USCCB President Paul Coakley meets with Trump, Vance at White House

(RNS) — Archbishop Paul Coakley, the recently elected president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, met with President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other officials at the White House on Monday (Jan. 12). It marks the first time a U.S. president has met with the president of the bishops’ conference in nearly a decade. 

According to a statement from Chieko Noguchi, a spokesperson for the bishops’ conference, Coakley, Trump and other leaders “discussed areas of mutual concern, as well as areas for further dialogue” at the meeting. 

“Archbishop Coakley is grateful for the engagement and looks forward to ongoing discussions,” Noguchi wrote.

As the ecclesiastical adviser for the Napa Institute, Coakley, who is archbishop of Oklahoma City, has ties to several prominent conservative Catholics. The institute’s co-founder, Tim Busch, wrote in March that “Donald Trump’s administration is the most Christian I’ve ever seen” and praised many Catholics who surround the president, noting he’d met and worked with many of Trump’s senior staff.

At the November bishops’ meeting where Coakley was elected, they released a rare “special message” opposing the “indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” Though a mass deportation campaign has been a key priority of Trump’s second term, the message did not mention Trump by name. 

In a video released during that meeting, Coakley called immigration a “difficult and neuralgic topic,” but said that it would continue to be a priority for the conference. 

Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley. (Video screen grab)

Last January, in his first interview released since assuming the vice presidency, Vance responded to a question about the bishops’ opposition to a Trump administration policy allowing greater latitude for immigration enforcement at churches. He accused the conference of helping “resettle illegal immigrants” and being “worried about their bottom line” in an apparent reference to the conference receiving federal funding for its work resettling federally vetted refugees.

Months later, the conference announced it would no longer partner with the federal government to resettle refugees after the Trump administration suspended the refugee resettlement program.

Historically, the bishops have been aligned with Republicans on abortion issues. But last week, Trump urged House Republicans to be “flexible” about the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for abortions and is among the policies that the bishops have said “save lives and respect the consciences of Americans.”

But Coakley has also been outspoken in his opposition to gender-affirming care and “the transgender movement,” an area of alignment with the Trump administration, which has released extensive executive orders restricting gender-affirming care and attempting to define gender as inextricably linked to a binary understanding of biological sex.

In his exit interview with OSV News, Coakley’s predecessor as conference president, Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, said that he and his predecessor, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, had sought out meetings with Trump and former President Joe Biden without success.

The last time a conference president met with the U.S. president was when Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, Texas, met briefly with Trump in 2017, shortly before Trump signed an executive order about religious freedom.