Pope Francis on Monday named Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, bishop of San Diego, to be the next Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, moving one of his most vocal allies on immigration to one of the most prominent posts in the American church.
The move, announced in the Vatican’s daily bulletin, comes at a critical moment two weeks before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated and sends a signal about Pope Francis’ priorities. Many powerful American Catholics, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, have aligned themselves with Mr. Trump’s efforts against immigration and abortion.
Cardinal McElroy, 70, is a longtime supporter of the pope’s pastoral agenda, and is known for regularly speaking out on the inclusion of migrants, women and L.G.B.T.Q. people in the Catholic church and in the United States.
He will succeed Cardinal Wilton Gregory, 77, the first African-American to be made a cardinal, a member of the church’s highest governing body.
In December, as Mr. Trump promised to crack down on immigration once again, Cardinal McElroy and 11 other bishops from California issued a statement in support of “our migrant brothers and sisters.”
“We want to assure you that we, and our mother, the Church, stand with you in these days of anxiety,” they wrote, promising “to advocate for your dignity and family unity.”
His presence in Washington will stand in contrast to that of Mr. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and advanced a hard-line anti-immigrant agenda on the campaign trail last year. Alongside Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance called for mass deportations, promised to end legal immigration programs and spread baseless rumors that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pets.
Mr. Vance represents the traditionalist wing of the church, which has gained strength in Republican circles as it pushes against the rise of secularism.
As bishop of the San Diego diocese, along the border with Mexico, Cardinal McElroy has a history of standing with immigrants, who represent a significant constituency for the Catholic church both globally and in the U.S.
As an undergraduate at Harvard University, he studied with Oscar Handlin, a prominent scholar who shifted public views about the role of immigration in American history.
Shortly after Mr. Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Cardinal McElroy, then a new bishop in San Diego appointed by Pope Francis, told a Catholic immigration conference that it was “unthinkable” to stand by as Mr. Trump promised to deport millions of immigrants.
He described Mr. Trump’s policy as “an act of injustice which would stain our national honor in the same manner as the progressive dispossessions of the Native American peoples of the United States and the interment of the Japanese.”
He also spoke out when President Trump tried to end the program that protects from deportation about 700,000 immigrants, known as Dreamers, who entered the country as children.
As other Catholic bishops sought to make abortion their pre-eminent issue, Cardinal McElroy often argued that abortion was only one of several critical priorities of Catholic moral teaching. When conservative bishops targeted President Biden, America’s second Catholic president, with a proposal in 2021 to deny politicians communion because of their support of abortion rights, he pushed back, saying that under such a proposal, the sacrament, “which seeks to make us one, will become for millions of Catholics a sign of division.”
Cardinal McElroy has made a case for the “radical inclusion” of women and L.G.B.T.Q. people in church life and leadership, to the exasperation of conservatives. In 2022, Pope Francis made him a cardinal, and therefore eligible to vote on the pontiff’s successor.
Past leaders of the archdiocese of Washington have navigated the inherently political nature of the posting in their own ways. A scholar of American history by training, Cardinal McElroy is a rare prelate who holds a doctorate from Stanford University in political science, and he has not shied away from contemporary controversies, either in the church or in the nation.
“Our political society has been poisoned by a tribalism that is sapping our energy as a people and endangering our democracy,” he wrote in America Magazine, a Jesuit publication, in 2023. “And that poison has entered destructively into the life of the church.”
Though the archdiocese of Washington is home to about half as many Catholics as the diocese of San Diego, it is one of the most prominent postings in the country. The archdiocese includes the nation’s capital, as well as major institutions like the Catholic University of America and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Catholic church in North America.
Cardinal Gregory moved to Washington in 2019 from Atlanta, where he was archbishop, following a tumultuous period when church leaders in Washington were at the center of America’s sexual abuse crisis. Pope Francis elevated him to the College of Cardinals in 2020, at a time of widespread calls for racial justice across the country and within the church.
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting.
