It is over a decade since the BBC questioned whether the Church of England was still the ‘Tory Party at prayer’. In 2014, reckoning that most English Anglicans voted Conservative, it concluded that it was. It is doubtful if that is still the case, so obsessed with minority rights, reparations and institutional racism is the hierarchy of the Church of England.
Many Conservative voters will have fled the church. Only those convinced that same-sex marriage should be permitted and that Queen Anne’s Bounty should be invested in Africa and the Caribbean will soon be left.
Meantime, across the Atlantic, there is little doubt that the Roman Catholic Church has largely become the Democratic Party at prayer. My title is not original, first having been used in City Magazine in an article referring to prayer within the Democratic Party. The article was primarily referring, not to Christian prayer, but to Jewish prayer explaining the importance of the Jewish vote to the party.
However, based on recent visits over the past few years to the United States and my attendance there at Sunday Mass in various Roman Catholic churches and cathedrals, the Catholic Church appears to have largely Democratic congregations. Without doubt the message in Sunday sermons – especially during the previous and present Trump administrations – is anti-Trump, anti-Republican and expressly pro-migrant.
During the first Trump administration I attended a Saturday Vigil Mass in a downtown Catholic Church in New York. The sermon was quite explicit about the ‘threat’ facing America under the government. All eyes had to be on the way that immigrants were being treated, without distinction between legal and illegal migrants, or between those obeying the law and those breaking it. Migrant status clearly conferred a particular sanctity not ascribed to those ‘born and bred’ Americans who had lived their whole lives there, worked hard and paid their taxes.
Fast forward to Washington DC this month, to St Matthew’s Roman Catholic Cathedral where, on Sunday October 19th, the celebrant was Rev Msgr W. Ronald Jameson. I don’t recall much of what he said. But then I don’t need to as he quoted liberally from a homily delivered from that very same pulpit on Sunday September 29th 2025 by Cardinal Robert McElroy for World Day of Migrants and Refugees. And, as if to bolster his homily further, he cited Dilexi te (‘I have loved you’), the Apostolic Exhortation released by Pope Leo XIV on October 9th.
Cardinal McElroy’s homily was loaded with rhetoric and spiritual misdirection. He reckoned that Americans were seeing “an unprecedented assault upon millions of immigrant men and women and families in our midst”, making specific reference to the “undocumented” (a.k.a. illegal migrants) within the Archdiocese of Washington DC. Americans were witnessing “a comprehensive governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women who have through their presence in our nation been nurturing precisely the religious, cultural, communitarian and familial bonds that are most frayed and most valuable at this moment in our country’s history”.
I interpret the Cardinal’s words as code for ‘many of these people are Roman Catholics’ as if that sanctified breaking the law. Indeed, he confirms that later saying that DC “has witnessed many people of deep faith, integrity and compassion who have been swept up and deported in the crackdown which has been unleashed upon our nation”.
He does acknowledge that Catholic social teaching says, “every nation has the right to effectively control its own borders and provide security”. But he takes exception to the present US Government’s position that these people “broke a law when they entered”, which seems a perfectly reasonable position to adopt.
The US provides plenty of other opportunities for people to enter legally such as the Green Card Lottery under the Diversity Visa Programme. My Uber drivers from Dulles airport to DC this year and last – one Ethiopian and one Afghani – were both lottery winners along with 55,000 other people in the years they won.
According to Cardinal McElroy, the first obligation of the Church “is to embrace in a sustained, unwavering, prophetic and compassionate way the immigrants who are suffering so deeply because of the oppression they are facing”. And there was me thinking that it had something to do with saving souls.
Turning to Pope Leo, who is already proving to be something of a disappointment to traditional Catholics, readers of The New Conservative may be used to his antics such as blessing a lump of ice. He has already, like his predecessor, shown himself to be soft on migration.
However, contrary to the impression given by Msgr Jameson last week in DC, the latest encyclical is not focused on migrants. Easily 90% of Dilexi te is concerned with “the poor” and only three paragraphs (73, 64 and 75) of 121 paragraphs make explicit reference to migrants.
Of course, Leo draws Biblical analogies such as Abraham setting out without knowing what his destination was and Moses leading his people across the desert. But Abraham and Moses were called by God to set out. They were not lured by the bright lights of the United States. The Church’s tradition of “working for and with migrants” is referred to and nobody would deny the importance of this role.
But Leo fails to distinguish between legal and illegal migrants and, in common with Cardinal McElroy, seems to view all migrants through the rose-tinted spectacles of the Vatican saying that the challenge of migration must be responded to by “welcome, protect, promote and integrate”. I presume he means that the communities where migrants (legal and illegal) settle must attend to the integration. There seems to be a glaring lack of migrants, integrated or otherwise, within the walls of the Vatican.
Perhaps it is time the Catholic Church in America stopped trying to out-preach the Democratic National Committee and remembered that salvation was once its business model. Compassion for migrants is one thing; sanctifying illegal border-hopping is quite another.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
This piece was first published in The Daily Sceptic, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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(Photograph: Edgar Beltrán, The Pillar, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
I tend to switch off articles referencing the Catholic Church where the writer doesn’t get the name of the Church right – I won’t belabour the point, but it was the new Protestants, the Anglicans at the time of the Reformation who introduced the term “Roman Catholic” to peddle the heresy that there is another, wider Catholic Church of which the one loyal to the Pope is but a part. Don’t need a pope to be part of the Catholic Church. Hence we now have people describing themselves as Anglo-Catholics, for example, and plenty others who point to the Creed’s description of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, to justify identifying themselves as Catholic. But don’t take my word for it: the early documents, including the earliest letter from a Bishop (Ignatius of Antioch) speaks of “the Catholic Church”. And there is a very concise, historically accurate article entitled How Did the Catholic Church Get Her Name available on the Christian Order website. Google is (sometimes) your friend.
That said, I wholly agree with Roger Watson’s condemnation of the wrong-thinking within the Catholic Church, at the highest levels, about immigration and the poor. Christ told us that we would always have the poor with us; it is not a sin to be poor – on the contrary, it is a tried and tested aid to the spiritual life and thus our salvation.
Pope Leo is another Francis. In fact, he is, if anything, worse than Francis and he will be called to account for his scandalous pontificate in due course. In the meantime, more and more people, including even some bishops, are waking up, better late than never, as evidenced by the Act of Reparation held by a group of them in St Peter’s in Rome this past week – reparation for the shocking “LGBTQ+ pilgrimage” there recently.
Roger is correct to highlight the truth that Christ gave us the Church as the ark of salvation – that is the work of priests, bishops and popes; to teach us about the need to save our souls. Nobody gets into Heaven for being nice to immigrants or for helping the poor. Those who proclaim not to believe in God, do the “nice” thing. The Church is about teaching us how to avoid sin and damnation – and unless prelates and priests return to that essential work, there will be, I’m certain of it, a divine intervention in the not-so-distant future. For, as St Paul warns: “God will not be mocked” and right now, that is what is happening.
In other words, according to the (Roman, sorry Patricia) Catholic Church, to be an immigrant means you are virtually already a saint and should be treated as such. Whether these new saints are Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, Atheist etc. is a minor detail and their place in Heaven is assured (apparently).
On a more theological level, if practicing and regular (R) C churchgoers continue to attend whilst not actually believing the pronouncements of the Pope and his clerics, on Immigrants, Climate Change and other matters, how is this any different to those who believe they are Catholics but not within the confines of the (R) Catholic Church (such as Anglo-Catholics and Anglicans)?
Nathaniel,
That is an excellent, highly intelligent question.
What most people do not understand – including too many, if not most Catholics today – is that no pope can expect, let alone demand, obedience to his political or cultural pronouncements. He has absolutely no authority to pronounce, in the name of Christ, on such issues. That is an aberration, an abuse even, of his office. To tell us that we must examine ourselves for sins against the environment is beyond ridiculous. Like Francis, Leo is already bringing himself (and his office) into disrepute. He is misrepresenting the Church and papal authority. My considered opinion about this new pope is that he is about as Catholic as Sadiq Khan.
There are limits to the office and authority of the papacy. In fact, papal authority is very limited indeed.
The reason we have popes, is so that the deposit – the basic – Christian Faith is safeguarded and passed on intact. That is what the popes can preach about – nothing else. If they want to share their thoughts on politics or culture then that is all they are sharing – their personal thoughts which we can take or leave. No Catholic is obliged to accept any pope’s views on anything. We are only obliged to adhere to the traditional Catholic, i.e. Christian, Faith. If we don’t accept that, then, in effect, we are placing themselves outside of the Church. Such Catholics are really only different from the groups you mention by virtue of the fact that they can repent and return to the Sacraments in due course. In the meantime, they should, at the very least, identify themselves as lapsed Catholics, if not apostates.
In the writings of the Fathers of the Church (the earliest “experts” so to speak) we find that limited papal authority spelt out, notably by St Vincent de Lerins, very helpful to us in these confused times. He famously answered the question of what Christians should do if it appears that the entire hierarchy has gone astray and is not teaching the truths of the Faith. Then, he said, you must “cling to antiquity” – that is, to Tradition: in short, we must believe what all Christians have always believed, everywhere/at all times.
Some will reply that this is not accurate since we have relatively recent dogmas being pronounced such as the Assumption of Our Lady – where is that, for example, in Scripture? Well, in Catholic Theology, Scripture and Tradition hold equal weight; not everything has been revealed through Scripture, as the Bible itself admits.
And, although the dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady was only formally defined in 1950 (Munificentissimus Deus (The Most Bountiful God), the teaching itself was believed by all Christians from the earliest days and there is nothing in Scripture to contradict it. There were no relics of Our Lady’s body, no answer to the question “What happened to her body?” and so the first Christians, for over a thousand years, believed that she had been particularly honoured in having her body and soul assumed into Heaven.
I hope this clarifies things a bit for you Nathaniel – if not, say the word and I will try again. I can be (as you’ve probably worked out by now) extremely trying!
Nay, nay, and thrice nay, Patricia! You are definitely not trying!! It’s actually refreshing to come across someone who understands the Catholic Church!!
tenacioussweets88de5cf6c5
Thank you! You’ve made my day – I’m more used to being told I’m more Protestant than Martin Luther!
Speaking as someone who was AC (Anglo-Catholic) and now (R) C I can look at things from two directions. ACs mistakenly believe that they have the Apostolic Succession, something which was trashed by Pope Leo XIII in Apostolicae Curae (Anglican orders are utterly null and void), so do they also believe that their sacraments are valid, which (apart from Baptism) they’re not. I went along with this for far too many years until it was just impossible to continue in the CofE. Classical Evangelicals in the CofE are splitting away from the mainstream because of the women bishops and the threat of same sex marriage, but the ACs are still insisting that they can work alongside women priests and bishops. This is completely nonsensical as can be seen in the London diocese where ACs have their own male bishop, but always invite the diocesan bishop (Dame Sarah Mullally) to sit in choir. When challenged by the Protestant nature of the CofE (remember the King’s Coronation Oath) they say ” ah yes, but we’re Catholic and Reformed” as if that makes it all okay. If the ACs had any honesty/morality they would be on the next ferry across the Tiber, but the lure of a CofE salary and generous pension negates any sort of integrity.
Now regarding the pronouncements of the Pope there is a difference between upholding the authentic teaching of the Church and the Pope’s persoal thoughts, so if the Pope says that Transubstantiation is to be believed by all faithful Catholics that’s what should be believed because it is part of the Deposit of Faith. However, if the Pope says we need to do something about immigration, or climate change, or any other modern fad, they are his personal thoughts and can be dismissed by the Faithful if they don’t agree. Unfortunately as popes have become superstars with the coming of modern forms of communication every utterance by His Holiness takes on the mantle of Papal Infallibility, something which St John Henry Newman (about to become a Doctor of the Church) had doubts about. Pope Bergoglio brought the Popesplainers out of their closets because they couldn’t believe that he was a material heretic, and also changed doctrine unilaterally. I go to a very traditional Catholic church in York and even there when I suggested that Bergoglio was bordering on heresy I was almost stoned to death on the church steps for saying that the Pope was wrong. “He’s the Pope”, they cried, “so he’s infallible!”. Unfortunately Catholics these days don’t understand what Papal Infallibility really means. In fact many of them don’t understand much about Catholicism!
No Pope since John XXIII has demonstrated belief or acceptance of Leo XIII’s assertion of the invalidity of Anglican Orders or they would not meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury (or other Anglican prelates) as these accordingly would be merely members of the public masquerading as ordained Priests (and surely would also not attend services on Anglican premises). Both CofE and (R) C are so full of contradictions they both need to go back to basics, something that their congregations might actually respect.
Nathaniel,
You are so right – what you have described in your accurate comment is a major aspect of the ongoing crisis in the Catholic Church, a key piece of evidence that the hierarchy has gone astray. The nature of the current crisis in the Church is, uniquely, a crisis in the priesthood.
It’s also exactly the same in the Anglican Church, if the 39 Articles, KJB and BCP were solely and strictly adhered to, then (R) C and CofE could simply agree to differ and stop pretending that there is sufficient common ground to bother with ecumenism. It’s of course even more disingenuous, and insane, that both are now also playing the ‘we’re all nice and equally valid’ game with Islam, Judaism etc.
The game will be up, and the Pope exposed as a fake Catholic and cynic, if/when he meets the Mullally woman and doesn’t say anything about even her claims to Priesthood being anathema to Catholicism. And if she meets the Pope then her Anglican credentials are similarly trashed.
Perhaps it requires an Atheist to bang these muddled mitred heads together!
tenacioussweets88de5cf6c5,
Now it’s my turn to say how refreshing it is to meet another Catholic who can see right through the disastrous crisis in the Church. It is especially interesting that you are a convert – you may know that both UK well-known converts, the Welshman, Michael Davies and the Scotsman (former Communist) Hamish Fraser, were also among the minority to see what was going on in the early days of this dramatic time of emergency in the Church. Michael Davies’ writings on the Second Vatican Council and the New Mass are treasure troves.
And you are spot on to identify the fact that many (I’d say most) Catholics don’t understand much about the Faith at all; few understand, for example, that we must adhere to the infallibly defined teachings of the Church – not, as you indicate, every whim of any current pontiff. Your mention of the way St John Henry Cardinal Newman opposed the definition of papal infallibility when it was up for debate, is a great example, but once it was defined, he accepted the fact in the Catholic spirit: “Rome has spoken; the cause is finished” (Latin ” Roma locuta; causa finita est”).
This sums up the only possible attitude open to Catholics – other than place themselves outside of the Church. It is in the authoritative definitions of the popes that we can be certain that this or that teaching is authentically from God. Contrast, for example, the closing words of the Apostolic Constitution on the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven, with the weak exhortations of modernist popes to care for the “environment” (instead of clear reminders that God created the world – China created everything else – smiley face!)
Here’s an example of true papal authority in action –
From the conclusion of Munificentissimus Deus (on the Assumption of Our Lady)…
“It is forbidden to any man to change this, our declaration, pronouncement, and definition or, by rash attempt, to oppose and counter it. If any man should presume to make such an attempt, let him know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.”
In passing, I’ll mention a useful book published by the Fatima Center in Canada, entitled Crucial Truths To Save Your Soul by Fr Nicholas Gruner, available to read in pdf at the fatima.org website, although it’s quite inexpensive to purchase a hard copy. I’ve long valued my copy despite Fr Gruner’s (RIP) insistence on using the Reformation (RC) name for the Church. I’ve met him, he was saintly, so I can’t believe he did that. In any event, if I ever get elected pope (who knows!) I’ll demand that the banner headlines on every diocesan website with RC emblazoned be removed and all Catholics who continue to use the term, be put on bread and water to fast throughout Lent in reparation. Maybe allow a bar of chocolate in Eastertide!
I’ll think about it!
I had meant to note, in my original comment, that one of the most shocking things about the way churchmen are preaching nonsense about climate change and immigration, is the way they do not distinguish between legal and illegal migrants. In effect, these churchmen are encouraging criminal activity.
And be prepared for the usual baloney in Christmas sermons/homilies portraying the Holy Family as refugees – and all because they had to take the long way round, as we say in not-so-sunny Scotland, to get home. Their arrival home was delayed because they had been warned that Herod was seeking to kill the child, and so they went home by a different route. Hardly “refugees”.