Overlooked Debate Moment: Vance Sets Fuse to Anti-Catholic Bigotry Issue

While Republican VP nominee J.D. Vance drew plaudits for a winning personal manner and

sharp takedown of Tim Walz during last week’s vice presidential debate—during which he masterfully flipped the script on many of the left’s false narratives on various hot-button policy issues—he also set a landmine for Democrats by highlighting an issue that has long been mounting and is soon likely to explode: he hit hard but deftly at Kamala Harris’s record of anti-Catholic bigotry.

In an obviously planned and shrewd political maneuver in front of a national primetime audience of more than 43 million, Vance was capping off a series of events from the prior week such as the startling news that Harris would not attend the legendary Al Smith charity dinner hosted by the Archdiocese of New York (which led to talk of a staff shakeup over the campaign’s blunder), social media posts from Donald Trump detailing several anti-Catholic allegations against Harris, a widely-viewed interview in which House Speaker Newt Gingrich charged that Harris is the most anti-Catholic presidential candidate in 150 years, and a TV ad shown in five crucial Senate races that actually takes two minutes of airtime to catalogue a series of moves by Senate Democrat candidates against Catholics.

The explosiveness of the issue—although it has never been understood by the GOP consultant class—is obvious enough from a mere look at the number of Catholics in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, a state whose city of Savannah has the largest St. Patrick’s Day parade nationally outside of New York and Chicago, and that is not to mention the size of the Hispanic population in those states, more than one million in Pennsylvania and Georgia, 550,000 in Michigan, 430,000 in Wisconsin, and 2.3 million in Arizona.

The play here is starkly obvious. Many Hispanics, who are devout churchgoers, are also voters, but are unaware of the Democrat Party’s record on anti-Catholicism. For that reason, for example, the Super PAC ad against Democrat Senate candidates played a Spanish language version on Latino television in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Even more pointedly, the ads mention at the end how Hispanics have a strong recollection of the persecution of the church by socialist governments. “Latino American families remember—Latino Americans remember—how evil governments in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela hated the Church and Catholics, and how they persecuted priests, nuns, and laypeople,” the ad states. “Latino Americans know from history that this must not happen here in America.”

Thus, Vance delivered an emotional slam dunk in citing one of the left’s most flagrant acts of religious persecution against Catholics from the debate stage last Tuesday night—namely, Democrat Party attempts to force the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of nuns beloved by the Catholic community, to violate the precepts of their faith and perform or pay for abortion procedures.

“Do you want to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions against their will?” Vance asked pointedly of Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. “Because Kamala Harris has supported suing Catholic nuns to violate their freedom of conscience.”

As a Senator, Harris introduced the so-called “Do No Harm Act,” which would compel Catholic doctors to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs and perform abortions and transgender surgeries on patients. The legislation would also prevent religious groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor, as well as Catholic hospitals, schools, and charities, from operating until they disavowed their religious beliefs. Harris has also been an avid supporter of the so-called “Equality Act,” which would allow men to compete in women’s sports, force Catholic churches to host same-sex wedding receptions, force the closure to Catholic adoption and foster care programs, and strike a death blow to religious liberty all across the nation.

The sheer political lunacy of the Democrat Party—once identified as the party of Catholic immigrants as well as the first party to nominate in Al Smith a Catholic candidate for president and to elect President John F. Kennedy as the nation’s first Catholic president—becoming deeply hostile to the Little Sisters of the Poor is only surpassed by Harris’s personal attack on the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal and charity organization and an esteemed presence within virtually every Catholic parish. Harris did this with her strong insinuations that American Catholics—and ostensibly every American of faith—are not fit to serve as federal judges. In 2018, when questioning Brian Buescher—a nominee to be a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska—Harris, in her capacity as a Senator, pointed to his membership in the Knights as problematic, condemning the organization’s (and the Church’s) long-held views as extremist.

These lines of questioning from Harris and other senators were so startling, that they brought even prominent secular figures—including the president of Princeton University—to speak out. In September 2017, Princeton president Christopher L. Eisgruber issued an unprecedented letter to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging them to “refrain from interrogating nominees about the religious or spiritual foundations of their jurisprudential views.” The president of the University of Notre Dame, the Harvard Law Review, and the Anti-Defamation League echoed Eisgruber’s sentiment, also releasing statements condemning the rhetoric.

Thus, Vance’s reference to this record of anti-Catholicism on the debate stage followed logically from Trump’s spree of Catholic-friendly social media posts. Just days prior to last week’s VP debate, Donald Trump posted the prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel—the premiere Catholic prayer for divine protection against spiritual forces of evil—on his X, Truth Social, and Instagram pages that received more than 30 million views on X (weeks earlier, Trump posted an image of the Virgin Mary on September 8, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where he said “Happy Birthday Mary!” that received nearly 60 million views on X). Previously, Trump took aim at Kamala Harris’s controversial decision to not attend the Al Smith dinner (a decision that was also highlighted in a widely read AMAC Newsline piece) as “sad, but not surprising” given that “Catholics are literally being persecuted by [the Harris-Biden] Administration,” before cataloguing the list of ways in which Harris has slighted the Catholic faithful.

Also this fall, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich alleged that Kamala Harris is the most anti-Catholic presidential candidate in 150 years. “The truth is that I think she is afraid to go to the Al Smith dinner because she’s the most anti-Catholic presidential candidate since James G. Blaine in 1880,” he said in a viral interview with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow.

Additionally, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed friendly to both Kamala Harris and Barack Obama, Peggy Noonan implored Harris to “reverse [her] decision and come to the Archdiocese of New York’s Al Smith dinner.”

Even left-wing Politico took note of Harris’s Catholic problem, observing that Democrats’ odds of winning in the Catholic-heavy must-win swing state of Pennsylvania “are looking considerably dicier” than in 2020, thanks in large part to “the cultural dissonance with Harris” that “makes her an awkward fit in a closely watched, economically hard-pressed working-class region that’s historically been a locus of [pro-life] activity.”

Politico’s grim warning reinforces what is obvious to nearly everyone but to those who create TV ads for GOP Senate candidates: that the key electoral demographic of Hispanic voters—many of whom are Catholic themselves (43% of Latino adults identify as Catholic)—is heading south for Democrats.

A late August Reuters poll found that Hispanics prefer Trump over Harris on immigration by five points and on the economy by nine points. A recent Opiniones Latinas survey found that Trump has gained 17 points with Hispanics from 2020. And according to a recent NBC News poll, Hispanic support for Democrats “has declined to [its] lowest level in the past four presidential cycles”—a seismic warning sign to both the Harris-Walz ticket and to Democrats running in competitive Senate and House races.

Thus as Vance demonstrated by following up on this series of news hits, interviews, and social media attention, the decay in Hispanic support for the Democrats goes beyond the issues of economics or immigration—and right to the Catholic issue. So, with Election Day just weeks away, there could be no better time for Republican candidates up and down the ballot to exploit the issue. Shamelessly.

For years, political operatives, public figures, and institutional leaders of every political persuasion have cautioned Democrats to be careful when it comes to their expressions of anti-Catholicism.

And at this juncture, by every indication, the Democrats’ anti-Catholic chickens are finally coming home to roost—and come November 5, it could very well be the issue that makes or breaks their chances at the ballot box.

Should Republicans continue to expose the Democrats’ anti-religious bigotry of the left for what it is and treat their party’s anti-Catholicism as a serious campaign issue in the final weeks of the campaign, it could very well find itself on the path to an unprecedented electoral majority.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.