Catholic

Though I don’t regularly attend Mass, I fondly remember the two years in high school when I prepared for the sacrament of Communion.

In the basement of St. Boniface Church in Anaheim on weekday afternoons and weekend mornings in the mid-1990s, my sister, about 20 other teenagers and I learned about the tenets of our faith.

We were inculcated with the importance of charity, love toward all, good works and humility, and urged to carry those virtues into adulthood. I didn’t agree with everything our lay teachers espoused — why abortion should be outlawed, why necking was bad, why only men could become priests — but I learned enough important moral lessons that I still proudly call myself Catholic.

Confirmation is meant to bring recipients closer to God and “imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark,” according to the Vatican’s official guide to its doctrine. What especially stayed with my classmates and me was, well, us.

We were white, Filipino, Vietnamese and Latino, children of working-class parents and equals in the eyes of God. Church fairs were as likely to serve pancit and spring rolls as hamburgers and tacos. When we finally received confirmation at a special Mass at St. Boniface attended by then-Bishop Norman McFarland, we exemplified not just the future of the church but also the promise of a better tomorrow for the United States.

Our parish lived and practiced American Catholicism’s long tradition of welcoming the stranger, the outcast, the refugee — following the example and words of the Gospel we read every Sunday. But even as we committed ourselves to the path of Christ, politicians in California waged a war against illegal immigrants and anything that suggested diversity — a xenophobia that would culminate decades later with President Trump’s election.

Trump is a walking manifestation of the seven deadly sins, to the point that he has depicted himself as Jesus and a pope on social media. Nevertheless, a majority of Catholics — thankfully no one in my immediate family — voted for him in each of his three presidential elections, with support topping out at 55% in 2024, per the Pew Research Center.

Catholics were a key constituency in every sector Trump needed for his historic victory against Kamala Harris. Swing states with old-line communities like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Boom states like Nevada and Florida. And especially Latinos, who voted for Trump in numbers never before seen for a Republican presidential candidate. Latino Catholics went even harder for Trump: The Public Religion Research Institute found their support for him increased by 17 percentage points from 2016 to 2024, even as his white Catholic support dropped from 64% to 59%.

Issues from abortion to the economy to transgender rights spurred Catholics to side with Trump, but his hard-line stance against immigration was especially popular. As immigrant Catholics were being demonized, echoing previous eras of American history, too many Catholics sided with the demonizers.

Maria Marin and her husband, Martin Marin, pose with a cardboard cutout of Pope Leo XIV during the Archdiocese of Chicago’s celebration of Leo at Rate Field on June 14, 2025.

(Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times via Associated Press)

A June 2024 survey by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which tracks American Catholic life, showed that 43% of respondents supported lower levels of immigration. A month into Trump’s second term, 41% of American Catholics thought that increased immigration in recent years had changed the U.S. “for the worse,” compared with 33% who felt it made life better, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, I argued about the dignity of Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants with people from my parents’ native ranchos in Mexico, who came to this country without papers and are regular churchgoers. I sighed in disappointment as former confirmation classmates whose refugee parents fled tyrannical rulers, just like the Holy Family, posted approvingly on social media about Trump’s vow to build a bigger, nastier border wall.

Catholics have frequently exemplified the best and worst tendencies of American society. We’ve been brutal conquistadors and the huddled masses yearning to be free, trailblazing politicians and the millions who stood silently during our church’s sex abuse scandals. Trump’s support among Catholics represented a new low. But by some miracle of God, more and more of those supporters are finally seeing him for who he is.

On Aug. 12 — the feast day of Jane Frances de Chantal, the patron saint of forgotten people — the Public Religion Research Institute released a survey showing that 62% of Catholics think unfavorably of Trump, while 57% oppose his handling of immigration, both legal and illegal. If this repentance transforms into votes against MAGA in the midterms, the rest of Trump’s presidency is doomed.

The poll offers no insight into why Catholic support for Trump has cratered. The easy explanation would be the president’s enmity toward Pope Leo XIV, who has preached a gospel of kindness toward the undocumented and spoken out against the quagmire in Iran. When the Trump administration invited the native-born Chicagoan to visit the U.S. for America’s 250th anniversary, Leo instead decided to spend his Fourth of July on Lampedusa, the Ellis Island of the Mediterranean.

But the poll noted that Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, had higher favorability ratings among American Catholics during the same time in their respective reigns — 90% to Leo’s 75%.

Trump’s popularity is also collapsing among Americans as a whole. Only about a third support him, according to an a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll — the poorest showing of his second term, matching the lowest numbers of his first term. But for Catholics, it’s not just high prices, the Iran War and Trump’s drift toward despotism that makes him so onerous.

The Catholics in his government, from Supreme Court justices to Cabinet members to Vice President JD Vance, are acting as a rubber stamp for an imperious ruler, instead of imitations of Christ. Trump’s immigration sweeps are hitting American Catholicism so hard that bishops have allowed the faithful to stay home instead of attending Mass.

What reason is there left for good Catholics to support Trump? If ever a group needed to break away from him, it’s us.

What’s been especially galling about Trump’s second term, from a Catholic perspective, is his gleeful cruelty.

Proverbs 21:13 states, “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.” Conservatives who have criticized Pope Leo for taking on Trump over his nastiness toward the meek don’t get that his motive isn’t political — this has been standard Vatican doctrine going back to his namesake, Leo XIII. In an influential 1891 encyclical urging the world to stand by the working class, Leo XIII pointed out that sacrificing oneself “for the benefit of others, is man’s surest antidote against the insolence of the world and immoderate love of self.”

Is there any statement more contrary to MAGA than that?

Cardinals Robert McElroy, Christophe Pierre and Joseph Tobin and Archbishop Bernard Hebda speak to reporters after a Mass in solidarity with migrants at the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas on Feb. 27, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn.

(Mark Vancleave/Associated Press)

The Catholics who supported Trump may have forgotten Leo XIII’s words as they repeatedly voted for him. But that’s the beauty of our faith. We can admit our errors and seek to right them through another sacrament — confession.

“Through such an admission man looks squarely at the sins he is guilty of,” reads the catechism of the Catholic Church. That way, people can “take responsibility” for their faults and reconcile with God “in order to make a new future possible.” And the way to do that is by “doing something more to make amends for the sin.”

Catholics are supposed to confess our sins privately. But we must repent of Trump publicly and loudly at the ballot box this November and urge others to follow.

We helped usher in Trump. We must now lead in exorcising him from American society once and for all.

July 23 (UPI) — The head of the U.S. mission in Cuba met with the Cáritas Cuba director Wednesday as the Catholic charity began distributing humanitarian aid sent by President Donald Trump‘s administration to vulnerable families in western Cuba, the U.S. Embassy in Havana said.

The meeting between Mike Hammer and Carmen María Nodal Martínez came a day after the first shipment from a $100 million humanitarian assistance package arrived in Havana. it was announced in May by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The shipment includes prepackaged food and hygiene kits for about 700 families, the U.S. State Department said. Catholic Relief Services is distributing the aid in coordination with the Catholic Church and Cáritas Cuba.

The U.S. Embassy said Hammer and Nodal reviewed the distribution process through Catholic parishes and planned visits to volunteers and beneficiaries as the humanitarian program expands across the island.

The first deliveries began in the municipalities of Bejucal, in Mayabeque province, and Alquízar, in Artemisa province, targeting families previously identified by local communities as the most vulnerable.

Cáritas Cuba confirmed that volunteers from parish communities started to deliver the food and hygiene kits on Wednesday. The organization said the assistance is being distributed according to humanitarian vulnerability criteria, with an emphasis on transparency throughout the distribution process.

According to the State Department, the packages contain rice, beans, pasta, canned tuna and sardines, cooking oil, sugar and salt, along with soap, detergent, toothbrushes, sanitary pads, water purification tablets, solar lamps and other household supplies intended to meet a family’s basic needs for about 10 days.

Washington has said it is using Catholic Relief Services, Cáritas Cuba and the Catholic Church to ensure the aid reaches recipients directly without being diverted by the Cuban government. State Department officials said they will closely monitor the distribution process to prevent the assistance from being misappropriated.

Cuba authorized the shipment’s entry, but government officials criticized Washington for providing humanitarian assistance while maintaining sanctions and what Havana describes as a de facto oil embargo that has worsened the island’s economic crisis.

Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment acknowledged receiving the shipment, while reiterating that U.S. restrictions continue to affect the country’s economy.

Several Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives who recently visited Cuba have also called on Washington to lift the restrictions, arguing they amount to collective punishment.

Rubio and other U.S. officials have rejected that criticism, arguing that Cuba’s ruling elite and the military-run conglomerate GAESA have diverted the country’s resources and prioritized scarce fuel supplies for the government and its security apparatus rather than the general population.

WASHINGTON — Several FBI analysts tied to the creation of a 2023 memo warning of a potential threat from Catholic “violent extremists” were fired Friday, according to their lawyer, the latest wave of terminations under Director Kash Patel.

The fired employees included four intelligence analysts and a supervisory analyst. The FBI declined to comment.

“This action is manifestly unjust, completely unsupported by the facts, and subverts standard FBI policy and procedure,” their lawyer, David Laufman, said in a statement. “These individuals deserved far better for the exceptional and faithful public service they rendered to protect our country.”

The January 2023 intelligence product produced by analysts in the FBI’s Richmond, Va., field office emerged as a political focal point after it was issued, with Republicans in Congress citing it as part of their broader claim that the FBI during the Biden administration was targeting conservatives.

Then-FBI Director Chris Wray denied that allegation and the agency has said the document was quickly retracted and an internal review was launched. Merrick Garland, the attorney general under President Biden, has said he was “appalled” by the memo.

Earlier Justice Department investigations into the memo challenged the analytical tradecraft but did not find intentional misconduct by the analysts involved.

The firings are part of a broader personnel purge under Patel, a President Trump loyalist who over the last year has pushed out dozens of employees who either contributed to investigations of the president or who were perceived as not in alignment with the administration’s agenda. The Justice Department has engaged in similarly sweeping firings of prosecutors since Trump took office last year.

In February, for instance, the FBI fired a group of counterintelligence agents who participated in the investigation into Trump over his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

Critics including former federal officials say the purge has transformed federal law enforcement agencies into politically motivated extensions of the Trump White House. The classified documents investigation resulted in a federal indictment against Trump, but the case was dismissed after his 2024 election.

The Richmond memo, which emerged from a domestic terrorism investigation, sought to examine a potential link between what it called “Radical Traditionalist Catholic” ideology and racially and ethnically motivated extremists. It warned of the potential for violence and also highlighted what the authors described as “new avenues for tripwire and source development.” FBI leadership quickly condemned those findings once the document became public.

An internal FBI review described in a 2023 letter to Congress and based on interviews with 26 people “found that all individuals involved in the creation, review and approval of the product failed to adhere to analytic tradecraft standards and failed to recognize that the product, as drafted, equated the subjects’ interest in their self-described form of religion with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist (RMVE) ideology without sufficient evidence or articulable support.”

The failure to adhere to standards, including on proper domestic terrorism terminology, “created the appearance that the FBI conducts investigative activity based on religious affiliation,” the letter said. “One of the FBI’s most fundamental principles is that investigative activity may not be based solely on the exercise of rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.”

A Justice Department inspector general report in 2024 summarized the earlier FBI review by saying that though there were departures from proper analytic tradecraft, “no evidence of a malicious intent or an improper purpose” were found.

MS NOW earlier reported the firings.

Tucker and Richer write for the Associated Press and reported from Los Angeles and Washington, respectively.