The Democratic Party at Prayer

It is over a decade since the BBC questioned whether the Church of England was still the ‘Tory Party at prayer’. In 2014, reckoning that most English Anglicans voted Conservative, it concluded that it was. It is doubtful if that is still the case, so obsessed with minority rights, reparations and institutional racism is the hierarchy of the Church of England.

Many Conservative voters will have fled the church. Only those convinced that same-sex marriage should be permitted and that Queen Anne’s Bounty should be invested in Africa and the Caribbean will soon be left.

Meantime, across the Atlantic, there is little doubt that the Roman Catholic Church has largely become the Democratic Party at prayer. My title is not original, first having been used in City Magazine in an article referring to prayer within the Democratic Party. The article was primarily referring, not to Christian prayer, but to Jewish prayer explaining the importance of the Jewish vote to the party.

However, based on recent visits over the past few years to the United States and my attendance there at Sunday Mass in various Roman Catholic churches and cathedrals, the Catholic Church appears to have largely Democratic congregations. Without doubt the message in Sunday sermons – especially during the previous and present Trump administrations – is anti-Trump, anti-Republican and expressly pro-migrant.

During the first Trump administration I attended a Saturday Vigil Mass in a downtown Catholic Church in New York. The sermon was quite explicit about the ‘threat’ facing America under the government. All eyes had to be on the way that immigrants were being treated, without distinction between legal and illegal migrants, or between those obeying the law and those breaking it. Migrant status clearly conferred a particular sanctity not ascribed to those ‘born and bred’ Americans who had lived their whole lives there, worked hard and paid their taxes.

Fast forward to Washington DC this month, to St Matthew’s Roman Catholic Cathedral where, on Sunday October 19th, the celebrant was Rev Msgr W. Ronald Jameson. I don’t recall much of what he said. But then I don’t need to as he quoted liberally from a homily delivered from that very same pulpit on Sunday September 29th 2025 by Cardinal Robert McElroy for World Day of Migrants and Refugees. And, as if to bolster his homily further, he cited Dilexi te (‘I have loved you’), the Apostolic Exhortation released by Pope Leo XIV on October 9th.

Cardinal McElroy’s homily was loaded with rhetoric and spiritual misdirection. He reckoned that Americans were seeing “an unprecedented assault upon millions of immigrant men and women and families in our midst”, making specific reference to the “undocumented” (a.k.a. illegal migrants) within the Archdiocese of Washington DC. Americans were witnessing “a comprehensive governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women who have through their presence in our nation been nurturing precisely the religious, cultural, communitarian and familial bonds that are most frayed and most valuable at this moment in our country’s history”.

I interpret the Cardinal’s words as code for ‘many of these people are Roman Catholics’ as if that sanctified breaking the law. Indeed, he confirms that later saying that DC “has witnessed many people of deep faith, integrity and compassion who have been swept up and deported in the crackdown which has been unleashed upon our nation”.

He does acknowledge that Catholic social teaching says, “every nation has the right to effectively control its own borders and provide security”. But he takes exception to the present US Government’s position that these people “broke a law when they entered”, which seems a perfectly reasonable position to adopt.

The US provides plenty of other opportunities for people to enter legally such as the Green Card Lottery under the Diversity Visa Programme. My Uber drivers from Dulles airport to DC this year and last – one Ethiopian and one Afghani – were both lottery winners along with 55,000 other people in the years they won.

According to Cardinal McElroy, the first obligation of the Church “is to embrace in a sustained, unwavering, prophetic and compassionate way the immigrants who are suffering so deeply because of the oppression they are facing”. And there was me thinking that it had something to do with saving souls.

Turning to Pope Leo, who is already proving to be something of a disappointment to traditional Catholics, readers of Daily Sceptic will be well used to his antics such as blessing a lump of ice. He has already, like his predecessor, shown himself to be soft on migration.

However, contrary to the impression given by Msgr Jameson last week in DC, the latest encyclical is not focused on migrants. Easily 90% of Dilexi te is concerned with “the poor” and only three paragraphs (73, 74 and 75) of 121 paragraphs make explicit reference to migrants.

Of course, Leo draws Biblical analogies such as Abraham setting out without knowing what his destination was and Moses leading his people across the desert. But Abraham and Moses were called by God to set out. They were not lured by the bright lights of the United States. The Church’s tradition of “working for and with migrants” is referred to and nobody would deny the importance of this role.

But Leo fails to distinguish between legal and illegal migrants and, in common with Cardinal McElroy, seems to view all migrants through the rose-tinted spectacles of the Vatican saying that the challenge of migration must be responded to by “welcome, protect, promote and integrate”. I presume he means that the communities where migrants (legal and illegal) settle must attend to the integration. There seems to be a glaring lack of migrants, integrated or otherwise, within the walls of the Vatican.

Perhaps it is time the Catholic Church in America stopped trying to out-preach the Democratic National Committee and remembered that salvation was once its business model. Compassion for migrants is one thing; sanctifying illegal border-hopping is quite another.

Dr Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.