"Catholic in Name Only"
It's Not the Hypocrisy about Who Is and Isn't Catholic. It's Actually about Authority.
Donald Trump’s ‘border czar’ Tom Homan has weighed in with his ecclesiological thoughts on immigration after the U.S. bishops approved a statement opposing the Trump Administration’s enforcement and deportation policy. Homan said—
The Catholic Church is wrong. I’m sorry. I’m a lifelong Catholic. I’m saying it as not only border czar, I’ll say it as a Catholic. I think they need to spend time fixing the Catholic Church, in my opinion.
Less visibly but just as interestingly, a user on Elon Musk’s X wrote this week about James Martin, SJ’s role in the reception of a gay man into the Church. That user wrote—
The Pope needs to speak Ex Cathedra and settle this matter once and for all.
If the Pope says it’s okay, I am on the way out.
Think that last one through. One Catholic has dictated to the Pope how he needs to define infallibly whether the Church should receive LGBTQ+ people. And, if the Successor of Peter disagrees with X user @Mount_Defiance, then the Pope—though speaking infallibly—would still be so wrong that @Mount_Defiance would need to leave the Church.
Here it is worth a word on obsequium religiosum. In the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council wrote that—
Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.
Baptism makes Catholics. Religious submission of mind and will is what characterizes the observance of the Catholic faith. Of course we can disagree with what the bishops and the Church have taught. Catholic faith is not brainwashing. But religious submission of mind and will is a willingness to put aside our disagreements and keep faith with the Church. We disagree and fail to be convinced in much the same way that we sin: inevitably, we all respond to many different perspectives and motives. But faith means trusting the bishops, the Pope, and the Holy Spirit. We set our disagreements and doubts aside, and thus we are believers.
With that in mind, it is worth returning to the uncharitable ugliness that confronted Joe Biden in 2020, when Lou Holtz called Biden a “Catholic in name only” after asserting that the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign was “the most radically pro-abortion campaign in history.” I’m not sure how anybody would measure something like that to back up Holtz’s claim. Of course, that wasn’t the point anyway. The point was to rally Republican voters against Biden who has described publicly his own religious submission of mind and will to the Church’s teaching on abortion.
And so here is what is interesting. Joe Biden has described his thoughtful position that does mark him as a faithful Catholic. Tom Homan, @Mount_Defiant, and (presumably) lots of others are public in how they want to dictate their own version of Catholic faith for bishops and the Pope to fall in line with them. Yet only Joe Biden and other Catholic Democrats get called “Catholic in name only.” It’s a maddening and dishonest double-standard.
But there really is more.
I return often to paragraph 27 of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church, Gaudium et Spes, which tells us—
…whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as [poor] living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as [unsafe] working conditions, where [people] are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society…. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.
This critical text is the seedbed of the consistent ethic of life. The consistent ethic’s approach was born here in the undifferentiated way that all of these threats to human life and human dignity “and others of their like” must command our moral attention. Some of these threats are more direct and serious than others. But this is not a ranked list. None of them is optional or more important than any of the others despite differences in moral graveness. Together they all are that “seamless garment of life” that addresses real human suffering that always is urgent. Catholics can no more ignore “abortion” than “deportation.”
Joe Biden and other Catholic Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and Mario Cuomo all have asserted that they accept the teaching of the Church while they also have asserted the complexity of their positions as public figures. There is no question here about religious obedience of mind and will. None of them ever has said “The Catholic Church is wrong” as Homan has.
When we give our religious submission of mind and will, we accept that we must defer to the Church’s teaching on all of these dangers to the human person. Yet somehow—mostly in the United States—some version of Catholicism has grown up where the Church must submit to the individualistic judgments of Catholics in the Trump Administration or in the influencer universe online. No matter what Gaudium et Spes teaches authoritatively, Tom Homan knows better than the bishops and the Pope. But this, surely, is not Catholicism.
The abortion politics of the last forty years have been a challenge to the Church’s style of public witness. That has been difficult and not good for anybody. But this funhouse-mirror version of Catholicism Homan and others have advanced is far worse. It undermines the authority of the Church, itself, to achieve a partisan outcome while still asserting the credibility of a “lifelong Catholic.”
I do not presume, like Holtz, to pronounce particularly on who is Catholic and who is not. But I can say firmly—if one cannot give religious submission of mind and will to what the Church teaches authoritatively (or if one cannot, at least, pretend to be trying to), it denies and mocks Catholic faith when that person announces himself as a Catholic.
Catholic faith either transforms us or it does not. The Catholic Church is not a membership organization or a club. It is a community of missionary disciples united by faith in one Gospel, one Tradition, one Word, one Sacrament. Our faith demands things from us, and they should be uncomfortable.
The comfortable Catholicism that gives instructions to the bishops and the Pope will always fail to be any more than precisely what it is—a magnum latrocinium, a gang bent on stealing the authority of the Church for its own foul purpose.
In these days, it is urgent to recognize them when you see them, and to call them what they are. The Church’s authentic and authoritative public witness is too important to look the other way.
This piece keeps insisting it’s defending “religious submission of mind and will,” but it never applies that standard to the very example it’s built around. The entire argument treats Joe Biden’s public actions, which include repeatedly promising to restore Roe, codify it into federal law, and aggressively expand abortion access, as compatible with “religious submission,” simply because he verbally says he “accepts” Church teaching. But Catholic theology has never taught that professed assent overrides manifest contrary action. Millies knows this. The Church’s own categories distinguish between prudential matters (immigration enforcement, deportation policy) and acts the Church names intrinsece malum - intrinsically evil - precisely because they admit no exceptions, no circumstances that can make them good.
That is the core incoherence here: the author quotes Vatican II on religious submission while ignoring the very magisterium that has defined abortion as a non-negotiable moral absolute from Gaudium et Spes to Evangelium Vitae. Biden’s public actions don’t merely “disagree”; they work to legally entrench what the Church calls the direct killing of the innocent. To claim this still “marks him as a faithful Catholic” is to empty “religious submission” of all content. If verbal assent is all that’s required, then the Church’s moral teaching becomes a decorative accessory worn for political biography - precisely what Millies claims to decry.
Finally, the piece accuses others of “stealing the Church’s authority” while modeling the very thing it condemns. It demands unquestioning deference to episcopal statements on immigration - yet waves away decades of definitive, repeatedly clarified papal teaching on abortion. It treats disagreement with a prudential policy document as rebellion, while treating open political defiance of the Church’s most authoritative moral teaching as fidelity. And then it laments a “double standard.”
The double standard is real, all right - but it’s in this essay, not in the people it attacks.
If “religious submission of mind and will” means anything at all, it has to apply first to what the Church actually teaches most authoritatively, not to selective political applications that flatter one party and shield another. Otherwise, we are left not with Catholicism, but with a partisan mirror version - angry at people who question bishops on immigration, indulgent toward public officials who promise to expand an intrinsic evil, and confident enough to call that contradiction “faithful.”
That’s the real “magnum latrocinium” here.
I think the core issue in your piece is that it treats a bunch of things the Church differentiates very sharply as if they all sit on the same moral plane. Once that distinction collapses, the rest of the argument sort of slides with it.
You lean heavily on GS 27 as though the items listed there obliterate any hierarchy among moral acts. But the post-conciliar Magisterium (JPII especially, in both Veritatis Splendor 79-83 and Evangelium Vitae 62-73) already made clear that intrinsically evil acts are in a category of their own. Immigration enforcement, deportation, housing conditions... these can be gravely wrong, yes, but they are not intrinsece malum. The direct killing of the innocent is. The Church says that repeatedly, and not ambiguously. If GS 27 made everything morally equivalent, then unsafe working conditions and genocide would share the same moral species, which the Church obviously denies.
There’s also a key point missing in how you apply LG 25. Vatican II does teach religious submission of mind and will, but only toward the Church’s authentic magisterial teaching on faith and morals. It does not bind Catholics to every prudential or policy-level conclusion of a bishops’ conference. Benedict XVI said this pretty directly more than once: the Church doesn’t propose specific political solutions as doctrine. So disagreeing with the USCCB on immigration policy does not violate obsequium religiosum. But denying that abortion is intrinsically evil does.
Which leads to the second problem: saying that certain Catholic politicians have “accepted the teaching” on abortion simply because they say they do, despite actively supporting laws that maintain or expand access to an intrinsic evil. Evangelium Vitae 73-74 explicitly addresses this exact scenario. It says personal agreement is not enough if one’s public actions materially cooperate in the legal protection of an act the Church calls always and everywhere gravely immoral. Complexity doesn’t override the nature of the act.
This is why the equivalence you draw between “abortion” and “deportation” doesn’t hold up inside Catholic moral theology. One is always wrong because of what it is. The other depends entirely on intention, manner, and circumstance. Vatican II didn’t erase that distinction, and the magisterial interpretation since the Council only entrenches it.
So the real danger to the Church’s authority isn’t that lay Catholics sometimes disagree with bishops on prudential matters. It’s when the hierarchy of moral norms gets flipped upside-down: when contingent political questions are treated as doctrinal, and doctrinal prohibitions are treated as if they’re negotiable or secondary. That’s the reversal the tradition warns against.
A Catholic can legitimately debate immigration enforcement.
A Catholic cannot legitimately debate whether abortion is intrinsically evil.
Those aren’t partisan positions; they’re the structure of Catholic moral reasoning itself.
For that reason, your argument ends up resting on a reading that the Magisterium has already ruled out. It moves moral weight away from what the Church teaches with the greatest authority and onto matters the Church classifies as prudential. That’s where the ecclesiological problem really sits.