Copyright The New York Times
As the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign continues, and Pope Leo XIV urges support for migrant families, America’s Roman Catholic bishops redoubled their focus on immigration while electing new leaders at their annual meeting on Tuesday. In a hotel ballroom in Baltimore addressing the first major gathering of American bishops in the Leo pontificate, the outgoing bishops’ conference president opened with pointed remarks. Bible teaching, he noted, is to have “special care for strangers, aliens and sojourners.” “It is not rocket science, but the Word of God,” Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio said. The bishops elected Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City to be their next president, to serve for a three-year term. An institutionalist with ties to the church’s right wing, Archbishop Coakley issued a statement two days after President Trump’s inauguration calling on Catholics to remember that Jesus was once a refugee, and to support immigrant families. The bishops also elected Bishop Daniel E. Flores, who leads the diocese of Brownsville, Tex., as vice president. The strong support for Bishop Flores, who came close to winning the presidency on a third ballot but wound up second, losing to Archbishop Coakley by just 19 votes, shows that the treatment of immigrants is at the forefront of the group’s concerns. He has long been focused on the issue, and his diocese is on the border with Mexico. The leadership team in the U.S. will be the first new slate under Pope Leo’s tenure. It will also span the remainder of President Trump’s presidential term. The bishops are also set to consider a “Special Message” on immigration, a rare statement issued only at their annual meeting, to address the circumstances of the day. The last one was in 2013, and was expressed in opposition to the contraceptive coverage mandate of the Affordable Care Act. The bishops so far have stopped short of a statement directly targeting the Trump administration, unlike a conservative push in 2021 to deny communion to Catholic politicians who supported abortion rights, including Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was president at the time. But the annual meeting, and the intensity of the moment, put the U.S. bishops in the spotlight in a way that they haven’t been in years. For the first time, the conference is being held while a pope from the United States sits in Rome. The intense focus on immigration is a shift from the bishops’ last presidential election three years ago, when they made their efforts to end abortion a priority after the backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Last month Pope Leo urged the bishops to strongly support immigrants, as the Trump administration escalated its deportation efforts throughout the country, including in the pope’s hometown, Chicago. A third of the church is Hispanic, and many Catholic families are fearful of going to Mass, worried that they will be apprehended by officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On Tuesday the bishops approved a letter to Pope Leo making their current challenge clear. “As shepherds in the United States, we face a growing worldview that is so often at odds with the Gospel mandate to love thy neighbor,” they told him. “We support secure and orderly borders and law enforcement actions in response to dangerous criminal activity, but we cannot remain silent in this challenging hour while the right to worship and the right to due process are undermined,” the letter continued. Archbishop Broglio also said he raised a concern directly with Pope Leo last month “that some of our faithful listen more readily to sound bytes, the sirens of political discourse, or whatever confirms their conclusions and partisan leanings, than they are to hearing their pastors and us.” In choosing their next leaders, the bishops passed over Bishop Robert E. Barron, who leads the diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota. In March, he attended Mr. Trump’s address to Congress as the guest of Rep. Riley Moore, Republican of West Virginia, who has supported Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign. Archbishop Coakley, 70, was generally expected to win the election. He served for the past three years as the bishops’ secretary, and the bishops often select an existing conference leader for the top post. He is an adviser to the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic-oriented network, and has been known nationally for his opposition to the death penalty. He praised Oklahoma’s governor for signing a near-total abortion ban in 2021, and supported an effort in Oklahoma, blocked by the Supreme Court in May, to create the nation’s first chartered religious school, which would have used government funds to teach Catholic doctrine. In 2018, Archbishop Coakley expressed support for a controversial effort by a now-excommunicated archbishop accusing Pope Francis of covering up sex abuse and calling on him to resign. Catholic bishops for months have raised alarms about the treatment of migrants and objected to Mr. Trump’s tactics. Top prelates have protested his domestic policy bill in Congress, and bishops have shown up at court hearings, hoping to deter Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Recently, bishops with more conservative leanings have also spoken out. When it comes to immigration, “there’s a remarkable unity among all the bishops,” Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., said in the bishops’ news conference on Tuesday. “Now is really a crisis situation.”
