National Catholic Register, Jan 7, 2025 / 06:00 am
Cardinal Robert McElroy, the new archbishop of Washington, D.C., says he wishes success for President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration but that he’ll be watching closely to see how Trump deals with immigrants who are in the country without legal status.
“The Catholic Church teaches that a country has the right to control its borders. And our nation’s desire to do that is a legitimate effort,” McElroy said Monday, shortly after being introduced as Washington’s eighth archbishop during an online press conference at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle amid an unusually heavy snowstorm in the nation’s capital.
“At the same time, we are called always to have a sense of the dignity of every human person. And thus, plans which have been talked about at some levels of having a wider indiscriminate massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine. So we’ll have to see what emerges in the administration.”
The Vatican announced Monday that Pope Francis has appointed McElroy, 70, as archbishop of Washington, a high-profile see that includes about 667,000 Catholics in the District of Columbia and five counties in southern Maryland.
McElroy, widely seen as a progressive and an ally of Pope Francis, was appointed by the pope to the College of Cardinals in August 2022. He has served as shepherd of San Diego since 2015.
In Washington, he replaces Cardinal Wilton Gregory, 77, who has served as archbishop there since 2019.
The appointment was immediate. Gregory was already listed Monday as among the “former archbishops” of Washington on the archdiocese’s website.
The two cardinals appeared together at the online press conference.
The press conference, which was emceed by a moderator, featured prepared statements by the two cardinals, two questions from reporters the moderator posed to McElroy, and one question from a reporter the moderator posed to Gregory.
Gregory took over the archdiocese in April 2019 when it was reeling after revelations of sexual abuse by Theodore McCarrick, the sixth archbishop of Washington, whom Pope Francis dismissed from the clerical state, and the awkward departure of the seventh archbishop, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who was sharply criticized for how he handled allegations against McCarrick and for how he handled certain clergy-sex-abuse cases when he was bishop of Pittsburgh.
Gregory, who has been seen as a lower-profile prelate than his predecessors, has worked to right the ship in Washington. But financial and other problems loom, as McElroy noted in his prepared statement.
“The journey of this Catholic community has known mountaintop moments, the visits of St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict, and Pope Francis, and it has known also moments of failure and shame — in the massive betrayal of the young to sexual abuse and the moral and financial reckoning for this betrayal which lie ahead of us,” McElroy said.
“In this mixture of mountaintop and failure, we are no different from the first disciples of the Lord. The light of Christ radiates in the Catholic community of this diocese in all of these dimensions, but most powerfully, it radiates in the lives of individual women and men who form the people of God, struggling in a world filled with turbulence, hardship, and illusion to follow the pathway of Christ,” he added.
The first question McElroy fielded was about decreasing reliance on so-called fossil fuels (such as oil and natural gas) in the Diocese of San Diego, such as through using solar panels.
McElroy, a staunch promoter of Pope Francis’ environment-focused encyclical Laudato Si’, said San Diego implemented the Archdiocese of Washington’s already-existing plan.
“So I’m here to learn as much as to bring new ideas. I think one of the great challenges for the Church in the world at this moment is that of the care for our home on this Earth, for the planet, and all of the abuse which it is suffering,” McElroy said.
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“And it is a top issue in terms of our world,” he said. “How are we going to preserve the creation that God has given to us and enhance?”
The second and final question he received was about the incoming second Trump administration.
McElroy said he addressed a similar question about polarization in the United States during a panel discussion about six months ago, long before the November 2024 election that Trump won. His answer remains the same, he said.
“All of us as Americans should hope and pray that the government of our nation is successful in helping to enhance our society, our culture, our life, and the whole of our nation. And that is my prayer. It was my prayer then, not knowing who it would be, and it is my prayer now,” McElroy said.
“I pray that President Trump’s administration and that all of those state and local legislators and governors across the whole of the country will work together to make our nation truly better and to talk through the major issues that we face and make a difference,” he added. “And so our first responsibility for all of us is support for that goal, of success for our government.”
McElroy had been rumored as a likely replacement for Gregory since at least Oct. 10, 2024, when he met with Pope Francis at the Vatican, along with two other allies of the pope, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, and Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago. While details of the private meeting have not been made public, some observers have suggested the men discussed high-profile archbishoprics that needed to be filled, including Washington.
Gregory, who was appointed archbishop of Washington in April 2019, served five years and nine months in the post. His successor’s tenure could be even shorter.
McElroy turns 71 next month. Under Church law, he must submit his resignation to the pope in early February 2029, about four years from now, when he turns 75. Pope Francis has allowed certain bishops to continue serving until age 80, which for McElroy would mean 2034.
Gregory answered one question during the press conference, saying that he plans to stay in the Archdiocese of Washington and assist in any way he can.
At the end, McElroy whispered to Gregory: “That was easy.”
This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.
