President Donald Trump became the first sitting US president to address the “Values Voters Summit”, organised by the Family Research Council’s political arm.
The annual event brings together conservative Christians and aims “to help inform and mobilise citizens across America to preserve the bedrock values of traditional marriage, religious liberty, sanctity of life and limited government that make our nation strong”.
“We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values,” Mr Trump told the gathering in Washington, D.C. “And you know, we’re getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don’t talk about anymore. They don’t use the word ‘Christmas’ because it’s not politically correct. Well, guess what? We’re saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”
Most of those attending the summit were evangelicals, but a number of Catholics spoke to the gathering, including former White House advisers Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. Mr Gorka is a regular guest on EWTN’s The World Over.
Catholic critics of the summit questioned which values the event had celebrated. “Catholics who applauded Trump at this summit give moral cover to an administration that has contempt for Gospel values,” John Gehring, Catholic Programme Director at Faith in Public Life said.
Professor Cathleen Kaveny, of Boston College, told The Tablet: “This gathering sounds more like the ‘ecumenism of hate’ that Fr [Antonio] Spadaro [editor-in-chief of the Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica and close confidant of Pope Francis] wrote about [in his publication on 13 July] than the Church as a field hospital that Pope Francis speaks of.”
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