May 1st 2020

By Bill Berkowitz

On April 25, Cardinals Timothy Dolan of New York and Sean O'Malley of Boston, joined by Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, currently also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Michael Barber of Oakland, California, chairman of the bishops' Committee on Catholic Education, along with others, participated in Trump's phone version of a campaign rally. During the call, the Catholic News Service reported “Trump said he would continue to support issues vital to the Catholic Church, especially abortion, religious freedom and school choice”.

Trump referred to his reelection campaign stating that the "situation coming up on Nov. 3, the likes of which have never been more important for the church." He warned that if defeated, "you're going to have a very different Catholic Church."

In a subsequent appearance on the Fox News "Fox and Friends" show, Cardinal Dolan said "I'm in admiration of his [Trump’s] leadership." "I really salute his leadership. I salute the leadership here, too, of our governor and our mayor and everybody has really come through. But the president has seemed particularly sensitive to the, to what shall I say, the feelings of the religious community," he added.

A National Catholic Reporter Editorial characterized the April 25th phone call and subsequent events as “cringe worthy,” stating, “The capitulation is complete.” The Editorial went on to say that the actions of Dolan and others “has inextricably linked the Catholic Church in the United States to the Republican Party and, particularly, President Donald Trump.”

“Certainly, it is without precedent that the leadership would cozy up so cravenly to a president whose most consistent attribute is an uncontrollable propensity for lying, continuously and about everything. He is dangerously disconnected from reality and is defined by characteristics that normally are condemned from pulpits,” stated the Editorial. 

In 2016, Donald Trump squeaked out a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton among Catholic voters. Among white male Catholic voters, Trump overwhelmed Clinton by a 60 to 37 margin. In recent weeks, even as the Trump administration was being overwhelmed by his administration’s bungling of the coronavirus pandemic, Team Trump took time to launch its “Catholics for Trump” initiative. 

As The Economist recently pointed out, “Catholics for Trump,”  whose advisory board includes Newt Gingrich, a prominent Catholic convert, “is not trying to reach all Catholics. That is because there is no homogenous ‘Catholic vote’ in America. Rather, members of the country’s single biggest religious group vote along a hodgepodge of social and demographic lines.”

“’Catholics for Trump’ would be better named ‘Right-Wing Catholics for Trump’ because it’s really just an effort to nail down the conservative faction of the church that obsesses over issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights,” Rob Boston, editor, of Americans United’s Church & State magazine, told me in an email. 

“In 2016, a slim majority of white Catholics voted for Trump, but Biden will certainly make a play for those votes. Unlike white evangelicals, who are firmly in Trump’s camp, American Catholics across the board are much more diverse politically and as such are up for grabs Trump is probably trying to lock down the conservative faction of the church now so he can focus on moderate members of that faith. In a close election, every demographic group will be important.” 

“Ahead of a general election where Catholics could prove to be vital swing voters, particularly in the Midwest, the coalition launch indicates that Trump doesn’t plan to limit his faith-based outreach to evangelicals who have long been a key part of his base,” The Associated Press reported. One major stumbling block to convincing Catholics to vote Trump in 2020 is that the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, is a devout Catholic. 

In addition to seeking the support of conservative catholic leaders, the Trump reelection team is using advanced technology strategies to target these potential supporters.  Earlier this year, I wrote about how the GOP is using geofencing, a service that triggers an action when a device enters a set location (). In the National Catholic Reporter, Heidi Schlumpf wrote that “Political marketers are using cellphone data from churchgoers to target the GOP base, especially white Catholic and evangelicals in key states for the 2020 presidential election.” 

Geofencers “capture data from the cellphones of churchgoers, and then purchase ads targeting those devices,” Schlumpf reported. “That data can be matched against other easily obtained databases, including voter profiles, which give marketers identifying information such as names, addresses and voter registration status.”

Team Trump is also counting on motivated conservative Catholic activists –including college students to get out the vote in 2020. “Trump’s Catholic support … was among the most important and unexplained statistics of the 2016 election,” Angela Denker, a Lutheran pastor and veteran journalist, explained at uscatholic.org. At the heart of the concerns Catholics have and why they are driven to Trump are broad cultural issues. Not so much limited to abortion or same-sex marriage but worries that the Church is losing its broad sense of mission. 

During a visit to the small Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump, found that despite “its tiny enrollment and small footprint,” it “may have an outsized influence on conservative Catholicism due to the zeal of its students and their global connections. 

“They have an incredible sense of mission that most American religious leaders would love to see in their parishioners. The college represents a small extreme of a growing edge of conservative Catholicism, a connection to rightwing, sometimes aristocratic, European movements and a privileging of elite white men. Thomas More proves that conservative Catholicism is not only for Baby Boomers and older. There is also a rapt audience for extreme conservative ideas within the whole American Catholic Church, including its youth.”

While conservative Catholics will undoubtedly line up with Trump as will several of the church’s Cardinals, the National Catholic Reporter sounds a cautionary note: “It is, finally, reasonable to note that at this moment, particularly, the bishops have little credibility…. [S]urvey after survey has shown over the years that they have been unable to persuade even Catholics to their point of view in any proportion different from the consensus that exists in the wider public.” They also lack credibility due to their perpetuation of an all-male culture, and their obfuscation and mishandling of the  church’s sexual abuse scandals, particularly their “accommodating a level of violence against already-born children, covering it up and wishing to move beyond the facts and the wrecked lives of thousands of victims and their families.”