Exactly two weeks before Donald Trump began his second term as president, Pope Francis appointed one of the Catholic Church’s most progressive voices as the new Archbishop of Washington. Was it a provocation?

Absolutely not, say Vatican insiders. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be fireworks in the future.

A Trump critic, Cardinal Robert McElroy, 70, was formally introduced in St. Matthew’s Cathedral as Washington’s new archbishop on Jan. 6. 

McElroy came to the job from rights California, where he had emerged as a leading Catholic voice championing the rights of refugees and migrants, confronting climate change, and issues related to LGBTQ communities.

But McElroy was not moved to Washington because of the then-incoming president’s largely opposing stance on those issues, according to Andrea Gagliarducci, one of Rome’s leading analysts on the Vatican.

“The Vatican doesn’t change course that quickly,” Gagliarducci told Just the News. “McElroy’s appointment was in the works for months, and it would have been made no matter who won the presidential election last year.”

Still, Gagliarducci and other analysts said, conflicts between the Church and the Trump White House are inevitable.

Trump’s first physical encounter with the pontiff came in 2017, at the start of the 45th president’s first term. That meeting – which resulted in what became a viral portrait of a smiling Trump and a less-than-thrilled pope – came after a stern critique of the plan to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico.

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," Francis said a year earlier, in response to Trump’ fiery rhetoric during his winning 2016 presidential campaign. 

There’s no visit scheduled this time around, but in the wake of Trump’s election victory last year the pope wasted no time in criticizing the notion of mass deportations.

Trump’s deportation goals, which Francis called “disgraceful,” would make “poor wretches who don’t have anything foot the bill,” the pope said in a television interview on the eve of Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. “That is not how you solve problems.”

By all indications, McElroy’s views on those topics are largely in line with the pope’s stated opinions. 

“The Catholic Church teaches that a country has the right to control its borders. And our nation’s desire to do that is a legitimate effort,” the cardinal has said.

“At the same time, we are always called to have a sense of the dignity of every human person,” he went on. “And thus, plans which have been talked about at some levels of having a wider indiscriminate massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”

According to Gagliarducci, it is wrong to look at these developments as purposeful swipes at Trump and his policies.

“I think it’s clear that the pope doesn’t really like Trump on a personal level, and that Trump, maybe we can’t say he doesn’t like Francis, but we can say he isn’t too worried about him,” Gagliarducci said. 

“But it’s also clear that these stances aren’t designed to be anti-Trump stances," he continued. "They just represent business as usual for the Vatican, the continuation of long-held views.”

It's not clear how relevant this low-key face off may be. This is the third act of Francis’ papacy, and yet the depth of his influence among the world’s more than 1 billion Catholics is not evident. 

Francis has selected the vast majority of the members of the College of Cardinals who will one day pick his successor, and yet a major area of speculation among Vatican watchers is whether the next pope will be a progressive in the mould of Francis or someone more conservative, like Pope Benedict XVI, the previous pontiff.

For their part, U.S. Catholics seem to be a mixed lot. Notwithstanding the Vatican’s strict and consistent opposition to abortion, polls show that Catholics in the country leaned Democratic in the presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, before favoring Trump 52 percent to 45 percent in his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

In 2020, Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, beat Trump among Catholics 52 percent to 47 percent, before they favored Trump over Kamala Harris by a 58 percent to 40-percent margin last year, a record-large margin of victory.