The Church Is Political—Inside and Out, by Darrick Taylor

By Darrick Taylor, Crisis Magazine, May 23, 2025

Darrick Taylor earned his PhD in History from the University of Kansas. He lives in Central Florida and teaches at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, FL. He also produces a podcast, Controversies in Church History, dealing with controversial episodes in the history of the Catholic Church.

The Church is political because sometimes you cannot but favor one side or another in a conflict.

A reporter recently asked U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a practicing Catholic, how he reconciled the teachings of the Catholic Church with the Trump administration’s aggressive stance against illegal and mass migration. Rubio gave an interesting answer about the nature of mass migration, but he also insisted that “the pope is not a political figure.” This is the kind of answer that Catholic politicians who take the Faith seriously are wont to make, and I understand why Rubio and other Catholics in the administration, such as J.D. Vance, use it from time to time. There is just one problem with it: it is not true.

Politics is intrinsically moral, so it will always have something to do with religion. This ought to be obvious; but for many, it escapes them routinely. This does not mean that faith can be reduced to power conflicts or that political loyalties are a replacement for theology. What it means is you cannot avoid taking stances at certain times and places that are going to benefit one side in a conflict over another. To think otherwise is naïve, for neither in Church nor in State can we ever truly dispense with questions of power. ….

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