The U.S. bishops are speaking out forcefully on politics—and finally being heard

When the Catholic Church speaks up about politics, who is it who decides what to say?

One of the great gifts of being Catholic is a robust sense of the church as a corporate person, not only in the legal sense but also as the Body of Christ subsisting through history in the church’s visible institution. It is that sense that lets Catholics say and mean “Mother Church” and to cultivate a deep and personal love for the church even when, as Flannery O’Connor wrote to a friend who had converted to Catholicism, it can seem that we “have to suffer as much from the church as for it.”

Sentences that begin with “the church says” or “the church teaches” feel natural to Catholics, as if St. Peter’s Basilica had a metaphorical tongue alongside the metaphorical arms of Bernini’s colonnade stretched out to embrace the world. But we all know, on reflection, that what the church teaches is mediated by documents, catecheses, homilies and a thousand other particular vehicles of communication. 

When the church says something on a contentious political issue, however, we are often tempted to move directly to defending (or arguing with) whatever it was “the church said” without thinking through how it actually got said. 

In the context of the church’s involvement in American politics, what “the church says” most often means is that a bishop, usually the chair of the relevant committee or subcommittee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has written a letter addressed to some set of public officials that has then been posted to the website of the conference and shared with journalists through the mechanism of a press release.

And then the headlines say “the church says X,” which may or may not be an accurate summary of what the bishop who signed the letter actually said, and the fragmented social media ecosystem of the 21st century goes to work encouraging us to be indignant or outraged or (if one’s capacity for patience and discernment is sufficient) perhaps even consoled or challenged.

Recognition that a bishop, or the bishops as a conference, are the ones who have said something about politics on behalf of the church, when it does occur, often appears as frustration. Why haven’t the bishops said something stronger? Or clearer? Or braver? Or about this other issue that they should have addressed instead?

In 11 years on the staff of America, I have seen many of these sorts of criticism; they are among the most frequent tropes in our comments and letters to the editor, and authors often submit pieces to us along these lines. In honesty, I should confess that I have written several pieces myself that could fairly be classified within the genre.

There are plenty of times when the criticism is warranted. But in many cases, the position taken by the bishops’ conference is quite solid, supported by deep staff expertise on policy topics and grounding in the church’s moral and social teaching tradition. The U.S. church’s positions on immigration and advocacy for the human dignity of migrants, to pick one current example, have been consistent, and further outside the comfort zone than either major political party is willing to go, for a very long time. 

Often enough, the honest answer to “why haven’t the bishops said” whatever someone thinks they should have said is that the bishops have said it—but they have not always gotten heard.

Meeting the Moment

Over the course of the last year and a half or so, prompted by the beginnings of both Leo XIV’s papacy and the second presidential term of Donald J. Trump, the bishops are using their voice in a new way, and they are being heard differently, and on a wider variety of topics, than was previously the case. Some of that change has been thrust upon the church and the bishops by the political choices of the Trump administration, especially with regard to mass deportation and the war in Iran. But the bishops’ ability to meet these moments effectively also reflects shifts in their approach that Pope Francis encouraged and Pope Leo is consolidating, alongside bolder tactical choices about how to get the church’s message heard.

There are three key moments over this time period that demonstrate how much has changed about how the bishops speak within the American political context: first, Pope Francis’ open letter to the U.S. bishops on mass deportation; second, the U.S. bishops’ special message on migration issued during their plenary assembly; and third, President Trump’s social media attack on Pope Leo.

Bishop William A. Wack of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Fla., prays the Stations of the Cross in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the second day of a “Lenten Experience in Montgomery and Selma” for bishops March 18-20, 2026. The pilgrimage was coordinated by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion of Racial Justice and Reconciliation and the Catholic Mobilizing Network. Credit: OSV News photo/courtesy USCCB Subcommittee for the Promotions of Racial Justice and Reconciliation.

In February 2025, within the first month of the second Trump administration, Francis sent an open letter to the U.S. bishops, saying, “I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations.”

While the pope’s letter was sent to the U.S. bishops, it also addressed the Catholic faithful more broadly, with Francis exhorting “all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of goodwill, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.” 

Because the letter was understood as responding to political events in the United States, it commanded enormous attention. In addition to addressing the mass deportation agenda to which the new Trump administration had committed itself, the letter also seemed to correct Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert. In an interview at the end of January, Mr. Vance had defended the administration’s policies as an expression of a “very Christian concept,” arguing that love for family and fellow citizens took priority over love for “the rest of the world.” In a social media interchange following the interview, he identified this concept as the “ordo amoris,” the proper ordering of love. 

Pope Francis’ letter to the bishops, while not mentioning Mr. Vance explicitly, said that “the true ordo amoris” could be understood through the parable of the good Samaritan and “meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, then president of the bishops’ conference, responded to Pope Francis on behalf of his brother bishops to thank him for his letter, and the tensions between the bishops and the administration over immigration enforcement continued to simmer.

As the letter was being prepared, then-Cardinal Robert Prevost was the head of the Dicastery for Bishops. While the Vatican has not described how the letter was drafted, it is reasonable to expect that as head of the dicastery, he would have at a minimum been aware of the preparations to send a letter to the nation’s bishops, in addition to potentially being consulted as an American who would understand the American political scene.

Though only speculation is possible regarding his involvement in preparing the letter, there is clear evidence that Cardinal Prevost followed news of the letter’s reception in the United States. After he was elected pope in the conclave, journalists realized that he had a personal social media account on which he had posted links to several articles in the U.S. Catholic press about the letter, including, as I was surprised to find out, one that I had written.

While the bishops’ most visible response would not come until November, during the time between Pope Francis’ letter and then, many of them found concrete ways to call public attention to the dignity of our migrant brothers and sisters. Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami led a motorcycle rally of Knights of Columbus to pray at the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center in Florida. Bishop Michael Pham of San Diego, himself an immigrant from Vietnam, joined with other people of faith to accompany people during their appearances in immigration court. Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso helped organize a march and vigil coinciding with the feast of St. Oscar Romero, in which a number of other bishops joined.

A Special Message

The second key moment of this recent shift happened in November 2025, when the U.S. bishops issued a “special message” on immigration with a near-unanimous vote (216 in favor, five abstentions, and three opposed) at their biannual meeting. The last time the bishops had used this highly public form of communication was in 2013 during the conflict between the conference and the Obama administration over the federal mandate for insurance coverage of contraception in the Affordable Care Act.

The bishops did not stop at just adopting the message and letting it be communicated by press release. They also recorded a video of many individual bishops reading the message aloud, which was distributed widely in clips via social media. This may not seem terribly significant, but compared to the more ordinary way they had responded to Francis’ letter and against the backdrop of the normal rhythm of how the bishops speak on political topics, both the highly visible formal mechanism for voting on the message and the subsequent efforts to make sure that it was heard are notable.

Speaking in one of his informal press encounters outside Castel Gandolfo a week later, Pope Leo called the special message a “very important statement” and encouraged “especially all Catholics, but people of good will, to listen carefully to what they said.”

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that in addition to endorsing the message once it was issued, Leo had been moving to help the bishops recognize the need for action and unity.

Bishop Jacques Fabre-Jeune of Charleston speaks at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Takoma Park, Md., on July 28, 2026, during a Mass of Solidarity with the Haitian community and those impacted by changes to U.S. immigration policy and Temporary Protected Status. Credit: OSV News photo/Mihoko Owada, Catholic Standard.

Around two months before the bishops’ message on immigration, Leo’s first major interview as pope, with the journalist Elise Ann Allen, was released. Asked about the church’s relationship with President Trump, Pope Leo indicated that he would be willing to engage with him, but he prefaced that openness by saying, “I think that it would be much more appropriate for the leadership in the church within the United States to engage him, quite seriously.”

A few weeks later, a controversy arose over plans to give an award to Richard Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, to recognize his advocacy for migrants, as some Catholics objected to his legislative record in support of abortion. Pope Leo commented on the matter by saying, “Someone who says ‘I am against abortion, but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

In early October, Pope Leo had received Bishop Seitz, who has often been at the forefront of the bishops’ response to immigration issues and who chairs the U.S.C.C.B.’s migration committee, in an audience at the Vatican. During the meeting, he presented the pope with a bundle of letters written by migrants.

Pope Leo told Bishop Seitz, “You stand with me, and I stand with you,” and said that “the church cannot remain silent” about the treatment of immigrants in the United States. Bishop Seitz told America in an interview following the audience that “Pope Leo said he would really like the [U.S.] bishops to speak together on this issue.” 

Just over a month later, they did.

Calls for Peace and an Attack on the Pope

The change in how U.S. bishops focus on making sure their interventions are heard has not been restricted solely to immigration issues. Earlier this year, the Trump administration’s increasingly volatile and bellicose foreign policy was met with a significant and sustained critique not only from the Vatican, whose interventions to call for peace and dialogue are both expected and largely ignored in the American political sphere, but also from a number of U.S. bishops.

In January, following the U.S. raid to arrest Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and President Trump’s repeated comments about seeking control of Greenland, Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph W. Tobin, C.Ss.R., of Newark, issued a joint statement citing Pope Leo’s warning about a “zeal for warmaking.” After Mr. Trump had refused to rule out the use of force to acquire control over Greenland, Archbishop Broglio of the archdiocese for the military, said in a radio interview that it would be “morally acceptable to disobey” a “morally questionable” order.

At the end of February, the United States and Israel attacked Iran. Several bishops spoke out clearly and quickly against the war, including Cardinals Cupich and McElroy, along with Archbishop Paul Coakley, who had been elected president of the bishops’ conference at the November meeting that adopted the special message on immigration. 

This criticism was sustained as the war continued. In April, speaking on an episode of “Face the Nation” scheduled to air on Easter Sunday, Archbishop Broglio echoed Pope Leo’s concerns about the war and said that it likely could not be justified under Catholic teaching. A few days later, Archbishop Coakley responded on behalf of the bishops within hours to President Trump’s threat that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not make a deal, saying that such a threat “cannot be morally justified,” and again aligned the bishops with Pope Leo’s critique of the war and call for peace.

Three days later, Pope Leo said, “God does not bless any conflict” and does not side with those who drop bombs. Two days after that, Cardinals Cupich, McElroy and Tobin spoke to “60 Minutes,” criticizing both the war in Iran and the administration’s mass deportation agenda.

In a joint interview with CBS’s Norah O’Donnell on “60 Minutes” April 12, 2026, Cardinals Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, N.J., Robert W. McElroy of Washingto, and Blase J. Cupich of Chicago, began by giving their impressions of the first U.S. pope, Pope Leo XIV. Credit: OSV News screenshot/Facebook.

A few hours after the interview aired, President Trump attacked Pope Leo in a social media post, igniting a controversy to which Leo responded in a press conference the next day as he began a papal trip to Africa, saying, “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel.” 

Shortly after that, Mr. Vance commented, in reference to Pope Leo’s opposition to the Iran war, that the pope needed to “be careful” in talking about theology, leading again to a near real-time response, as the chair of the bishops’ conference committee on doctrine issued a statement the next day defending Leo’s application of the church’s just war tradition.

What Happens Next?

Taken in isolation, any single instance of the various interventions by the bishops detailed above might be treated as business as usual. But as a sustained pattern, they mark a new willingness on the part of both individual bishops and bishops acting through the conference to take the megaphone and act to make sure the church’s teaching is heard clearly—and to respond directly to attempts from politicians to minimize or dismiss the church’s moral voice on the issues of immigration and war.

Before this recent shift, the public perception of the church’s political advocacy was that it was focused on abortion, which the bishops described in 2019, and again in 2023, as “our pre-eminent priority” in letters introducing their voting document, “Forming Conscience for Faithful Citizenship.”

To be sure, the church’s opposition to abortion has not changed, though the overturning of Roe v. Wade has scrambled how the issue shows up in electoral politics. Nor is the church’s advocacy on other issues a recent development. Even as they named abortion a pre-eminent priority, the bishops had also been speaking in those same introductory letters about many topics including immigration, racism, economic justice and working for peace. But those concerns generally did not make it into the headlines about what the bishops were saying, and the bishops generally did not have a working strategy to achieve wider recognition of their other political emphases.

The “Faithful Citizenship” document surfaces on the bishops’ agenda in four-year cycles connected to presidential election years. It was first issued in 2007, saw a limited revision in 2015, and was reissued in 2019 and 2023 with updated introductory letters. Over the years, there have been calls from some bishops, as well as other commentators, for a wholesale rewrite of the document. At the bishops’ June 2026 meeting, Archbishop Shelton Fabre of Louisville, Ky., who chairs the committee on domestic justice and human development, told the conference that after consultation about a potential revision, the plan was to continue using the present document “as an evergreen and foundational source document” while also focusing on new communications strategies.

One reading of this news could be that after a brief experiment with a different style of political engagement, the bishops are returning to the status quo ante. But I think that reading may be unnecessarily pessimistic. It is also premised on the failure to distinguish between what the bishops say, which has been and will continue to be consistent with the whole wide range of Catholic moral and social teaching, and what the bishops make a special effort to get heard above the noise.

Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, holds a bundle of letters to Pope Leo XIV from migrants in the United States before presenting them to the pope Oct. 8, 2025, during an audience at the Vatican. The note, in Spanish, says, “Pope Leo, please listen to the cry of those who are being marginalized.” Credit: CNS photo/courtesy Hope Border Institute.

The main action in the 2019 round of discussion about “Faithful Citizenship” was not about the text of the document, but about how the introductory letter should integrate Pope Francis’ teaching, particularly a paragraph of his exhortation “Gaudete et Exsultate” that criticized the view that “the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause,” and described the lives of the poor and vulnerable as “equally sacred” as the lives of the unborn.

At the end of his Africa trip, Pope Leo made a comment along similar lines, in response to a question about blessings for same-sex couples. He said, “We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue.” In a letter to the United States marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, the pope spoke about the protection of human life from conception to natural death, and then went on to say, “defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants.”

The bishops will have their regular November meeting this year shortly after the midterm elections. In 2027, if the historical pattern holds, that meeting will include discussion about the introduction to “Faithful Citizenship” for the 2028 presidential election cycle. I would argue that the practical impact of the church’s witness for the next election will have more to do with what issues the bishops work to call attention to, and the cues they take from Pope Leo’s prioritization of issues, than with whether or not they revise the text of the document itself.

Over the last year and a half, and especially in response to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda and the war with Iran, the bishops have shown both their willingness and their capacity to claim headlines for the full range of the church’s moral witness. Their leadership during this time deserves the gratitude and support of all of us in the church—and it has lessons to teach not only for the faithful but also for the bishops themselves about how they can bring the message of the Gospel to bear on political issues.

This essay is adapted from a presentation for the 2026 Catholic House Seminar series at the Chautauqua Institution.

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