Every morning, a line forms at about six outside the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, on West Thirty-first Street, near Penn Station, as it has done (with a few exceptions) since 1930; on average, there are two hundred and fifty people, mostly men in various states of need. At seven, a bell is rung and meal bags—people can choose from oatmeal, fruit, a sandwich, nuts, juice, and coffee—are distributed by half a dozen volunteers standing at folding tables set up on the sidewalk. The food is provided by a group called Franciscan Bread for the Poor, which is aligned with the church but operates independently and is funded entirely by private donations. It’s the sort of face-to-face “work of mercy” that Pope Francis has advocated throughout his pontificate, inspired by the example of the medieval saint whom he chose as his namesake.
I was there earlier this month, invited by a friend who volunteers one morning a week, between his arrival at Penn Station, on New Jersey Transit, and the beginning of his workday in the Flatiron District. Not long after, he sent me a cellphone video, posted by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, which showed Francis paying a surprise visit to St. Peter’s Basilica, two and a half weeks after his release from the hospital. The Pope was in a wheelchair, as he generally has been during the past year, but he was wearing black pants and a white shirt rather than his white papal vestments, and he had a striped blanket over his shoulders to ward off the spring chill. “Feels like an end,” my friend commented. Those two scenes—of an ailing Pope, and of the long-standing Catholic commitment to helping the vulnerable—point to the two dominant stories of Catholicism in the United States, which have converged in the weeks leading up to Easter.
The more obvious story is that of the Pope’s health. Francis, who is eighty-eight, was rushed from the Vatican to Gemelli Hospital, on February 14th, with bronchitis in both lungs. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, said that the Pope was “probably close to death.” But crowds of the devout held nightly recitations of the Rosary in St. Peter’s Square, and he was finally discharged on Sunday, March 23rd, after thirty-eight days. He gave a thumbs-up to a waiting crowd and was taken to the Casa Santa Marta, the guesthouse where he lives. Two weeks later, he appeared unexpectedly in St. Peter’s Square (using a breathing apparatus), and the following Wednesday he received King Charles and Queen Camilla. On Palm Sunday, the Vatican released a video of Francis praying and greeting a few well-wishers at St. Peter’s. He looked better than he had in the video my friend had sent three days earlier. Still, the relief over Francis’s survival hasn’t dispelled questions of whether he is able to lead the Church at a critical moment—or whether he should follow the precedent set by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, and resign the papacy, making way for a healthier man.
The other story is that of the abrupt cessation of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ program for the resettlement of migrants and refugees, announced in a Washington Post opinion piece this past Monday, by Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the current president of the conference. The bishops have run the operation with government funding since 1980, building on more than half a century of similar efforts funded by other means. The closure is a recent development in a conflict involving the Church’s efforts to aid people in need and the funding of those efforts by the federal government, which has played out since Inauguration Day. In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” on January 26th, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a Catholic convert, accused the bishops of operating their refugee-resettlement programs, supported in part by federal funding, in order to make money. Over the next two weeks, the Trump Administration began gutting U.S.A.I.D., a principal funder of Catholic Relief Services’ efforts to help migrants and refugees, prompting C.R.S.’s president to announce impending layoffs and a reduction in services. Vance, speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox, sought to justify the Administration’s actions in Catholic terms. On February 10th, in a rare public letter to the bishops, which included an implicit rebuke of Vance, Pope Francis urged them to continue their work with refugees. When he took ill, four days later, public attention shifted away, but the conflict remained unresolved. The bishops sued the government, challenging its “suspension of funding for the refugee assistance programs we have run for decades.” A federal judge ruled against them, maintaining that a contractual dispute was beyond his court’s purview, and the bishops have appealed.
The situation suggests the precarity of a Church led by an ailing pontiff and put under pressure to accommodate itself to a government’s way of doing things. In January, Cardinal Dolan gave an opening prayer at President Trump’s Inauguration, as he’d done eight years earlier. On February 19th—the day after the bishops filed their lawsuit—I attended a press event organized to highlight the New York archdiocese’s work with migrants and refugees through its social-services organization, Catholic Charities. I asked Dolan if he had spoken with the President about the matter of migrants and refugees. He said that he had: “I like to reassure him that, if he’s looking for an organization and for a community of people who would want true immigration reform, who would want secure borders, and would want dangerous people in our country not to be here anymore, he’s going to find allies. And I’ve also mentioned that if you want to kind of dramatically and radically alter the magnificent history of the benevolent approach that this great country has had to offering hospitality to the immigrant—that, to us, is not only against our religion, it’s against our patriotism and our sense of what America is all about.”
When I asked Dolan if he had spoken with Trump about the issue lately, he replied, “He’s got my number; I don’t have his,” drawing laughs. But, if given the chance, “I’d say, ‘Thanks for the good work that you’re doing, there’s some things we’re concerned about,’ ” he said. “We do worry about a caricature of all immigrants as ruthless and dangerous and bad for the United States, where the overwhelming majority of immigrants have been a positive boost to this nation. He knows that: our First Lady is an immigrant—our beautiful First Lady was a refugee, from Slovenia.” Melania Trump actually came to the U.S. to pursue her modelling career, but this was vintage Dolan, using jokey self-deprecation to disavow his proximity to state power and to scant the authority vested in him as archbishop. Surely the man who heads the Catholic Church in the largest city in the nation (where nearly forty per cent of the population is foreign-born), and who maintains a cordial relationship with the President, might be expected to press the case harder.
Dolan’s timidity in February presaged the decision of the bishops’ conference to wind down the refugee program in April, apparently without any attempt to sustain it independently. In the Washington Post piece, Archbishop Broglio framed the program’s demise as a fait accompli. “The federal government’s suspension of refugee resettlement programs,” he wrote, “has made it too difficult for the bishops’ conference to continue operating our resettlement agency. In the past, when government funds did not cover the full cost of these and other care programs, they were generously supported by the faithful. However, the work simply cannot be sustained at current levels or in its current form with only the church’s resources.” He did not explain why this meant that the program had to be shut down altogether, but added that he was “praying for the impacted refugees,” and vowed that the Church would “find new means” to help people in need.
Michael Sean Winters, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, posed the questions that the archbishop left unanswered: “Was there no thought given to meeting with Catholic philanthropists to keep at least some of the work going? Was there any discussion about having an emergency second collection as we do when some disaster strikes? Were bishops scheduled for the Sunday talk shows to make the case for maintaining government contracts with religious groups to help these desperate people?” (Asked to address those questions, Chieko Noguchi, the spokesperson for the bishops’ conference, noted that there is “a special collection that aids in the various projects and efforts supported by the USCCB, including our office of Migration & Refugee Services.”) Broglio’s vagueness invited some suspicion that the bishops had acted as they did to avoid conflict with the federal government while they are in litigation with it; to stay in its good graces as the Supreme Court considers a case involving government funding for a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma, which could radically redraw the lines between religion and public education; or just to avoid the vexed work of opposing a vengeful and capricious chief executive. The vagueness was underscored in the Catholic Standard, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington, where the auxiliary bishop Evelio Menjivar, a native of El Salvador, invoking the example of Saint Óscar Romero, urged readers to abandon their “silence . . . or even approval” of the federal government’s policies and instead “demand that the government respect human dignity.”
