Keith Mercer

An Open Concern About Appearances: The Catholic Church and the Midterms I am Catholic. I say the rosary. I go to Mass. Nothing in what follows is an accusation against the Church, the Pope, or any bishop. It is a concern about how things look from the outside, and how that appearance is landing with millions of Americans right now. This administration created a Justice Department task force on anti-Christian bias, pardoned twenty-three pro-life prisoners, stood up a White House Faith Office and a Religious Liberty Commission, designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern over the killing of Christians, and cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood. For a Catholic writer, that record is not nothing. It is, on its face, one of the most tangible pro-life and pro-faith agendas in modern presidential history. In January 2025, the same administration suspended the refugee and migrant service contracts that had funded the USCCB and Catholic Charities for decades. Over one hundred million dollars a year. More than ninety-five percent of some program budgets. By spring, staff were laid off. By summer, agencies were closing programs. The money did not come back. Institutions that lose their largest funding stream tend to find their moral vocabulary sharpening in the same direction as their budgets. I am not saying that is what happened. I am saying that is what it looks like, and that appearance is not going unnoticed. Fourteen months later, in April 2026, the public statements from the Vatican and from American bishops toward this administration grew noticeably louder and more pointed than anything seen during the first term. Catholics see it. Non-Catholics see it. And when a bishop speaks out days before a national election against one party’s immigration positions—which are prudential disagreements open to debate—while remaining silent on the other’s platform positions that contradict settled Church teaching on life, on the body, on marriage, the imbalance is impossible to miss. I am not suggesting the Church holds a grudge, or that its silence on one side was bought. I am saying that is the appearance, and appearances are what most Americans, Catholic and not, actually see. When the institution that spent a year without its largest funding stream then directs its public voice at one party near an election—the very party that delivered more concrete protections for Christian life and religious liberty than perhaps any administration in living memory—the appearance is not of a shepherd. It is of a stakeholder. That is the embarrassment I cannot unsee. -- Joseph Fosco October 27, 2026