Pope Francis on Monday is expected to tap Cardinal Robert McElroy as the new archbishop of Washington, D.C., appointing one of his top U.S. allies, one of the American church’s most forceful defenders of migrants and a sharp critic of Donald Trump’s first administration just days before Trump takes office a second time.
McElroy of San Diego is expected to succeed retiring Cardinal Wilton Gregory, 77, who has led the Washington Archdiocese since 2019, where he became the city’s first African American archbishop. In 2020, Francis elevated him to the College of Cardinals, making him the first Black U.S. cardinal.
The news was expected to come as soon as noon in Rome, 6 a.m. Eastern time. McElroy declined to comment.
Over the last decade, McElroy has become one of the most vocal champions of Pope Francis’ pastoral agenda among the U.S. hierarchy. He has frequently echoed the pope’s prioritization of migrants and refugees, environmental concerns and a more welcoming approach to LGBTQ people.
The pope’s expected Jan. 6 selection of a prelate who has not shied from implicit criticism of Trump comes just after Trump announced his selection of a sharp critic of Francis to be the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See — which also marks a contrast to the warm relations the pontiff has enjoyed with President Joe Biden, who is set to visit Francis on Friday (Jan. 10) at the Vatican.
McElroy, 70, was first made an auxiliary bishop of San Francisco in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI and then named bishop of San Diego by Francis in 2015. In 2022, the pope made him a cardinal. He has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, and a master’s and a doctorate from Stanford University.
In the U.S. church, McElroy has struck a contrast to many of the more traditionalist bishops in the U.S. and has become one of the leading proponents of Francis’ push for synodality, which focuses on greater lay involvement in the life of the church.
Soon after arriving in San Diego, McElroy held a first-of-its-kind diocesan synod on marriage and family in 2016. He was later named as a papal appointee to the 2019 special synod on the Amazon region and the 2023 and 2024 synod on synodality.
In recent years, McElroy has published a series of essays reflecting on the global synod process. The cardinal has called for « radical inclusion » in the church, particularly among the divorced and remarried and LGBTQ Catholics, as well as voicing his support for the restoration of the female diaconate. Those writings set off a firestorm among conservative Catholics, with one U.S. bishop suggesting the cardinal to be a heretic.
As the San Diego cardinal is expected to lead the Catholic Church in the American capital, he is set to take over at the start of a new political administration that has vowed to deport millions of undocumented migrants and blasted climate change as a hoax.
In 2017, just one month into Trump’s first term, McElroy delivered a fiery speech to community activists that amounted to a repudiation of the new president’s political agenda.
« We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families, » McElroy said. « We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies, rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need. We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men and women and children as sources of fear rather than as children of God. »
While often using sharp rhetoric to criticize Trump’s initiatives to end refugee resettlement programs and separate migrant families, McElroy has also emphasized the need for dialogue to improve the country’s immigration policies.
McElroy is expected now to take the reins from Gregory, a churchman who rose to prominence in the early 2000s when he served as president of the U.S. bishops’ conference as they navigated their response to the early days of the sexual abuse crisis.
A Chicago native and a convert to Catholicism, he was an auxiliary bishop of his hometown archdiocese from 1983 to 1994. From 1994 to 2004, he was bishop of the Diocese of Belleville, Illinois, and in 2004 was appointed archbishop of Atlanta, Georgia, where he served from 2005 until 2019.
Gregory’s transfer to Washington in 2019 came in the midst of a major racial reckoning in the United States.
His appointment to one of the most important centers of African American heritage in the nation was widely celebrated by the city’s Black community. However, the early days of his tenure were largely overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered churches and limited public engagements.
During his time in the Archdiocese of Washington, Gregory resisted a push by conservative U.S. bishops to deny Communion to President Joe Biden, the nation’s second Catholic president, over his support for abortion rights.
Like McElroy, Gregory was selected by Francis to serve as a papal delegate to the 2023 and 2024 synod on synodality in Rome.
