The Vatican today named one of the leading liberal Catholic prelates in America to run the prominent D.C.-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.
If you think this was a shot across the bow at Trump and MAGA, you would be right. Via the Washington Post:
San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy, who has led a diocese that runs the length of California’s southern border with Mexico for a decade, will take over an archdiocese still bruised by a major sexual abuse and mismanagement scandal that broke in 2018.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to serve the Catholic community in our nation’s capital and for the confidence His Holiness has placed in me, but I have truly loved the last ten years I’ve spent as bishop of San Diego,” McElroy said in a statement. “I have never in my life felt more welcomed, more supported or more rewarded.”
McElroy, who holds a political science doctorate from Stanford University, is considered, by some Catholics, to be a leading intellectual closely aligned with Pope Francis — and, by others, too direct at times on secular politics. Soon after Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration in 2017, McElroy 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.”
“Given the fact that the president-elect has indicated a willingness to challenge certain constitutional assumptions, there’s only one bishop in America who has thought deeply about the intersection of public life and Catholic theology, and that’s Bob McElroy,” said Michael Sean Winters, a longtime columnist for the National Catholic Reporter news site. “The pope is sending to the capital city the one American bishop who has a profound understanding and has thought about the American Constitution and religion for his entire adult life.”
This should be interesting! From what I've read, Francis was kind of "meh" about suggestions that he appoint McElroy to D.C. -- until Trump was reelected, and the Vatican decided they wanted a strong voice in favor of immigrants at the seat of power.
