Most Catholics don’t seem to have allowed themselves to recognize the gravity of the conflict underway in the United States. One can go to church, see an American flag alongside the altar, pray for the country and its leaders, share Communion with fellow believers, and go home under the impression that the flag and cross are more or less in harmony. But they are not. Seen through the eyes of recent church teaching, and most of all alongside the ministry of Jesus, the United States of America is a hostile power—a country so shrouded in the clothes of its own idols that it is incapable of hearing the prophets that the church has raised, from the Holy Father to a child in a detention center.
Disregarding Christian teaching is normal for governments. Perhaps there is no other option. The first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine, delayed his baptism until his deathbed, which some have attributed to the knowledge that the bloody business of state was in tension with truly following the Prince of Peace. Political leaders pay lip service to the religions of their people, whether by their own conviction or for the sake of their constituents, and then quietly go the other way whenever they feel they must. But the current situation in the United States is of a different order.
On issue after issue, the U.S. government has contradicted recent Catholic teaching—and not subtly, but by flaunting its acts of opposition to the teaching from the religious institution that represents more Americans than any other.
First, take the environment. This has been a priority for popes St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis, who devoted an entire encyclical to the topic in 2015, then a further apostolic exhortation in 2023. Pope Leo XIV has continued to carry this message to world leaders. There is no ambiguity but that decades of Catholic teaching has seen mounting calls for responsible stewardship of God’s creation in nature, and particularly attention to the human-created ecological crisis of climate change. The church teaches that all people have a moral responsibility to work toward “integral ecology” that heals both environmental and social harms.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has undertaken a scorched-earth campaign against any effort to acknowledge or mitigate climate change and other forms of environmental disruption. The administration has withdrawn from global climate agreements, defunded scientific research on the topic, cancelled clean-energy projects, discouraged electrification and doubled down fossil fuels—even when the energy industry would prefer not to. The president and his administration habitually show their contempt for any attempt to mitigate the causes or effects of climate change, leaving future generations to live with the consequences.
But the changes that the Trump administration seems most eager to brandish are those relating to immigration. The United States has long failed to pass legislation that would update immigration law in a humane way, but Mr. Trump’s policy is to escalate the cruelty of the system. The process for granting asylum to refugees has been suspended. International students are having their visas revoked. Deportation raids are terrorizing immigrant communities and entire cities. The government that has been deporting immigrants to labor camps abroad is also building a massive nationwide immigration detention system—in a country that already has the highest incarceration rate of any democracy on the planet. Children are being taken from their homes and schools.
The church has been crying out on behalf of migrants for decades, and as a church of migrants. Jesus fled persecution and lived abroad in his childhood, and in his ministry he often showed foreigners respect that his fellow Jews denied them. The first trip of Pope Francis’ pontificate was to Lampedusa, seeking to highlight the plight of migrants risking their lives to travel there. Last year, the U.S. bishops issued a “special message” of solidarity with immigrants. Meanwhile, biblical passages are being used in recruitment ads for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency most closely tied to the government’s strategy of glorifying brutality.
A further trajectory of recent church teaching has been the refusal to baptize the use of war as a normal practice of statecraft. Pope Francis stressed the exceptional conditions necessary for claiming a “just war,” advancing a tradition that has roots in the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. In this, the church comes closer to the example of Jesus, who told his followers to love their enemies and refuse the urge to fight back when attacked. While many Jews at the time expected the Messiah to be a warrior who would lead a revolt against Rome, he allowed the empire to execute him.
The U.S. government has increasingly practiced pre-emptive violence as a normal function of state. This violates even the more permissive just war approach, and Catholic defenders of that approach are appalled. Extrajudicial assassinations abroad became especially normalized during the Obama years, and the Trump administration has leaned on spectacular strikes, such as in Iran and Venezuela, to achieve policy goals even when there is no imminent threat to the United States. In the context of Gaza, where U.S. diplomats brokered a supposed cease-fire, U.S.-backed Israeli troops have killed hundreds of Palestinians since the agreement went into effect. As Pope Leo XIV has said, the promise of an international order that aspires to peace has given way to “a world that is ablaze.”
Another priority of church teaching in recent years has been a turn toward pastoral leadership—toward approaching the most divisive debates in society with an outlook of listening, patience and mutual respect. The third encyclical of Pope Francis, “Fratelli Tutti,” called for solidarity among all people, including those with whom we disagree. Francis famously made a point of kindness and curiosity among gay and queer people, even while reasserting a church teaching on sexuality that stands in tension with many of their experiences.
Meanwhile, U.S. political leaders seem to have fully embraced the rhetoric of dehumanization, both with each other and with ordinary people. In the case of gender identity, for instance, the government now routinely refuses to accept people’s stated identities—even to the point of misgendering a sitting member of Congress. Mr. Trump has routinely called for violence against his opponents, even while he has faced assassination attempts of his own.
This is beyond the territory of agreeing to disagree. This is a cruel rejection of Catholic teaching, which recent leaders of the church have made clear. Of course, the American government is not a Catholic institution, and it is not bound to church teaching. And no government will ever be truly Christian but God’s kingdom. But this is a country where nearly a quarter of the population identifies as Catholic, including the vice president. That does not obligate a government’s respect for the church but should at least recommend it. Leaders can make reasonable efforts to take church teaching seriously, for the sake of their Catholic voters if nothing else. This government does the opposite.
The disregard of Catholic teaching is bipartisan, to be sure. The Democratic Party’s lack of space for voices opposed to abortion, for instance, and the Biden administration’s enabling of Israel’s destruction of Gaza are moral failures. The enthusiastic military support for Israel by a Catholic president drove Pope Francis to make nightly, concerned phone calls to Christians under the rain of American-supplied munitions. But the war now at hand against what the church teaches is firmly in the court of the current administration.
Catholics need to take notice and make ourselves heard. This country should shame us before our Lamb.
The war against Catholic teaching is less kinetic than the government’s recent spectacles of violence, from Minneapolis to Tehran. It is also less visible. But once you begin to notice it, the state of war is clear.
What, then, is the responsibility of American Catholics? Give Caesar what is Caesar’s—sure, he can have all the meme-coins he wants. For God, we owe much more consequential obedience, as Jesus did: to refuse the call to arms and hear the call to love.
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