In an interview five days before he would be installed as the new archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Robert W. McElroy expressed concern about the personal impact of the Trump Administration’s controversial policies of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and the widespread firings of federal workers.
When asked what his message would be to the immigrant community at this time, Cardinal McElroy said, “Sorrow. Love, embrace, compassion. Advocacy and solidarity. And all done in God’s name.”
In the wide-ranging March 6 interview with the editors of the Catholic Standard and Spanish-language El Pregonero newspapers of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, the cardinal also addressed his initial approach to leading the archdiocese, what he sees as the Church’s main pastoral challenge in today’s world, and what he has learned from Pope Francis’s example.
Asked about the firings of federal workers, Cardinal McElroy said, “That is going to be a deep wound and a growing wound, I fear, within our parishes and for individuals, because so many of the people who are being fired are people who have been in jobs, where they require talents and skills and, also (they) have had a sense of security in those jobs. So it’s particularly harsh when this comes down on them so abruptly.”
The day before, Washington’s archbishop-elect had celebrated an Ash Wednesday Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, and he greeted people afterward.
“I can’t tell you the number of people as they were coming out, I was saying hello as they were coming out, they would ask me to pray for them, for various things, (and) how many said, ‘Please pray for me. I’ve lost my job,’ or ‘my wife has lost her job,’ or ‘I think I’m going to lose my job.’ It’s much in the consciousness of people now, and I fear the ripple effects it will have, not just within the economy of this area, but also within the culture of the area,” Cardinal McElroy said.
The cardinal said federal workers are facing “a difficult situation. And my concern is that there has to be a clear set of criteria for establishing what’s necessary and what’s not within the federal government. And it doesn’t seem to me that these firings are proceeding from a coherent sense of that. And I think that makes it particularly troublesome, because it’s one thing to let people go when you have to, or because the job isn’t needed or so forth. But always every person is sacred, and should be looked upon in that way, so that at least it’s done in a way that’s thought out, and not kind of as a reactionary process. And I fear we’re falling into that, and I fear there will be a diminishment of the identity of the culture here in Washington. I think it’s going to be very hard.”
From 2015 until Pope Francis named him as the new archbishop of Washington on Jan. 6, 2025, Cardinal McElroy led the Diocese of San Diego, which runs the length of California’s border with Mexico. He noted that undocumented immigrants are woven into the fabric of life in San Diego, just as they are in the Washington area.
Cardinal McElroy said the Church must stand with undocumented immigrants as they face the threat of mass deportations being carried out across the country.
“In San Diego, our Catholic population is about 1.4 million Catholics, and we probably have 180,000 undocumented men, women and children in families. And so many people in our parishes and our communities are people who live family lives, building up their communities, are people of faith, people living good, solid lives, moral lives, and yet this fear has been unleashed on them because of their undocumented status, and so it is critical for the Church that we stand with these communities at this time, and not only with words… but with our actions too, to stand with those who are undocumented,” the cardinal said.
Washington’s new archbishop said this situation has developed because “for the past more than 20 years, our nation’s immigration laws have been broken. The system is broken. The Congress has been unable to address a whole series of dysfunctionalities in our laws, about who we let in and why we let them in, what is asylum, how we secure the borders, how we deal with people who really need to be let in because their plight is so difficult, how we deal with people who should never be let in, because they have criminal backgrounds… (and other issues including) how do we balance employment law, (and) how do we balance giving status over time to those who are undocumented, living within our midst?”
Pope Francis in his recent letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops calling the program of mass deportations a crisis “put his finger right on the problem and the conversation that we’re having on immigration in the United States right now,” Cardinal McElroy said. He noted that the pope in that letter said a country has a right to control its borders, “but he said the core of what’s going on now that is so contrary to the most fundamental Christian beliefs is the effort to label all of these men and women and children who came here without documentation from these terrible conditions, to label them all perpetually as criminals.”
Cardinal McElroy said that when you label immigrants as criminals, “you dehumanize them, you say they’re the other, they’re not like us. And thus it is all right to treat them as lesser, as less human than us. That’s a very dangerous thing. I think he (the pope) was absolutely correct in pointing to that as the problem. And that’s what I think is at the core of the danger we face as a country now. And that’s why we as Christians have to stand up and say, ‘These are our neighbors. These are men and women and children who we know, and they live good lives. They’re not criminals.’”
The majority of those immigrants, the cardinal said, “are men and women and children and families who have often had to flee terrible situations of injustice or economic degradation or danger to their person from gangs… These (are) people who have had to flee here and are living among us in such an exemplary way.”
Cardinal McElroy said earlier waves of immigrants, like the Irish and Italians and Poles, also faced opposition and arguments that “they should not be let in because they’re lowering the stock in the United States.”
Echoing the pope in decrying the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants now underway in the United States, Washington’s new archbishop said the idea “that we would go after them and in a mass, indiscriminate deportation, eject them from our country, would be a grave stain upon the United States in my view.”
Excerpts from interview with Cardinal Robert McElroy
(Five days before he was installed as the new archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Robert McElroy was interviewed on March 6, 2025 by Mark Zimmermann, editor of the Catholic Standard newspaper and website of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, and by Rafael Roncal, the editor of the archdiocese’s Spanish-language newspaper and website, El Pregonero. Cardinal McElroy was installed as the new archbishop of Washington on March 11 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The following are excerpts from the interview with Cardinal McElroy.)
On his approach as archbishop of Washington
Cardinal McElroy: “Well, the first one is I’m going to listen and go out. What I’m doing over probably the next six months, I’m going to meet individually with each of the priests of the diocese just to get to know them a bit, but also to get to know their parishes in which they’re serving. And then I’m going to go out and meet with groups of leaders from each of the parishes in sessions to talk with them about the state of the church, both in their parishes in the diocese as a whole, what they think I should know as archbishop of Washington. And so, we’re going to use there the synodal model of discussion, so that everyone has a chance to say something. We all listen to it first and then we react to what the others have said, and then we prayerfully try to come to some conclusions. So I’m hopeful in that way to getting a fairly broad sense, not a deep sense, that’ll take me years, but a broad sense of the communities of faith within the Archdiocese of Washington in those months.”
The biggest pastoral challenge for the Church
Cardinal McElroy: “I think the most important pastoral challenge the Church has at this moment is young people. There’s a terrible avalanche of young people leaving life of the Church, and it’s not leaving generally out of an anger, or out of upset at particular teachings, or particular moments. It’s a drift. When I was at San Diego, we held a synod on young people… What they found and what has been my experience is young people drift away from the life of the Church. And we have to find out how to arrest that drift and erect a positive outreach of the Church that is filled with humility and joy, and that is filled with a robust sense of what our faith proclaims and what it could offer to young people. But we have not been effective in doing that. And that’s one of the great challenges we have. I think there’s no more pressing pastoral goal than that in the Church in the United States, and frankly, across most of the world.”
The mission of the Church today
Cardinal McElroy: “Well, I think it goes back to Paul VI’s beautiful theology of Christians being witnesses, and that as believers in Jesus Christ, we are called not merely to believe some personal faith that’s only on the interior, but rather one that calls us to proclaim and live out that faith in every sphere of our lives, and thus we are all called to be witnesses or active disciples of Christ. Pope Francis uses the words missionary disciples. That’s a very important phrase, because it says we cannot, if we’re going to be living out our faith, we cannot be passive about it. All of us are better in some elements of our faith than others. All of us have strengths and weaknesses in living out our faith, but we are all called to use our strengths as ways of proclaiming Christ’s presence in the world.
“Synodality – which is such a focus of Pope Francis at this time – in the final document at the synod in Rome, which the pope took and accepted and made the document on synodality from that synod, it says that synodality is the journey of men and women together as believers, in light of Christ, companions with one another, bearing each other up, sharing each other’s joys and hardships, and together radiating Christ to the world. I think that captures what the mission of the Church is, and it says that everyone has a responsibility in the life of the Church to proclaim Christ – Christ crucified, Christ risen, and Christ living in the community. In these particular times, it’s challenging on many levels, because our culture and our politics have both become very much corroded, and they have flown apart. We have such polarization in our culture and in our politics, and it’s harder in that context to live out the Christian vision, but we’re called to do it all the more.”
Learning from the example of Pope Francis
Cardinal McElroy: “Well, he is a really hard worker. So it’s a constant challenge, I feel I work a reasonable amount, but you know, I’m put to shame when I see how much he does. He has a strong will. He’s very prayerful, much in touch with God. He listens. He has a great sense of humor, and the greatest contribution he has made, in my view, in the life of the Church is his pastoral understanding of the role of applying theology and doctrine in the lives of people. Some people say you need to bring Catholic doctrine, and then you just apply it flat out to the lives of people, that’s the important Christian goal.
“But if you look at what Pope Francis says, he does what Christ did. What Christ did, Christ came to people in need who had problems, (and) the first thing he’d do would be to embrace them, to let them know he loved them. The second thing was to try to heal whatever was the problem, I don’t mean just physically heal whatever problem they were wrestling with. And it’s then, in that order, that he says to them, now change your life and don’t do this again, something they’ve been doing wrong. That is, to my mind, the view of Pope Francis. We first embrace people in the life of the Church, then we listen to their story and try to do what we can to heal them. And thirdly, then we speak to them about the correction that’s needed. All of them are important, but the order is very important. And so I think that’s the gift that Francis brought to the Church.
“In my own mind, each of the recent popes had many great qualities and emphases. But for each one, one stands out to me. For John Paul II, it was witness. He was witnessing to the faith, in the midst of all of the oppression he’d grown up with, and then (being a) witness to the world. For Benedict, it was truth, his focus was on truth. And for Pope Francis, to me it’s the pastoral, it’s the pastoral identity of Jesus’ ministry, which should be the imprint of our own ministry. And each of those is a really important thing. And we can’t leave out any one of them. But to me, we received a legacy from each of these popes about an important element of our faith. For Francis, I point always to the pastoral.”
Family roots and his parents’ example
Mark Zimmermann: “You’re a fifth generation San Franciscan. Do you know anything about your original ancestors who settled there?”
Cardinal Robert McElroy: “Yes, most of my family, three generations of my family came to San Francisco with the gold rush, looking for gold, assisting those looking for gold, and then they settled there. And most of them came from Ireland. My mother’s family, one of them came from upstate New York and originally had been in Philadelphia. In fact, their family moved to Philadelphia the year Philadelphia was founded, and they were English...”
Mark Zimmermann: “How did your parents’ example shape you?”
Cardinal McElroy: “They grew up in San Francisco. They had gone to the same grammar school… It was a very Catholic culture at that time, (they) went to Catholic high schools, they knew each other during all that period of time. And then my father was in the military during World War II. He was in the Army Air Force, and my mother then was graduated from Berkeley at that time. And so they met up again and fell in love and got married, and I was born. Now, since we’re fifth-generation native San Franciscans, and the family was always kind of chauvinistic about it, for all five children in my family, my father drove my mother the half-hour to the hospital, because we lived down the peninsula, to make sure we’d be born in the hospital in San Francisco so we’d be native San Franciscans, even though I never lived in San Francisco until I was an adult.
“Both my parents were religious, very faith-filled. Both of them had a great sense of God’s presence in their lives and tried to put that at the center of the family. There was a great sense of joy and hopefulness in their faith, and it wasn’t an oppressive faith in any way. It was one filled with a real sense of hope and joy attached to it, and looking at life and understanding how to live our life through Catholic teaching, so that was with the Catholic schools. So they were always there, they were very much in love with each other, and they loved us very deeply, and part of that was that they communicated a love for the faith.”
Shaped by serving as a parish priest
Mark Zimmermann: “What was it like, after being ordained, serving as a parish priest at St. Cecilia’s where your parents had grown up? Your biography describes parish work as your first love. How did your parish experiences at St. Cecilia and then at St. Pius in Redwood City, and then as pastor of St. Gregory in San Mateo, how has that shaped your pastoral approach as a bishop, (first) being a parish priest?”
Cardinal McElroy: “Well, I always wanted to be a priest when I was young, maybe before the age of 8. I ended up going to a high school seminary, which I liked very much, but would never send anybody to nowadays. But for me, it was a good experience. And then I left the seminary system for college and then came back.
“But all during that time, I intended to be a priest, and I was always focused on parish priesthood. The image I had of parish priesthood, it was very positive, it lifted me up. It was correct in many ways, but it did not capture the wonders I encountered in life when I entered in the parish ministry at St. Cecilia’s at first, then St. Pius, and then St. Gregory, in the sense (0f) that overwhelming way people invited you into their lives of faith, into their family lives, into their struggles with problems that they were having in life. It was just, in a very affective way, it was a wondrous discovery for me. And I found that I had not realized the degree to which that invitation into people’s lives would be so robust and filled with life and beauty and warmth. So it was a wonderful experience for me during all those periods of time.
“And, you know, sometimes people would say to me, ‘Does it get you down to be a priest when you have to listen to people’s problems? It could be overwhelming.’ And it can be overwhelming, but I always found that when I was with people, almost without exception, I came away not thinking about how they’re falling short, but rather about how overwhelmingly well people in general struggle with horrendous problems in their lives and often complex situations, excruciating, difficult situations to have to get through, and people wrestle with those and try to work their way forward. And that, for me, was one of the greatest gifts too, to see that (in) people’s lives, the faith alive in that sense, and that they truly, when they are having problems that could seem overwhelming and are overwhelming objectively, that they do as well as they do. That’s what was left with me from my experience with people in parish life.”
Mark Zimmermann: “And how has that shaped you as a bishop?”
Cardinal McElroy: “Well, part of it is, it always calls me to think about the community itself or the individual rather than the bureaucratic or abstract way of approaching things. Now, as a bishop, sometimes you live in a world of, you know, governance and these different things. But (the experience of) being the parish priest, being a pastor, kind of just constantly calls me to make primary that vision of what this is all for, which is for individuals and communities and families striving to be with God and for God, and I’m journeying with them, and trying to help them strive to do that.”
