Among the slew of new cardinals announced by Pope Francis on Sunday is San Diego’s famously liberal Bishop Robert W. McElroy, who is known for being highly vocal on the issue of climate change.
As bishop of San Diego, McElroy repeatedly minimized the gravity of abortion. In 2020, he declared that abortion should not be given priority over global warming because the “death toll” of climate change is higher than abortion’s.
This is despite the fact that nearly one million children are killed via abortion in the United States each year, and 40 million are aborted globally.
According to Fox Metro News:
Prior to the 2020 presidential election, McElroy declared that “the survival of the planet, which is the prerequisite for all human life, is at risk” because of climate change, adding that for this reason, many Catholics feel they “cannot support a candidate for national office who does not vigorously fight climate change.”
“Decisions on climate change in the next four years will either irrevocably amplify or arrest our world’s trajectory toward climate annihilation and the possible ending of all human life on this planet,” he warned.
McElroy in 2021 even spoke in favor of allowing Joe Biden to continue to receive Communion despite his support for abortion, which flies in the face of Church teachings.
His reasoning was that it is the responsibility of bishops to “signal unity” for the sake of healing divisions in America.
Despite these calls for unity, though, McElroy publicly excoriated President Donald Trump.
“President Trump was the candidate of disruption. He was the disrupter,” McElroy said a month after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. “Well, now we must all become disrupters.”
McElroy went so far as to urge his hearers to resist calls for unity and instead fight Trump at every opportunity. Fox continues:
“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,” McElroy said. “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 and women and children as sources 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,” he said.
Yet McElroy notably left out abortion.
Although the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has called the state-sanctioned killing of the unborn the “preeminent” moral issue in contemporary America, McElroy fought against that language, saying that calling abortion the “preeminent priority” goes against the teachings of Pope Francis.
Fox Metro News notes:
Bishop McElroy said the text was “discordant with the Pope’s teaching, if not inconsistent,” despite the pope’s frequent condemnations of abortion. Francis has called abortion a “scourge” and compared the act of abortion to hiring a hitman to take out a child.
At that time, the redoubtable Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, replied to Bishop McElroy, insisting that calling abortion the “preeminent priority” was not just correct but necessary, adding that this position represented no breach with Pope Francis.
“I am against anyone saying that our stating that [abortion] is preeminent is contrary to the teaching of the Pope, because that isn’t true,” he said. “It sets up an artificial battle between the bishops’ conference of the United States and the Holy Father, which isn’t true.”
“I don’t like the argument Bishop McElroy used, because it isn’t true,” he added, eliciting a round of applause from the bishops in the hall.
Not all bishops are cut from the same cloth. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been prohibited from taking communion when in her home district under orders of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, a fervent conservative who for years has been outspoken about Pelosi’s support for abortion, gay marriage, and other liberal positions that run counter to Catholic teachings.
The House speaker suggested that if she is disciplined for her position on abortion, then Catholics who support capital punishment, which the Church is also against, should likewise be banned from receiving Communion.
