Trump, Pope Leo, the USCCB, and Catholic loyalty

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 13, 2025

Have you heard the news? The Trump coalition is breaking up. At least that is what the media is telling us. The New York Times, for instance, puts the breakup on podcasters fighting over the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

[Tucker Carlson’s] ongoing feud with fellow members of the Republican Party—and critics who have suggested he’s antisemitic—has been striking. This week it boiled over on one of the nation’s most popular podcasts, as a schism over the Charlie Kirk assassination continued to aggravate an already rattled Trumpworld coalition…

[B]attle lines have also been deepening over the investigation of Mr. Kirk’s murder in September, which has been the subject of conspiracy theories, including those spread by Candace Owens, another prominent right-wing podcaster, who speculated about whether the shooter acted alone.

The Free Press, meanwhile, puts it on President Trump’s flip-flops over Jeffrey Epstein. Here’s the opener of their report on the ground in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Georgia district:

RINGGOLD, Georgia—From behind the counter of a gas station, Lauren Epperson leaned over to tell me that she used to love President Donald Trump.
“Yep,” she said, smacking her lips. “Used to believe every word he said.”
Not anymore. The first nail in the coffin was Israel, which Epperson said she realized has been “blackmailing” the president and the entire federal government for decades. But the death knell was months of resistance by the president to releasing the federal government’s files on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I don’t like him anymore,” said Epperson, 41 and the mother of two kids, while counting bills near the cash register. Trump is “a sellout—just like all the people I’ve loved and voted for. Oh, they got me good.”

Guess who’s not breaking up with MAGA? Catholics! According to a recent EWTN poll, an extraordinary 67 percent of Mass-attending Catholics view President Trump “very or somewhat favorably.”

But wait! Pope Leo and the U.S. Bishops have both condemned the Trump Administration’s mass deportation policies in the strongest possible terms. So it must be that faithful Catholics support Trump despite disagreeing with him on his most famous issue, right?

Wrong. The same EWTN poll shows that “[a]mong daily and more-than-weekly Mass attendees, about 75% strongly or somewhat favor mass deportations” [emphasis added]. In other words, mass deportations are even more popular among the Catholic faithful in the U.S. than is Trump himself. And this, amid not just the Catholic hierarchy’s strong disapproval of that policy, but also all the sturm und drang over rightwing podcaster infighting and Jeffrey Epstein files and other issues that could be causing a MAGA crackup.

You can read the article from which I take those numbers here. You can read more about the poll, upon which that article is based, here. As you will see from those two links, there are all sorts of cross-tabs, categories within the Catholic population that break down current Catholic opinion with more depth. I am focusing on Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week because I want to know what faithful Catholics are thinking. Fulfilling the precepts of the Church—such as Mass attendance on Sundays and holy days of obligation—are the bare minimum of what the Church expects of her members. Separating out practicing Catholics from lapsed Catholics gives us a better sense of what the faithful think. (The lapsed, God bless them, should be the focus of more important matters, like evangelization.)

So all that being said, what do these numbers tell us? Why do Catholics remain Trump’s most loyal constituency while other parts of the MAGA coalition seem to be weakening? The White House says it is because Trump “promised to fight for people of faith, and he has delivered in record time”:

President Trump launched a task force to eliminate anti-Christian bias, pardoned Christian and pro-life activists, enforced the Hyde Amendment, defunded Planned Parenthood, stopped the chemical mutilation of our nation’s children, and stopped men from competing in women’s sports and invading their private spaces…,

I think that is part of it. But I also think that, to borrow Glen Loury’s terms, the Catholic faithful prize “civilizational cohesion”—indeed, “civilizational survival”—right now over “universalist doctrine.” That is why, for instance, Pope Leo’s criticism of the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) lands with a thud. Catholics in the pew see what the author of the NSS sees: we face “civilizational erasure.” Not just Europe. Us. The USA. Getting our own house in order must be a more immediate priority right now than whatever priorities are being urged on us by “universalist commitment.” That is why Trump’s mass deportation policy—the thing that most horrifies the Catholic hierarchy—is even more popular among the Catholic faithful than is Trump himself.

That does not mean that the Catholic hierarchy should stop advocating for universal moral principles or for the dignity of every human being. Or that the faithful should turn a deaf ear to its own shepherds. But it does mean the bishops’ advocacy should take greater account of where their own flock stands in these matters. A more balanced approach, one that gives greater deference to the Catechism’s teaching about the obligations that immigrants owe to the countries that receive them, would go a long way toward helping the sheep hear the voice of the shepherd—and of those who speak on his behalf.