WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Robert McElroy was installed on Tuesday as the eighth archbishop of Washington, D.C., making him one of the most prominent figures in the U.S. Catholic Church.
But the former San Diego bishop has made a reputation for himself as a particularly heterodox, controversial prelate.
McElroy has aggressively defended giving Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians and downplayed the gravity of abortion, denying that the murder of unborn children is the “preeminent” moral issue.
The liberal cardinal, a favorite of Pope Francis, has also faced backlash for criticizing Catholic teaching on homosexuality, celebrating LGBT-themed Masses, calling for unrepentant homosexuals to be admitted to the Eucharist, and throwing his support behind LGBT activists like Father James Martin.
McElroy is a major proponent of “women deacons” as well and has suggested that women could eventually be “ordained” to the priesthood in contradiction to Catholic teaching.
He prohibited priests from signing religious exemption letters for COVID shots and quickly cracked down on the Latin Mass in response to Pope Francis’ restrictions. And last year, his diocese banned homeschoolers from using parish property.
At the same time, the new Washington, D.C., cardinal has been faulted for his handling of sexual abuse cases, including that of a now ex-priest accused of satanic ritual abuse.
Below is a closer look at McElroy’s record.
Communion for Biden, other pro-abortion politicians
On abortion, McElroy strongly supports giving Holy Communion to politicians who promote the killing of unborn children and opposes the U.S. bishops’ declaration that abortion is the “preeminent priority” for Catholics.
Three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, McElroy defended Joe Biden from critics of his pro-abortion positions, claiming that it was “offensive” and “repugnant” to dispute Biden’s Catholic identity, even though Biden supports virtually unlimited, taxpayer-funded abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
“Such denials are injurious because they reduce Catholic social teaching to a single issue. But they are offensive because they constitute an assault on the meaning of what it is to be Catholic,” McElroy said.
His comments led to a rebuke by Bishop Thomas Daly of Spokane, who said that McElroy’s remarks “effectively constituted a defense of Biden and other prominent Catholic elected officials who publicly support unrestricted abortion.”
During the early months of the Biden presidency, McElroy joined a letter urging then-president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Archbishop José H. Gomez to halt discussions of denying Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians.
McElroy claimed in a 2021 essay that it would be “tremendously destructive” to ban pro-abortion politicians like Biden from Holy Communion and that doing so would be “instrumentalization” of the Eucharist “for a political end.”
Even before becoming a bishop, McElroy staunchly defended giving Holy Communion to politicians who reject Catholic teaching and promote the murder of unborn babies in abortion. In 2005, McElroy criticized the archbishop of Newark for prohibiting pro-abortion politicians from the Eucharist, claiming that doing so makes the Church look “coercive.”
Soon after the 2020 election, McElroy encouraged Catholics to work as “proud collaborators” with the radically pro-abortion, pro-LGBT Biden administration, including on “climate change” and the rollout of the COVID-19 shots. He also complained that some bishops thought the USCCB “must adopt an overall stance of confrontation with the president and his administration” due to the “centrality of abortion.”
Conversely, within days of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, McElroy attacked the Republican president and encouraged participants at the Vatican-sponsored World Meeting of Popular Movements conference to become “disruptors” of his administration.
“He was ‘the disruptor.’ Well, now we must all become disruptors,” McElroy said.
Last month, McElroy stated that he had no plans to meet with Trump after being installed as the new archbishop of Washington but added that he recently had a “lengthy” call with Biden.
McElroy: Abortion is not ‘preeminent’
McElroy has also repeatedly condemned the U.S. bishops’ voting guide for declaring abortion the “preeminent issue.”
Before a vote on the USCCB guide in 2015, McElroy criticized the document, saying that it allegedly put too much emphasis on abortion and euthanasia. Prioritizing abortion reflected an outdated “worldview of 2007,” he told fellow bishops.
McElroy again attacked the guide in 2019, claiming, “It is not Catholic teaching that abortion is the preeminent issue that we face as the world in Catholic social teaching. It is not.”
Describing abortion as “preeminent” is “at least discordant with the Pope’s teaching if not inconsistent” and is a “grave disservice to our people,” he said.
In an address last year at the University of San Diego, McElroy said that “climate change” and “the degradation of the earth are the most important global moral challenge that we face at this moment in our history.”
The cardinal, who as archbishop of Washington is now the chancellor of the Catholic University of America, added in the speech that “for this reason alone,” Pope Francis’ climate-themed encyclical Laudato Si’ “should be a focus for every Catholic university.”
In February 2020, in another address at the University of San Diego, McElroy also downplayed the mortally sinful nature of contraception, saying that “it is a far greater moral evil for our country to abandon the Paris Climate Accord than to provide contraceptives in federal health centers.”
McElroy failed to note that the Paris Agreement is pro-abortion, and many contraceptives act as abortifacients, in addition to causing serious harms to women, like cancer and stroke, and violating “the inner truth of conjugal love,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches.
Abortion is the leading cause of death worldwide and is estimated have killed more than 44 million children in 2023 and more than 1 billion children in recent decades.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is always gravely evil and a “most serious and dangerous crime” and that the right to life is “the first of the fundamental rights” and the “source of all other rights.” Politicians have a “grave and clear obligation to oppose” pro-abortion policies, according to Catholic teaching.
The Church punishes abortion with the penalty of automatic excommunication, and a 2004 memo from the Vatican to the U.S. bishops states that politicians who advocate for abortion or euthanasia should be denied the Eucharist.
McElroy’s pro-homosexual ‘heresy’
In addition to downplaying abortion, McElroy has contradicted Catholic doctrine on sexuality, particularly homosexuality, on numerous occasions and closely allied himself with LGBT activists.
In 2016, he slammed Church teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” calling it “very destructive language.”
However, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’”
Two years ago, McElroy sparked outrage for demanding “radical inclusion” of divorced and civilly “remarried” people and so-called “LGBT persons” that would allow them to receive Holy Communion without repenting of adultery or sodomy, in blatant contradiction to the teaching of the Church.
In a January 2023 essay for Jesuit-run America magazine, McElroy rejected what he described as a “theology of eucharistic coherence” and called for homosexual and gender-confused individuals to be included in “full participation in the life of the church,” even if they persist in sexual sin.
“The distinction between orientation and activity cannot be the principal focus for such a pastoral embrace because it inevitably suggests dividing the LGBT community into those who refrain from sexual activity and those who do not,” he wrote.
In a follow-up article, McElroy said that serious sin should not be “the basis for categorical ongoing exclusion from the Eucharist” and that “sexually active members of the L.G.B.T. communities” should be invited to “the eucharistic banquet.”
Several bishops publicly rebuked McElroy in response to his “radical inclusion” comments, including Illinois Bishop Thomas Paprocki, the current chairman of USCCB’s canonical affairs and church governance committee, who condemned McElroy’s statements as “heresy” and suggested that he excommunicated himself.
“With regard to the sinfulness of homosexual acts,” Bishop Paprocki said, “the truth that must be believed with divine and Catholic faith is also stated clearly in the Catechism.”
Other bishops who rebuked McElroy include Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, and Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska. Archbishop Charles Chaput, archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia, called for McElroy to be “publicly corrected” by the Vatican.
Promotion of LGBT activists
In response to the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized homosexual “marriage” throughout the United States, McElroy suggested that homosexual “marriages” “enrich the lives” of participants.
In October 2016, McElroy launched the diocesan “San Diego Synod” to implement Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia and “offer the diocese a new model for ‘being church.’” The synod proposed “embracing LGBT families” and allowing divorced and “remarried” Catholics who persist in adultery to receive Holy Communion liberally based on the “internal forum of conscience.”
The following year, McElroy called for priests to give Catholic burials to homosexuals, despite canon law prohibiting funerals for unrepentant manifest sinners.
Allowing such burials “is the appropriate policy that I would hope the priests would observe, especially in the times of funerals,” he told the National Catholic Reporter. “Our fundamental stance has to be one of inclusion in the church, especially during a time of burial.”
The D.C. cardinal is also a public supporter of LGBT activist priest Father James Martin, S.J., and wrote a glowing endorsement of Martin’s 2017 pro-LGBT book Building a Bridge, in which Martin criticized Catholic doctrine on homosexuality as “needlessly cruel.”
In 2018, McElroy gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests, which has advocated for “women’s ordination,” ordaining homosexuals as priests, and homosexual adoption.
He later signed a rainbow-colored statement organized by a homosexual activist group, the Tyler Clementi Foundation, telling “LGBT youth” that “God is on your side.” The statement made no mention of Catholic teaching on the sinfulness of homosexuality or the evil of gender ideology.
Shortly after becoming bishop of San Diego, McElroy assured a homosexual diocesan employee, Aaron Bianco, that he would not remove him due to his sinful lifestyle, The Wall Street Journal reported. Despite concerns raised by parishioners, McElroy told Bianco that his homosexuality “should not hinder me from participating fully in the life of the church,” Bianco said.
Bianco, who is in a homosexual “marriage,” was also a “program outreach associate” for the pro-abortion, pro-LGBT group Call to Action starting in 2015. McElroy nevertheless asked Bianco to form an “LGBT ministry” at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in San Diego.
The parish also named Bianco as the point of contact for couples preparing for marriage and the coordinator for young adults and pastoral outreach.
As bishop of San Diego, McElroy additionally allowed the nominally Catholic University of San Diego to promote LGBT ideology and fund “sex change” surgeries and abortion in student health care plans.
McElroy’s ‘LGBT Mass’ with drag queen activist
McElroy has celebrated LGBT-themed Masses, including one at St. John the Evangelist parish that featured “married” homosexuals with children, homosexual politicians, and a drag queen activist who spoke at the lectern after Communion.
Tables with rainbow-colored tablecloths were set up for the post-Mass reception in the playground of the parish’s K-12 school. The parish continues to celebrate “LGBT Masses” and advertises “LGBTQ ministry” events with rainbow “pride” colors.
The drag queen activist, “Nicole” Murray Ramirez, a former board member of the pro-LGBT group Human Rights Campaign, presented McElroy and his then-auxiliary bishop John Dolan (now the bishop of Phoenix) with a “humanitarian award” named after late, pro-homosexual San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, according to the San Diego diocesan newspaper.
Murray-Ramirez suggested that the two San Diego bishops celebrated the LGBT-themed Mass at his request. In a Facebook post praising Pope Francis’ appointment of McElroy as a cardinal, Murray-Ramirez said that the “beloved” McElroy and Dolan “granted our request for a (M)ass to be said for LGBTQ Catholic families” at St. John the Evangelist parish.
The drag queen stated in an earlier post that he was “asked to speak” at the event.
‘Ordaining’ women
McElroy is also an advocate for “ordaining” women to the diaconate and suggested that women could eventually become priests, despite women being unable to receive Holy Orders.
“The church should move toward admitting women to the diaconate” due to “reasons of inclusion,” McElroy said in 2023. He presented the “ordination” of women to the priesthood as an open question as well, saying that it may be a position that “emerges from the synodal discernment.”
“The call for the admission of women to priestly orders as an act of justice and a service to the church was voiced in virtually every region of our world church,” he continued.
However, the inability to ordain women to the priesthood is an infallible truth of the faith that “requires definitive assent,” the Church teaches.
COVID shots are ‘vitally important’
During the COVID era, McElroy strongly pushed Catholics to take the abortion-tainted COVID shots, saying in a video to “all of the Catholics” in his diocese that there was “only one real pathway for us as a society out of the pandemic, and that is through the embracing of vaccinations by the whole of our community, so I encourage you to get vaccinated.”
He added in a letter that it was “vitally important that all of us receive the Covid vaccine,” including to “bring back the joys of life.” “In the coming months, the vaccine will be available for every member of our society, including those without documents, and no one who cannot afford it will have to pay,” he added.
McElroy additionally instructed priests not to sign religious exemption letters for jab mandates.
Leaflets about the COVID shots distributed by the San Diego diocese read: “Getting the vaccine is a way to follow Jesus’s command to love your neighbor … Catholics also have an obligation to protect their family, friends and community by vaccinating as soon as feasible in accordance with public health guidelines and protocols in their area.”
The COVID shots, all of which were developed with the cells of aborted babies, have been linked to numerous serious side effects, tens of thousands of deaths, and millions of injuries.
Latin Mass crackdown
Days after Pope Francis announced heavy restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) in 2021, McElroy ordered two of the diocese’s three churches that offered the Latin Mass to stop doing so, relegating the TLM to the Church of St. Anne, far from parishioners in northern San Diego County.
“There will be no other public celebrations of the Eucharist utilizing the Roman Missal of 1962 permitted in the Diocese of San Diego,” McElroy wrote. “Priests who wish to celebrate the Mass using the 1962 text privately are to seek specific permission from me to do so.”
Canceling homeschoolers, faithful priest
Under McElroy’s leadership, the Diocese of San Diego last year banned homeschool groups from using parish facilities. However, the same policy allows parishes to rent school properties to non-Catholic education programs on a “case-by-case” basis.
Allowing homeschool programs to use parish property “can undermine the stability of nearby Catholic schools and lead people to think that the Church is approving and advancing particular alternative schools and programs,” the policy claims.
McElroy’s marginalization of homeschoolers is particularly notable given that homeschool programs can serve as refuge for Catholic families from sexualized, anti-Christian public education systems like California’s.
California mandates that public schools instruct children in extremely graphic, pro-abortion, pro-LGBT “comprehensive sexual education” and “LGBT history” lessons. The state also forces schools to hide children’s gender confusion from parents and to allow students to leave campus so that they can obtain abortions without parental consent.
In 2016, McElroy prohibited Father Richard Perozich from writing columns in his parish bulletins after the priest stressed Catholic teaching on abortion and other matters of intrinsic evil and criticized unregulated immigration, restrictions on legal gun ownership, and militant Islam. Perozich soon retired.
At the same time, McElroy allowed dissident LGBT activism at San Diego parishes like St. John the Evangelist Church and St. Thomas More parish in Oceanside.
The cardinal has also said that he would ban Catholic TV network EWTN from diocesan media due to criticism of Pope Francis aired on the station and because EWTN is allegedly trying to “steer the world away” from Francis’ “reforms.”
Abuse
McElroy and the Diocese of San Diego have been accused of mishandling sexual abuse as well, most notably in the case of now-laicized ex-priest Jacob Bertrand, a satanic ritual abuser who was left in active ministry by McElroy for more than a year after confessing guilt his to the diocese.
In 2014, Bertrand admitted to abusing Rachel Mastrogiacomo in the presence of diocesan administrator and later vicar general Father Steven Callahan, but the diocese still transferred him to St. John the Evangelist parish the following year, a few weeks before McElroy’s installation.
The Diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina, where she was living at the time, had sent the diocese a report describing Mastrogiacomo’s allegations of abuse that Bertrand inflicted on her in 2010 while she was a theology student in Rome, and other women in San Diego made similar complaints, as Mastrogiacomo related in a 2022 interview with Crisis magazine.
But McElroy left Bertrand in active ministry for over a year, until August 2016, after learning that Bertrand was being prosecuted. Prosecutors accused the diocese of withholding key files about the Bertrand, who ultimately pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct in the third degree and faces 10 years’ probation.
The Diocese of San Diego has been faulted in other abuse cases under McElroy, such as in 2018, when the diocese did not alert parishioners that police launched an investigation into Father Juan Garcia Castillo, an associate pastor at St. Patrick’s Church in Carlsbad, for sexual battery of a seminarian.
Diocesan spokesman Kevin Eckery defended the decision by saying that the accuser was an adult and the diocese didn’t want to influence a criminal case. Castillo was convicted that December.
In 2016, McElroy received a letter detailing allegations against now-laicized ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington, from A.W. Richard Sipe, a researcher of priestly sexual abuse. Sipe wrote that he had interviewed 12 seminarians and priests who attested to sexual propositions and harassment from or sexual activity with McCarrick. McElroy didn’t respond to the letter and later said that he ignored it because he couldn’t substantiate the accusations.
