(LifeSiteNews) — Viral coverage in religious and secular media of the record number of American adults entering the Catholic Church this past Easter included an article in The Federalist titled “America’s Catholic Renewal Is a Rejection of Liberal Modernity.”

American bishops and prelates, John Daniel Davidson wrote, mostly embrace “the Catholicism of Pope Francis, marked by a disdain for the Latin Mass, an embarrassment at ritual and hierarchy, a marked ambiguity on moral questions, and a willingness to compromise with liberalism and thereby change the Catholic Church.”

A closer look at the late Francis’ brand of Catholicism, now continuing under Pope Leo XIV, shows why both new converts and cradle Catholics have disconnected from Church leadership in the Vatican and the United States. It’s a politicized version of the faith that prioritizes wokeness and social justice over doctrinal fidelity.

Exhibit A is the trio of left-leaning American cardinals who took to 60 Minutes on the Sunday after Easter to criticize President Donald Trump for the war in Iran and the mass deportation of illegal migrants. Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., Blase Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, were all appointed to the cardinalate by Francis, who died in April 2025.

Cardinal McElroy promoted “radical inclusion” in a 2023 essay in the Jesuit magazine America, advancing heterodox positions on the sinfulness of homosexual acts, female ordination and the exclusion from participation in the Eucharist of divorced and remarried or LGBT Catholics. The bishop of Springfield, Illinois, countered with an essay in First Things called “Imagining a Heretical Cardinal” that suggested McElroy may have excommunicated himself.

Cardinal Cupich, another supporter of LGBT causes, helps spearhead the Vatican’s campaign to suppress the Latin Mass, even as parishes in his Archdiocese of Chicago are hotbeds of liturgical abuse. The crackdown is baffling because Latin Mass devotees tend to belong to large families that conform to official Catholic teaching.

Cupich’s opening prayer at the 2024 Democratic National Convention failed to mention the name of Jesus Christ or the issue of abortion. Taxpayer-funded abortion on demand was, and remains, a central plank of the party’s platform.

Last fall Cupich moved to honor retiring U.S. Senator Dick Durbin with a lifetime achievement award for his support of immigrants and refugees. He was forced to back down because Durbin, a Catholic, is also a diehard supporter of abortion and has been banned from receiving Holy Communion in his Illinois home diocese for decades.

Cardinal Tobin called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a “lawless organization” last January and urged the agency’s defunding. But a poll released in December 2025 found that most Catholic voters supported Trump’s mass deportations, although that was before two protesters were killed by federal agents while interfering with enforcement activity in Minnesota.

READ: Leading Catholic convert says Vatican Synod’s pro-LGBT move mirrors Anglican ‘schism’

On NBC’s Today Show in 2019, Tobin said the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s description of homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered” is “very unfortunate language” that should be changed. Another controversy stemmed from the late-night message he accidentally posted to his public Twitter account from an airport runway in 2018.

“Supposed to be airborne in 10 minutes. Nighty-night, baby. I love you,“ Tobin tweeted. The cardinal claimed the tweet was intended for his sister and quickly deleted it, but many observers doubted that alibi. Writing in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher called for the mainstream media to take “a serious look at the culture of homosexuality within the priesthood, and especially among the episcopal class.”

The U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference (USCCB) pushes progressive issues that most churchgoing Catholics would keep on the back burner. These include climate change, the death penalty, criminal justice reform, social safety net programs and racial equity.

The USCCB laudably provides corporal works of mercy for migrants and refugees on an industrial scale, but its recent labeling of Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship as “immoral” struck many as a swim-lane violation. Vice President J.D. Vance pointed out in January that the American bishops have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts to resettle illegal immigrants.

The Synod on Synodality, a centerpiece of the Francis pontificate, is the biggest reason why conservative Catholics feel alienated from the Church’s elderly leadership. Synodality refers to the process of listening and dialogue begun in 2021 through which laity, clergy, bishops and even non-Catholics seek to jointly discern and implement the Catholic Church’s mission.

Catholics primarily concerned with preserving the historical deposit of faith oppose the synodal vision, while Catholics who care mainly about social justice welcome it. Latin Mass communities have been excluded from the worldwide project despite their high rates of church attendance and booming vocations.

The Synod’s Final Report of Study Group 9, released on May 5, rejects the Church’s 2,000-year-old understanding of the sinfulness of homosexual behavior and normalizes the idea of same-sex “marriage.”

Crisis Magazine called the report “a jaw-dropping attack on Scripture and everything that the Church has ever taught concerning sodomy.” German Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, formerly the Vatican’s top official for doctrinal matters, denounced the authors’ “heretical denial of the revealed truth that God created man as male and female.”

The malign presence of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, meanwhile, still hangs over the Catholic Church. There was never a full accounting for McCarrick’s decades of sexual abuse of boys and adult male priests and seminarians, even though millions of dollars in legal settlements have been paid out.

McCarrick headed the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., from 2001 to 2006 and died last year at age 94. He was a prolific fundraiser and a globetrotting political emissary with especially deep ties to the Democratic Party. “Uncle Ted” became the highest-ranking Catholic prelate ever to be laicized in 2019, following a Vatican investigation that confirmed his long-rumored serial sexual misconduct.

Cardinal McElroy was reportedly informed about McCarrick’s wrongdoing in 2016, when he was bishop of San Diego, but declined to take any action. The rapid rise of Cardinal Cupich and Cardinal Tobin through the Church’s hierarchy, like that of many of their progressive peers, was aided by the patronage of McCarrick, whose social network within Church circles has been mapped by researchers.

Pope Benedict XVI resigned suddenly in 2013, becoming the first Roman Catholic pontiff to take that step in 600 years. He cited failing strength as the reason for his decision but lived for another decade in mostly good health. Benedict continued the strong focus on orthodox teaching of his predecessor, Pope St. John Paul II.

Pope Francis sought to redirect the Church to align with the secular values of modern global society, leaving for Pope Leo a legacy of chaos and confusion. Seeking spiritual depth and clarity, faithful Catholics will try to forget the divisive Francis papacy and ignore the liberal bishops he put in charge.

Robert Jenkins is a Catholic writer living in Sacramento, California.