(LifeSiteNews) —President Donald Trump told EWTN host Raymond Arroyo last night that he likes the Catholic Church “a lot.”
Arroyo interviewed the former president prior to the annual Al Smith Dinner.
Trump said he is “totally in favor of religion” and likes “the Catholic Church a lot” when asked by Arroyo about Pope Francis’ comments on the two candidates. Last month, Francis said “Who is the lesser evil, that lady or that gentleman? I don’t know, everyone in conscience thinks and does this” and compared Trump’s generally restrictive position on immigration to Harris’s support for abortion.
Asked what Pope Francis meant by this, Trump said (perhaps in jest):
Well, I think he wants them to vote for me. And I stand for really everything that you stand for and that the Church stands for. And she doesn’t. She’s a very different kind of a person. She’s a Marxist. Her father was a Marxist and still is a Marxist. And they are not big into religion, I will tell you. And I’m not just talking about the Catholic religion; I’m talking about any religion.
Trump has a mixed record when it comes to Catholic social issues, however. In his favor, he has opposed the surgical and chemical mutilation of gender-confused children and opposed males competing in women’s sports. As president, he also generally favored religious liberty and did appoint three Supreme Court justices who voted to reverse Roe v. Wade. He also stripped Planned Parenthood and other abortion vendors of some taxpayer dollars and reinstated, and expanded, the Mexico City Policy. This policy prohibits foreign aid from going for abortion and to organizations that commit abortions.
However, he has also allied himself closely with pro-LGBT groups, and his campaign supports the availability of dangerous and deadly abortion drugs. He has also refused to commit to any federal limits on abortion, though running mate J.D. Vance said Trump is open to defunding Planned Parenthood. Trump has said he will vote against a radical abortion amendment in Florida, after initially suggesting he thought the state’s protections for preborn babies from six weeks were too restrictive.
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Trump has faced scrutiny for saying he supports “reproductive rights” and for supporting mandatory insurance coverage of embryo-destroying in-vitro fertilization. However, he has been supportive of certain Christian concerns such as “family values,” earning the backing of the group Catholics for Trump. Last night, Trump said he is open to granting religious exemptions to his IVF mandate.
The Harris-Walz campaign, however, supports abortion through all nine months of pregnancy without any limits. Tim Walz, as governor of Minnesota, also signed legislation that allows courts to take custody temporarily from parents who do not want their gender-confused children to undergo irreversible surgeries and drugs to look like the opposite sex. As a U.S. Senator, Kamala Harris questioned a Catholic judicial nominee’s fitness to be a judge because of his membership in the Knights of Columbus. The Biden-Harris administration has also locked up pro-life dads and compared parents who spoke out against sexualized school content to domestic terrorists.
— Matt Lamb (@MattLamb22) October 18, 2024
Arroyo also asked Trump last night about his recent publications of Catholic content on social media, including posting “Happy birthday Mary” on the feast of the Nativity of Our Lady and the St. Michael the Archangel prayer. Trump has also played “Ave Maria” (Hail Mary) during rallies.
“Is that telling voters something about your spiritual journey? Arroyo asked.
“No, I don’t think so. It’s just beautiful to me,” Trump said. “I mean, I look at the whole thing, the words and the pictures. The pictures are so beautiful.”
“And yeah, I put up some stuff. Somebody else asked me that same questio,” he said. “And it’s really that. I think it’s really very beautiful.”
Trump reportedly also has a statue of St. Michael the Archangel on his bedside.
In June, Father James Altman told LifeSiteNews that he had been asked by Hollywood film producer Oscar Delgado to get a statue of St. Michael into the former president’s hands. Unsure he would be able to succeed, the priest took the statue with him to Mar-a-Lago, where he was introduced to Barron Trump. Altman then gave Barron the statue to pass on to his father.
“So blessed I was in God’s providence to run into the one person I could give that to who would get it to him,” Altman said. “And I hear back that it’s on his desk and perhaps on his bedstand now.”
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