It was a common running joke among fans of the novelist Tom Clancy that the only thing left for his Mary Sue protagonist, Jack Ryan, to do was to become pope.
Ryan — for those of you not familiar with the Clancy oeuvre or who merely watched the movies — moved from a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, to a CIA analyst, to the CIA acting deputy director, to the deputy director, then to the president’s national security advisor, then to vice president, and finally to president. Ryan, like Clancy himself (mirabile dictu! What a coincidence!), was a Baltimore-born Irish Catholic, and the only place for him to go up to was the Chair of Saint Peter.
Speaking of U.S. presidents who have done everything — this one non-fictional — Donald J. Trump is not a Catholic. That didn’t stop him and his supporters from having a little fun with the recent vacancy in Cephas’ seat, which supposedly outraged Democrats:
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 3, 2025
This is deeply offensive to me and to my fellow Catholics around the world as we continue to mourn our beloved Pope Francis. https://t.co/i3Uv3zjwdT
— Governor Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) May 3, 2025
As a Catholic, I take great offense to Donald Trump mocking Catholics.
I wish Trump would focus on lowering prices instead. The American economy had negative GDP growth last quarter. That’s what he should be focused on instead of making fun of Catholics. https://t.co/MLJB9ccW8t
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) May 3, 2025
Are you surprised that Democrats were busy destroying Catholicism while they attacked Trump for being anti-Catholic?
Now, I say “supposedly offended” not just because I think this offense isn’t genuine or these individuals are horrible examples of who Catholics should be in public life, although both are almost certainly true. (Full disclosure: The author is a former Catholic who still has deep respect for that branch of the Christian faith but has some theological quibbles with it. So he thinks he’s able to pass some judgment on these matters, if you’ll indulge him.)
I say it because, instead, one of the most repellent, prejudicial, and dangerous attacks on the Catholic faith is being mounted by Washington state Democrats — one that would essentially make one of the core tenets of the faith literally illegal — and Hochul, Lieu, and the rest of the Catholic Democratic Karen squad can’t muster a single word against it after working up a mighty lathered rage against an AI joke image.
According to Fox News, Democratic Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed a law last week that impels “members of the clergy” to report all confessions of child abuse or neglect to law enforcement, adding them to other professionals required to do so. The bill, SB 5375, does not allow members of the clergy to rely on legal privileges that would prevent them from doing so, unlike other “supervisors” covered under the state’s mandatory reporting laws.
The problem inherent in the legislation should easily become clear to anyone who’s seen a movie that’s used the Roman Catholic confessional as a cheap plot device, of which there are no shortage. As Pillar, a Catholic publication, noted, this is what Canon law states: “The sacramental seal is inviolable; therefore, it is a crime for a confessor in any way to betray a penitent [confessor] by word or in any other manner or for any reason … A confessor who directly violates the seal of confession incurs an automatic [latae sententiae] excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.”
Furthermore, for those of you not familiar with the workings of the Catholic Church, confession is not optional. You don’t get to choose which mortal sins you share and which you don’t. It is necessary to reconcile oneself with the Church, the Body of Christ, and to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion. From the catechism of the Catholic Church:
According to the Church’s command, “after having attained the age of discretion, each of the faithful is bound by an obligation faithfully to confess serious sins at least once a year.” Anyone who is aware of having committed a mortal sin must not receive Holy Communion, even if he experiences deep contrition, without having first received sacramental absolution, unless he has a grave reason for receiving Communion and there is no possibility of going to confession. Children must go to the sacrament of Penance before receiving Holy Communion for the first time.
To respond to this invitation we must prepare ourselves for so great and so holy a moment. St. Paul urges us to examine our conscience: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” Anyone conscious of a grave sin must receive the sacrament of Reconciliation before coming to communion.
So, to be clear: It is a religious necessity to confess all mortal sins, and it is a religious necessity for the clergy who hears the confession to keep it secret, lest he be excommunicated.
And, just to be clear, this isn’t a law trying to crack down on clerical sexual abuse, which I’m sure some liberal keyboard warriors will try out when this goes to court, as it invariably will. This is literally the state of Washington declaring that Roman Catholicism is illegal because it does not sufficiently make the government’s job easier.
The next keyboard warrior argument that will emerge is that we’re using religion to protect child abusers. This is slightly (but only slightly) more salient, but the problem is that opposing this is not simply to defend the penitent who happen to be guilty of crimes. All of us are sinners, but we can all agree that some of us are much worse than others. Child abusers certainly fit on the worse end of the spectrum.
However, this is the object lesson in the principle of the slippery slope if there ever was one: If you decide that a necessary religious practice that is definitionally, sacramentally private must be open to state scrutiny because it aids in catching and stopping bad people, there is no line. Period. Whatever is deemed to be expedient for enforcement of anything politicians declare important can and must be reported.
And make no mistake: This targets one branch of the Christian faith. The law is written in such a way as to force the Catholic clergy to betray their own faith. There is no good-faith explanation for this — and it’s a test-balloon for how much pressure the boot of the state can put on the neck of the Roman Catholic church in America. Blessedly, there are those standing firm against this:
Seattle Archbishop Etienne is putting God’s law above man’s law. 🔥
“Catholic clergy may not violate the seal of confession – or they will be excommunicated from the Church. All Catholics must know and be assured that their confessions remain sacred, secure, confidential and… pic.twitter.com/nZFwwBREn4
— CatholicVote (@CatholicVote) May 5, 2025
Also blessedly, we have 1) a First Amendment and 2) an administration that defends it.
“SB 5375 demands that Catholic Priests violate their deeply held faith in order to obey the law, a violation of the Constitution and a breach of the free exercise of religion cannot stand under our Constitutional system of government,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a media release Monday, announcing a DOJ investigation into the law.
“Worse, the law appears to single out clergy as not entitled to assert applicable privileges, as compared to other reporting professionals. We take this matter very seriously and look forward to Washington State’s cooperation with our investigation.”
Did those professionally offended nominal Catholic Democrats repost this, saying this is one of the few times they concurred with the Trump administration? If there were ever a time for these people to burnish their faith and bipartisan credentials, here it was: an open attack on their faith by their own party.
No Ted Lieu. No Kathy Hochul. Nor any other prominent Catholic Democrats, either: No Nancy Pelosi or “devout Catholic” Joe Biden, or John Kerry, or even Andrew Cuomo, who has nothing to lose in a mayoral race in a city with no shortage of Catholic voters.
But AI Trump pope? Cue that outrage machine, baby. The iron law of woke projection — accuse your opponents of the outrages you yourself are perpetrating — wins again.
There were those who took note of this, too:
Hey, your Democrat friends in Washington just made it a crime for priests to keep confession secret. I haven’t seen anything about that in your timeline and I thought that was kind of weird. I mean some people might think that you’re just posing with fake outrage over Trump. https://t.co/iCBlAHR8cp
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) May 5, 2025
Or the fact that Ted Lieu is all about mocking Catholics — so long as it’s his constituency. (I’m sure the others I mentioned would almost certainly do or have done the same, but they didn’t leave behind the evidence for us to find quite so easily.)
Interesting. That’s Ted Lieu there in the center with the maroon shirt. Were they not mocking Catholics Congressman? https://t.co/1eZDcbIMvc pic.twitter.com/Vp5xeqv918
— Soquel by the Creek (@SoquelCreek) May 4, 2025
If you aren’t one, take it as someone who was raised as an Irish Catholic and still, culturally, has the mentality of that spiritual milieu: We can take a joke about us.
I can remember our parish priest’s favorite Catholic joke, in fact — the one about the pope reluctantly accepting a trillion dollars from Tyson to change the words of the “Our Father” to “give us this day our daily chicken.”
The punchline was John Paul II breaking it to the College of Cardinals: “OK, first the bad news: We’re dropping the Wonder Bread account.” I’d say that’s far edgier than Pope Trump AI as these things go, but I’d also say that Ted Lieu hanging out with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is way, way, way edgier, to the point of utter blasphemy. Yet he clutches his (almost certainly unused) rosary at a meme? Give me a break.
As for Tom Clancy, I’m sure he heard the Jack Ryan pope joke — and laughed. So did plenty of priests, bishops, and other clergy who read those novels. They also probably got a chuckle out of Trump’s AI image, if I know my Irish Catholic brethren. If my parish priest is still around, he definitely did. If not, he would have.
I can tell you what Catholics don’t laugh at: being told our religion is illegal because it’s inconvenient and it needs to change under penalty of law.
We may loathe child abusers — all Christians do — but Christians also aren’t stupid, and we know the state’s interference in the confessional will never stop there, nor will the godless bureaucracy’s interest stop with Catholicism. And, as for all the Democrats who cosplay as Catholics when they need to appear as if they believe in something higher than their own self-advancement, it’s time they stood up for the faith they claim to profess, not against a silly (but funny) meme.
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