Pope Francis weighed in on Americans’ upcoming choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump on Friday, critiquing both candidates as “against life” and urging Catholic voters to choose the “lesser of two evils.”
“One must choose the lesser of two evils. Who is the lesser of two evils? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know,” Francis told reporters while on the papal plane.
Francis, who has been more openly political on some topics than his predecessors, criticized Trump’s handling of immigration and Harris’s support for accessing abortion services.
“To send migrants away, to leave them wherever you want, to leave them … it’s something terrible, there is evil there. To send away a child from the womb of the mother is an assassination, because there is life. We must speak about these things clearly,” he said.
This isn’t the first time the pope has opined on issues like these during his 11-year tenure.
Back in 2016, when Trump was running his first presidential campaign on building a wall at the southwestern border, Francis said of the GOP-front runner, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”
At the time, Trump immediately bit back, saying, “If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which, as everyone knows, is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.”
In 2021, in a rare public rift between the Vatican and American bishops, the pope, via the institution, warned conservative American bishops to “hit the brakes on their push to deny communion to politicians supportive of abortion rights,” the New York Times reported. The Vatican’s response came as some leading American bishops were questioning whether President Joe Biden ought to be served communion because he endorses some reproductive freedom measures. Biden is the first Roman Catholic to occupy the Oval Office in 60 years—since John F. Kennedy.
Francis, who has called abortion a “plague” and a “crime” akin to “mafia” behavior, said at the time that communion is “not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.”
The pope has also critiqued couples who choose to have pets instead of children—echoing Republican vice presidential candidate and new Catholic JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remarks—saying that “denial” of fatherhood or motherhood “takes away our humanity.”
In October of 2023, hundreds of delegates from around the world flocked to the Vatican, beginning a monthlong meeting as part of Pope Francis’ “Synod on Synodality”—a gathering to discuss the church’s global aims and plans. For the first time ever, women delegates were allowed to join in.
A couple of months later, in December of last year, Francis released new guidance on same-sex couples who are Catholic, saying that their unions can receive formal blessings—so long as they aren’t mistaken for marriages. Queer couples, the letter made clear, cannot invoke “any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding.”
Some of the pope’s positions on women and queerness—while far from revolutionary—have upset a growing movement of a new kind of right-wing American Catholic.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor who incited a racist campaign against the comedian Leslie Jones and was banned from Twitter for it in 2016, has called to “make the Vatican straight again” and “make America homophobic again.” (This is the same guy who says he set up the meeting between Trump and white nationalist Nick Fuentes in 2022.)
According to Pew, 20% of US adults describe themselves as Catholics and are generally older than the American average—and three-quarters of this group reportedly view Francis favorably. About six in ten Catholics say abortion should be legal, with 39% saying it should be legal in most cases and only 11% holding that it should be illegal in all cases.
In the 2020 election, 52% of Catholic voters chose Biden, to Trump’s 47%.
Despite criticizing the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, the leader of the Holy See said Catholics should vote.
“Not voting is ugly,” the 87-year-old pontiff said. “It is not good. You must vote.”
