If President Donald Trump is going to “protect” Christianity, the editorial staff of the National Catholic Reporter isn’t feeling the love.
The flagship independent publication of American Catholics published a scathing editorial about Trump’s policies Feb. 6, calling out “the unprecedented cruelty.”
Specifically, the editorial responds to news that Catholic Relief Services faces “massive cuts in staff and programs because of reductions in international aid” made suddenly and perhaps illegally by the Trump administration.
USAID, which the administration shuttered, supplied about half of the Catholic organization’s $1.5 billion budget.
“The U.S. was never a nation of angels. But we have aspired to noble ideals no matter how imperfectly lived over our history,” the editorial says. “We are now in danger of abandoning any pretext to living those ideals. Never before has intentional cruelty and intentional destruction of democratic institutions and norms been wedded as national policy.
“Never before has intentional cruelty and intentional destruction of democratic institutions and norms been wedded as national policy.”
“Cruelty this truly is, with no other apparent motive than to demean others and to save what amounts to a paltry sum in federal spending. For those of us in the Catholic community, cruelty should be especially alarming. And a call to action.”
The word “cruel” is used a dozen times in the piece, which repeatedly calls out the administration for seeking to save paltry sums by afflicting the poor.
“To target this tiny portion of the federal budget in such a haphazard and irresponsible way is going to cost people’s lives and livelihoods,” the outlet quoted Stephen Colecchi, a former director of the Office of International Justice and Peace for U.S. bishops. “It is not a thoughtful or humane way to go about treating programs that help the poorest of the poor all over the world.”
Then the editorial continues the theme: “Cruelty is the only term that adequately describes the terror coursing through refugee and immigrant communities now living in unremitting fear of the indiscriminate tactics underway. Children who go to our religious education classes and sit in our church pews with their parents can’t help but understand the stakes — their parents may be taken from them. Religious congregations of every persuasion and religious leaders across denominations and faiths are spending inordinate time and effort devising clandestine plans to protect immigrants from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.”
These Trump-induced actions create the same kind of helpless feelings in people as natural disasters, the editorial warns.
These “cruel” actions — from immigration raids to ending food programs — defy Catholic doctrine, the editorial says. Catholic social doctrine “provides the lens that cuts through the distractions and allows us to focus on what is most essential — the dignity of the human person and the priority to tend to the most vulnerable regardless of race, creed, politics, nationality or place on the globe.”
Ironically, Vice President JD Vance is a Roman Catholic, although one who is at odds with his own church’s social teachings. Recently, Catholic leaders publicly denounced Vance’s theology.
“We are becoming the global face of the cruel man currently in the Oval Office.”
In a White House full of cruelty, nothing compares to the horror that is abruptly ending foreign aid, the piece continues. “The effect of the initial order was immediate, causing a spike in humanitarian crises from starving refugees, to those in extreme poverty needing medical care, to residents of Ukraine dependent on the U.S. aid to make it through the winter as their country continues to fight an unprovoked and dastardly Russian invasion.”
The editorial calls Elon Musk “an unelected and unaccountable ‘broligarch’ influencer given shocking and unprecedented authority over U.S. foreign policy.”
The bottom line, according to the Catholic publication: “Trump will never be able to understand or appreciate the work of USAID because the payoff doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.”
This is ruining America’s reputation around the world, the authors contend. “We are becoming the global face of the cruel man currently in the Oval Office. That means we are becoming a nation folded in on ourselves, motivated by retribution and revenge and what we perceive as self-interest to the exclusion of anything else.”
And in one of the sharpest blows of all, the piece ends with this call to action: “It is time for complicit Catholics, in particular, to stop aiding and abetting cruelty by asserting that this administration is in any way pro-life. It is not.”
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