexual marriage are in a state of grave sin and thus can’t receive Communion. McElroy said the church needs to rethink this emphasis on sexual activity.
“The effect of the tradition that all sexual acts outside of marriage constitute objectively grave sin has been to focus the Christian moral life disproportionately upon sexual activity,” he wrote. Sexual activity, “while profound,” isn’t the heart of Christian truths. “This should change.”