Republicans have long worried about the historically low percentage of Catholic voter turnout, and a former Vatican ambassador and staunch Pope Francis critic is urging that to change.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Italy's apostolic nuncio to the U.S. during the Obama administration (2011-2016) is urging Catholic Americans to turn out to vote to bring Trump back to the White House over an "infernal monster" in Vice President Kamala Harris.
"The choice is between a conservative president, who is paying with his very life for his fight against the deep state, and an infernal monster who obeys Satan," Viganò wrote in an "open letter to American Catholics" this week.
"For a Catholic, there can be no question: voting for Kamala Harris is morally inadmissible and constitutes a very grave sin. Nor is it morally possible to abstain, because in this war declaring oneself neutral means allying oneself with the enemy."
Trump is the answer to protect America's traditional Catholic ideals, he added.
"In Kamala Harris' America, Catholics — but also Protestants — are considered fundamentalists to be marginalized and eliminated, and their children are considered the property of the state, which arrogates to itself the right to lead them astray from an early age in both body and soul," Viganò wrote. "Trump's America can become great and prosperous again.
"Harris' America is destined for invasion and for moral, social, and economic destruction: the most ferocious dictatorship."
While Trump is not ideal on protecting the unborn or support for IVF, Harris is the "threat to democracy" that Democrats have been attempting to pin on Trump, Trump represents a vote for religious liberty, according to Viganò.
"In this election you must choose between two radically opposed ways of conceiving the government of your nation: you are called to choose between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and slavery," his missive began.
"On one side we have candidate Donald J. Trump, who, despite serious problems in his positions, especially in the matter of abortion and assisted procreation, has as his objective the common good and the protection of the fundamental freedoms of citizens.
"In Donald Trump’s America, every Catholic can practice their Faith and educate their children in it without interference from the State.
"On the other side we have a candidate and a party that promotes everything that directly opposes the Faith and Morals of the Catholic Church."
America has unraveled under the Biden-Harris administration, he warned.
"Look at your country! Your cities have become dumps filled with derelicts and criminals, drug dealers and addicts, prostitutes and robbers," he wrote. "Your schools are dens of indoctrination and corruption from kindergarten onwards. In your courts, criminals are acquitted and innocents are imprisoned: new ideological crimes are prosecuted, while illegality is tolerated and encouraged.
Harris exposed the anti-religion agenda last week when she said a Jesus supporter was "at the wrong rally," Viganò wrote.
"At that point, dear American Catholics, you will not only have to go to a different rally — as Kamala would like — in order to say 'Christ is the Lord,' because saying that will be considered hate speech, and praying in front of an abortion clinic an act of terrorism," he wrote. "Do not think that these are remote hypotheses: wherever the woke left takes power, it establishes the most vicious, anti-human, and anti-Christian dictatorship that humanity has ever known.
"And we know that every time the left has come to power, it has never left through democratic means."
Trump is "the only possible" answer in this election, he concluded.
"Candidate Donald J. Trump, while certainly taking some serious critical positions that a Catholic cannot agree with, represents for us, dear American faithful, in this specific historical moment, the only possible choice to counter the globalist coup that the woke Left is about to implement definitively, irreparably, and with incalculable damage for future generations," he wrote.
"Voting for Donald Trump means firmly distancing ourselves from an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian and anti-human vision of society. It means stopping those who want to create a hellish dystopia that is even worse than the one announced by George Orwell."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.