Viral coverage in religious and secular media of the record number of American adults entering the Catholic Church this past Easter included an article in The Federalist titled “America’s Catholic Renewal Is a Rejection of Liberal Modernity.”
American bishops and prelates, John Daniel Davidson wrote, mostly embrace “the Catholicism of Pope Francis, marked by a disdain for the Latin Mass, an embarrassment at ritual and hierarchy, a marked ambiguity on moral questions, and a willingness to compromise with liberalism and thereby change the Catholic Church.”
A closer look at the late Francis’ brand of Catholicism, now continuing under Pope Leo XIV, shows why both new converts and cradle Catholics have disconnected from Church leadership in the Vatican and the United States. It’s a politicized version of the faith that prioritizes wokeness and social justice over doctrinal fidelity.
Exhibit A is the trio of left-leaning American cardinals who took to 60 Minutes on the Sunday after Easter to criticize President Donald Trump for the war in Iran and the mass deportation of illegal migrants. Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., Blase Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, were all appointed to the cardinalate by Francis, who died in April 2025.
Cardinal McElroy promoted “radical inclusion” in a 2023 essay in the Jesuit magazine America, advancing heterodox positions on the sinfulness of homosexual acts, female ordination and the exclusion from participation in the Eucharist of divorced and remarried or LGBT Catholics. The bishop of Springfield, Illinois, countered with an essay in First Things called “Imagining a Heretical Cardinal” that suggested McElroy may have excommunicated himself.
Cardinal Cupich, another supporter of LGBT causes, helps spearhead the Vatican’s campaign to suppress the Latin Mass, even as parishes in his Archdiocese of Chicago are hotbeds of liturgical abuse. The crackdown is baffling because Latin Mass devotees tend to belong to large families that conform to official Catholic teaching.
Cupich’s opening prayer at the 2024 Democratic National Convention failed to mention the name of Jesus Christ or the issue of abortion. Taxpayer-funded abortion on demand was, and remains, a central plank of the party’s platform.
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