Despite immigration defense, U.S. Catholic bishops falter on clarity at 2025 fall assembly

Public proceedings have wrapped on the latest fall gathering of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which runs through Thursday and this year included a response to Republican machinations rather than tepid endorsement, even if the former remained feeble.

Effectively a wide-ranging lobbying group, the USCCB is tasked with both representing the nation’s Catholic prelates on the public scene as well as corralling their number for business and spiritual matters. As in the past, their fall plenary assembly—held this week in Baltimore—included a bit of both and told a story about the ideologies present on the episcopal bench.

The livestreamed public sessions began on Tuesday with welcome messages from the president, Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Military Services, and from the pope’s representative to the United States, papal nuncio Cardinal Christophe Pierre. Both messages took glancing aim at political divisions present in American life, with the latter more directly aimed at correcting perceived issues present among the U.S. Catholic bishops.

“In our engagement with public life, we are not chaplains to parties or distant commentators, but shepherds who bring the breadth of Catholic social teaching into civic discourse in a way that transcends partisanship,” Pierre said on Tuesday, explicitly culling insights from the Second Vatican Council.

“We must never forget the call Pope Leo XIV places at the heart of ‘Dilexi Te’ to renew our saving relationship with the poor, whose poverty takes many forms—migrants seeking dignity, victims of human trafficking and abuse, families denied a fair chance to improve their lives. To be faithful to Vatican II is to be the Church of Christ among—and with—these brothers and sisters.”

In a sense, the assembled USCCB body was given a chance to respond with their vote thereafter for their new president and vice president, selecting the center-right Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City from a slate including several more conservative candidates. The close second, Pope Francis ally Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, was then selected as VP.

The assembly also included votes for the chairmen of standing advocacy committees, including—among others—International Justice and Peace (Ukrainian Catholic Archbishop Borys Gudziak of Philadelphia), Evangelization and Catechesis (Bishop William A. Wack, CSC of Pensacola-Tallahassee), Protection of Children and Young People (Bishop-designate Mark W. O’Connell of Albany), and Religious Freedom (Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland).

It is hard to draw too much from the selections, other than that the selections indicate business as usual for the American episcopate: If given the choice between a moderate or progressive and a conservative, the latter almost always wins out in the end. And between two conservatives, the more conservative is the favorite. 

Even in the case of a tie, as it was this year for the Religious Freedom Committee, the winner by seniority voluntarily handed the chairmanship to Sample, one of the nation’s most hardline bishops.

Similar impulses came through in a successful vote for changes to the USCCB’s ever-evolving "Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services," which include new content intended to combat gender ideology. (Conservative media darling Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, who lost out badly for the conference presidency, was among those who rose to commend the additions.)

As could perhaps be expected, the bishops broke from standard conservatism to unite on the issue of immigration, which has taken center-stage in the American mind since the onset of the second administration of President Donald Trump. The abject violence and inhumanity of the White House’s mass deportation efforts was roundly condemned by the USCCB this week in a variety of forms. These included a pointed (though as yet unpublished) address from the Migration Committee chair, Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, and, on day two of the Baltimore assembly, a vote in favor of a public statement abjuring the abuses and expressing solidarity with immigrants.

Curiously, though, unlike Seitz’s address, the conference statement makes no specific mention of those responsible for the violations of human dignity—namely, the Republican Party, President Trump, and his fellow workers of iniquity. (Oh, how different was the bishops' tune during the Obama presidency in 2013!)

The vague and passive voice is nothing new for the USCCB of recent years, but it was striking to see it show such vigor for the idea of speaking truth to power, while at the same time lacking the courage to name the powers themselves. This, despite the guilty party including a slew of Republican Catholics who have accused the USCCB of no less than human trafficking in their support for migrants.

The Jesus who once called pseudo-religious leaders “vipers” and King Herod “that fox” was nowhere to be seen in the bishops’ special statement—made all the more special by the reality that no shortage of U.S. Catholic prelates surely voted for venomous and vulpine characters just one short year ago.

Apparently the statement was also initially bereft of any direct mention of deportations. This was only resolved by the intervention of a progressive prelate, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, who demanded an addition on the assembly floor after questioning President Broglio’s insistence that no further amendments were possible. (“It’s in the interest of time,” the executive noted, before immediately backtracking.)

Before the vote affirming the new communique, it was noted that revisions were requested by some bishops who felt it did not make enough mention of Jesus, Scripture, or “an explicit rejection of violence.” Eminently conservative-coded, such requests likely came from the eight prelates who ultimately voted against the statement or abstained.

It’s a safe bet that the same bishops were in favor of a later vote, to rubber-stamp another National Eucharistic Congress in 2029, following the “great success” of the $14 million-plus 2024 gathering., according to Eucharistic Revival spearheader Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston. His presentation near the end of the assembly all but credited the twin efforts with the revival of the Catholic faith in America, including increased Sunday Mass attendance and a swell of interest in conversion.

In reality, though, correlation does not equal causation, and the Catholic churchgoing turn of many Americans in recent years—driven by a surprising amount of young people—can hardly be attributed so simply to a largely insular programmatic effort.

Capping off the bishops’ gathering was a surprisingly refreshing presentation on artificial intelligence—perceived to be one of the pressing issues of the day by religious figures across the spectrum, and the Catholic hierarchy in particular.

Dr. Paul Scherz, a theology professor from the University of Notre Dame, was quite frank about both the promise and dangers of AI, returning repeatedly to its potential for social harm in the form of racist and sexist reinforcement across the social sphere. (The presentation even brought out the rare appearance of a Black Catholic bishop at the microphone during a public bishops’ meeting, in Bishop Emeritus Edward Braxton of Belleville during the Q&A.)

One wonders, though, whether forces much like artificial intelligence, such as the false learnings of the American right wing, have similarly strengthened the negative impulses in the minds of the nation’s prelates themselves. They can recognize symptoms but not diagnose the illness. They can respond to the consequences but not prevent the conflagration. As it is, even if the USCCB presidency has not gone to the most conservative bidder, I fear the episcopal electorate is still very much in the throes of a powerful, faulty language model.

Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.

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