WASHINGTON — Amid the coronavirus pandemic and ahead of the upcoming 2020 election, Catholic voters have new concerns over local regulation of church gatherings and vandalism of religious imagery in addition to their ongoing concerns for conscience protections and free speech on the issues of life and marriage. 

Religious-freedom questions have also arisen prominently during the confirmation process of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee and a Catholic mother of seven, who has been heavily scrutinized over her beliefs on marriage and abortion. 

Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have displayed different approaches to these issues and may be pressed to further address the growing concerns of religious voters ahead of the election.

The Trump campaign has worked to reassure voters that the president will defend religious liberty, telling the Register in September that the president is a “vocal defender of religious liberty.” The defense of “the freedoms of religious believers and organizations” was added in September to Trump’s list of second-term priorities after not being initially mentioned. 

In May, he called on state governors to allow churches to reopen “right now” as “essential” services and threatened to “override” governors on the issue after concerns surfaced over houses of worship receiving unequal treatment in the reopening process. Additionally, multiple speakers at the Republican National Convention acknowledged concerns over uneven restrictions on churches, including the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., who said that “people of faith are under attack. You’re not allowed to go to church, but mass chaos in the streets gets a pass.”

The Trump campaign also lauded Barrett’s faith when she was nominated to the Supreme Court last month. She was targeted over her faith by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in her 2017 judicial confirmation hearings when Feinstein told her “the dogma lives loudly within you.” During the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner in September, Trump said, “We will not stand for any attacks against Judge Barrett’s faith. Anti-Catholic bigotry has absolutely no place in the United States of America.”

While Biden and Senate Democrats have also strongly opposed Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, unlike in her 2017 confirmation hearing, the party’s leaders have largely refrained from directly criticizing her for following Catholic teachings. Instead, such attacks this time around have largely been mounted by media outlets seeking to keep the issue alive, primarily by calling attention to her involvement within the charismatic People of Praise community.

The Biden campaign released a statement on religious freedom on Sept. 8, in which Biden said that “this challenging moment for our nation and the world is an especially stark reminder of how vitally important it is for everyone to be able to live and practice their faith freely. That’s why I will always stand strong in defense of religious freedom around the world.” 

However, that statement did not address any individual domestic threats to religious liberty. While Biden has not addressed church reopenings specifically, he has generally urged caution in regard to large gatherings due to coronavirus concerns. In January, the Biden campaign ran an advertisement saying, “We need a president who respects religious freedom” in reference to Trump’s travel ban on certain countries. Biden did tell reporters shortly before Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings that he didn’t think there should “be questions about her faith.”  In his 2015 visit to the United States, Pope Francis called religious freedom “one of America’s most precious possessions.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “The right to the exercise of freedom, especially in moral and religious matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of the human person. This right must be recognized and protected by civil authority within the limits of the common good and public order.”

 

Concerns of the Bishops

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have emphasized the importance of this issue in voting, noting in their 2015 teaching document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship”: “In the United States, religious freedom generally enjoys strong protection in our law and culture, but those protections are now in doubt. For example, the long-standing tax exemption of the Church has been explicitly called into question at the highest levels of government, precisely because of her teachings on marriage. Catholics have a particular duty to make sure that protections like these do not weaken but instead grow in strength.” 

Biden holds several positions at odds with the bishops’ stance on religious liberty. Following the Little Sisters of the Poor’s Supreme Court win in July, Biden vowed if elected to restore the original pre-Hobby Lobby contraceptive mandate that would compel the religious order and other faith groups to facilitate contraceptive coverage for their employees despite their conscience-based objections. 

He has been rebuked by the bishops for this in the past. He also named the Equality Act as his top legislative priority, a bill that would “close faith-based foster care and adoption agencies that honor children’s rights to a mother and father,” the USCCB noted, by adding sexual orientation and gender identity to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act without religious-freedom exemptions.  

Trump has been more in line with the bishops on religious liberty and received praise from them when he exempted religious groups, including the Little Sisters of the Poor, from complying with the contraceptive mandate. He has also stated his opposition to the Equality Act, saying that the “bill in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to undermine parental and conscience rights.” 

 

Vandalism and Church Reopenings

Two areas of recent concern that some U.S. bishops have spoken out on are the unequal treatment of churches in reopening and the acts of vandalism against churches and religious statues amid rioting and racial unrest.

In July, Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami and Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City said that, “in the last few weeks, we have witnessed, among other things, one church rammed with a car and set on fire, as well as statues of Jesus Christ and of the Virgin Mary defaced or even beheaded. An historic mission church has also been badly damaged by fire, and the cause is still under investigation.” 

They wrote that “whether those who committed these acts were troubled individuals crying out for help or agents of hate seeking to intimidate, the attacks are signs of a society in need of healing.”

The vandalism and targeting of religious statues and churches have concerned many Catholic voters, according to an Aug. 27-Sept. 1 EWTN/RealClear Opinion Research poll. The survey found that 83% of Catholics are “concerned” over recent vandalization and attacks on churches, and 74% are “concerned” over “attacks on statues of Catholic heroes” and over “protesters burning Bibles” in Portland, Oregon.

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has campaigned publicly against the revised policy on religious worship in the context of the coronavirus pandemic that his city implemented in September, which subjected religious gatherings to far harsher restrictions that those mandated for a wide range of commercial activities. 

“Why can people shop at Nordstrom’s at 25% capacity but only one of you at a time is allowed to pray inside of this great cathedral?” he asked in his homily at the Sept. 20 Sunday Mass he celebrated in the plaza of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption.

After the U.S. Department of Justice warned in a Sept. 25 letter to San Francisco Mayor London Breed that the limits on indoor religious worship “may violate the First Amendment to the Constitution,” she eased the restrictions. While Archbishop Cordileone thanked the mayor “for responding to her constituents’ call,” he said the state of California’s continuing limit of 100 people at religious gatherings “is still unjust.”

 

Religious Liberty ‘Fragile’

Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel for the First Liberty Institute, told the Register that these pandemic restrictions on churches have become a major concern ahead of the election. 

It has “always been a mainstay of people who have alleged that there are no real attacks on religious liberty,” Sasser noted, to say “we don’t see too many churches getting shut down or people getting banned from singing or banned from worship.” Now, he said, “that’s no longer true. We’ve seen them exercise that power, and what’s fascinating is that it was not legislatures that were exercising their power. Executives from governors down to some little mayor in some town just started issuing edicts and orders without regard to any kind of constitutional restraint.” 

“I think a lot of people realize now that it’s fragile, that liberty is a lot more fragile than they ever imagined it can be,” Sasser said. “A lot of people thought that the battles over religious liberty were kind of on the edges, like in the workplace or at school. No, they’re coming for the worship service, too; at least that’s a possibility.”

He also noted “the push for various challenges to biblical worldviews,” saying that there is a problem where “people start using the government apparatus to punish dissenting views and to exclude people of faith who have different views on issues like life and marriage to exclude them from essentially public participation, whether that be Catholic Charities being told, ‘You can’t participate in the foster-care system because of your religion’; or it can be a Catholic hospital being required to perform an abortion if they’re receiving a certain type of funds.”

“The fight used to be basically about what the preferred policy position should be for the government and people of faith staking out their claims,” Sasser said. “Now, it’s about forced compliance with a view that’s antithetical to the worldview of people of faith, and so that is obviously a serious problem.”

 

Increased Violence and Vandalism

Thomas Brejcha, the president and founder of the Thomas More Society, told the Register that we’re in “an unparalleled time where the Catholic religion especially has been the object of so much in the way of violence and adverse behavior.” 

He said the Thomas More Society is “busy in jurisdictions all over the country urging and demanding that secular authorities back off from these instances of gross outrageous interference with religious belief and practice.”

“We think that there’s active discrimination that’s gone on. We found blatant examples of that in many of the states — New Jersey, New York, California — and we’ve gone to court with mixed results that themselves are very troubling,” he said. He discussed his group’s success in suing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio, who “were actively hostile to religious worship and belief and practice, going so far as to discriminate in a very open and blatant way by not only allowing but participating in street protests … at the same time they were banning and barring with very modest exceptions any religious practice outdoors and indoors.” 

Brejcha also noted the “troubling development in recent months” of “official governmental tolerance of graffiti and removing religious statues.” He referenced a case of this in Ventura, California, where St. Junípero Serra’s statue was voted to be taken down by the city council. 

He also expressed concern over the slogans painted on the outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and the response from Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, who “publicly stated that he considered this a minor matter and would take no action against the perpetrators, although at least some of them were known.”

 

Important to Catholic Voters

The most recent EWTN News-RealClear Opinion Research poll of Catholics voters found very strong support for religious freedom.

At least three in four Catholics, regardless of how frequently they attend Mass, said that they are more likely to favor candidates who support religious freedom. The poll was conducted Oct. 5-11.

Overall, 78% of the Catholics polled said they were more likely to support candidates who protect religious freedom for people of faith. This included majorities of both men and women, as well as majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, and majorities of every age range, geographic region and race surveyed.

Lauretta Brown writes from Washington.

Catholic News Agency contributed to this report.