The Catholic Archbishop of San Antonio Texas attacked President Trump by name in a barrage of Twitter posts Monday, accusing him of “racism” and “hatred” and of engaging in “fake prayer.”
The Mexican-American Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller minced no words in his rebuke, demanding that the president “stop hate and racism, starting with yourself” and accusing him of having “destroyed people’s lives,” following the lethal attack by a gunman in El Paso, Texas, on the morning of August 3.
“President stop your hatred. People in the US deserve better,” García-Siller said in another tweet.
“President you are a poor man, a very week [sic] man. Stop damaging people. Please!” he said in another.
“Stop racism!!!! Stop!!!” the archbishop tweeted. “Starts with leadership.”
Later, Archbishop García-Siller apparently thought better of his remarks and deleted all the tweets, but not before the attentive folks at Crux, an online Catholic news outlet, took screen shots of several of them.
It is unclear what exactly the president did or said that led Archbishop García-Siller to accuse him of racism and hatred or of having undertaken “fake prayer.”
According to Catholic tradition, it is difficult enough to fully understand one’s own intentions and motivations, or the quality of one’s prayer, let alone to be able to judge the soul of another.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that respect for the reputation of persons “forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury,” adding that a person becomes guilty of rash judgment if he “even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor.”
“To avoid rash judgment, everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbor’s thoughts, words, and deeds in a favorable way,” the Catechism continues, noting that every good Christian “ought to be more ready to give a favorable interpretation to another’s statement than to condemn it.”
Although Archbishop García-Siller’s were the most direct and vehement attacks by an American prelate on Trump to date, they are not the first.
Archbishop Wilton Gregory, the newly installed leader of the Washington, DC, also suggested recently that some of Mr. Trump’s comments were motivated by racism, despite the fact that the president never brought up the question of race.
Archbishop Gregory — the only African American Catholic archbishop in the country — also went after Trump by name, saying that “recent public comments by our President and others and the responses they have generated, have deepened divisions and diminished our national life.”
In his August 1 statement, the archbishop suggested that the president’s remarks had racist overtones.
“Our faith teaches us that respect for people of every race, religion, gender, ethnicity and background are requirements of fundamental human dignity and basic decency. This include newcomers to our country, people who have differing political views and people who may be different from us,” he said.
“We all need to reject racism, disrespect or brutality in speech and action,” he said, adding that “racism occurs when we ignore the fundamental truth that, because all humans share a common origin, they are all brothers and sisters, all equally made in the image of God.”
“We must all take responsibility to reject language that ridicules, condemns, or vilifies another person because of their race, religion, gender, age, culture or ethnic background,” the archbishop repeated.