On March 7, 2016, the National Review published a letter signed by three dozen Catholic laypeople — some academics, some nonprofit leaders — that called Donald Trump “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States.”
Trump’s campaign, they wrote, “has already driven our politics down to new levels of vulgarity. His appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility.”
Among the signers was Brian Burch, a west suburban Chicago man who co-founded an advocacy group called CatholicVote about a decade earlier. Its self-described mission “is to inspire every Catholic in America to live out the truths of the Catholic faith in public life.”
Seven months later, Burch dramatically shifted his position on Trump; his organization went on to spend close to $2 million trying to sway Catholic voters to support Trump’s campaigns in 2020 and 2024.
Those efforts appear to have been rewarded. In December, Trump selected Burch to be the next U.S. ambassador to the Holy See; the nomination was formally sent to the U.S. Senate earlier this month for confirmation.
“He represented me well during the last Election, having garnered more Catholic votes than any Presidential Candidate in History!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Brian loves his Church and the United States – He will make us all proud.”
Burch’s nomination comes amid simmering tensions between the Trump administration and the Vatican over immigration issues and cuts to aid programs. Some observers say his likely appointment could be a harbinger of continued turbulence given Burch’s past criticism of Pope Francis, whose extended hospitalization has raised questions about how long the 88-year-old pontiff will remain the head of a Catholic Church that counts an estimated 53 million U.S. adults among its nearly 1.4 billion global flock. Francis returned to the Vatican on Sunday after nearly six weeks in Rome’s Gemelli hospital battling a near-fatal case of pneumonia in both lungs.
“The question is whether he’s being sent to Rome in order to express in forceful terms, in the kinds of ways we’ve seen in the last six to eight weeks, the administration’s displeasure with Pope Francis’ positions,” said Steven Millies, professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. “We know Trump likes his appointees to be swinging for him.”
Emails to CatholicVote seeking an interview with Burch were not returned. In a statement posted on his organization’s website, Burch said he was “committed to working with leaders inside the Vatican and the new Administration to promote the dignity of all people and the common good.”
‘Quiet ambassadorships’
While past presidents have dispatched personal envoys to the Vatican, it’s only in the last 40 years that the United States has appointed an ambassador to the Holy See, the Catholic Church’s central governing body.
That lack of formal diplomatic relations was due in large part to anti-Catholic sentiment, said Kathleen Sprows Cummings, professor of American studies and history at the University of Notre Dame.
“It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around the pope being seen as a threat by American Protestants, who are still the majority U.S. citizens,” Cummings said. “Catholics were a minority religion and believed by many Americans to be anti-democratic and un-American by virtue of their loyalty to the pope.”
During his failed 1928 presidential campaign, New York Gov. Al Smith was asked whether his allegiance was to the U.S. Constitution or to Rome. Thirty-two years later, John F. Kennedy faced a similar line of questioning on his way to the White House.
In 1983, Congress repealed a 116-year-old law that banned federal spending on diplomacy with the Vatican. A year later, President Ronald Reagan appointed businessman William Wilson as the first Holy See ambassador. Subsequent ambassadors include former broadcasting executive Frank Shakespeare and onetime politicians Raymond Flynn, Lindy Boggs, Francis Rooney and, most recently, Joe Donnelly.
Others have been academics. Former Chicago attorney-turned-law professor Mary Ann Glendon was picked as Holy See ambassador from 2008 to 2009; her successor, Miguel Diaz, is currently chair in public service in the theology department at Loyola University Chicago.
During Trump’s first term in office, he picked as Holy See ambassador Callista Gingrich, who founded a multimedia production company with her husband, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
“For the most part, they are quiet ambassadorships,” Millies said.
Burch, he added, “is unlike any other. His resume is that of an activist. … He is a controversialist, which is the opposite of a diplomat.”
Frayed relationship
Burch has said he grew up attending Catholic schools in Phoenix and graduated in 1997 with a degree in politics from the University of Dallas, a small, private Catholic university in Irving, Texas. The 49-year-old and his wife, Sara, have nine children and live in DuPage County, where he serves as president of the board of directors for Seton Academy, a Catholic Montessori school in Villa Park.
His nomination now sits with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. If confirmed, he’ll undoubtedly step into a frayed relationship. Last month, days before his hospitalization, Pope Francis penned a letter to U.S. bishops that criticized the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans.
“What is 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,” Francis wrote, according to Reuters.
The pope’s comments echo similar ones made prior to Trump’s election victory in 2016, when he told reporters that anyone who wants to build walls “is not Christian.” A spokesman later said the comment was not meant to attack Trump, The Associated Press reported.
Also last month, Vatican charity Caritas Internationalis issued a statement condemning the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID.
“Stopping USAID abruptly will kill millions of people and condemn hundreds of millions more to lives of dehumanising poverty,” Alistair Dutton, the organization’s secretary general, said in the statement. “This is an inhumane affront to people’s God-given human dignity, that will cause immense suffering.”
For his part, Burch has found occasions to clash with the pope.
In 2023, after Francis removed a Texas bishop from his post and evicted a retired American cardinal from his Rome apartment — both men had been critical of the pope and are seen as traditionalists in the church — Burch told The New York Times: “The pattern of vindictiveness and punishment seems to fly in the face of what he says about being an instrument of mercy and accompaniment.”
He also took aim at the pope’s efforts to curb the saying of Mass in Latin and said Francis’ statements on blessing people in same-sex unions created “massive confusion.”
“There is an unprecedented opposition to the pope among a certain segment of Catholics in the U.S.,” Millies said, “and that opposition is sustained by organizations like CatholicVote.”
‘Quite partisan’
In 2005, Burch and others launched Fidelis, incorporated in Michigan and described at the time as “a group of Catholic-based political, legal, research and educational organizations whose collective mission it is to formulate, promote, and defend public policies that uphold religious freedom, human life from conception to natural death, and the traditional institutions of marriage and family.”
A co-founder and early president of Fidelis was Joseph Cella, who a year earlier had helped start the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast. Cella, like Burch, would go on to sign the 2016 National Review letter opposing Trump only to shift gears, serving on Trump’s campaign and transition team before eventually being appointed ambassador to Fiji in 2019.
Fidelis eventually adopted the name CatholicVote and operates separate 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) entities, allowing it to collect tax-deductible donations through the former and actively lobby for political candidates with the latter.
In 2022, the last year publicly available on the IRS website, its lobbying arm reported gross receipts in excess of $9 million; its 501(c)(3) Fidelis Center for Law and Policy reported around $3.5 million in gross receipts. Burch, records show, was paid around $220,000 in compensation.
CatholicVote’s website notes that it does not speak for individual bishops or the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. And while it says it’s nonpartisan, its stances on abortion, immigration and LGTBQ+ rights align with those typically espoused by Republicans.
“I receive the CatholicVote emails; they’re quite partisan, quite one-sided,” said Millies, who faced criticism from CatholicVote in 2023 over comments he made about a U.S. bishop’s response to the Los Angeles Dodgers hosting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBTQ+ group.
“I don’t think it represents the fullness of what the church has to say about the issues in front of us.”
Three years ago, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on CatholicVote’s “Hide the Pride” initiative, which encouraged people to visit the children’s section at their local libraries and check out every book displayed during LGBTQ+ pride month so as to temporarily keep them from being viewed by kids.
Last year, CatholicVote added its voice to criticism of a transgender activist’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.
Since 2015, federal campaign contribution records show CatholicVote, either through its political action committee or through independent expenditures, has spent more than $3 million in support or opposition of candidates across the country.
Most of that money has gone to support Republican candidates, with the rare exception of a few Democrats who are against a woman’s right to an abortion — CatholicVote spent close to $10,000, for example, in support of former U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski, an Illinois Democrat and Catholic who lost his seat in a 2020 primary.
Some of its political work has provoked backlash. In 2020, CatholicVote drew the ire of some when it harvested cellphone data from Catholic Mass attendees to target them with political ads.
Those efforts were not enough to propel Trump to victory over Biden, a Catholic, in 2020; exit polls showed the two men splitting support from Catholic voters. Four years later, Trump and his running mate, JD Vance — a Catholic convert — garnered an estimated 58% of the Catholic vote compared with 40% for Kamala Harris.
“That 58% was eye-popping,” Millies said. “It means Catholics in the U.S. are no longer a vital swing constituency that can be looked at to study, but a niche constituency of one party.”
