Donald Trump launched his campaign to “re-Americanize” America with two moves that immediately put him on a collision course with even the Catholic bishops most aligned with his policies. These moves were a crackdown on undocumented immigrants and a restrictive interpretation and of ius soli regarding the right to U.S. citizenship.
In his second term Trump surrounded himself with Catholic staff members in prominent positions within his administration, among them notably Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State M. Rubio. Considering that six out of nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic, an unprecedented picture emerges of the rise of Catholicism to power in the United States.
Trump has shaped his political vision of the role of Catholicism in America to counteract the two episodes in the nation’s history that brought Catholics to the White House: J.F. Kennedy and Joe Biden. One cannot fully understand Trump’s domestic and foreign policy without interpreting it as a radical deconstruction of the America between Kennedy and Biden.
The Trumpian project, encapsulated in the motto “Make America Great Again,” aims to redesign the country along what we might call a “nativism of origins.” This project grants American Catholicism a dignity of original belonging that it has never historically possessed. The sole condition for this veritable American baptism is loyalty at any cost to the President, whatever he may want and do.
This internal pact within the administration is the source of Trump’s papal imagery, announced to the world between the death of Francis and the election of the first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church. This was neither madness nor arrogance but rather an articulation of Catholicism’s new American citizenship.
The friction with Pope Leo XIV, beyond the incidental issues that served as its immediate cause, finds its deep roots and raison d’être in this extraconstitutional citizenship that the American president conferred upon Catholicism as an integral part of the “nativism of origins.” For Trump, it is unacceptable for a Catholic who is constitutionally American to not bow to the honor of this unprecedented political expansion of his right to citizenship.
For this reason, for the duration of the Trump administration at least, every pastoral decision by American bishops is a political choice that will determine the future of the United States’ founding document, the Constitution. With Mephistophelean skill, Trump has succeeded in wresting the daily work of ordinary pastoral care from the American Church. He has transformed it into a choice of sides, an act of political alignment, a gesture of the nation’s decline or greatness.
Perhaps never before has the Gospel’s sacredness of the “care of souls,” which looks to the ultimate good of people without conditions, been transformed into a crucial political practice—for or against the creation ex nihilo of a new America.
In this context, there seems to be no room for balance or a position of American Catholicism that could present itself as a force for the reconciliation of a divided nation. This is a nation in which this division has been brought to a fever pitch in order to reach a moment of judgment, when it will be determined which people will enter the new promised land.
This is the context in which the bishops and the American Church celebrate the Feast of the Sacred Heart today. During the Eucharistic liturgy held in Orlando, where the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is gathered for its spring general assembly, they will consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (a decision made by the bishops in November 2025).
The consecration of a nation to the Sacred Heart has its own history, which inevitably speaks of things that go beyond today’s intentions, especially if one is unaware of it. This act of religious devotion in modern Catholicism has always had a political component regarding the state and its power. Clearly, at this moment in America, the political significance of such an act of devotion is growing exponentially.
Furthermore, the American Catholic Church is carrying out this act of devotion to the Sacred Heart just one month after the political liturgy of Trumpian “nativism of origins,” which was celebrated on May 17 with the rededication of America to God. Trump’s choice of the term “rededication” for this moment of national prayer was neither random nor neutral; traditionally, a liturgical and religious space is rededicated after it has been desecrated.
Trump’s rededication of the nation to God represents a break and takes the form of a judgment on the irreligiousness of all previous politics and every form of faith and Christianity. The U.S. bishops chose the Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart as a liturgical emblem to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American nation. However, it has no chance of functioning as a means of reuniting a divided nation, pacifying culture wars, or guiding a humanistic policy that honors the dignity of every human being.
It cannot succeed because Trump has placed a veto not so much on its liturgical meaning, but rather on the constructive effectiveness of such devotion within the country’s public life. In this way, Trump’s political coercion of Catholic religious practice enters the sancta sanctorum of the Church’s liturgical celebration.
After the culture wars and the clash of civilizations, a battle of devotions looms—if the devotion to the Sacred Heart refuses to become a mere vassal of the devotion to the “nativism of origins” to which Trump seeks to lead American Christianity and Catholicism.
Respectful bewiderment here: On this Catholic website, President Trump has now taken on the “prophetic” mantle with Cathoics in his inner circe and on the Supreme Court. The only glaring horror here is that he is not a real prophet and has never had a speck of interest in such superstitious nonsense and there’s no identifiiable public deal to be made with many of the American Bishops lobbies–nor with Pope Leo at this time. No doubt that the American Catholic church, has losing its “church pilgrim” and “church prophetic” mission in this age of deadening techno-bureaucracy, or, “The Banalities of Evil.”
The most obvious elephant in Trump’s room are the genocidal horrors of a Trump-Netanyahu-Israeli collusion of private and geo-political agenda interests—all of which aligns with the original Project 25. The hideous price that continues to be paid is that both the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes are just fossilized remnants of what Judeo-Christianity once assumed that it represented–at least in symbolism, if not in truth. No amount of devotional consecration to the Sacred Heart or to the Immaculate Heart of Mary should have to suffer yet more insult, abuse, and murderous violence to the hearts of its own faithful. You cannot transform the heads of terminally diseased-rotten twin fish (Trump & Netanyahu) to the rest of the fishes body for honest and healthy consumption (the Catholic faithful). Flannery O’Connor would have a field day with writing THIS one up! Back to the same old diseased elephants in these same horror rooms and the American Catholic Bishops will address everything else but this 20th-21st century plague and assaults against the very body and souls of humanity itself. The Immigration narratives on all sides are the repetitive record-is-stuck smoke-screens and false mirrors of our age, Its much easier to scream praise or obsencities at masses of migrants. Anything but cut off the heads of the rotten fish who are hunting down and killing impoverished nnocents every day. And I pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet every day…