Do Catholics only oppose immigrant abuse, or the evil that fuels it?

January 21, 2026

I had a rare moment of Christian celebration yesterday, when Rev. Kelle Brown of Seattle’s Plymouth UCC and chair of the Poor People's Campaign in Washington State kicked off our civic MLK Day rally saying:

“In one year it feels like what we’ve been through centuries of crap-stained years from hell, soaked in hot dog water,” she said.

In a passionate speech, Brown called President Donald Trump a “warmonger” and condemned Project 2025, exploitation under capitalism, unaffordable health care and disproportionate policing. – Seattle Times, Jan. 19, 2026

That's the kind of gospel-focused moral clarity without dissembling I was raised to expect from Christianity. It's what the world expects to hear from our faith leaders during this crisis, and what we are not hearing from Catholicism. Which is odd, given that the Catholic Church isn’t exactly known for skimping on the “moral judgment.” Where other traditions have to wrangle over “prudential” disagreements, we have the standard of Catholic Social Teaching to help cut through the noise of subjective congregational opinion and reach objective truth.

But with months of policy that demonstrably violates the principles we say are central to our faith and its vision of a just society, that judgment has been sinfully slow in coming. The “slow and steady” crowd point to the historically rare Special Message from the U.S. Bishops denouncing mass deportation policies as if that excuses their silence. But why did it take eleven months for them to say anything? Surely the defunding of the Church’s refugee settlement services and those of Jesuit Refugee Services and potential restrictions on religious worker visas didn’t have anything to do with it, right?

As the federal government actively works to erode the very democratic norms that keep the Church safe from persecution, the leaders of the Church failed either to speak against the substance of those abuses or to rein in their fellow bishops who are complicit in committing them. While well-behaved bishops stick to their worn-out, collegial etiquette to avoid the perceived “scandals” of open partisanship or fraternal correction, the culture-war mavericks among them have no problem actively serving as government appointees in an openly antidemocratic regime.

Yes, we should be grateful the bishops are finally speaking out against the deadly abuse of immigrants, refugees, and American citizens in the nativist hellscape that is now America. But we should also be mad as hell that they steadfastly refuse to address the gravely disordered morality behind it all.

Immigrant abuse is only a symptom.

Trumpism and MAGA Catholicism are the disease.

And our bishops’ “special message” is a band-aid.

Make no mistake. Our bishops are not courageously challenging a Trumpist agenda. They’re just raising a point of order.

And in doing so they have effectively abandoned their children: Catholics – indeed, any Christians – speaking out against this disease because of our faith and not despite it. We are the neglected children of our spiritual parents, wondering why Dad is too busy to show up for the big game.

Perhaps that’s about to change.

Yesterday, three American cardinals finally spoke out. Instead of staying on the safely purple plain denouncing the evils of our immigration policy, they ventured into a scathing critique of the United States’ gravely immoral cessation of foreign aid and expansionist warmongering.

We seek a foreign policy that respects and advances the right to human life, religious liberty, and the enhancement of human dignity throughout the world, especially through economic assistance. – Cardinals Cupich, McElroy, and Tobin, January 19, 2026

Moreover, in an interview the day before, Military Archbishop Timothy Broglio declared that a U.S. invasion of Greenland may well be morally unjust.

“It would be very difficult for a soldier or a marine or a sailor by himself to disobey an order such as that,” he said. “But strictly speaking, he or she would be within the realm of their own conscience, would be morally acceptable to disobey that order. But that's perhaps putting that individual in an untenable situation, and that's my concern.” – National Catholic Reporter, January 19, 2026

My fellow Catholics, we have been put on notice.

It is not enough merely to question politely whether mass deportation is gravely immoral (it is) or a matter of prudential difference of opinion (it is not).

A properly formed conscious must find U.S. foreign policy gravely inconsistent with a culture of life, a violation of religious liberty and human dignity throughout the world.

And as culture-war Catholics have delighted in telling everyone for forty years, if you disagree, you may not be as good of a Catholic as you pretend.

Harsh words, but ask yourself: does the incarnate Christ – through whom all life and being enters into visible reality from the mind of the eternal Father – stand for authoritarian rule and military expansionism or against them? Does he lend the power of his creative Word to sustain “princes in their palaces” or “the least among you” who are the bedrock of his Kingdom?

Nearly a century ago, no less than the Pope denounced the dangerous fictions of Germany’s rising authoritarian government in Mit brennender sorge, the only encyclical ever published in German.

The peak of the revelation as reached in the Gospel of Christ is final and permanent. It knows no retouches by human hand; it admits no substitutes or arbitrary alternatives such as certain leaders pretend to draw from the so-called myth of race and blood. – Pope Pius XI, March 14, 1937

It is time for our pastors and the princes of today’s Church do the same. I call on my bishops – as I implore you to call upon yours – to denounce MAGA and Trumpist Catholicism as gravely inconsistent with the gospel and the social teaching of the Church. I call on my bishops to denounce all Catholic teaching that promotes the degradation of the rule of law and democratic norms as an attack on the Body of Christ. I call on them to denounce the MAGA cult of personality around the authoritarian president as a false idolatry. Before it is too late.

Your excellencies, it is time to wake up and smell the hot dog water.