The Dictatorship
Why this U.S. Catholic leader is not the right fit for this moment
Catholic insiders know about the conservatism of Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley, who was elected president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops this week. Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, called the election of Coakley “deeply disappointing.” I agree. The election of Coakley is yet another sign that the American Catholic Church has decided to keep on its rightward political move, in the service of what Winters terms “accommodation.”
Coakley, who replaces Archbishop Timothy Broglio as president of the USCCB, is not the change candidate needed to mount a full-throated response to the Trump administration’s mass-deportation goals. While Coakley has been vocal about immigration issues, he said on the day of his election that it’s better to “cast more light than heat.” He spoke after his election of the need to figure out “how to work with our administration to advance the interests of the church” on immigration policies. He represents the desire of most of the conference to take a consistent, middle-of-the-road approach to immigration issues.
The election of Coakley is yet another sign that the American Catholic church has decided to keep on its rightward political move.
But as disappointing as the election of Coakley is, there are yet signs that the UCCSB appreciates the awfulness of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security are doing on our streets. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, only lost the USCCB presidency by a few votes, which means that the vocal advocate for immigrants and their plight will be the vice president of the conference. That he was a close second to Coakley is proof that there are bishops who hope their conference is louder in its support of immigrants. You can count on Flores to be vocal, and you can count on him to do more than just write statements. He has — and likely will continue — to stand with immigrants and support them.
Coakley, a particularly staunch pro-lifer, serves as adviser to the Napa Institutethe mission of which, in its own words, is to “empower Catholic leaders to renew the church and transform the culture.” Theologian Massimo Faggioli wrote this year that the “Napa Institute is one of those places where the new American political-religious order is taking shape” and that “the voices of the bishops there hold a particular authority.”
Coakley’s authority was compromised, though, when he expressed support for Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former apostolic nuncio to the U.S. Viganò invited Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to sign same-sex marriage certificates, to meet Pope Francis in 2015, which resulted in Francis replacing him as nuncio. Viganò was excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 2024 for the offense of schism and public acts of defiance against the pope.
In 2018, Viganò had, as Commonweal reported at the timemade “sweeping charges against U.S. and Vatican church officials, including Pope Francis,” for mishandling claims that former Archbishop Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused minors and adults, and he called on Francis to “set a good example” and resign the papacy. Responding to the news of Viganò’s 11-page testimony, Coakley wrote a letter to the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, saying, “While I lack any personal knowledge or experience of the details contained in his ‘testimony,’ I have the deepest respect for Archbishop Viganò and his personal integrity.”
Francis said he did not know about McCarrick’s abuseand he defrocked McCarrick in 2019. A Vatican investigation the pope launched found many in the Catholic Church’s hierarchy had downplayed the abuse but did not name Francis as one of them.
Speaking to OSV News after his electionCoakely said of Viganò, “The harm that was done through that scandal has been deep and mistrust that followed is real.” Coakley said he “didn’t know Archbishop (Carlo Maria) Viganò other than what I knew of him from walking these halls here at bishops’ meetings. …. And I just didn’t want to jump to conclusions before all of the information was available.”
A Special Pastoral Message on Immigration is an indication that the bishops are pulling together to echo Pope Leo XIV on immigration.
Regarding Viganò, Coakley said he didn’t know “what his views were, when I made those comments, which have been thrown back in my face numerous times subsequently and used against me,” but he agreed with the reporter interviewing him that the claims against him were warranted.
In addition to Flores’ election, a Special Pastoral Message on Immigration, approved on the second day of the bishops’ conference, is an indication that the bishops are pulling together to echo Pope Leo XIV on the issue of immigration. The statement said, in part:
“We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools.”
That message will be given to each parish across the U.S. by local bishops.
The document, which a group of bishops worked on, was strengthened with language suggested by Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago: “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”
While this simple sentence should be clear from Catholic Church doctrine, it took Cupich to remind the conference of the need to speak with plain moral clarity. That sentence — “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” — should be the talking point of every Catholic clergyperson in the United States.
Will Coakley, who doesn’t want “heat” with the White House, be the one to communicate that message as ICE continues to chase down people on our streets to deport them? Given his desire to bring “light” to the situation, one can only hope. But until then, the pews of many parishes in the United States will remain emptier as Catholic immigrants hide in their homes because ICE has made them too afraid to come out and worship.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance say their interim deal to end the war with Iran will deliver a financial windfall to American farmers.
But the Iranians deny it. And in the absence of more details, sanctions experts are flummoxed over exactly how billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets would make their way to the American heartland from the escrow accounts where they’ve been locked for years by U.S. sanctions.
A tentative agreement reached last week would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once passed, and allow Iran to start selling its oil freely again during a 60-day period when the two countries will continue negotiating key issues. The memorandum of understanding also promised to unfreeze Iranian assets.
Trump’s deal has come under fire for failing to address the reasons the president cited for going to war with Iran on Feb. 28, including curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its missile program and its support for militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Lashing back at critics Tuesday on his Truth Social media platform, Trump said U.S. farmers would get a payday: The U.S. Treasury Department, he wrote, would release the Iranian assets “into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran.’’
Vance, who spoke about the proposal after high-level talks in Switzerland, and Trump say that any frozen funds and assets held outside of Iran will be used to buy U.S. crops.
But the Iranians deny that’s part of the deal. A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, said any agricultural purchases would be based on “prices and quality,’’ not terms dictated by Washington.
“It is interesting that the philosophy and goal of the war, which was the destruction of the Iranian civilization and the collapse of Iran, has become enriching American farmers,” Baghaei said.
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Iran’s ambassador in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, rejected Vance’s contention that the U.S. and Qatar would dictate how Iran uses unfrozen funds. “Iran is the only country who decides what to do with those assets,” he told reporters.
A U.S. official dismissed the contradiction, asserting that Iranian leaders were speaking to their domestic audience. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Joseph Glauber, a research fellow emeritus at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said Iran was unlikely to abandon its other trade partners on food.
Iran’s major suppliers include Brazil, India, Turkey, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Argentina, he said. Trump’s demand to buy from the U.S. would “create some hard feelings with some of our competitors.”
Under previous sanctions, the U.S. has required that money foreign countries spend on imports from Iran — such as South Korean purchases of oil and Iraqi purchases of Iranian electricity — be locked in escrow accounts and typically released only if the Treasury approves and if the proceeds go toward “non-sanctionable’’ items such as food and medicine.
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury approved the sale of Iranian oil, petrochemicals and petroleum products through Aug. 21. It did not mention any escrow accounts.
Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who coordinated efforts to put diplomatic pressure on Iran in the first Trump administration, said in a post on X that he would welcome “a clarification that Iran is actually restricted to only buying U.S. agricultural products.”
Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said it’s unclear what the new U.S.-Iran agreement actually means for releasing restricted Iranian assets.
Could the U.S. require that the assets be used to buy American farm products?
“Well, we can try!’’ Nephew, who helped design Iran sanctions in the Obama and Biden administrations, said by email. “All you really need to do is to tell a foreign bank that they can move the money but only to a U.S. bank to buy soybeans or whatever.”
Banks do not have to comply, he said. If they refuse, the U.S. could sanction them as well.
But it’s rare for the U.S. to conduct itself that way, he added, “in part because we don’t usually like to give the impression that we treat national security issues as a cash grab.”
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Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Wednesday marks four years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs decisionwhich effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and repealed the constitutional right to an abortion. On “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski explained how the ruling set off a domino effect across the United States, affecting not just abortion-related care, but also altering “the state of women’s healthcare as a whole.”
As Brzezinski noted, states across the country have enacted harsher abortion restrictions since the 2022 ruling, with 13 outright banning the procedure with very limited exceptions. This has created a climate of fear among those who treat pregnant patients, with many healthcare providers worrying that any care involving an abortion could violate the law, even when the mother’s health is at risk.
“We are talking about people dying when they’re miscarrying because doctors are too afraid to intervene and save their lives,” Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, told MS NOW.
Brzezinski said the laws have effectively limited women’s “access to lifesaving healthcare.”
The MS NOW host reflected on some high-profile stories of pregnant women who faced delayed care in states with near-total abortion bans, noting “the numbers of cases that we’ve covered here on the show of women who have had their lives threatened, have been forced to give birth to dying or dead babies, and then, by the way, denied the access to ever create life again, because they became sterilized in the process.”
“There’s an image I can’t get out of my head,” Brzezinski added, before sharing reporting from ProPublica about Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother who died in Texas in 2023 after not receiving timely care for a miscarriage.
“For months afterward, Porsha’s 3-year-old son would chase after women who looked like her on the street, shouting, ‘That’s Mommy!’” Brzezinski said. “That’s the detail I can’t forget. I can’t stop imagining that little boy chasing after strangers on the street. And that story repeats itself.”
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
One of the biggest upsets in Tuesday night’s primaries came in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist, managed to beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who was backed by establishment Democrats.
Chevalier, a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York, secured 49.4% of votes in the district — which encompasses upper Manhattan, Harlem and parts of the Bronx — defeating Espaillat, who received about 46% of the votes after representing the district for nearly a decade, according to The Associated Press. She now advances to the November general election, which she is presumed to win in the solidly Democratic district.
Chevalier’s primary win marks a major win for the Democrats’ left-wing flank that backed her, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdaniwho endorsed Chevalier last month during a joint interview on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Here is what to know about Chevalier and the platform she campaigned on.
She has never held elected office
Prior to her congressional campaign, Chevalier had never run or held elected office. But she has been involved with advocating for issues that became political flashpoints, including helping organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, according to her biography on the website of the Justice Democratsthe progressive group that recruited her to run.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Chevalier also worked as an organizer for Families for Freedom, a New York City group that assists immigrants facing deportation.
Chevalier earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University in 2016 and later worked as a paralegal, according to her LinkedIn.
Chevalier faced scrutiny during her campaign over previously articulated stances and incendiary comments, including her appearance at a Times Square rally the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where attendees reportedly suggested the attack was justified.
At a March candidates’ forum, Chevalier declined to condemn Hamas, saying that a request to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that that folks were living under before this genocide began,” the local outlet City & State reported. Later, on local radio station WNYC, Chevalier said she did condemn Hamas when asked, adding, “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”
In a series of since-deleted social media posts between 2018 and 2022Chevalier also used expletives to refer to former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee, calling for abolishing borders and stopping all deportations, according to BLN. Other reports noted that she called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and disparaged white people in some of her posts.
Chevalier has said she has “grown considerably” since writing those posts and that she regrets them. Mamdani defended her after the social media posts surfaced but said he was unaware of them before endorsing Chevalier.
She’s the left’s preferred candidate
Chevalier’s focus on affordability, expanding housing access and opposing war and deportations made her the preferred candidate of many progressive groups. In addition to the endorsements from Mamdani and the Justice Democrats, she was also backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several progressive members of the New York City Council.
After her primary win, the Democratic establishment also seems to have rallied behind her, despite her previous expletive-laden critiques of them.
In a statement Tuesday, DNC Chair Ken Martin called Chevalier “a tireless advocate for the hard-working people of New York City” who “will fight for healthcare, affordable housing, public education, civil rights, and an economy that works for everyone.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
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