Editorial: That Trump can still sway some Catholic voters is a real scandal | National Catholic Reporter
***Perhaps the deeper scandal of that story is why CatholicVote wanted the information. The architects of the 2016 improbable political upset knew one thing: a solid base of likely Trump voters were carrying their cellphones into those churches. And that, we propose, is the real scandal here.
The Trump operatives' confidence that they have the support of voters in those churches is borne out by hard data.
A recent Pew survey reported on by current NCR national correspondent Christopher White indicates that President Donald Trump remains the favorite of white Catholics by a tiny plurality. But that is a wide survey number, counting all those who self-identify as Catholics. If one narrows the survey down to regular Massgoers, not simply those who identify themselves as Catholics, the numbers are indicative of a Trumpian landslide.
A RealClear survey taken early this year of U.S. Catholic registered voters found that among devout Catholics, those who attend Mass regularly, 63% approve of Trump's performance as president.
That is a sorry statistic. It tells us something about Catholics who regularly partake in the Eucharist and hear about an itinerant Palestinian preacher who talked about love for foreigners and the outsider. They remain a bedrock of support for this most peculiar president, a man who metaphorically worships at the foothold of Confederate statues and freely calls Catholic immigrants rapists and murderers. He is the most race-baiting president since Woodrow Wilson, who didn’t have Twitter to extol the virtues of the Klan and "The Birth of a Nation."
When Martin Luther King Jr. led his march on Selma, and other places throughout the South, prominent places were reserved for Catholic priests and nuns. Their presence was a sign that an immigrant church was emerging into the full light of American life, backing the long struggle for basic human rights in the United States.
In the civil rights era, debates over Communion for wayward Catholic politicians often revolved around support for segregation, as politicos who crossed New Orleans Archbishop Joseph Rummel discovered in 1962. Local officials fought against Catholic school integration. Rummel applied the penalty of excommunication. But in this new era of civil rights advocacy, it’s the politicians who play the white resentment card who think they have a friend among devout Catholics.
But maybe the times are changing.***
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