The latest victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome? The first American pontifex maximus of the Roman Catholic Church, apparently.
In a speech on the Senate floor this week, GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri criticized Senate Democrats for holding up the vote of President Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the Vatican, Brian Burch.
This meant that, while Burch was in Rome for the installation of Pope Leo XIV — born in Chicago, as you doubtlessly know right now — we have no actual ambassador to the Holy See.
In his remarks on the Senate floor earlier this week, after Democrats blocked a floor vote on Burch, who was head of pro-Trump religious organization CatholicVote, Schmitt didn’t mince words.
Schmitt said in a post on X that while Republicans had asked for unanimous consent for him to be installed before the pope’s installation — he had made it out of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations April 30 on a 12-10 party-line vote, according to the Catholic News Agency — the Democrats decided to block it.
If you want to know how broken Senate Democrats are they just blocked the confirmation of the Ambassador to the Vatican. Insane. pic.twitter.com/MHK9K67MoJ
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) May 13, 2025
And then, from the Senate floor, he chastised them for what they had done.
“I just never thought I’d see the day that the ‘resistance’ would mean holding up the ambassador to the Holy See to be there for the installation of the pope,” Schmitt said.
Do you consider what the Democrats are doing to be an insult to the pope?
He added: “But here’s where we are: total brokenness from the other side.”
A symptom of TDS now includes Democrats blocking the U.S. Ambassador to The Vatican in time for the Pope’s installation this weekend.
Sadly, I don’t think they’ve hit rock bottom yet. pic.twitter.com/q7PalHk6uI
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) May 13, 2025
Is he wrong? Well, there are explanations why this might have happened the way it did besides Trump Derangement Syndrome, but TL;DR: Probably not.
Most of the complaints lodged by Democrats during the Senate committee confirmation hearing had to do with Burch’s criticisms of the late Pope Francis — still pontifex maximus when the hearings were held in early April — as well as his support for some of the Trump budget cuts and whether they were consistent with Catholic teaching.
Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, for instance, cited a statement from a liberal Catholic humanitarian organization which said that shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, “will kill millions of people and condemn hundreds of millions more to lives of dehumanizing poverty,” according to The Associated Press.
Shaheen then asked how, with USAID shuttered (and no longer producing those transgender Peruvian comic books saving so many lives, I can only assume), he would “reassure the Holy See that the United States really is committed to saving the lives of those in need.”
Burch’s response — really beside the point, but it shows you how concerned about Catholicism Democrats suddenly get when opportunity knocks — was that Catholic NGOs have “some of the best, some of the lowest cost of overhead and some of the most effective and most impactful programs.”
However, it is worth noting that Burch and CatholicVote were involved in a minor to-do with the papal selection process which hadn’t gone over well in the Italian media sphere.
According to the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote posted that Italian media was reporting Cardinal Pietro Parolin — Pope Francis’ secretary of state and one of the frontrunners at the conclave — had collapsed due to a spike in his blood pressure.
“The famously scrappy Italian newspapers pushed back, saying the item first appeared on CatholicVote. All the related websites involved in the spat have been updated, making it difficult to determine who is to blame,” the Catholic Register reported, noting that “the controversy comes at a particularly bad time for CatholicVote co-founder Brian Burch, whose nomination to be ambassador to the Holy See is pending in the U.S. Senate.”
It’s impossible to judge at this juncture, but Parolin’s record indicates he would have been a more liberal pope on some social issues (climate change) but not on others (homosexuality) than Leo XIV. However, his closeness to Francis and the sensitivity of the issue might have persuaded some Democrats to forego the vote until after the installation to avoid starting some kind of Italian media feeding frenzy.
This is also speculation, however, and the fact that he only advanced out of committee on a party-line vote because Orange Man Bad and Catholic who support Orange Man Also Bad doesn’t precisely lend credence to this more nuanced view of the matter.
The point is, we should have had an ambassador to the Vatican, especially as the first American pope was being installed. We did not. We still do not. And the Democrats seem in no hurry. It turns out TDS can be exported to even the smallest city-state in the world, and in the most petty fashion possible.
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