Brian Burch, the new U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, might have both official and unofficial duties

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 21, 2024

President Trump has chosen Brian Burch, the head and co-founder of CatholicVote, to be U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. I cannot be more pleased. It is upsetting all the right people.

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According to the always sober, just-the-facts-ma’am, reporting of Catholic News Agency:

“Brian is a devout Catholic, a father of nine, and president of CatholicVote,” Trump wrote in the Dec. 20 post. “He has received numerous awards and demonstrated exceptional leadership, helping build one of the largest Catholic advocacy groups in the country.”

CatholicVote is a political advocacy group that endorsed Trump in January and ran advertisements in support [of] the president-elect during his campaign. According to CatholicVote, the organization spent over $10 million on the 2024 elections.

But here is what I think most upsets some people:

“[Burch] represented me well during the last election, having garnered more Catholic votes than any presidential candidate in history!” Trump wrote…

According to a Washington Post exit poll, Trump won the Catholic vote by a 15-point margin this year—a 10-point swing in his favor from the previous election. Exit polls also showed Trump winning the majority of Catholic voters in vital swing states.”

Not that Burch’s critics will admit that this is the real cause of their consternation. According to the always leftist, frequently hysterical, reporting of the National Catholic Reporter:

Trump’s choice of Burch to represent him here in Rome is certain to raise eyebrows inside the Vatican, as he has long expressed criticism of the Francis papacy.

The NCR goes on to list some of those instances. Burch criticized the Vatican document allowing the blessing of same-sex couples. Burch took issue with Pope Francis punishing Cardinal Burke, who is perhaps the single most careful and respectful of all the Holy Father’s public critics.

Spare me. Their real beef with Burch is not that he criticized the Pope. Eleven years into this pontificate, even the Popesplainers criticize the Pope.

It’s that Burch criticized the Pope for the wrong things. CatholicVote under Burch’s leadership was not fretting that the Holy Father was insufficiently belligerent toward Russia. CatholicVote was busy suing the Biden Administration for information about questionable activity on our border. CatholicVote ran ads “in several contested battleground states that accused Vice President Kamala Harris of supporting taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgeries on children.” And—wait for it—“LGBTQ advocates accused the nonprofit of using misleading and inflammatory terms for partisan political purposes.”

CatholicVote made a specific accusation against Kamala based on an answer she gave on a questionnaire and her refusal to disown it. “LGBTQ advocates” made a vague accusation against CatholicVote because CatholicVote’s ads hurt their feelings.

But this is a dispatch from Planet NCR, a Bizzarro World where everything is its opposite. On Planet NCR, the disapproval of LGBTQ activists of a nominee, for being in the trenches in defense of Catholic teaching, is disqualifying for U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. Here on Planet Earth, though, it’s a badge of honor.

Prior to Burch’s nomination, there was much online talk on the Catholic Right urging Trump to deliberately pick an ambassador who was a papal critic, as a way of sending a message. Bishop Strickland, say, or Taylor Marshall. My sense is that the NCR leaned into this crazy talk as a way of downplaying what really upsets them most in the Burch nomination.

I think what really upsets Burch’s critics most is how effective he—and CatholicVote—were in helping to elect Trump. And—adding insult to injury—that they did so by driving Trump’s Catholic numbers up so high that, in the eyes of many, it was the Catholic vote that put Trump back in the White House. Ouch. If you’re a Catholic leftist, there is no greater burn than that.

But let’s consider the crazy talk for a moment. In a column written prior to Burch’s nomination, George Weigel warned against it. “The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See thus represents one sovereign actor—the United States of America—to another sovereign actor, the Holy See,” Weigel wrote. “The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See does not represent the Catholic Church in the United States to the Church’s central authority.”

Weigel is exactly right. The U.S. bishops are the official representatives of the American Church and no one else. I can’t imagine that Burch would see it any differently. A proper deference to the authority of the Pope, and the bishops in communion with the Pope, is part and parcel of being a faithful Catholic—even when one occasionally disagrees with them.

But, unofficially? A few years ago Father Raymond de Souza made a fascinating observation about unofficial representation between Rome and the U.S. Church. As de Souza saw it, each recent Pope had unofficial spokesmen whom they favored to represent them to a U.S. audience. Cardinal O’Connor and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus for Pope St. John Paul II, Cardinal Francis George and then-Fr. Robert Barron for Pope Benedict, Cardinal Cupich and Fr. James Martin for Pope Francis.

Can the same thing work in reverse? Brian Burch is a man of substance, not a mere internet bomb-thrower. He has accomplished real things in the real world. Would it be so bad if Burch did—unofficially—represent to the Holy See a U.S. Church that often feels itself to be misunderstood by the present pontificate? Especially at a time when even the U.S. Bishops can feel misunderstood by the Vatican’s own official representatives to them?

When Joe Biden was first elected, Helen Alvare warned that Catholics could come to view him, and his dissent, as representative of Church teaching. This has been the case now with generations of pro-abortion Catholic politicians. If there is to be unofficial representatives of our faith, wouldn’t we rather it be a man like Brian Burch?

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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• Posted by: Randal Mandock - Dec. 22, 2024 8:35 AM ET USA

  Wolfgang's last paragraph reminded me of a preeminent scandal that occurred in August. As reported here, "America" magazine published an opinion representative of Catholic liberalism: "The appreciations for our second Catholic president show much nostalgia for the brand of Catholicism he represents, and despair or (at least concern) for what comes next...Biden’s presidency represents an extraordinary moment for all U.S. Catholics." Biden's "brand" is not the brand of many Catholics in the U.S.