You are here:
Home / Archives for admin
But the dismissal appears to be an unforced error in a political year when Republicans cannot afford mistakes. The controversy exposed long-simmering tensions between Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians over who should be lawmakers’ religious counselor. And a public clash between Southern evangelical Republicans and Northern Catholics could play to the advantage of Democrats, who are pressing hard to bring working-class Catholic regions in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin back into the Democratic fold.
The controversy was heightened when Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina and a Baptist minister, said Thursday in an interview with The Hill newspaper that he hoped the next chaplain of the House might come from a nondenominational church tradition who could relate to members with wives and children.
Catholic Democrats quickly called his remarks anti-Catholic, as Catholic priests are celibate, and Mr. Walker’s spokesman later said Mr. Walker was not excluding a particular faith group. One Republican, Representative Peter T. King of New York, took issue with the comments.
“To be excluding one religion up front, that has all sorts of connotations coming from the evangelical community,” Mr. King said in an interview. He said he had received several inquiries from priests about Mr. Ryan’s decision, and he told the speaker, “This issue is not going to go away that quickly.”
A House Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said Mr. Ryan gave the Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, an additional reason for Father Conroy’s ouster: Mr. Ryan said he was upset that the chaplain had granted an interview to The National Journal.
In the interview, Father Conroy expounded on matters like sexual harassment and a possible spiritual crisis in Congress. He said he was asked during his job interview whether he had ever molested a child. And while he said he had never been asked to counsel a victim of sexual harassment or assault, he had handled cases of workplace abuse during his tenure in the House.
“Think about it: Who are the people that run for office?” he was quoted as saying. “Are they all highly skilled in every endeavor? No! They’re not. Many of them, I can tell you, don’t know how to say hello in the hallway, let alone work with office people that maybe they don’t think they have to listen to.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Ms. Pelosi issued a statement arguing that Mr. Ryan did not have the authority to dismiss the chaplain. “I have expressed my forceful disagreement with this decision to the speaker,” she said. “It is truly sad that he made this decision, and it is especially bewildering that he did so only a matter of months before the end of his term.”
The outrage broke down largely along party lines. Of 148 members of Congress who signed a letter to Mr. Ryan demanding answers on why he ousted Father Conroy, just one, Representative Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, was a Republican.
“This will have ramifications,” Mr. Jones said Friday afternoon. “This is bigger than Father Conroy and the House of Representatives. This is about religion in America.”
The controversy was multifaceted, pitting evangelicals against Catholics but also resurfacing lingering anger over this Congress’s singular accomplishment, the 10-year, $1.5 trillion overhaul of the tax code.
To supporters of that legislation, especially to one of its chief architects, Mr. Ryan, the prayer issued by Father Conroy would have stung: “May all members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle,” the priest said in the midst of the debate. “May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”
Father Conroy, who was named to the post in 2011 by another Catholic Republican speaker, John A. Boehner, said that he did not regard his November prayer as political in nature.
“If you are a hospital chaplain, you are going to pray about health,” he said. “If you are a chaplain of Congress, you are going to pray about what Congress is doing.”
He said Mr. Ryan’s remarks to him afterward marked the only time anyone from the speaker’s office had chastised him for veering into the political realm.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
“I’ve never been talked to about being political in seven years,” he said.
In an election that ultimately will revolve around President Trump, the controversy may well prove ephemeral.
“Whatever Democrats try to do, if they try to politicize this or capitalize on this, I just think it is way too obscure,” said Douglas Heye, a longtime Republican political strategist and a Catholic. “If you are having a larger conversation about ‘Catholic issues,’ Trump is going to dominate that.”
Ten years ago on Capitol Hill, the number of Catholic Democrats in the House was more than double the number of Catholic Republicans. Now it is nearly even.
Some on the left see an emerging issue for Mr. Ryan and his supporters. “Partisans will likely frame this as a Catholic versus evangelical contest,” said Christopher J. Hale, a strategist who did Catholic outreach for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. “They made a political football out of a good Catholic priest.”
The spat is particularly pointed because religious power in Washington has shifted drastically under Mr. Trump to white evangelical leaders. Unlike Mr. Obama, who relied regularly on a religiously diverse group of interfaith advisers, including prominent Catholics, Mr. Trump has elevated a select group of conservative evangelicals who routinely defend his political agenda, and it is rare to see a Catholic bishop in the White House.
Mr. Trump himself famously feuded with Pope Francis during his 2016 presidential campaign over Mr. Trump’s push to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico, which Francis called “not Christian.” Last year, some of Mr. Trump’s evangelical advisers sought to quiet Vatican criticism of the rightward direction of American Catholicism.
Before Francis became pope, the Vatican seemed to favor Republican mainstay issues, such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Francis’ rise helped reset the role of Catholicism in American public life, and prioritized political and economic messages on immigration and climate change.
The pope, like Father Conroy, is a Jesuit, an order of priests viewed by some as more liberal. Father Conroy’s resignation is all the more contentious in Catholic circles because Mr. Ryan is a Catholic conservative.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
“We are a long way from Pope Francis at the White House and in the Capitol,” said John Carr, the director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. “The divisions are greater, they are more stark and they are more angry.”
On Friday, the Catholic Association, a more conservative group, came to Mr. Ryan’s defense. Maureen Ferguson, a senior policy adviser with the organization, called criticism surrounding his decision to ask Father Conroy to step down “downright absurd.”
“Anyone who knows Speaker Ryan knows he is a devoted Catholic,” she said. “Much ado is being made about nothing.”
For others, it far more serious. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and an editor at large of America magazine, said he has heard from Catholics who are “dismayed” that a chaplain would be fired for apparently defending the poor, and he worries about the anti-Catholic dog-whistling.
“The implication that, as one legislator said, a ‘family man’ would be more suitable smacks of anti-Catholicism,” Father Martin said. “By that yardstick, Jesus wouldn’t qualify either.”
Continue reading the main story
Share and Enjoy
President Trump on Friday placed himself at the center of the remarkable summit between the leaders of North and South Korea, taking credit for bold and innovative diplomacy that may open a path to peace where other leaders failed.
“It’s certainly something that I hope I can do for the world,” Trump said. “This is beyond the United States. This is a world problem, and it’s something that I hope I’m able to do for the world.”
The dramatic turn of events on the Korean Peninsula was the capstone to a week that crystallized the ways Trump has established his foreign policy approach as one that rests largely on the pride he takes in busting the old conventions of diplomatic negotiations and remaking them in his image.
The world is adjusting.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the White House this week hoping to convince Trump not to abandon the Iran nuclear deal and to back off his protectionist trade policies. But by the time they left, both leaders had largely given up trying to convince Trump he was wrong and instead focused on how to work around their differences.
British Prime Minister Theresa May, who had been keeping Trump at arm’s length in recent months, defied the threat of mass protests this week to finally invite him to visit what is often called America’s closest ally.
And the Senate confirmed Mike Pompeo, a Trump political ally and former tea party congressman, to be secretary of state, giving the president a foreign policy team more in line with the international policies he promoted during the campaign.
Trump’s foreign policy maneuvers, particularly on North Korea, carry great risks. Pyongyang has proven an unreliable negotiator in the past; a failure of talks now could inflame tensions back to where they were only months ago, when there were concerns that a military confrontation was becoming more likely. If he abandons the Iran deal, Trump will be under pressure to come up with a new approach to keeping Tehran’s nuclear ambitions in check.
And while Trump boasts that his tough trade talk is bringing countries to the negotiating table, congressional Republicans are openly fretting that potential trade wars will be disastrous for the economy and their party’s prospects in the midterm elections.
But for now, the president is dismissing his critics as naysayers who have failed where he plans to succeed.
“We get a kick every once in a while out of the fact that I’ll be watching people that failed so badly over the last 25 years explaining to me how to make a deal with North Korea,” Trump cracked during a White House news conference Friday with Merkel. “ I get a big, big kick out of that.”
Trump has turned the traditional step-by-step process of major international negotiations on its head. He stunned some aides by agreeing on the spot to an offer of direct talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The meeting casts Trump as the iconoclastic dealmaker in chief — and he appears to relish the image.
“The United States in the past was played like a fiddle,” by North Korea, because Pyongyang could take advantage of a “different kind of leader,” Trump said Friday. “That’s not happening to us.”
Hours before, Kim had walked across the border to South Korea and a waiting embrace from South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Over an hours-long visit across the heavily armed border, Kim laid the foundations for a meeting with Trump, which is expected to occur as soon as next month. Kim has agreed that denuclearization will be on the table.
Trump claims he has forced the issue through his tough stance on North Korea during his first year in office, and vowed that he will be a sharper negotiator than any of his predecessors.
Trump also credits the personal bond he forged with Chinese President Xi Jinping for fostering the rapid turnabout with North Korea, China’s Communist ally and economic lifeline.
“Everyone’s surprised at how tight he clamped down,” on North Korea, Trump said. “Everyone said that he’d just talk about it, he wouldn’t do it. Well, he did it, and he did it out of a relationship that we have.”
Trump also took credit for helping South Korea open the door for talks, through his support for the Winter Olympics held there in February. With Trump’s blessing, South Korea invited North Korea to send athletes and dignitaries, transforming the games into a spectacle of sports diplomacy after nearly 70 years of conflict and hostility between the two Koreas.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a frequent critic of Trump on foreign policy matters, sounded excited about the reversal on the Korean Peninsula after months of Twitter taunts and name-calling between Trump and Kim.
“We’re not there yet, but if this happens, President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize,” Graham said Friday.
Merkel’s cordial afternoon visit Friday was brief by comparison with the three days of frills accorded Macron earlier in the week.
Merkel came to make a final argument to Trump that he should not break the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, ahead of a May 12 deadline. Macron had already suggested that his own diplomacy had failed to sway Trump away from his opposition to what the president calls a “bad deal.”
Merkel was also making a practical argument for exempting Europe from new tariffs on steel and aluminum that would take effect on May 1. Trump’s reasons for the tariffs are, like his views on the Iran deal, rooted in his populist worldview — the “America First” campaign slogan put in action no matter the horrified complaints of allies and some in Trump’s own party.
That traditional allies had to come to him, asking for a change of heart on issues where the United States and Europe once walked in step, shows the ways in which Trump has rewritten the rules.
“The president will decide. That is very clear,” Merkel said. “We had an exchange of views on the current state of affairs of the negotiations, and the respective assessments on where we stand on this. And the decision lies with the president.”
Merkel leads Europe’s most populous country, and is the longest-serving leader among the major European powers — a mainstay of the kind of cautious consensus politics Trump instinctively rejects.
But more than a year after their awkward first White House meeting, dominated by Trump’s pet peeve about German contributions to NATO that he considers paltry, Merkel seemed to have the hang of navigating policy disagreements with an American leader she must nonetheless court.
On Iran, she told reporters that she told Trump that, in her view, the current deal “is anything but perfect,” but she avoided any point-by-point examination of their differences.
Trump smiled as she moved to a discussion of NATO that addressed Trump’s complaint that the United States pays too much — in terms that he might have chosen himself.
“Germany and Europe have to take their destiny into their own hands, because we can no longer, as we used to during the period of the Cold War, during the years when Germany was divided, rely on America coming and helping us,” Merkel said.
Trump, who is broadly unpopular in Germany, shrugged off a German reporter’s question about his “aggressive tweeting” and blunt diplomatic style.
“I believe that — you know, when I look at the numbers in Germany — and some other countries, they may not like Donald Trump but you have to understand, that means I’m doing a good job because I’m representing the United States,” he said.
Share and Enjoy
