Archbishop Paul Coakley, the newly elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told OSV News in one of his first interviews that he hopes to show that the U.S. bishops are more unified than most would have you believe.
“The narrative is out there that the American bishops are divided, we’re polarized, and that’s not been my experience,” he said. “I think there’s a lot more mutual understanding and support for one another and genuine friendship among us.”
It may seem naïve to think that any body of over 200 people from around the country would be aligned on much these days. Immigration remains a deeply polarizing issue for the entire country, including among Catholics.
Indeed, the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign hung over the bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore, which I attended this week for America. You could feel the energy in the room shift any time the topic came up.
Yet other items on the agenda had the potential to distract from the bishops’ lament over the treatment of immigrants, many of whom are their fellow Catholics. The election of new leadership at the conference risked highlighting partisan divisions; a new set of ethical and religious directives that deals with “gender interventions” at Catholic hospitals would be discussed and voted on.
A media advisory in October announced that the bishops would include a discussion and response to the current events around immigration. That came together in a plan to issue a “special message” about immigration on the last day of the meeting. The U.S.C.C.B. noted that it had not issued such a message in over 10 years, the last one being in 2013 to oppose the Obama administration’s mandate that health insurance plans cover contraceptives. These messages require a two-thirds majority to approve and are issued on behalf of the entire conference. They differ from the routine statements issued by the U.S.C.C.B. press office in response to current events.
If the discussion over the statement had led to public disagreement or a failed vote under the eyes of the media, that would send its own message.
The draft circulated to the bishops and a small writing team attempted to incorporate the suggested changes the evening before the final vote. Despite the suggestion from Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the president, to refrain from further changes to the text during the floor debate, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago proposed a significant addition. He suggested including the phrase, “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”
After some further discussion about the propriety of including additions to the text, and some differing suggestions about where best to include Cardinal Cupich’s phrase, more bishops rose to speak about the importance of the church making a statement. There were also attempts to wordsmith the statement further, and I began thinking about the difficulty of all group projects, but especially joint statements like unsigned editorials or open letters. A horse designed by a committee is a camel, the adage goes.
Most observers agree that the bishops are united on immigration, but there were a few factors at play that could have worked against the statement’s passage. One archbishop mentioned to me that some bishops wanted the statement to be even stronger; others worried about whether a stronger statement would hurt the church’s influence with the Trump administration or even invite further terror upon their immigrant congregations. If the committee had indeed created a camel, they were also trying to thread a needle, which is at least easier than having a camel walk through one. With so many different concerns in tension, I could see many ways that the vote on the statement might have only barely eked out the required two-thirds majority.
I was wrong.
When the statement came to a vote, it passed overwhelmingly, with 216 votes in favor, five votes against and three abstentions.
In the end, the bishops demonstrated their unity with one another but also with Rome. And the major headlines coming out of the meeting are drawing attention to the terror experienced by immigrants during the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, although the bishops’ statement did not mention Mr. Trump by name.
So is Archbishop Coakley correct? Are the bishops more united than many would have you believe? If they could come together and issue a statement of such importance on a highly polarized political topic, then there is something to his point. Then again, the claim that the U.S. bishops were divided among each other was only half the narrative—the other half being that they were divided from Rome.
Throughout Pope Francis’ pontificate, the bishops in the United States were perceived as having a complicated relationship with Rome. If it is too much to say they were at odds with Pope Francis’ way of leading and reforming the church, they were at least seen as slow to embrace his signature projects, such as the Synod on Synodality and prioritizing care for the environment.
Cardinal Christophe Pierre spoke about the disconnect between the U.S. hierarchy and the Vatican in an interview with my colleague Gerard O’Connell in 2023. He was “shocked” that many U.S. bishops were unfamiliar with synodality’s origins in South America and were still struggling to understand it, and that some dismissed the idea that the church should be a missionary church that goes out to the poor as “Bergoglio’s idea.”
But narratives that may have been true at one point are not universally so. Some analyzed the choice of the next U.S.C.C.B. president as another referendum on whether the American hierarchy was for or against Rome, and described Archbishop Coakley as the anti-Francis/Leo choice.
It seems much more likely to me that many of the bishops saw Archbishop Coakley as a capable officer during his term as secretary, someone who would provide continuity of leadership for administrative purposes (which is important for complicated gatherings like the bishops’ meeting) and as someone they simply like personally.
The evidence for the idea that Archbishop Coakley was an anti-Francis and anti-Leo choice is as follows: He voiced initial support for Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the now-disgraced and excommunicated former nuncio, when he first accused Pope Francis of covering up the sexual abuse of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick. (In his interview after his election as president, Archbishop Coakley said that he “certainly could not countenance” everything he learned about Archbishop Viganò’s views in the months and years that followed.) Archbishop Coakley also serves as the ecclesiastical advisor to the Napa Institute, a group that has regularly hosted Francis critics like Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Joseph Strickland.
But as the Vatican journalist Rocco Palmo pointed out on X.com, Archbishop Coakley has also defended the work of Catholic Relief Services against attacks from the Lepanto Institute while he chaired CRS’s board. He has also been critical of the Trump administration: In 2021, while serving as the U.S.C.C.B.’s chairman for the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, he issued a scathing condemnation of the Jan. 6 riots and attack on the U.S. Capitol.
And during the floor debate about the special message on immigration, he stood to voice his strong support for the statement.
Pope Leo, in the few times he has weighed in on affairs in the United States during his still-new papacy, has relentlessly stood up for immigrants and pushed for the church in America to do the same. The bishops responded to that call in just about the strongest way they could in what is essentially a large board meeting. They have also developed plans of accompaniment and pastoral support to bring back to their diocese, because they know that, as Bishop Mark Seitz told the conference, “statements are not enough.” Thus, it is worth being skeptical of interpretations of the U.S.C.C.B. presidential election as evidence that the bishops are at odds with each other and with the pontiff, when both the bishops as a body and their new president aligned themselves so strongly with Leo’s approach on immigration..
Still, unity is not a passive virtue. It requires active cultivation, and there are many challenges to the unity felt in Baltimore this week. Archbishop Coakley’s answer about his past support for Archbishop Viganò has been criticized for not recognizing how his support came at the expense of Pope Francis’ reputation. With a better response, he could put to bed a frequent talking point that threatens that unity. Meanwhile, the bishops will still have to navigate other politically polarized questions, especially about how Catholics are called to respond to threats to democratic norms and the rule of law.
But we are due for a reset of a few narratives: that the bishops cannot stand up to the Trump administration (they can), that they are polarized along partisan lines (they voted near-unanimously on a politically charged topic) and that they are against Rome (they just fulfilled Pope Leo’s clearest wishes for them). Archbishop Coakley will have to learn to navigate being the public voice for the American hierarchy during the remainder of the Trump administration. He will have to rally support for the implementation of synodality in the U.S. church. He should be able to do so as his own person, without having to crawl out of the ruts of our well-worn priors.
Because in a moment that called for solidarity, prophetic witness and, yes, unity on behalf of the vulnerable, the bishops came through.
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