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Robert McElroy has made many statements supporting LGBTQ+ people and criticizing Donald Trump's anti-immigrant policies.
Pope Francis has named a pro-LGBTQ+, pro-immigrant critic of Donald Trump as the next Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C.
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Cardinal Robert McElroy “constantly calls on members of the church to examine their negative attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people,” says a press release from New Ways Ministry, which works for LGBTQ+ equality within the church. “He did so most recently in 2024 to refute church leaders who spoke negatively against the Vatican’s directive allowing for the blessing of people in same-gender relationships. He stated that opposition to such blessings reveals ‘an enduring animus among far too many toward LGBT persons.’”
The pope announced McElroy’s appointment Monday. He will succeed Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who has headed the Washington archdiocese since 2019 and was its first African-American archbishop. McElroy was previously bishop of the San Diego diocese. The Washington archdiocese includes not only the District of Columbia but also Montgomery, Prince George’s, St. Mary’s, Calvert, and Charles counties in Maryland.
Among his other pro-LGBTQ+ statements: In 2023, he wrote in an essay that there is “profound and visceral animus” toward LGBTQ+ people among some in of the church, adding that it is a “demonic mystery of the human soul.” In 2018, he objected to the blaming of gay priests for the clergy sexual abuse crisis, “saying that such abuse was a matter of power, not sexual orientation,” New Ways reports. Also that year, “he supported Aaron Bianco, a gay pastoral worker in his diocese who was threatened with harm by traditionalist churchgoers because of being married to a man,” the release notes.
In 2016, he was the first among just a few Catholic leaders who offered sympathy to LGBTQ+ people after the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, calling the massacre “a call for us as Catholics to combat ever more vigorously the antigay prejudice which exists in our Catholic community and in our country.” He further supported Pope Francis’s 2016 apology to gays and lesbians, while urging the church to take additional steps to support LGBTQ+ people.
McElroy is also a strong critic of Trump’s policies on immigration and more. “We must all become disruptors,” he said in a speech in Modesto, Calif., in 2017. “We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families. We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need. We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men, women, and children as forces of fear rather than as children of God. We must disrupt those who seek to rob our medical care, especially from the poor. We must disrupt those who would take even food stamps and nutrition assistance from the mouths of children.”
In 2016, shortly after Trump’s first election, McElroy called on Catholics and the nation to pray for the president-elect and the new Congress but added, “We must turn as a society from selective outrage based upon partisan and ideological categories to a comprehensive compassion for all those who are suffering in our midst, combined with care, analysis, and action. The reality that young black men fear for their security when facing law enforcement, the sense of dispossession felt by young white men in the Rust Belt without a college education, the fear that police face every day trying to protect society, rampant patterns of sexual harassment and assault directed against women, the institutionalized patterns of poverty and ever increasing economic inequality in America — these are all wounds in our society which must be addressed.” The remarks came at a speech at the Center for Migration Studies in New York City.
In a virtual press conference Monday, he offered further support for immigrants. “The Catholic Church teaches that a country has the right to control the borders, and our nation’s desire to do that is a legitimate effort,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “At the same time, we are called always to have the sense of the dignity of every human person, and thus plans which have been talked about on some level of having a wider indiscriminate, massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”
New Ways concluded its release by noting the significance of the location of McElroy’s new assignment. “Most importantly is that Cardinal McElroy has been appointed to the nation’s capital at a time when a new presidential administration and Congress have strongly indicated that legislation repealing civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people are at the top of their agendas,” the release says. “We are confident that Cardinal McElroy can provide a strong Catholic voice affirming the human dignity of LGBTQ+ people and the need for laws that will protect them.”
