The Trump administration has reportedly canceled an $11 million contract with the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, which offers shelter and care to migrant children entering the United States alone.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has paid Catholic Charities for numerous years to house immigrant children entering the U.S. without adult supervision. The federal government contacted the charity about the cancellation in late March, according to The Miami Herald.
The abrupt severing of the White House’s long-term support to the nonprofit comes amid an ongoing feud between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV. Responding to Leo’s repeated criticism of the Iran war, Trump bashed the pope on Sunday in a social media post in which he called him “weak” on crime and “terrible” for foreign policy, urging him to “get his act together as Pope.”
So I’m all for the Catholic church not getting tax payers money. But let’s be real 11 million to the Catholic church is like me accidentally losing 20 bucks.
You realize the church isn’t getting the money, the church is using the money
to house immigrant children entering the U.S. without adult supervision
You’re not hurting the church when you no longer let them use your money to help care for the needy, you’re only hurting those needy
Don’t let your hatred of organized religion distract who this hurts
Although I agree with you there are some fundamental issues here.
First: the Catholic Church does not require taxpayer funding to perform charitable or humanitarian work. When it participates in federal refugee resettlement, it is operating as a contracted service provider, not a financially dependent institution. The dependency narrative is therefore misleading.
Second: embedding a religious organization inside state-funded humanitarian logistics creates an inherent conflict of roles. The government is outsourcing policy execution; the Church is executing civic functions under spiritual identity. That overlap guarantees recurring tension over accountability, neutrality, and influence.
Third: policy reversals under the Trump administration altered refugee intake levels and associated funding flows. Whether one interprets that as governance reform or political disruption, the result is the same: humanitarian delivery systems become unstable when they are tightly coupled to shifting political priorities.
Fourth: the moral inconsistency runs in both directions. It is problematic to weaponize funding decisions as leverage against service providers. It is equally problematic to design humanitarian systems that depend on politically contingent funding streams in the first place.
Do you think we can trick him into taxing churches
what a petty little bitch
A shame that a whole country wants their intentions to be decided by a narcissist.
I’m curious if there’s historical record of anyone or especially a leader being as petty as this short fingered vulgarian.
I’d like to think anywhere before say 1900s they’d have dealt with such an issue in a way relevant to the times. But we have stories of Nero and Caligula…is Trump going to join their ranks in history? I do hope so, but as a footnote, the worst thing for him is to be forgotten when he’s done.
At this point, beyond all political crap, the proper stand is to just ignore the orange infant. I thought otherwise before, how to ignore a driving force in the world? Well if every other country stops acknowledging him, he’ll probably have a stroke or something. Seriously let’s all make an ignore Trump day/month and everyone including countries just don’t acknowledge he’s there. At his age that may least overcome one issue. Plus the rage posts will be great for the books, history and psychology.
Seriously who lets someone like that get into power? He’s a petulant child and should be treated as such but somehow he’s been treated with kid gloves cause he’s rich.
The “ignore” tactic might work on an anonymous internet troll, it’s impossible for the president of the US. Even if he acts like an internet troll.
I second that idea. Lets make June Ignore the Orange Shit-stain month since his birthday is in June. Maybe he’ll stroke-out out of pure rage.
He wouldn’t notice or care. Ignoring Trump is how he got elected twice.
Tax them, Donald! That’ll teach them a lesson! In fact, tax all religions so the rest of them know not to challenge you!
For the current Republican Party, making race a topic of division is probably useful as a wedge issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue
A wedge issue in politics is any issue used to create a division within a political party. These issues are usually employed as a tactic by a minority party against a governing majority party, with the aim of splitting the majority’s electorate into two or more camps.[1][2] Although any issue could potentially be used as a wedge, some of the most common examples are often concerned with social justice, such as abortion or civil rights.[3][4][5] Due to the prevalence of social justice issues as a wedge, the tactic is often most effectively employed by conservative parties against liberal parties. American political strategist Lee Atwater has been noted as an early champion of wedge issue politics during the Reagan era.[6]
The Republican Party would probably rather have people divided over race. The Democratic Party over wealth.
But a Catholic-Protestant split would probably work pretty well for the Democratic Party as a wedge issue too, given that the current Republican Party is the social conservative party.
So, I think that Trump starting fights with the Catholic Church is probably a bad idea from the standpoint of the Republican Party, but if I were the Democratic Party, I’d probably be watching this with interest.
So, I think that Trump starting fights with the Catholic Church is probably a bad idea from the standpoint of the Republican Party, but if I were the Democratic Party, I’d probably be watching this with interest.
But Democrats are probably more likely to be pro-Choice, and the American Catholic Church has made the abortion issue a litmus test for support. Even with all of Vance’s bloviating, I haven’t seen any US Bishop say they would deny him communion, like they threatened to do to Biden.
Really, the Catholic Church has brought this onto itself. They openly supported the candidates that are now deporting and torturing it’s most vulnerable parishioners, all to make sure they could punish women who make choices the Church didn’t like.
But Democrats are probably more likely to be pro-Choice, and the American Catholic Church has made the abortion issue a litmus test for support.
YMMV. Plenty of Catholic Democrats have campaigned as Pro-Choice. The odd secular Ayn Rand loving Republican always finds a way to be Pro-Life. Rank and file Catholics routinely advocate for abortion rights, breaking 60/40 in favor as of just last year. Abortion prohibition hasn’t been a winning issue with Catholics in my lifetime.
Really, the Catholic Church has brought this onto itself.
Totally ahistorical. Catholics (in America) are practically synonymous with liberalism going back to the 1930s. They’ve been in the tank for the Democratic Party since Kennedy.
If anyone has shifted over the last few decades, it’s Republicans who have become more Catholic, not Catholics who have become more Republican. TradCath influencing and political leanings come from historically Protestant regions that are seeing the local evangelical churches dry up from lack of attendance or go bankrupt due to corrupt and incompetent leadership. Increasingly, the Catholic Church is the last church left standing in Rust Belt and Sun Belt states that have seen poverty wipe out the traditional middle class religious centers.
Totally ahistorical. Catholics (in America) are practically synonymous with liberalism going back to the 1930s. They’ve been in the tank for the Democratic Party since Kennedy.
searches
It looks like there’s some commentary out there on this already:
President Donald Trump has stepped on a political hornet’s nest with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV that have infuriated Catholics worldwide. The rift with the Vatican could exacerbate an already challenging 2026 election season for congressional Republicans as Trump risks alienating a key constituency.
Several conservative-leaning Catholic leaders have publicly called on Trump to apologize – which the president rebuffed – saying they shouldn’t have to choose between their faith and their country. “There is no doubt that President Trump’s post insulting Pope Leo crossed, again, a line of decorum that plays an important part in diplomacy,” Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of CatholicVote, a political advocacy group, said April 13 in a post on X.
Catholics are the single largest religious denomination in the United States, accounting for one-fifth of the population, according to the Pew Research Center. Catholics are 10 percentage points more likely to lean toward Republicans than Democrats, Pew found in 2025.
Trump lost the Catholic vote to Joe Biden 52%-47% in 2020, according to CNN exit polls. He won over Catholics 59%-39% against Kamala Harris in 2024.
2026 is expected to be a tough year for the GOP as forecasters shift more races in Democrats’ favor.
Republican pollster Brent Buchanan said his polling firm Cygnal has been tracking Catholic voters since the 2022 midterms. He said that American Catholics have repeatedly shown their independence from the Vatican’s policy guidance but that if Trump persists in squabbling with the pope, it could spell trouble for the GOP this fall.
“The papacy is an institution that has existed for thousands of years,” Buchanan said. "Even if you don’t ascribe to Catholicism, you know who the pope is and you have an idea what the pope stands for, and it’s usually broad, positive, moral things.
“Catholics tend to be one of the swingier groups in the country, and pretty much whatever direction Catholics go politically, the country goes politically. They’re almost like a bellwether of sorts. So it’s unnecessary noise for an important swing group.”
Political scientists note that Washington and the Vatican have been at odds over policy before, but this war of words is uniquely bitter.
“There’s never been anything this public, this personal or this partisan,” David Campbell, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, told USA TODAY in an interview.
