Courtney McGrailJust days after this issue of The Irish Catholic comes out, millions of Americans will go to the polls to vote in the ugliest – and surely the most worrying – election in living memory. It is difficult to see how Catholics can vote for either candidate without serious – even grave – reservations.
Hillary Clinton’s commitment to easy access to abortion has been underlined in recent weeks by revelations about how members of her team had in emails referred to Catholicism as “the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion”, and wondered how they could nurture a revolution in which “Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church”.
On the other hand, Donald Trump’s campaign has been marked by populist nativism, outright racism, reckless irresponsibility in international matters, and an attitude towards political violence that might charitably be described as nonchalance.
All of these have in recent weeks, of course, been overshadowed by Mr Trump’s misogynistic comments and boasts about sexual assault, with numerous women coming forward with claims that suggest his boasts have not been hollow ones.
Interview
All of which makes especially bizarre Raymond Arroyo’s interview last week with Mr Trump for the Catholic media group ewtn.com.
“He reveals the reason he switched his position on the life issue, talks about religious liberty, and speaks to women’s concerns about his candidacy. We also spoke about his prayer life, whether he had a favorite saint, and a lot more,” said Mr Arroyo ahead of the broadcast of the interview, which can be watched on youtube.com.
“Honestly, this is the most relaxed I’ve ever seen him on camera,” he continued, adding, “viewers will be very interested in what he has to say.”
As Tommy Tighe of catholichipster.com said on his Twitter account
@theghisilent: “I’m on the edge of my seat, anxiously awaiting what is sure to be a hard-hitting interview of Donald Trump on EWTN later tonight…”
The text of the 15-minute interview, since published on catholicnewsagency.com, shows that the interview was no more coherent than it was hard-hitting, and should – like so much else – leave Catholics thinking of voting for Mr Trump deeply uneasy.
The candidate dismisses women who have accused him of the very behaviour of which he has boasted as having made up their claims , whereas of his most controversial comments on the subject, recorded over a decade ago, he said: “Well, it was locker-room talk; it was locker-room talk. The microphones, I mean, to be honest, should, you know, should never have been on, but that was locker-room talk. And it’s just one of those things. I have it. I’ve said it. I’ve made my apologies, but again, just one of those things.”
The issue was then dropped, without a question of whether the kind of things Mr Trump had said were appropriate in any context, even a ‘locker-room’ one, making all the more jarring his subsequent comments about his favourite saint.
“Well, I think that if you look, Mother Teresa, who’s probably our newest, is great, and John Paul … Pope John Paul, I thought, was terrific,” he said, explaining, “because he had something special. He had a special something. There was a warmth. There was a toughness, but there was a warmth that was incredible. So, I certainly think, Pope John Paul.”
The interviewer doesn’t press Mr Trump on his attitude to immigrants, especially those from Latin America, which is baffling given the demographics of the US Church, or to Syrian refugees, who Mr Trump is allowed claim the US is taking in by the tens of thousands, when in reality it was barely two months ago that the 10,000th refugee was finally accepted.
It’s worth throwing a critical eye over the whole interview, which Michael Sean Winters at ncronline.org describes as showing how the Trump campaign clearly regards EWTN as ‘Catholic Fox’ and a ‘media quisling’.