Now that San Diego’s Catholic Bishop Robert McElroy is headed to Washington D.C. there are probably a lot of Catholics and non-Catholics wondering how he will handle being the church’s leader at ground zero of the political divide in our country.
If the past ten years serving as Bishop in San Diego is any indication, he will probably speak out about church issues as he did here, but we may not see him getting into any public debates with politicians about issues.
As the San Diego Union Tribune puts it in an in-depth report,.
“One thing McElroy did not do is insert himself into local politics and says that banning communion to someone over their stance on abortion is a bad idea — once writing that the “Eucharist must never be instrumentalized for a political end, no matter how important.”
The Union Tribune report saying McElroy doesn’t appear to have spent much time courting elected leaders.
He has repeatedly defended Pope Francis, who is seen as a more liberal pope and in 2022, the pontiff appointed McElroy to the College of Cardinals.
That means he will have a vote in deciding who succeeds Pope Francis and will be more in the spotlight than he was here in San Diego.
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