Francis made the comments during a press conference aboard the Papal plane on his flight back to Rome from Singapore.

Without naming Donald Trump or Kamala Harris directly, Pope Francis referred to policies on immigration and abortion as serious moral issues.

He condemned the refusal to welcome migrants as a "grave sin" and described abortion as an "assassination".

The pope encouraged Catholics to vote, urging them to reflect deeply and decide in good conscience, saying "Not voting is ugly. It is not good. You must vote".

"You must choose the lesser evil" he said.

"Who is the lesser evil? That lady, or that gentleman? I don't know. Everyone, in conscience, (has to) think and do this."

52 million US Catholics

US Catholics, numbering around 52 million, are seen as a key voting bloc in the November election. Catholics make up significant portions of the electorate in swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where their votes could sway the election outcome.

The pope reiterated the Church's longstanding opposition to abortion, stating clearly that it is "killing a human being" and that no exceptions could justify it.

Similarly, he emphasised the Church's support for the rights of migrants, referencing biblical teachings that call for the care of orphans, widows and foreigners.

Trump has promised, if elected to a second term as president, to crack down on illegal immigration and deport millions of immigrants already in the US.

He has also refused to rule out building detention camps for undocumented immigrants.

Harris has promised to sign any legislation passed by Congress to restore national protections for abortion access, which the Supreme Court struck down in its 2022 Dobbs decision.

Francis said both candidates' policies are "against life".

"Whether it is the one who is chasing away migrants or the one who kills children, both are against life."

Sources

Reuters

Religion News Service

CathNews New Zealand

Pew Research released a report on Apr 30 exploring support for presidential candidates sorted by religious affiliation.

The poll found that 55% of Catholics support or lean towards supporting former President Donald Trump in a head-to-head against Biden.

Conversely, only 43% of Catholics support Biden in the same one-on-one pairing.

The 12% margin of support for Trump marks a significant shift from 2020 when he held an extremely narrow lead—50% to 49%.

Biden currently leads among Hispanic Catholics with a narrow 49%-47% split, but the close contest marks a major shift rightward for the demographic.

Read More

In an essay published by the National Review said Trump is "manifestly unfit to be president of the United States."

The essay, "An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics," was co-written by Princeton professor Robert P. George and St. John Paul II biographer George Weigel.

The call has been supported by about three dozen lay Catholics, many of whom are active in conservative academic and nonprofit circles.

The group called on Catholics "to reject [Trump's] candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by supporting a genuinely reformist candidate."

The article criticized Trump's "appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice" that are "offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility" and his promise to kill the families of terrorism suspects.

"There is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us ground for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government," read the article.

After a visit to the US-Mexico border last month, Pope Francis said politicians who advocate building border walls aren't Christian. Trump then lashed out at the pope, saying it was offensive for the pontiff to question anyone's religious beliefs.

Several US bishops have condemned Trump's rhetoric on immigration, suggesting the candidate is engaging in modern-day nativism, resurrecting the kind of bigotry once directed at Catholics.

Sources

• National Review
• Christian Today
• The Washington Times
• Breitbart.Com
• Crux
• Image: AP/The Washington Times

Pope Francis is expected to be greeted with huge crowds and across-the-board reverence when he tours Washington, New York and Philadelphia during his first visit as pontiff to the United States.

The rapture, however, will not change the awkward - and largely forgotten fact - that for centuries the US discriminated against Catholics.

The land of immigrants enshrined freedom of religion in the constitution yet spent much of its history despising, harassing and marginalising Catholics.

From the first Puritan settlers to televangelists, leading political, business and religious figures lambasted followers of Rome as theological abominations and traitorous fifth columnists.

"When you look back at the true, hidden history of the United States this strand of anti-Catholicism is very powerful," said Kenneth Davis, a prominent historian and commentator.

"We want to show this patriotic view that we were this melting pot of religious freedom. Nonsense. People wanted their own religious freedom, not freedom for others. There was a very, very deep hatred of Catholics."

Discrimination dwindled in the 20th century, especially after John F Kennedy became the first Catholic president, bequeathing a sort of amnesia, said Davis.

"It's really astonishing how it has been swept under the rug. It's as if with JFK all the past is forgiven."

That history will seem distant indeed if, as expected, progressives and conservatives seek to co-opt the Pope, the former cheering his denunciations of poverty, inequality and climate change, the latter his espousal of family values.

The political establishment no longer frets about the religion. Joe Biden, the vice-president, is Catholic, as are three Republican presidential candidates: Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian
• Image: Smithsonian.com

In late October, the Vatican sent to national bishops' conferences a preparatory document and questionnaire for the 2014 Synod of Bishops on the family with the directive to circulate them "as widely as possible." The questions ask about topics like knowledge and acceptance of church teachings, family transference of the faith, marital issues (including natural law, divorce/annulments, and same-sex unions), and contraception.

Much attention has focused on how various bishops and dioceses would distribute the questionnaire, which NCR made public, and gather responses. While reform groups and lay organizations have joined the data collection push, valid research from social scientists already provides brushstrokes toward a portrait of the modern American Catholic family.

For example, NCR has sponsored a longitudinal study on American Catholic beliefs and practices with surveys conducted every six years since 1987. The most recent version, titled "Catholics in America," appeared Oct. 28, 2011. Similar, extensive work has been conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University, and the Pew Research Center's Religion and Public Life Project.

While not all questions posed by the Vatican fall under the scope of previously conducted studies, a wealth of information still exists.

Currently, Catholics in the United States number 78.2 million, about a quarter of the population. About 25 percent of U.S. Catholics attend Mass weekly. According to the NCR survey, more than half are of the post-Vatican II (born 1961-78) and millennial (born 1979-93) generations. A third are Hispanic. As of 2011, two-thirds have been married (54 percent currently, 69 percent of those validated by the church), and 10 percent live with a partner, while a fifth of respondents reported they have never married.

The synod survey first asks how Catholics understand (Question 1a) and accept (1b) family-related church teachings contained in the Bible, Gaudium et Spes, Familiaris Consortio and other documents. Though not specifically gauging comprehension of these texts, recent studies provide insight into U.S. Catholics' familiarity with such teachings.

In its 2007 survey on marriage, CARA found 34 percent of Catholics reporting high familiarity with church teachings on marriage, and 37 percent somewhat familiar. The percentages jumped when examined through Mass attendance, what CARA identified as "a strong indicator of the general importance of Catholicism in a person's life and of his or her level of commitment to living out the faith." Among weekly attendees, 59 percent describe themselves as very familiar with marriage teachings.

Catholics showed little interest (30 percent) in further learning of marriage teaching, with CARA noting "perhaps because they are already relatively familiar with Church teaching on marriage." At least a quarter expressed interest in learning more about commitment and fidelity; divorce, remarriage and annulments; and interfaith marriage. Just 19 percent were interested in further information about the church's family planning teachings. The preferred medium for such information was print or online resources (40 percent) — almost twice as much as interpersonal interaction, whether in groups, retreats or conversations with their pastor.

For the most part, CARA reported that Catholics could accurately identify church teachings on marriage — it is a sacrament when between two baptized persons; openness to children is an essential part; considered good for individuals and the community — but other studies found that recognition did not necessarily equal adoption.

In the 2011 NCR survey, researchers pointed to a post-Humanae Vitae effect, where the Vatican's rejection of contraceptives dented its moral authority, evident in the five surveys conducted since 1987. The latest figures show Catholics siding with personal conscience as the final decision-maker on the morality of remarriage without an annulment (47 percent), abortion (52 percent), nonmarital sex (53 percent), homosexual activity (57 percent) and the use of contraceptives (66 percent).

Further, Pew found in 2009 that unaffiliated former Catholics, when asked why they left their faith, cited unhappiness with teachings on abortion and homosexuality (56 percent), on birth control (48 percent, too strict for the vast majority), and on divorce and remarriage (33 percent).

At the end of Section 1, the Vatican asks what cultural factors have hindered reception of church teaching. Pew found about a third of Catholics said pop culture or civil law at least somewhat influenced their view of marriage, but more pointed to family experiences (two-thirds) and their faith (55 percent).

In two separate 2011 polls, the PRRI found familiarity a factor in opinions toward abortion or same-sex marriage: Among the 61 percent of Catholics who have a gay friend or family member, two-thirds favored legalizing same-sex marriage (up 11 percent from all Catholics), and more than half of the 60 percent of Catholics who know a woman who has had an abortion support its legalization in most cases. [Read More]

Source

NCR Online
Image: NCR Online

Dolan talked about gay marriage and the US Affordable Care Act with David Gregory on NBC's "Meet the Press" in an interview.

"Regardless of the church teachings, do you think this is evolving in such a way that it's ultimately going to be legal everywhere?" Gregory asked.

"I think I'd be a Pollyanna to say there doesn't seem to be kind of a stampede to do this," Dolan responded. "I regret that."

Dolan made the comments in the midst of a wave of same-sex marriage legislation across the United States.

Hawaii and Illinois most recently legalized same-sex marriage in November, and the first weddings under Hawaii's law will took place Monday. Gay marriages are now legal in 16 states and the District of Columbia.

Dolan suggested the church has been "outmarketed."

"We've been caricatured as anti-gay," he said, adding that the church is "pro-traditional-marriage" and "not anti-anybody."

While Pope Francis has garnered attention for arguing that the church should devote less energy to fighting gay marriage and focus more on helping the poor, US bishops have been vocally opposed to same-sex marriage legislation.

Sources

Los Angeles Times
New York Daily News
Fox News
Image: AP/Fox News

"In fact, our polls going back to 2007 show Catholic identification in the US has held stable, fluctuating only between 22% and 23%," Pew Research said in its latest post.

The group said that although Americans may report attending church more frequently than they actually do, surveys find that self-reported levels of Mass attendance have remained virtually unchanged since the new pope was elected.

Since April of this year, 39% of US Catholics report attending Mass at least weekly, similar to the 40% attendance figure last year.

The pope appears to be well-liked by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, rated favorably by 79% of Catholics and 58% of the general public, but the report said the pope's popularity seemed to have not produced a Catholic resurgence in the US.

Source

Pew Research Center

Image: Pew Research Center

Church leaders have staged fasting and prayer events, starting last week, to spotlight the plight of the immigrant.

Church leaders urged Catholics to call, write and email their congressional representatives, even providing prewritten letters and electronic postcards, to push for immigration reforms.

Kevin Appleby, director of immigration policy at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the latest immigration overhaul campaign is larger, bolder and a more unified national effort than in years past.

Polls show that there is broad support among Catholics for immigration reform. The challenge is getting those people to take action.

Sources

Los Angeles Times

Bakersfield Now

Boston Herald

Image: Los Angeles Times

70% say Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican have done a poor job of handling sexual abuse, a significant rise from three years ago.

US Catholics say that their church and bishops are out of touch, and that the next pope should lead the church in a more modern direction on issues like birth control and ordaining women and married men as priests, according to the Poll.

A strong majority said the issue had led them to question the Vatican's authority. The sexual abuse of children by priests is the largest problem facing the church, Catholics in the poll said.

Three-fourths of those polled said they thought it was a good idea for Benedict to resign.

Most wanted the next pope to be "someone younger, with new ideas." A majority said they wanted the next pope to make the church's teachings more liberal.

With cardinals now in Rome preparing to elect Benedict's successor, the poll indicated that the church's hierarchy had lost the confidence and allegiance of many U.S. Catholics, an intensification of a long-term trend.

They like their priests and nuns, but many feel that the bishops and cardinals do not understand their lives.

"I don't think they are in the trenches with people," said Therese Spender, 51, a homemaker in Fort Wayne, Ind., who said she attended Mass once a week and agreed to answer further questions after the poll. "They go to a lot of meetings, but they are not out in the street."

Even Catholics who frequently attend Mass said they were not following the bishops' lead on issues that the church had recently invested much energy, money and credibility in fighting — artificial birth control and same-sex marriage. Continue reading

Image: SF Gate

Asked if they believe the pope is infallible when he teaches on matters of morality or faith, only 40 per cent of the total sample (and 45 per cent of those who said they attend Mass weekly) said yes.

A total of 79 per cent (62 per cent of weekly Mass attenders) favoured the use of artificial methods of birth control.

And 78 per cent (66 per cent of weekly Mass attenders) said they are more likely to follow their own conscience than papal teachings on difficult moral questions.

The poll found 69 per cent (61 per cent of weekly Mass attenders) believe the next pope should allow priests to marry; and a similar proportion (57 per cent of weekly Mass attenders) believe he should allow women to become priests.

Legalised abortion was opposed by 56 per cent (70 per cent of weekly Mass attenders); and a similar proportion (67 per cent of weekly Mass attenders) opposed the death penalty.

A majority of 53 per cent (44 per cent of weekly Mass attenders) said they believe the Catholic Church is out of touch with the needs of Catholics.

The New York Times/CBS News poll was based on telephone interviews, in English and Spanish, with 580 adult Catholics.

Three-quarters of those polled said they thought it was a good idea for Pope Benedict to resign. Most wanted the next pope to be "someone younger, with new ideas". A majority said they wanted the next pope to make the Church's teachings more liberal.

Sixty-two per cent said they were in favour of legalising marriage for same-sex couples. Catholics approved of same-sex marriage at a higher rate than Americans as a whole, among whom 53 per cent approved.

Source:

New York Times

Image: Another Voice-Greenleaf

On June 17, Obama held a slight edge over Mitt Romney among Catholics (49-47 percent). Since then, Obama has surged ahead, and now leads 54-39 percent, according to a Pew poll conducted on Sept. 16.

The poll showed that among all registered voters, Obama leads Romney 51-42 percent.

A report by Religion News Service (RNS) said Obama and Romney are essentially tied among white Catholics, which some pollsters call the ultimate swing group.

Romney on Monday unveiled his Catholics for Romney Coalition. The Obama campaign also has a Catholic coalition.

During the last week of June to July 4, US Catholic bishops held what they dubbed as a "Fortnight for Freedom," with Masses, prayer groups and presentations in dioceses nationwide. The campaign was aimed against an Obama administration mandate that requires some religious institutions to provide cost-free contraception coverage to employees.

The RNS report quoted John C. Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron in Ohio, as saying that Obama's surge among Catholic voters does not mean the bishops' campaign was ineffective.

"It's not the issue that most middle-of-the-road Catholics are responding to," Green said. He said religious freedom is not the most salient issue for Catholics during an election dominated by economic concerns.

The margin of error for the September survey of Catholic voters is plus or minus 5.1 percentage points, according to Pew.

Sources

• RNS
• Huffington Post
• The Washington Post
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: AP/Center for American Progress

Tucked in with announcements about a new electronic donation system and a church dinner at Margarita's Mexican restaurant was news that Zickel, the mother of two girls, had been dreading: Corpus Christi would no longer train girls to be altar servers.

Zickel burst into tears and ran to the bathroom.

"I knew right then that our family couldn't stay at this church anymore," Zickel said, her voice breaking. "I'm a mama bear, and they're going after my girls."

The decision last fall by Corpus Christi's pastor, the Rev. Michael Taylor, and the response of Zickel and about a dozen other families who left the 1,100-family South Riding church reflect ongoing tensions among American Catholics over the role of women. About 50 families from across the country wrote letters of protest to the Arlington Catholic Diocese, and a vigil is scheduled for Sunday outside the diocese's offices.

The subject has played out unusually in the diocese, which was the next-to-last in the country to say, in 2006, that girls were eligible to help priests at the altar. (The diocese in Lincoln, Neb., still has a boys­-only policy.) Arlington Bishop Paul Loverde left the decision up to individual priests. Five years later, about 60 percent of the diocese's 68 parishes across northern and eastern Virginia still allow only altar boys, a diocese spokeswoman said.

Some share Taylor's belief that the positions should be reserved for boys, who may become priests and help ease a major Catholic clergy shortage. Girls who had already trained as altar servers at Corpus Christi were allowed to continue, but they cannot wear the new black, priestlike robes the boys began wearing. People who oppose altar girls see the task as priest-like and note that the church teaches priests must be male because they model Jesus. Read more

• Source: The Washington Post
• Image: Commonweal

A lot has changed in parish life in a quarter-century, yet American Catholics are still predominantly attached to territorial parishes headed by a priest pastor. The model is being stretched and transformed, however, by tremendous demographic changes in the Catholic population. Church leaders are struggling to keep up.

In the years since we began this series on American Catholic laity, the Catholic population in the United States has increased by more than a fifth. It continues to grow at about 1 percent a year and even conservative estimates project that Catholics will top 100 million by the middle of the 21st century. The Catholic population is becoming more culturally and linguistically diverse as well, influenced by immigration from predominantly Catholic countries around the world.

Catholics are also more dispersed geographically than they were in 1987, continuing a late 20th-century pattern of movement out of the inner cities and into the suburbs, out of the traditional Catholic strongholds in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest and into the rapidly growing Sun Belt cities in the South and the Southwest. An unintended consequence of this growth and migration has been a mismatch between Catholic institutions and Catholic population. While more and more large, once-beautiful urban parishes and elementary schools in the traditional Catholic population centers such as Cleveland and Boston struggle under the burden of too few Catholics to provide financially for their maintenance or to keep them vibrant communities of faith, Catholics in Southern cities such as Atlanta and Fort Worth, Texas, are lobbying their bishops for new parishes and schools to accommodate the growth.

In 1987, there were about 19,600 parishes for 54 million Catholics, or about 2,700 Catholics for every parish. By 2011, the number of parishes had been reduced to about 17,800, a net decline of more than 7 percent. Even though most of the parish mergers and closures occurred in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, in areas that have lost Catholic population, there has been no corresponding increase in new parishes in the areas of the country that are experiencing the most growth. Thus, the ratio nationally is now more than 3,600 Catholics per parish. Read more

• Source: National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Hispanically Speaking News

Moderately committed Catholics (90 percent), similar to low-commitment Catholics (89 percent), are more likely than the highly committed (81 percent) to affirm this view, though clearly it is normative across all types of Catholics (see Figure 7). Nevertheless, despite this openness, Catholics still believe in religious truth. Close to two-thirds, 61 percent, agree that Catholicism contains a greater share of truth than other religions do (with 25 percent of these strongly agreeing). Not surprisingly, highly committed Catholics are more likely to affirm this stance, with 87 percent of them, compared to 61 percent of moderately committed Catholics, agreeing that Catholicism contains a greater share of truth than other religions do.

The continuing significance of an institutionalized Catholic spirituality is reinforced by the finding that 40 percent of our respondents "strongly agree," and an additional 34 percent "somewhat agree," that "the sacraments of my church are essential to my relationship with God." Although still high, the proportion of Catholics, 74 percent, who in 2011 say that the sacraments are essential to their relationship with God is not quite as high as the 81 percent who said so in 2005. Nevertheless, among highly committed Catholics in 2011, a full 100 percent see the sacraments as essential to their personal relationship with God, and among the moderately committed, 75 percent do so. By contrast, only 30 percent of Catholics with low levels of commitment see the sacraments as essential to their relationship with God (see Figure 7).

The ambiguity attached to religious institutional boundaries seeps into the labels people use when asked to describe themselves. Close to half (47 percent) of our Catholics say they are religious and spiritual, 13 percent say they are religious but not spiritual, 28 percent say they are spiritual but not religious, and 11 percent say they are neither religious nor spiritual (see Figure 9). We have not asked this question in previous Catholic surveys but we can compare our findings with those from a survey conducted by the General Social Survey in 2008 using a representative sample of Americans, not just Catholics. In that survey, 74 percent of Catholics said either they were religious and spiritual (40 percent) or religious but not spiritual (34 percent) — compared to the 60 percent in our 2011 survey who chose either of these religious designations. By contrast, 20 percent of Catholics in the 2008. Read more

• Source: National Catholic Reporter
• Image: dipity.com

The percentage of Catholics who are highly committed to the church has declined -­­ from 27 to 19 percent — in the 25 years since we first began tracking American Catholics' levels of commitment. Nonetheless, there is a relative stability in the commitment patterns over time. In 2005, for example, 21 percent of the respondents were classified as highly committed Catholics, and this figure was 23 percent in both the 1993 and 1999 surveys. Further, the percentage of Catholics with a low level of commitment has not increased over the past 25 years; in fact it has slightly declined over time. The relative stability in Catholic commitment is all the more noteworthy given that since the late 1990s, there has been a sharp decline both in the proportion of Americans who identify with a religious denomination and in the proportion who report weekly church attendance. In sum, while significant numbers of Catholics may leave the church (Pew Forum 2008), the snapshot of current Catholics that our surveys capture at any one point in time (e.g., 1987, 1993, 1999, 2005), suggests that despite Catholic fluidity (due to people leaving, the aging of current cohorts, the influx of new immigrants), the level of commitment of those who are Catholic at a given time is not dramatically changing. And yet we certainly live in a changing church and in a changing society where religion is losing some of its supreme salience. Read more

• Source: National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Fr Z's Blog