D.C.’s new archbishop has been preparing for this all his life
Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Catholic Church’s new man in Washington, is uniquely suited to the role.
March 17, 2025
If Cardinal Robert McElroy had decided long ago to prepare himself for engaging with presidents, public policy and a deeply divided Washington, he might have lived his life exactly as he has.
It goes all the way back to his time as a Harvard undergraduate, when he wrote a thesis exploring how John F. Kennedy handled the Cuban missile crisis while avoiding nuclear war. Later, he earned a PhD in political science from Stanford. Since then, he has been one of the Catholic Church’s most consistent fighters for social justice, the rights of immigrants and climate action.
But the 71-year-old McElroy, who was invested as archbishop of D.C. on Tuesday, doesn’t brag about his fancy education. You must pull it out of him. He doesn’t put much stock in the trappings of ecclesiastical power. He encourages people to call him Bob. And as outspoken as he has been, to the point that a conservative bishop once accused him of being heretical, one of his central preoccupations is healing a polarized polity and a riven church.
The tension between these two objectives defines McElroy’s ministry. On the one hand, he tells me firmly that while others have speculated on his appointment as a challenge to the current White House, “there is no correlation between my being appointed and the election of President [Donald] Trump. I know that for a fact.” And he insists that “there are going to be issues where I am supportive of this administration.”.
But there can be no denying that in the closing chapter of his tenure, Pope Francis knew he was delivering an unmistakable message by sending McElroy to lead Catholics in the nation’s capital. It’s a message that matters within the church but also far beyond it.
Just last month, after all, Francis sent a letter to American bishops lamenting the “major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations.” He warned that a policy “built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
A staunch supporter of Francis in an American church filled with prelates who harbor doubts and even quiet hostility toward Roman Catholicism’s leader, McElroy has been willing to accept the slings, arrows and accusations from conservative critics as he has stood up for the pope’s vision of a more inclusive and broadly progressive version of Catholicism.
The new archbishop can listen respectfully to views different from his own, but he’s not one for cautious hedges or pious evasions. One of his final acts as the leader of San Diego’s diocese, where he served as bishop for more than a decade, was to address a protest march last month where immigrants spoke of families separated during Trump’s immigration crackdown. “We must speak now and proclaim that this unholy misery and suffering — and, yes, war of fear and terror — cannot be tolerated in our midst,” he declared. “We must speak up and say: Go no farther.”
In an interview and follow-up email exchange in late February, he did not shrink from the battles that lie ahead. “It has become clear to me in the past days that one of the pastoral issues that I will have to face in leading the archdiocese is the concrete suffering that will flow from the cuts in governmental service which are taking place in our country,” he said. “The first level of this is the suffering being endured by our parishioners who have lost their jobs, and the often traumatic ways in which they have lost them. So many of these men and women are people of great talents who have dedicated their lives to public service, only to find that service abruptly ended, often without a clear rationale being presented.”
No ambiguity there, and he goes on to channel Jesus’ call to respect the dignity of “the least of these brothers and sisters of mine,” meaning the poor, the marginalized, immigrants, “men and women and children and families” who should “not go without basic health care or go to bed hungry at night.”
But the political scientist is resolute in saying that although politics matters, it will not be at the center of his ministry. For starters, he faces some practical problems, including an archdiocese grappling with a large annual deficit and declining contributions from the faithful. Nor is McElroy in doubt about his top concern: “The drift of young people from the life of the church is, in my view, the overwhelming pastoral problem we face — and the first, second and third priority.” He’s right about the challenge, particularly among younger progressive women pushed away by the Church’s patriarchal structure. A Pew Research Center survey released last month found that the median age of American Catholics rose from 45 in 2007 to 55 in 2024.
Yet there’s nothing gloomy about him. Hope, after all, is not a disposition but a virtue. He told a journalist last year that he is moved by “how heroically so many people strive to live as they should” and sustained by faith that a “God who embraces us, who loves, is not diminished by our failures.”
He’s coming to a place that seems determined to put both propositions to a severe test.
In his homily when he was installed at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on Tuesday, a soft-spoken McElroy thanked his family, friends and teachers who mentored him on his 45-year journey to leadership of the D.C. diocese. McElroy was born in 1954 and grew up in Daly City, California, a middle- and working-class enclave south of San Francisco and a classic postwar boomtown whose population tripled between 1950 and 1960, from 15,000 to 45,000. Its strikingly similar homes were deftly mocked in folk singer Malvina Reynolds’s song “Little Boxes,” but it represented a good life for many who moved there. Nonetheless, McElroy said, his family never lost its love for San Francisco. His father was so loyal to the city that he and his wife drove a half hour into town each time she was about to deliver. He wanted each of their five children to be born within the city limits.
The new archbishop grew up in the post-World War II consensus period still shaped by the New Deal and the Allied victory. Catholics were moving up the American social ladder — John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 was the symbol of their full arrival — and the church itself was liberalizing under the influence of Pope John XXIII, who convened the reforming Second Vatican Council in 1962. John’s hope was for a church that could discern the “signs of the times” and reject “distrustful souls” who saw in the modern era “only darkness burdening the face of the earth.”
It was a church whose roots in community and family were sturdy enough to allow it to ponder this new openness to liberal modernity, an urgent task in the wake of the horrors of global war, the Holocaust, and the rise of Nazism and fascism. The chaos would come later. McElroy says his family had “great faith” and that he “cannot remember a time in my life when I did not want to be a priest.” He saw a good model in the pastor of his home church, Our Lady of Mercy, “a great preacher” who had founded the parish and “knew all the people in the community.”
At the time, it was still quite common for candidates for the priesthood to enter seminary in high school and spend their lives in a clerical culture. Instead, McElroy went to Harvard, where he majored in history and wrote that senior thesis on the Cuban missile crisis.
The personal lesson McElroy drew from the crisis involved the now oft-told story of Kennedy receiving two letters from Nikita Khrushchev. The first was a long one describing how the Soviet premier “went through World War II and did not want his grandchildren to suffer what he had suffered in the war.” The two leaders, he said, “had to find a way out.” The next morning, a second letter arrived with a “more hard-line message,” suggesting Kremlin hawks were trying to rescind Khrushchev’s peace offering.
The genius of the Kennedy side, he said — referring to both the president and his brother and closest adviser, Robert F. Kennedy — lay in their decision to ignore the second letter and respond to the first. He also respects Khrushchev’s choice to join in making a deal and averting a catastrophe. For McElory, this led to a conviction that it’s worth taking risks to open the possibility of concord.
He told me he had a moment of doubt about the priesthood and spent another year in secular academia, pursuing a master’s degree in history from Stanford and writing another thesis on another crisis, the takeover of San Francisco by vigilantes in 1856, an homage to the rich history of a city that had been a magnet to Catholic immigrants and the working class from the beginning of the great Irish exodus in the 1840s. It was during that year of school, he says, that he resolved his questions about his chosen vocation.
A priest at 26, he was assigned at the dawn of the 1980s to St. Cecilia’s, the southwest San Francisco parish where his parents grew up. He says his ambition then was simply to be a parish priest, but he began to his rise in the church’s power structure just two years later when he became secretary to San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn, a liberal unafraid of criticizing the Vatican in the years of Pope John Paul II.
Though he has not one but two doctorates, McElroy doesn’t talk like a professor. The combination of the day-to-day and the scholarly explains a lot about him. Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago and a Francis ally, told me that though McElroy’s intelligence and scholarly writings are widely respected, “what I find most impressive is his pastoral sensitivity and concern for the dignity of every human being.”
Yet the scholarly work is revealing, too. The argument of his Stanford thesis — that a purely realist approach to international affairs ignores the important role moral norms have played in U.S. foreign policy — seems on point to our debates over Ukraine.
His dissertation for his degree in moral theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome focused on the thinking of John Courtney Murray, one of the United States’ greatest Catholic theologians and an informal adviser to John F. Kennedy when he was grappling with anti-Catholic bigotry during the 1960 presidential campaign. McElroy’s work on Murray, which later became a book, speaks of the dangers of isolating secular society from religious influence, but it is clear in rejecting what these days is called Christian nationalism: domination of the secular state by Christianity or any other religion. “In civil society, the government has certain legitimate roles on which the church should not encroach,” McElroy told me. “That doesn’t mean they’re totally separate in their interactions, but it does mean that the church cannot overpower, in a temporal way, the legitimate jurisdiction and activities of government.”
He shares with Francis a priority for the pastoral over the dogmatic — human relationships over doctrine. “Our truth is the person of Jesus Christ,” he told me. The task of a Christian is to notice that Jesus’ first instinct is not to judge or condemn but to “embrace people,” “to help them with whatever issue they’re dealing with,” and to address “the different elements of woundedness or exclusion they have in their lives.”
A prominent example of this: how his views on LGBTQ+ issues liberalized when he engaged with San Francisco’s gay community during the AIDS crisis — paradoxically, while working for Quinn to help prepare a relatively conservative document in 1983 stating that, although homosexuality was not “a sinful condition,” it required a life of chastity.
“It was a very vibrant group, wonderful people,” he said of the city’s gay community during our interview. “Four or five years later, the great bulk of the men in these groups had died, and they weren’t old — they were young men. … That to me was a prism through which to see the exclusion and the suffering of the gay community, particularly in San Francisco in those days. And it touched me deeply. … That is a big part of what has helped change my viewpoint.” He has since argued for a church policy of “radical inclusion” of LGBTQ+ people.
In the meantime, he continued his rise in the church, becoming an auxiliary bishop in San Francisco in 2010 before being named bishop of San Diego in 2015. By that time, he was already a prominent voice in both the broader public debate and arguments within the church, writing often for the middle-of-the-road to liberal Catholic magazines America and Commonweal.
While upholding the church’s opposition to abortion, he nonetheless spoke forcefully against denying Communion to politicians who supported abortion rights. In 2021, for example, he rebuked efforts to exclude then-President Joe Biden from receiving Communion. “The Eucharist is being weaponized and deployed as a tool in political warfare,” he wrote in a 1,700 word essay. “This must not happen.” Like Francis, he has criticized the tendency of more-conservative Catholic leaders — and within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — to emphasize the issues of abortion and euthanasia in ways that crowded out what the church had to say about social justice, immigration, climate change, and racial and religious bigotry.
McElroy’s appointment to leadership in D.C. was not the first time Francis singled him out as a voice he wanted the American church to hear. His elevation in 2012 to cardinal — giving him a say and a vote in the election of the next pope — reverberated loudly. American cardinals typically come from traditional Catholic centers such as Boston, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, not places like San Diego. Conservatives were unhappy that McElroy was named a cardinal while the archbishop of Los Angeles, José Gomez, was not.
Like Francis, McElroy can be radical in his critique of the status quo. Noting in a 2017 speech that Trump had cast himself as a “disrupter,” he declared: “We must all become disrupters” — disrupting “those who portray refugees as enemies rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need” and “those who train us to see Muslim men, women and children as forces of fear rather than as children of God.”
The church’s social teaching, he said, has long been “unequivocally on the side of strong governmental and societal protections for the powerless, the worker, the homeless, the hungry, those without decent medical care, the unemployed.”
Capitalism all by itself cannot define a good society, he argued. “Free markets do not constitute a first principle of economic justice. Their moral worth is instrumental in nature and must be structured by government to accomplish the common good.”
With McElroy, you get strong views and a moderate temperament, a desire both to disrupt and to reconcile. The pastor in him knows that the church to which he has devoted his life is no longer in the comfortable and perhaps complacent position it occupied when he was growing up. The church’s sexual abuse crisis, he told me, was “a self-inflicted wound” and “the great failure of both the church and the bishops in particular.” He underscored the burden on the church leadership by repeating the point. “That’s why the anger is directed particularly against bishops,” said the bishop, “and rightfully so.”
But the man who still believes in ignoring the hostile letter and answering the conciliatory one is also alarmed by the costs of political polarization.. He has criticized both Democrats and Republicans for cherry-picking church teachings “that promote their partisan worldview” and has frequently expressed alarm over how deeply the country’s political divisions have entered into the life of the church.
“Many of those most committed to the work of transforming our nation through the realization of Catholic social teaching are also deeply factionalized,” he said as part of a 2018 lecture series named after Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. As president of the Bishops Conference in the 1970s and archbishop of Chicago in the 1980s and early 1990s, Bernardin preached that Catholic political thought was a “seamless garment.” Promoting a distinctly Catholic perspective, he linked opposition to abortion with efforts to end the death penalty, to support social justice and the poor, and also to a skeptical view of war. Bernardin’s point was that abortion alone could not define the church’s public engagement. You could hear echoes of the Bernardin balance in McElroy’s homily at his installation. “The poor and the migrant are daily dispossessed,” he said, “and the dignity of the unborn is denied.”
For McElroy, communication across lines of deep division is about more than being affable. It’s essential both to decent politics and to how Catholics, whose task he sees as being “pilgrims of hope in a wounded world,” should engage in public life. “A Catholic political virtue ethic for this moment in our nation’s history,” he said in his Bernardin lecture, “must recognize that the need for dialogue, encounter and unity is more important than any single policy issue we face today, because such a stance of encounter and dialogue is itself the foundation for any genuine pursuit of the common good.”
One can only wish him luck with this now that he has relocated to a capital city whose current political spirit is so far removed from his aspiration.
When he became bishop of San Diego, McElroy chose as the slogan on his coat of arms “dignitatis humanae” — “of the dignity of the human person.” The phrase does double duty: It emphasizes the dignity of each of God’s creatures, especially the poor and the migrant, while also echoing the title of one of the Second Vatican Council’s most important documents, its declaration on religious freedom.
With liberal democracy under challenge, a renewal of the church’s encounter with liberalism and modernity that Pope John XXIII championed could not be better-timed. It’s the burden McElroy is assuming — and the opportunity he represents.