On December 20th, President-Elect Donald J. Trump announced that he will nominate Brian Burch, the President and co-founder of CatholicVote.org, as the 13th United States Ambassador to the Holy See.
The appointment must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
A non-profit Catholic advocacy group established in 2008, Catholic Vote is a combination of four connected entities—Catholic Vote Civic Action, an IRS 501(c) 4 lobbying organization; a federal political action committee, Catholic Vote PAC; and two tax-deductible affiliates, the Catholic Vote Education Fund and the Catholic Vote Legal Action Fund.
Identifying itself as “Leading the Fight for Faith, Family and Freedom,” Catholic Vote states that its mission is to “inspire every Catholic in America to live out the truths of our faith in public life.”
The group supports the right to life and traditional marriage, and has gained national media attention for tracking incidents of arson and vandalism directed against Catholic churches.
In January of 2024, Catholic Vote endorsed Donald Trump for President. The organization’s PAC spent $10 million on political ads during the 2024 election cycle, most of it supporting the Trump candidacy.
Burch, 49 and the father of nine, is the author of A New Catholic Moment: Donald Trump and the Politics of the Common Good published in 2020. In 2024, he edited a collection of essays titled For God, Country, and Sanity: How Catholics Can Save America.
Burch’s nomination has received uniformly positive coverage on conservative and pro-life media platforms, with Fox News describing him as “an outspoken conservative.”
The question remains however of whether the nomination of Burch is a signal that the second Trump Administration will return to the pro-life policies which characterized his first term, or is the appointment merely a reward for political compliance as President Trump distances himself from his previous pro-life positions.
Donald Trump was a Model Pro-Life President in his First Term
In his first term as President, from 2017 to 2021, Donald Trump was the most effective pro-life President in modern American history, more so than Ronald Reagan—a movement conservative who co-authored Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation.
Trump achieved what no other Republican President accomplished in the last half century, appointing enough originalist justices to the U.S. Supreme Court to finally overturn that constitutional contrivance known as Roe v. Wade.
Donald Trump’s pro-life record was even more expansive than ending Roe.
He supported the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the federal funding of abortion and the Weldon Amendment, which protects the conscience rights of healthcare providers.
Trump restored and expanded the Mexico City Policy, which prevents foreign aid dollars from being used to promote abortion; crafted the Hobby Lobby Rule, which exempted employers from mandates to subsidize abortifacient contraception; enforced Title X, which partially de-funded Planned Parenthood; and withdrew U.S. support for three abortion promoting UN agencies—the World Health Organization, the United Nations Fund For Population Activities, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Trump Changed Direction on Abortion in 2024
In July of 2024, the Donald Trump Campaign, suddenly, without consultation, and with virtually no warning, discarded 27 pro-life and pro-family planks from the Republican National Platform, abandoning forty-eight years of principled Republican opposition to abortion, and replacing explicit language defending the right to life of the unborn child with ambiguous references to the Fourteenth Amendment.
For the first time in history, the new, Trump approved Republican platform expressed support for abortifacient birth control and for embryo destroying in vitro fertilization.
President Trump then asserted that abortion was now a state issue, that the Republican Party would no longer support the Human Life Amendment, and that he would veto any federal ban on abortion.
He went on to describe state heartbeat laws and six week abortion bans as “extreme,” and promised that the Food and Drug Administration, under his Presidency, would keep the abortion drug Mifepristone legal.
Mifepristone now accounts for 63% percent of all U.S. abortions.
Almost overnight, with little or no opposition from establishment pro-life groups, Donald Trump succeeded in doing what generations of Big-Tent, Rockefeller Republicans failed to do.
He imposed, on the national level, a cultural revolution upon the Republican Party, transforming it into a second American political party which embraced the continued legality of procured abortion.
An Anemic Response From The Pro-Life Establishment
Given the sudden, dramatic and absolute undoing of decades of painstakingly achieved pro-life victories in the Republican Party—and the millions of lives in peril—one would imagine that the response of pro-life organizations would be one of justifiable outrage, unrestrained public denunciation of this stunning betrayal, and intense lobbying of the candidate and his campaign, demanding that they reverse their shameless flip-flop.
They could have told Donald Trump that he was making a mistake which would compromise his principles, destroy his legacy, alienate his base and imperil the future of his party.
Instead, the pro-life response was muted and anemic. Virtually every mainstream national pro-life organization—the National Right To Life Committee, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, the Family Research Council, Students For Life, Priests For Life and Americans United For Life—temporized.
At best, they offered tepid criticisms of the platform changes, while strongly emphasising the need for continued support for the Trump candidacy.
Instead of demonstrating courage and integrity, and advocating their cause before the Trump Campaign, they practiced expediency, by affirming their political endorsements, for the benefit of the Trump Campaign, to their own members.
Instead of resisting Donald Trump’s defection, they enabled it. Instead of making a moral judgement, they made a political calculation.
Frank Pavone of Priests For Life even attacked Live Action, the one national pro-life group which criticized Trump’s swing to the Left.
A Missed Opportunity
When Donald Trump, as a resident of Florida, hinted that he might vote for a ballot initiative to overturn that state’s six week abortion ban, there was a spontaneous outpouring of grass-roots pro-life disgust and indignation. Within 48 hours, Trump backtracked.
The episode illustrated the likelihood that Donald Trump, confronted by a concerted pro-life backlash, would have, at the very least, made concessions to political pressure coming from the right to life movement.
That pressure however, never materialized. Were the political actors leading these organizations more concerned with a seat at the table—or a place on the payroll—than with a consistent defense of their own professed principles?
Catholic Vote
The response of Catholic Vote to the reordering of the Republican Party in the direction of social liberalism was well within the accommodationist mainstream of pro-life America.
In a cloying whitewash of the Republican platform changes, Catholic Vote issued a statement which, while noting that “portions of the older platform were omitted,” still insisted that “Bottom line: The new GOP platform is unmistakably pro-life.”
It went on to say that “Nobody is interested in some pro-life Pickett’s charge up platform hill,” and then helpfully instructed readers that “The GOP is the party of life. But not a perfect party.”
As citizens of a republic, we are obligated to exercise our share in the governance of the country by voting. As Catholics, we are permitted to support that candidate or party which will inflict the least harm upon the common good.
Nothing in the exercise of this right and obligation precludes us, however, from telling the truth about the positions of these candidates and parties, and pushing back against their errors, even if we ultimately cast our ballots for them.
In 2024, the pro-life mainstream, along with Catholic Vote, decided that telling the truth was imprudent.
Were they worried that candor might cause their candidate to lose, or were they concerned that their candidate might win, and hold their candor against them?
What we do know is that conservative, Catholic, pro-life America will make no attempt to pressure Donald Trump, while President, to halt his defection from social conservatism.
If they were unwilling, as activists, to remonstrate with a candidate seeking election, there is no chance, none whatsoever, that they will, as government appointees, resist the policies of the sitting President who appointed them.
Conservative Catholics love to invoke, as their political model, Saint Thomas More, who sacrificed his life rather than apostatize from his Faith.
A more appropriate example for modern conservative Catholics in America might be a noted Catholic American from a century ago—New York State Senator George Washington Plunkitt.
It was Plunkitt, after all, who summarized elective politics with the memorable phrase: “I seen my opportunities and I took em.”
C. Joseph Doyle is the Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts.
