2 weeks Ago By Phelim McAleer
Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Belfast News Letter, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. At the White House Easter Egg Roll, Trump said Francis was “a good man, [who] worked hard and loved the world”. The president also announced that he and Melania would attend the funeral in Rome and that US flags would fly at half-mast on all government buildings.
The public statements and gestures were ironic because Pope Francis was the most left-wing Pope in history as America’s Catholics are swinging increasingly rightwards. Unlike the alliance between Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, who united against communism and for shared conservative values, Trump and Francis were often at odds. Advertisement Advertisement Francis championed progressive causes with a very selective and, some might say hypocritical, moral lens.
He campaigned for open borders and in 2016 washed the feet of people claiming to be refugees. He described Trump’s proposed border wall as “not Christian” while living in the Vatican, a walled city-state with strict entry controls. In 2025, he labelled Trump’s deportation plans a “disgrace,” and during his 2016 Mexico visit, he dramatically posed against a border wall praying for migrants entering the US.
During his visit to the United States however he did not meet American mothers grieving children killed by illegal immigrants. Francis’s selective activism extended globally. In Cuba in 2015, he avoided mentioning thousands of political prisoners under Castro’s communist regime, unlike John Paul II’s bold calls for freedom in Poland and the Soviet Union.
Pope Francis never met a leftist regime he didn’t want to cosy up to, even Communist China, where in 2018 he granted Beijing a role in selecting Catholic bishops. So Pope Francis became more progressive as America’s Catholics became more conservative. He pushed transgenderism and climate change alarmism as American Catholics supported Trump and his opposition to the destructive effects of these ideologies.
This was clear at the polls. The fact tank the Pew Research Center reported that Trump, a Protestant, won 52% of Catholics in the 2016 election. Joe Biden just managed to win over his fellow Catholics in 2020.
The change was dramatic in 2024. Trump secured 58% to Harris’s 40%, an 18-point margin. White Catholics led the surge, with 61% voting Republican in 2024, up from 41% in 2008.
Even Hispanic Catholics—normally staunch Democrats—are slowly moving rightwards, their support for Republicans doubling in the past decade. And the more Catholic you are, the more likely you are to be moving rightwards. Among frequent Mass-goers, 61% lean Republican, according to a 2023 Pew survey.
Advertisement Advertisement Abortion, economic concerns, and the perception that Democrats don’t like religion, especially Catholicism, drive this trend. The GOP (Republican Party) is pro-life, and most Democrats support abortion, often up to nine months, campaigning for measures allowing abortion up to birth in multiple states. Senior Democrats have also suggested Catholics are unfit for public office.
In 2018, then-Senator Kamala Harris aggressively questioned judicial nominee Brian Buescher about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organisation, implying his Catholic ties were disqualifying. When Harris was in the White House, the FBI circulated a secret memo labelling traditional Catholics as possible “violent extremists” with potential links to “domestic terrorists”. Though the FBI withdrew the memo after public outcry, the damage was done, and Harris and Democrats lost the Catholic vote by a record amount.
The old Democratic Catholic establishment, once defined by John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic US president and Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, have been decisively replaced by a new cadre of conservative Catholic power players. JD Vance, the vice president and a 2019 Catholic convert, channels his fervent faith into populist conservatism; Sean Hannity, a Fox News host, amplifies traditional values to millions; Kellyanne Conway, the former Trump advisor, lives her faith through daily Mass attendance.
And as the US Supreme Court has become more conservative, it has also become more Catholic—with five of the conservative judges on the panel proudly proclaiming their Catholic faith, particularly Clarence Thomas, who credits his success in life to his education by Irish nuns. Across the world, many countries are rejecting progressive politics and electing new conservative leaders. Will the electorate in the Vatican follow the trend? • Phelim McAleer is a Co Tyrone born journalist living in LA @PhelimMcAleer.
