Bulwark Takes - How MAGA is Splitting The Catholic Church | WTF 2.0

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

The Pillar's Ed Condon joins JVL to talk about the Trump administration's confrontation(s) with the Catholics.

Catholic Church is kind of important to world affairs. You may or may not have noticed that over the course of the last 2,000 years. And the Catholic Church is going to become increasingly important to American politics, I think, in ways which nobody who is Catholic would actually prefer. But here we are. And let's just start with J.D. Vance, who's been Catholic for five minutes, who a couple of weeks ago took after the U.S. CCB, the position was that Catholics are pro-illegal immigrant because they're all getting rich off of serving immigrants? its bottom line by taking federal grant money to resettle what he called illegal immigrants of course what they're actually resettling is vetted refugees but you know potato potato i guess but yeah he basically said that the church is a position on immigration the catholic bishops

who've always been very much in favor of both comprehensive immigration reform and you know actually clothing the naked feeding the hungry helping people who are on the street, people who have nowhere to go, settle in, especially if they're refugees. He said that that's basically a money-making concern for them, which, you know, was kind of ironic because, you know, a lot, this is a talking point that you see a lot. I remember seeing this on something called Fox and Friends, which I'd never seen before, like five years ago when I first moved back to the States. And I couldn't quite believe that people were shocked that the Catholic church through Catholic charities was, you know, working with refugees. But apparently that's a hot topic for some people. Um, I mean, it's true.

The, the USCCB farm takes in a lot of federal grant money and then farms it out to local Catholic charities. I think they've done something like $800 million in the last 10 years, more or less. So it is, it is a lot of money, but to accuse them of sort of patting their bottom line and saying, well, there's a profit center for them, which is what you hear most often. The bishops love immigration

because it's a profit center for them. It's not actually. It's a loss-making concern. The amount of money that Catholic charities get from federal grants rises and falls a great deal depending on who's in the White House. So in 2020, for example, when Trump was last in, they got $48 million. And in 2023,

they had $130 million come in in that year, federal grant money. So it gives you an idea of like, you know, it really doubles, triples even depending on who's in the White House. But every single year, they're spending more than they're taking in but this is actually a loss center for the usccb they're taking in tens of millions of dollars and then they're spending millions of their own money on top of that just to do work with refugees and they're getting kicked in the shins for this by by the vice president which is kind of surprising uh i would also say that anybody who has ever spent five minutes doing any sort of charity work in or around the Catholic Church will instantly understand that ain't nobody getting rich. Yeah. initiative that any Catholic church anywhere in America does is done on a

shoestring and it's almost entirely volunteers. And you're like working out of some basement that doesn't have heat. And, uh, it's the idea that anyway, this is like the time of thing I might've expected a, like a Southern Baptist from mega church to say about Catholics, but instead it was JD Vance who himself is a very devout Catholic. So what happened from that? I mean, was there any pushback?

Did the bishops say? Yeah, there's been a lot of pushback. The bishops put out a statement that said, you know, in their politest way, because, you know, they have to be professionals about these things, objecting in the strongest possible terms and pointing to inconvenient facts like you know yeah we took in 130 million in federal money to deal with refugees and help resettle them through catholic charities last year or in 2023 uh we spent 134 million on it though so you know cost us 4 million

on the deal i don't know that we can call us padding our bottom line there um but it actually the pushback got a little bigger. Last week, Pope Francis wrote a letter about this. Pope Tamburins. Yeah. Pope Francis. It takes a lot to get the pope, any pope, to make a direct intervention in international affairs generally, when there isn't actually a war going on, but to, you know, have the Pope write a letter about what's going on coming out of the White House was kind of

shocking, kind of a big deal. I can't think, I can't remember a time when this has ever happened apart from maybe on the eve of the Iraq war with JP2, John Paul II. So that was kind of a big deal. And Pope Francis not only wrote a letter about what he called the, you know, the major catastrophe, the, you know, the major catastrophe, the, you know, the horrible situation going on with the Trump administration's program of mass deportation, warning about human rights, human dignity, due process, all the stuff you'd expect the Pope to name check. But then he kind of poked a finger in J.D. Vance's chest personally, because along the way in all of the back and forth about this, J.D. Vance ended up in a Twitter fight with a guy called Rory Stewart, who used to be a member of parliament in Britain.

J.D. Vance, as part of this Twitter exchange with him, said, it's called the Order of Morris. Google it. I think Rory had basically questioned J.D. Vance's Christian bona fides by not wanting to give a bunch of money to help refugees and stuff. He said, it's called the order of Morris, Google it. And Pope Francis gave this like two paragraph long. It was like, by the way, just to clarify, the order of Morris does not mean that you have license to love some people less than others.

Like the principle that, you know, you have to, you have to help and love everyone. That's like, that's a Christian principle. If you really want to meditate on something about who you need, who's your neighbor,

who you need to love. There's this thing called the parable of the Good Samaritan. Look it up. And, you know, it's weird enough to have the pope wading into domestic political affairs of any country. But to have the pope kind of give a hot take on a Twitter fight with the vice president. That was a new one for me. I've not seen that one before. I just want to clarify for people here because I saw somebody say this in the comments.

And you mentioned this, they're Catholic charities, Catholic churches working with refugees. It is the stated, the stated protocol of the Trump administration is to view even well-documented refugees who are here according to law as illegal immigrants. And so their, their view is that anybody who came in is here illegally. And so this is why, this is what's going on here. So that, that's the first, so the next step is the church getting kneecapped as part of the USAID, feeding into the wood chipper. Talk to me a little bit about that. And so USAID is a giant, giant organization.

And, you know, it does a lot of its work on its own, but a lot of its work actually is subcontracted. That's right. To other organizations, including Catholic organizations. So talk to me about what's going on with that for the Catholics. Well, so I think I said it earlier, like something close to 800 million over the last 10 years is what the U.S. Bishops Conference, the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference, sort of broadly taken in from federal funding from one source or like USAID

and stuff like that. But they don't, I mean, they don't spend the money. They don't run the programs themselves. They're kind of a clearing house and they farm it out to Catholic charities, capital C, capital C, which is a sort of affiliated network of localized outreach programs and charities that administer the funds at a local level. And what they have all found is that it's not just that future funding has been cut off, agreed future funding has been cut off, but invoices they've been presenting for the last six weeks for previously agreed and executed work and projects are just not being met. Like they're not paying their bills. Yeah, they're just walking away from the check on work already done. And so we're seeing tons of layoffs.

We've seen the USCCB laid off, I think, 50 people, which, you know, the USCCB is not a big organization. You know, 50 people is a big part of its workforce. But it's even worse on the ground, like Catholic Charities of Houston, which does, as you would imagine, a lot of work with people who are living in extreme poverty and recent migrants, refugees, you know, working with families, trying to keep families together, resell people, keep them off the street, all the sorts of things that you want to do to stop people from, you know, depending on your level of paranoia about people who've entered the country, whether you're stopping people from living on the street and being exploited or eating your pets, if that's the sort of thing that you're concerned is going to happen. You would think that you'd want this sort of stuff to happen. And so Catholic Charities of Houston had to lay off 120 people two weeks ago. Because they said, it's not just that we can't keep our current rate of programs going, they're not paying the check on what we've already done.

Like, we just, we can't pay our bills. That's what's happening. So we've laid out... So they're leaving them in arrears, basically, right? Yeah, absolutely. Which is,

if I could just say, this is the Trump MO throughout his entire business career, which is to, you know, you get people to provide a service, and then you have them over the barrel when it comes to pay. So, you know, you get people to provide a service, and then you have them over the barrel when it comes to pay. So, you know, you renegotiate.

What's the Catholic Church going to do? File a lawsuit against the federal government and get them to pay? And maybe three years from now, that suit winds its way through the courts. I don't know, man. Is this something that people in in Catholic world are concerned about? Because my sense, and maybe I'm wrong, and this is largely my own experience, is that a large portion of the Catholic Church has been mogified. And I don't think it's exactly true that Catholics now vote the way Protestant evangelicals do, but it feels as though they are trending in that direction after basically being split.

I mean, typically, for the last 30 years or so, the Catholic vote has split basically the way the popular vote has split. Well, you know, Catholics sort of look like the rest of America. My sense is that that has, that has, that has been less true over the last couple of elections. I don't know that it's necessarily less true. I mean, my grand unified theory on Catholic elections has been,

there's no such thing as the Catholic vote as a block you can win. And you often hear that because it's demographically big enough that There are enough numbers of people who are Catholic in the country that if you can win the Catholic vote, you can win. But the idea of a block vote that is the Catholic vote, I don't think exists or has existed probably for at least 60 years, if not longer. But what you do tend to get with the quote unquote Catholic vote is it's an incredibly good cross section of the country. Like it's a great snapshot of voter trends generally. But you are seeing the demographics of Catholics in America changing a little bit along with the rest of the country. And it's ahead of the curve on a lot of it. So there are a lot more Hispanic Catholics than there are Hispanic Americans, generally speaking. So you see trends that way, distorting the Catholic vote versus the general vote, I think a little faster and a little more. But I think you say a large part of the

Catholic Church in America has been magnified. I don't know if it's a large part, but it is a part. Because like I was saying, you have, I think in the church in the United States, you have a lot of Catholic Republicans, you have a lot of Catholic Democrats. And it's not entirely clear to me whether they see themselves as Catholic first or Republicans first or Catholics first or Democrats first. And I don't think it's out of line with how a lot of people practice Christianity in this country anymore. I mean, what is for sure true, and we know this from poll after poll after poll from every different kind of outlet is pretty much any politically engaged Catholic in this country, not all of them by any stretch of the imagination, but most of them

will disagree with or outright dissent from Catholic church teaching on one or two big issues, usually in line with their party affiliation, you know, trying to find a really active Catholic Republican who is, you know, I'm pro-life 100 absolutely down take it no problem but ask them you know well okay so you post the death penalty which the catholic church is and it's like well okay not that that's a matter of prudential judgment right i know the pope said i know the pope said we should be against it but you know it's a matter of potential ditto you find you know really energized catholic democrats you always have but then you say okay well what about abortion i said, you know,

the church is just wrong on that one. So this idea of American Catholics becoming more magnified, it is a trend. It's definitely a trend, but I think it's a trend that you're just seeing as the Republican party gets magnified. And that's an excellent country. Yeah. So,

so what's going to happen here though? Because I mean, the stump is bringing is bringing the federal government into direct conflict with the church and not conflict in the way that, like... So the fight over abortion would be direct conflict, except that that is of an issue that is basically external to the church.

I don't mean external philosophically, but I mean, like, actually literally. Like, it is, you know... Whereas external philosophically, but I mean actually literally. Whereas this stuff is the federal government coming to take funding away from the Catholic church and to physically touch the church.

Is that going to be a problem that the church is going to have to grapple with, or will they become less likely to criticize because they feel like they've got to tread lightly in order to well you know gotta gotta make things work where we can right because that no i don't think they're going to tread lightly on this one the bishops are the bishops have been mad as hell i mean you can't find a catholic bishop in this country who is i don't want to say pro trump i don't think he is pro trump in any meaningful sense of the word but but he's definitely the kind of person, like, we work with whoever's in power. We take a positive out of it.

Which you have to. Which you have to. You know, the most pragmatic, the most happy to just say, listen, maybe we can find some stuff and get along with the New York's Cardinal Timothy Dole. Like, he did the invocation at the inauguration. He was the one who came out really swinging when J.D. Vance accused the bishops of, you know, basically making a profit off of their work with migrants and refugees. So I don't think they're going to tread softly on this. But I think for a lot of Catholics and a lot of, I think, American voters more generally, they're going to discover that how much government money is being administered on things like refugee resettlement, dealing with, you know, migrants, dealing with stuff at the border by local charities and actually have a conversation about, you know, we didn't realize there was all of this going on. There's a lot of work that we don't see being done because we just assume it's all being done by someone else and it doesn't touch the public square or its website. It's actually happening in our neighborhood. Yeah, it's actually happening

in our neighborhood and it really is important. And I think for a lot of, you do see this sort of strain of either MAGA or MAGA curious or Trump positive American Catholics saying, well, good, we don't want the church recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars of government funds to resettle refugees or anything else. We should be out of the business of government. We don't need government money. The church should be the church. The state should be the state. And why are we enmeshed with all of this? Which, okay, it's a point of view. But again, you ask those people some probing questions. You say, all right, well, fine. What about school vouchers for Catholic schools?

You want to turn that money away too? What about if tax dollars were going to fund the crisis? Well, those are really our dollars anyway. So, yeah. Or what if we took money away from Planned Parenthood and gave it to crisis pregnancy centers? Would you be, you know, should we turn that away? Because the government should, we shouldn't be taking government money with the church? I think people tend to have a lot of sort of a well-earned double thing going on. Any government money that goes on something I don't like is bad and we should be out of the game.

But any government money that's for something I like, well, that's ours by right. I think people are going to have to get over that cognitive dissonance pretty quickly here. So to, uh, okay. So we have the, the actual, I don't know if you remember this, but once upon a time, I remember it being a big deal that the Obama administration sued the little sisters of the poor. Yeah. And can you believe this? Well, in Texas, we have the governor of Texas suing Catholic charities. I don't think Republicans are too worried about that for some reason. Can you tell me a little bit about what's going on in Texas? Well, Texas is really a microcosm of the fight over Catholic charities and government funding that's been going on all over the country. But Texas is quite literally on the front line here.

You know, the narrative against Catholic charities in Texas goes, well, what they're doing is they're basically encouraging or facilitating people coming over the border illegally, because they're providing a safety net, they're getting people settled. You know, at the extreme end, you hear people say, well, Catholic Charities is basically engaged in human trafficking. There's no functional difference between people feeding hungry people on the street and coyotes running people across the border that it's all one and the same. And, you know, I, I find that kind of hard to believe you have had other instances where Texas has been at loggerheads either with Catholic charities or even diocese, Catholic diocese down there because of, for example, church property on the border and say, well, no, you're not going to put a fence and a wall across our land,

you know, for the purposes of this, not that we want it to be, you know, a funnel for people to cross the border illegally, but you know, we've got a church on the other side of that where you want to put the fence. I'm trying to remember what diocese it was. I think it was the diocese of Brownsville, but there, there really was a plan to, we're going to build a big, beautiful wall right across from church land. And on the wrong side of the wall is going to be a chapel that belongs to this Texas Catholic diocese. It, we would rather not have that. Thank you. We, we have a right of access to our own chapel, please. So, I mean, Texas is a mess in the sense of, you know, all of these lawsuits and all of these arguments have been going on for a long time.

So here's a, here's a large question. Um, what people aren't Catholic may not realize is that, I mean, the Catholic church is universal and Catholic, but also every, every church is a little bit distinct. Like the American Catholic church is not the German Catholic church. Um, are, are we going to wind up seeing what has been historically the Catholic Church in America changing? Because that's one of my fears. We've seen a lot of institutions that were once one way in America changing in sort of fundamental ways over the last 10 years or so. Is that going to happen to the Catholic Church too? Well, the Catholic Church in America is changing fundamentally for issues totally unrelated to this right now. You know, 60 years ago, there was a school in every parish. There was, you know, Catholic charities, you know, in every diocese. There was the church was a huge institutional footprint socially.

You know, Catholic schools, Catholic universities, Catholic sports programs for kids. You know, it was it was a giant institution. It was a parallel society, quite self-conscious. You You know, it was a giant institution. It was a parallel society, quite self-conscious. You could live your life in a Catholic ghetto. And that was the whole, and it was built for that purpose. It was built for the situation of the early 20th century, even mid-20th century. They were doing this when JFK was running.

That, you know, you'd have people like the KKK and the Freemasons running joint ticket candidates to ban Catholic schools from being able to open in a state, stuff like that. So the church focused itself on building basically a parallel American institutional framework for Catholics when they were excluded from other public institutions. But that's all collapsing right now. I mean, the Catholic church is seeing the same drop in attendance that religious affiliation is seeing in the United States generally. The money is drying up. You've had a lot of dioceses going into bankruptcy because of lawsuits over stuff like child abuse. So that whole footprint is changing no matter what.

Schools have been closing. Parishes are getting closed and merged. The entire institutional way the church in the United States operates is in flux right now. And nobody has a real clear vision for what American Catholicism 2.0 looks like, either at the 30,000 foot level or at your local parish level. So that conversation is all going on. Feed into it the fact that the church is at once becoming more Hispanic and also a lot more political and also a little bit more aga and having very confused, not to say violently opposed, and conflicted views on things like immigration. Yeah, it's all to play for. That's all very bad.

I kind of liked our little Catholic kiddos. I liked it the way it was. I feel like it wasn't perfect. You know, I feel like it was it was one perfect. Yeah, it was nice. Well, we had, you know, boy, howdy. I mean, so where do we go from here? This is one of the things that I have. You know, we have a mutual friend, Father Harrison.

Hi, Father Harrison. And this is he's our friend. Father Harrison is a priest in Canada. And he has this great perspective because he's not American. And so, but he, you know, pays attention to our world. And I remember he was the first person who said to me, yeah, you guys, like, you know, your American Catholicism is as much American as it is Catholicism. And that seems to be coming more so. Yeah, I don't know that that makes America an outlier, though.

No? Sure. Okay. I don't know that you could... Irish Catholicism is as much Irish as it is Catholic. So is Italian Catholicism. So is Mexican Catholicism, at least from my experience of it.

You know, the nice word for that in Catholic speak is enculturation. It's just whether we like the culture we're seeing reflected in our local church at any given moment. And, you know, that's kind of viewpoint specific, I guess. Yeah. All right. Well, last question on this then before we get to the hot watch talk. Prop nationalism. And to me, it feels like Christian nationalism is simply a flavor of nationalism, not a flavor of Christianity. It certainly feels that way to me whenever I see.

Well, whenever I see Christian nationalism discussed right now, that's certainly the impression I get. I mean, Catholic teaching recognizes nations and nation states and the idea of peoples that are coherent and recognizable in and of themselves, rooted in places as, you know, something that sort of exists as part of the natural order. So it's not to say that, you know, there's a misrepresentation of Catholic teaching that says like, oh, countries are bad and secondary or arbitrary, and they don't have to exist at all. Like, no, it's not what the church teaches. You know, John Paul II was kind of big on the idea of peoples and places and nations and their dignity and how we won the Cold War. But yeah, you're seeing a very, very different presentation and flavor of it now that basically

says, it's the same thing if, you know, a Catholic, the church would say, should consider himself a Catholic first. You wouldn't be a Democrat who's, you know, slightly inflected by their Catholicism or Republican who's slightly inflected by their Catholicism. You're a Catholic who can lean Republican or Democrat without coloring outside the lines of the faith. And I think the same thing's happening

with Christian nationalism. It's like you're seeing the idea of, well, we're nationalists, but we like the sort of Christian flavor and vocab you can put on it. You know, the thing that drove me absolutely crazy last week, and I mean, there's stuff to drive you crazy every week these days, I suppose, was when J.D. Vance gave his speech in Munich at the security conference. And, you know, basically trashed the entire European political establishment for walking away from free speech and from, you know, taking seriously their own elections and stuff like that. A lot of which I have to say, I agreed with. I lived in Europe for a very, very long time. I worked in European politics for almost 10 years. So I actually jived with a lot of

what he was saying. I don't know that at a security conference, what was supposed to be talking about Ukraine and Russia was necessarily the time and place for that, but it was fine. But at the end, he rounded it off with this call to say you know well as john second said be not afraid and you people need to trust your you know you need to trust your own voters and you need to you know you need to accept the voice of the people even if it's electing parties you don't agree with and he was pretty clearly talking about the afd in germany i just kind of like i okay i was nodding along like yeah the uk is having a crisis of free speech right now yeah the cancellation of the entire election in romania that was that was pretty iffy stuff but wait a minute you're if you think john paul the

second would have been like yeah be not afraid i didn't mean jesus christ i meant of the revanchist nationalist party in germany you know the only know, the only way to be truly, truly liberal is to support the Nazis. And if you if you're not on board with the Nazis, then I'm sorry, you're betraying liberalism. That's great. You know, I lied. Last thing. Last thing. Pope Francis, Pope Tambourines. This is you have to be a Catholic of a certain age to understand that joke. I don't really want to explain myself, but if you went to any masses in the early 1980s, you're picking up what I'm laying down. What? I mean, he's an old fellow. 88.

Pope Francis, is he going to be called home at some point? I mean, I assume at some point. What does the next pope look like? What does that look like coming up in the next year? If you thought the last U.S. election was a mess, wait till we get a conclave, man. No, Pope Francis is... Are we getting a MAGA pope? No, there's no chance of that. But we could get something very interesting. You just never know what you might get. No, francis has been in the hospital for four days now coming on five

he's got a respiratory tract infection which i mean the usual way they talk about the pope's health not just this pope any pope's health is everything is absolutely fine the pope is in great health the pope is having a routine physical the pope's going heliskiing you know tomorrow the pope has a slight cold the pope actually died two weeks ago it's usually how they roll this stuff they don't talk bad things like with pope francis and again he's got a lot of health problems he is 88 all of that is true i think it was two years ago now he was actually having a heart attack like he was in the back of an ambulance going from the vatican to a roman hospital having all the symptoms of a heart attack and the vatican put out a statement saying no it's just routine it's a

pre-scheduled doctor's appointment he's fine and he's in the back of an ambulance having a heart attack that's how guarded they are it's like the public bureau during the the old soviet days stalin is the chairman is fine absolutely fine in this case, they've actually said, well, okay, his prognosis is fair. And it's a very complicated situation. And, you know, they're coming as close as they can to say, without saying out loud, maybe the Pope is dying. We don't know. But he's, these are going to get more frequent and the health complaints are going to get more serious. You know, we're the guy's 88. He's been pope for more than 10 years. We're definitely not in the front half of this pontificate. When the next conclave happens, honestly, nobody has a clue what is going to happen. And, you know, you'll get your list of different places will give you a listicle. Here are the top three conservatives and here are the top three liberals.

And here's the wildcard. Nobody has a clue who's going to be in the running really, because what's different about the College of Cardinals that elects the Pope now that wasn't true 10 years ago when Pope Francis was elected was they don't really know each other. Pope Francis has made a real effort to pick wildcard guys and make them cardinals from different parts of the world that don't normally get cardinals, little out-of-the the way diocese that people have never heard of and don't know where they are on a map and he doesn't bring them to rome anymore with any kind of frequency they used to go to rome twice a year to have meetings and get to know each other so you know even though they live all over the world they have some idea of who everybody is he hasn't been doing

that either so it's going to be a group of relative strangers who in large part have never heard of each other who's going to get locked in a room and told okay figure it out who's going to be a group of relative strangers who in large part have never heard of each other, who are just going to get locked in a room and told, OK, figure it out. Who's going to be the pope? That's going to be wild. Well, that's why we have the Holy Spirit. A little more Catholic humor for you guys. Hey, guys, go follow the pillar on Substack. These Ed and his co-founder, J.D. Flynn, also my good friend, although not as good a friend as Ed, all they do is break all of the news that exists in the Catholic world. They do it absolutely without fear or favor. There is no Baghdad Bob happening at the pillar. If you want to understand the Catholic Church in America or globally

you should be reading them it's absolutely essential and if you can you should pay and support their work do that for me do me a solid go sign up and subscribe to the pillar Ed thank you my friend

I appreciate it real quick what are you wearing what's on the wrist today Tudor Black Bay GMT Ed, thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. Real quick, what are you wearing? What's on the wrist? Today, Tudor Black Bay GMT. I love it. Presented from a mutual friend of ours. I love it. Christmas two years ago.

And, yeah. Beautiful. Beautiful. All right, guys, thank you. We will do this again next Tuesday. I don't even know if I know who the guest is yet. But it'll be good. Ed, thank you. I appreciate it, buddy. I will talk to you over text in a couple minutes. Bye, guys. Thanks, buddy.