The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington
While I cannot say that I am friends with His Excellency, the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M. Conv., Bishop of Lexington, we are at least acquainted with each other. The Bishop at least recognizes me when he sees me, though I cannot be certain he remembers my name. We have had some pleasant conversations the few times he has visited our small parish.
I have written about him, or at least mentioned him, on this poor site, in 17 previous articles, not always charitably. Bishop Stowe is an excellent homilist, one who can really connect with a congregation, and I have no doubts at all about his faith. But, as a Catholic priest, he chooses the wrong things far too often for me.
Kentucky prelate calls lack of election response from American Church ‘disappointing’
by John Lavenburg | Tuesday, December 3, 2024
NEW YORK – In the month or so since former President Donald Trump was elected to occupy the White House for a second term, the majority of American bishops have either not commented on the election publicly, or issued a generic statement about the importance of civility, unity, and democracy.
That extends to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where – outside of responses to Trump’s stated plan for mass deportations – not much has been said. Bishop John Stowe, in a recent conversation with Crux, said that reality isn’t surprising considering how American Church leaders have handled the presidency of Joe Biden over the last four years.
“It was not surprising coming from the USCCB. What was surprising was the attitude when Joe Biden was elected, a Catholic president four years ago, and there was such an uproar in the conference about that election, and because of that, I really had no expectation that there would be much said about the Trump election,” said Stowe, the bishop of Lexington in Kentucky.
His Excellency the Bishop does not like former and future President Donald Trump. Speaking in August of 2020, before the 2020 election, the Bishop let us know, let all of his Catholic parishioners know, that he was opposed to President Trump’s re-election. Bishop Stowe was appalled by Mr Trump’s anti-illegal immigration policies, calling them “anti-life.”
For this president to call himself pro-life, and for anybody to back him because of claims of being pro-life, is almost willful ignorance. He is so much anti-life because he is only concerned about himself, and he gives us every, every, every indication of that.
However, then-former Vice President Joe Biden was running on a not just unlimited abortion rights platform, but even supported taxpayer funding for abortions. You can’t get more “anti-life” than that.
Pope Francis was far more supportive of free immigration than Mr Trump has been, and is, even though the unfettered immigration of third worlders into democratic Europe was destroying the culture and fabric of society there far more than in the United States. At least in the US, a significant percentage of the illegal immigrants are at least nominally Catholic and Christian, while those in Europe have come from Muslim countries, carrying with them the cultures and hatreds of the third world. Bishop Stowe very much supports the Pope’s position on immigration.
But, there’s a huge disconnect between opposing President Trump’s policies on illegal immigration, and supporting Mr Biden’s unqualified support for prenatal infanticide!
Back to the first cited article:
“Nonetheless, in President (Timothy) Broglio’s (Archbishop for the Military Services, USA) address to the assembly he did talk about the change of leadership in the United States, and talking about how we all have to play our parts as if we’re an orchestra and work together in harmony. There was no such harmonious recommendation during the Biden administration,” he continued. “There is a silent dissent or support for (Trump), opposed to outright resistance to (Biden).”
Our nation’s bishops mostly recognized that opposition to abortion was the primary political issue. Perhaps Bishop Stowe doesn’t see it that way.
“We could at least make a statement clarifying those issues about which we disagree so vehemently, and the concern about (vice president-elect JD Vance) who supports Trump and is in some ways even more extreme than Trump, and who is a member of the Church,” Stowe said.
“(M)ore extreme than Trump,” meaning that the Catholic Senator and now Vice President-elect Vance is actually, you know, Catholic?
Unlike most of his peers, Stowe, who is viewed as one of the more liberal American bishops, has not been shy with his stance on Trump’s election. He said he was “very disappointed” by the 2024 presidential election outcome, and noted that he is “rather dismayed” at the decision of voters.
Following a 2019 controversy at the March for Life gathering that included a confrontation between Catholic high school students from Kentucky and a Native American elder, Stowe shunned the students’ apparel. Some of them were wearing Trump’s “Make America Great again” hats.
“It astonishes me that any students participating in a pro-life activity on behalf of their school and their Catholic faith could be wearing apparel sporting the slogans of a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life-threatening policies,” Stowe wrote in a (Lexington) Herald-Leader opinion article. “We cannot uncritically ally ourselves with someone with whom we share the policy goal of ending abortion,” he continued.
So, our Bishop was endorsing one candidate over another, in an opinion piece written for and published by the local, secular newspaper.
Bishop Stowe, as it happened, had a knee-jerk reaction to the first reports of the ‘incident’ between the students from Covington Catholic High School and an American Indian at the protest; further examination of a video of the incident proved that the students did not provoke it, and student Nicholas Sandmann received settlements from The Washington Post, CNN, and NBC due to their erroneous reporting. If Bishop Stowe apologized for his comments, I missed it.
“I find it disappointing that our Church did not speak out more forcefully about the danger of this election, or that we failed to even issue as a conference of bishops an appropriately updated guide for voting, our Faithful Citizenship document, which merely had a new introduction and continued to assert that abortion is the pre-eminent issue, thereby practically endorsing somebody whose own position on abortion has actually fluctuated,” he said.
Asked about a concern that his statements against Trump make the Church seem partisan, Stowe noted that up until Trump he agreed with the Church’s approach to speak about issues not candidates, and not be partisan. Trump, he said, is an exception.
“There is also the issue of character, and when somebody has such a flawed character that has been manifestly obvious throughout his previous presidency and the time in between, even denying the reality of the previous election, I think we have a responsibility to name the issue, and the issue is the person in this case,” Stowe said.
Yes, Donald Trump is not exactly a great guy, personally, but as I have noted before, neither was one of the greatest heroes of the Bible, King David. David was an adulterer, a fraudster, a murderer, and possibly a rapist, but he also did the Lord‘s work. I would not compare Mr Trump with King David, a man who understood the Lord in ways few mortals did, while our former and future President shows nothing of that quality, but, with his judicial appointments, he has done much of the work of the Catholic Church, of Christianity, for the good of our country, and of all of us.
I would also note here that our incoming President has been very much in line with the Pope’s view of ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, where Mrs Emhoff supported its continuation.
Going forward, he said the American Church needs to return to looking at the gospel principles and the importance of character in those who govern, and invite the nation “to a real examination of conscience even about our own understanding of democratic ideals,” and how that aligns with the faith.
Would His Excellency’s “real examination of conscience” include his voting — and here I assume that he voted for the Democratic nominee — for Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff, a woman who promised that, were she elected and had Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, to pass a bill nationalizing abortion rights, overriding state laws to allow prenatal infanticide in those states, states which include Kentucky, which have outlawed that disgusting practice? It is one thing to try to stop illegal immigration, to the dismay of our Pope and local Bishop, and quite another to reopen the floodgates of abortion. It would seem that, at least for our Bishop, it’s more important to allow a flood of unvetted illegal immigrants into this country, including illegals like Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang member José Antonio Ibarra, than it is to prevent the slaughter of the unborn.
I get it: the Bishop of Lexington, who has openly supported homosexuality, including a Lexington parish which openly supports homosexuals, and transgenderism, including a ‘transgender’ religious hermit in eastern Kentucky, doesn’t like the fact that Mr Trump supports none of that nonsense, and Mr Vance is an actually practicing Catholic! But perhaps, just perhaps, His Excellency should at least try to work with our upcoming policies as best he can, rather than spew hatred toward our next President.