President-elect Donald Trump has nominated the president of an anti-LGBTQ Catholic group to become the next U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.
The incoming president on Dec. 20 announced he had nominated Brian Burch, president and co-founder of CatholicVote, for the ambassadorship.
“Brian loves the church and the United States,” said Trump on Truth Social. “He will make us all proud.”
Burch on X said he is “deeply honored and humbled to have been nominated by President Trump to serve as the United States Ambassador to the Holy See.”
“The role of ambassador is to represent the government of the United States in its relations with the Holy See,” said Burch. “The Catholic Church is the largest and most important religious institution in the world, and its relationship to the United States is of vital importance.”
“I am committed to working with leaders inside the Vatican and the new administration to promote the dignity of all people and the common good,” he added. “I look forward to the confirmation process and the opportunity to continue to serve my country and the church. To God be the glory.”
Burch in his post also thanked his wife, Sara, and their nine children for their support.
The National Catholic Reporter reported Burch last year sharply criticized Pope Francis’s decision to allow priests to bless same-sex couples.
CatholicVote’s website repeatedly refers to transgender people in quotes.
A Dec. 5 post on the U.S. v. Skrmetti case notes the justices heard oral arguments on “whether Tennessee can protect children from puberty blockers, which chemically sterilize, and sexual surgeries that mutilate and castrate.” A second CatholicVotes post notes the justices grilled the Justice Department “on challenge to Tennessee protections for children against ‘transgender’ mutilations and sterilizations.”
The Vatican’s tone towards LGBTQ and intersex issues has softened since Pope Francis assumed the papacy in 2013.
Francis, among other things, has described laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust.”
He met with two African LGBTQ activists — Clare Byarugaba of Chapter Four Uganda and Rightify Ghana Director Ebenezer Peegah — at the Vatican on Aug. 14. Sister Jeannine Gramick, one of the co-founders of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based LGBTQ+ Catholic organization, organized a meeting between Francis and a group of trans and intersex Catholics and LGBTQ allies that took place at the pontiff’s official residence on Oct. 12.
Francis during a 2023 interview with an Argentine newspaper described gender ideology as “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations” in the world because “it blurs differences and the value of men and women.” A declaration of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith released in March with Francis’s approval condemned gender-affirming surgeries and “gender theory.”
Los Angeles Blade courtesy of the National LGBTQ Media Association.
