(OSV News) – The U.S. bishops' Feb. 18 lawsuit against the federal government for abrupt and sweeping changes to refugee resettlement funding, and the bishops' Feb. 20 admonition of President Donald Trump's executive order aiming to expand access to in vitro fertilization underscore the ongoing friction between the nation's Catholic leaders and its 47th president in his first month since reassuming office.
"Things are off to a rocky start when it comes to relations between the bishops and the administration," said Stephen P. White, executive director of The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America in Washington. "We'll see if things continue on the same path, or if common ground is possible."
On Inauguration Day Jan. 20, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' spokeswoman said in reference to the first batch of the president's executive orders that the conference "will work with the Trump Administration as well as the U.S. Congress to advance the common good for all, which will include instances of agreement, as well as disagreement."
Immediately, instances of both materialized.
Trump has signed executive orders at breakneck speed, issuing more than 70 since the inauguration. While many of the orders met controversy, immigration policy quickly seized center stage, with more than a dozen related executive orders issued in his first week. Those orders included restrictions on birthright citizenship, deportation expansion, ending asylum-seeking across the U.S.-Mexico border, and pausing refugee resettlement programs, including for refugees already in the United States, upending the USCCB's longtime federal partnership for resettling certain lawful refugees through local agencies. Some of those orders have been met with lawsuits and paused by judges.
On Feb. 18, after bishops all over the U.S. had issued public statements decrying many of these changes, the USCCB sued the Trump administration, calling the refugee funding suspension "a textbook arbitrary-and-capricious agency action" that "violates multiple statutes" and "undermines the Constitution's separation of powers."
The USCCB's Migration and Refugee Services is one of 10 national resettlement agencies that work with the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which was established by Congress in 1980, formalizing the process by which refugees are legally resettled in the United States. According to a Feb. 19 statement about the lawsuit, the USCCB is the largest of the agency partners, and has helped to settle nearly 1 million refugees since the partnership began.
Meanwhile, Trump has suspended foreign aid distributed through the nation's international assistance arm, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, with plans to shutter the agency. Among organizations significantly impacted are charitable arms of the Catholic Church, including Catholic Relief Services and Caritas International.
The spate of executive orders and related federal department directives have addressed other matters of concern to the church, and some with decisions Catholic bishops have applauded, including those on gender identity and ideology, school choice and abortion funding.
Celebration over those pro-family orders, however, has been tempered by Trump's efforts to fulfill his campaign promise of expanding IVF access. While Trump said he aims to boost the nation's historically low fertility rates, the Catholic Church warns the practice is immoral, in part because it entails the destruction of embryonic human life.
Many of Trump's executive orders – those both supported and decried by church leaders – are being challenged in the courts.
Vincent Miller, a theologian who holds the Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton, a Catholic institution in Ohio, said he is viewing the Trump administration through the perspective of Pope Benedict XVI's 2009 social encyclical "Caritas in Veritate" on integral human development. In the document, the late pontiff says that working for the common good is a requirement of justice and charity, and that the more done to secure the common good according to others' real needs, "the more effectively we love them."
"That's the thing that's being crushed," Miller said, especially though the abrupt freeze of USAID, which experts say could devastate the lives of millions of people worldwide. Meanwhile, he is concerned about the quality of conversation about these sweeping changes, which he sees as being reduced to social media-style distortions and attacks.
"We can't have the conversations about what we're actually doing," he told OSV News. "Catholicism really, in its caring about the common good, understands that there are practices and norms and laws and structures that make that possible, and ... that's under attack now."
Whether or not one agrees with Trump's policies, however, White at The Catholic Project suggested Americans should not be surprised by the president's aggressive approach.
"For better or worse, the Trump administration is doing pretty much what it said it was going to do. This is what Trump campaigned on; this is what a majority of Americans voted for," he said.
Conflict between the Trump administration and U.S. Catholic leaders on immigration was also anticipated. In the weeks leading up to Inauguration Day, Catholic leaders issued public statements and held events to discuss how to address Trump's campaign promise to begin sweeping large-scale deportations of unauthorized immigrants in the country and plans to remove the "sanctuary" status for schools and churches, which had restricted Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from making arrests at what are seen as sensitive locations.
Both were among the second Trump administration's first actions. In the weeks since, the USCCB, state Catholic conferences, individual bishops and other Catholic leaders have reiterated the church's position on immigration – which both recognizes a nation's responsibility to secure its borders and demands humane treatment of all immigrants – while calling for Trump to approach immigration enforcement and reform with justice and mercy.
In an unsual move, even Pope Francis weighed in on Trump's mass deportation efforts with a Feb. 10 letter to the U.S. bishops that underscored the church's emphasis on protecting the vulnerable and defenseless. "What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly," he said.
Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, whose diocese borders the District of Columbia, issued a pastoral statement Jan. 31 on immigration law that called on Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other political leaders "to consider the common good of our country with the light of faith."
"We always defend and protect the most vulnerable, even as we defend the rights and duties of nations to govern themselves and to safeguard the common good," he wrote.
White praised Bishop Burbidge's statement in particular, as well as that of Minnesota's Catholic bishops, issued Feb. 7, and said that the church has "rightly focused a lot on what we ought to be doing for migrants to ensure that they are treated humanely." But, White said he also thinks the church "has been less astute in addressing the legitimate concerns of American citizens who are most directly affected by mass immigration."
"There are real, long-term economic, social and security costs to mass immigration, and those costs are borne disproportionately by poorer, working-class Americans," he told OSV News. "Too often, those concerns have been dismissed as racist, xenophobic or un-Christian. A big reason Trump was elected was that he didn't dismiss those concerns, still less lecture and scold people for raising them. He promised to do something about them."
Like White, John Carr is observing the Trump presidency from within the Washington Beltway. The founder of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University and former director of the USCCB's Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development, Carr said he sees the Trump administration "targeting the programs that serve the most vulnerable people in our nation and the world."
"They also seem to have a strategy of undermining Catholic leaders and ministries that serve the poor and vulnerable with attacks, falsehoods, and frozen or eliminated funding," he told OSV News. "All programs can be improved and reformed, however the reckless actions to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development is not about reform or improvement, but undermining and destroying our nation's commitment and capacity to help those who are hungry, sick and desperately poor around the world."
"I fear that these attacks are intended to intimidate religious leaders, undermine their credibility, and divide the Catholic community," he added.
Among the falsehoods to which Carr referred is Vance's accusation in a Jan. 26 interview that the USCCB profits from government funding it receives for refugee resettlement while aiding immigrants in the country illegally.
"I think the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has, frankly, not been a good partner in commonsense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for, and I hope, again, as a devout Catholic, that they'll do better," Vance said on CBS's "Face the Nation" after he was asked if he thought the USCCB was "actively hiding criminals from law enforcement."
Kenneth Craycraft, an attorney and professor of moral theology at Mount St. Mary's Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati, told OSV News he was disappointed by the comments, but said that he was willing to give Vance the benefit of the doubt. Craycraft said he thinks the vice president was misinformed, and he would like to see him apologize to the bishops.
Craycraft said he also believes there are conservative-leaning voters who "held their nose and voted for Trump because they saw Vance as somebody they could get behind" and that Vance has an opportunity to temper Trump. That could include a more nuanced approach to immigration policy, he said.
"We need a remedy for the breakdown in our immigration policy over the past four years, and that remedy is going to take careful consideration and deliberate analysis of particular instances," Craycraft said. "I simply don't think that it's wise or moral to talk about mass deportations without making the kinds of distinctions that are necessary to ask: 'Who is here? Why are they here, and what contributions are they making to us, society, to the U.S. economy, to their neighborhoods and so forth?'"
During Feb. 12 remarks at a panel discussion hosted by Georgetown's Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, the U.S. bishops' migration chairman, defended the USCCB against Vance's attack and said he invites the vice president to sit down and talk "because he clearly has been misinformed."
"That is so unfortunate when it comes from a person who has a loud megaphone," Bishop Seitz said. "It can be very harmful to this work of the church to very vulnerable people. So, it really is concerning."
Meanwhile, Catholics are taking note of instances in which Vance appeals to his Catholic faith, especially as a moral foothold for Trump administration policies. Vance, who entered the church in 2019, tweeted Jan. 30 about the theological concept of "ordo amoris" – the hierarchy of loves – to support the administration's immigration policies, drawing varied critiques and criticisms. Two weeks later, at the Munich Security Conference Feb. 14, he ended a controversial speech on democracy by quoting St. John Paul II's oft-repeated exhortation, "Do not be afraid." He called the late pope "one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other."
Vance "is a very different kind of Catholic than, say, Joe Biden," White said, not just because of politics, but because of his generation as the first millennial vice president.
"It's not so much that Vance sees the church differently than an older generation of Catholic, though that may be the case, too," he said. "I think Vance, like many younger Catholics, sees the world – and many of our secular institutions – very differently and so has a very different sense of what the church's mission looks like in this new 'post-liberal' world."
Whether the bishops will ultimately find a friend or foe in Vance remains to be seen, especially when it comes to immigration policy. Several Catholic leaders, including bishops, expressed appreciation for the pro-family stance Vance articulated Jan. 24 at the March for Life in Washington, in his first public appearance as vice president.
For now, the posture between the bishops and the Trump administration is largely adversarial, especially as the USCCB's lawsuit proceeds. It hit a setback Feb. 20 when a federal judge refused to immediately block the executive order affecting the funding.
Craycraft is hopeful, however, that the bishops will ultimately prevail. "Based solely on contractual reliance for reimbursement, the bishops have a strong case," he said. "It is not merely that programs are no longer proactively funded; rather, promised reimbursements are being withheld. ... The Trump Administration tends to use chainsaws where scalpels are required."
The author of the 2024 book "Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America," Craycraft said the current situation calls on Catholics to unify around the principles of their faith, not their political party.
"We American Catholics need to look at public policy through a Catholic lens, rather than looking at Catholic theology through our particular partisan lenses, and that would be very helpful," he said.
Carr agreed. He called the current situation "a time for Catholics to come together across political, ideological and theological lines to defend and support our church's efforts and our nation's commitments to help bring food, health care and hope to our poorest sisters and brothers in our nation and around the world."
