WarRoom Battleground EP 968: US Catholic Bishops Should Be Fighting Dem Governors Far Harder Over Parental Choice Restrictions
Stephen K. Bannon and Anne LaMonica critique the USCCB's failure to aggressively challenge Democratic governors blocking the federal school choice tax credit program, which offers up to $1,700 in tax reductions starting in 2027. While Republican governors opted in, Connecticut's Ned Lamont rejected it, despite the program requiring no direct federal funding. LaMonica attributes the Church's silence to local regulatory burdens and a post-1960s leftward drift that weakened parental rights defenses, contrasting this hesitation with urgent needs like immigration. Ultimately, the discussion highlights a critical gap where Catholic institutions prioritize survival over defending core social teachings against state overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Harnwell here at the helm on Steve Bannon's War Room.
Unlucky, some people think this day is.
I'm not a particularly superstitious person.
Let's see if it's going to be unlucky for our guest today as we dive into the huge debate that's taking place right now over the U.S. federal school choice tax credit program.
Our guest is going to be navigating us for the issue today is Anne Lamonica, who's the Associate Director for Education at the Connecticut Catholic Conference.
Anne, thanks very much indeed for coming on the show today.
I know this is a big, thorny issue sort of in the United States right now.
Pretty much dividing the country into the two equal halves, I think, between Democrats and Republicans.
Why don't you just, I have some questions which we're going to go into about how this and why this affects Catholics and why I think Catholics should be interested in this.
But I think it's a wider issue to do with parental choice, parental responsibility, the right of parents to choose the formation of their children.
That obviously includes a largely evangelical audience as well.
Why don't you just give me two minutes before we go into this next, just break down what this issue is to do with the federal tax credits and how it works?
Because it's not totally understood by everyone.
And what makes this different from in terms of the tax write-off ability when you make a standard, when Americans make a standard donation to a 501c3?
In fact, it's a tax credit, which means that you'll have a dollar-for-dollar reduction in what you owe to the federal taxes starting in 2027 for 17 up to $1,700 in donations.
Now, the way it works under the law, which passed under the One Big Beautiful bill, is that there is a tax credit for up to $1,700 for donations to scholarship organizations.
And then those scholarship organizations then go out and hand out scholarships to kids in need.
Now, there's an income requirement.
You have to, the children's families have to make under 300% of the gross median income.
And in Connecticut, where I am, that's roughly $250,000 to $300,000 would be 300% of the gross median income, depending on your zip code or demographic area.
So the one problem with this tax credit is that when it was drafted and passed, that the parliamentarian Was involved.
And as a result, the Senate Parliamentarian was involved.
And as a result, it changed a little bit.
And governors have to opt in their state's scholarship organizations in order to receive donations.
So anybody in the country can make a donation to a scholarship organization.
So if I'm in Connecticut, I can donate to an organization in Florida or Arkansas, but and they can receive it and give out donations in their state.
So here in Connecticut, we have to wait for our governor, Governor Ned Lamont, to sign in and opt our organizations in so that they can receive donations from all over the country.
And those donors will receive the tax credit.
It's not the children that are receiving tax credits.
I'll take the breathing pause that you gave to come in and ask a question that a natural observer might ask were it not so politically loaded already.
But isn't the idea of giving states their own opportunity and decision to opt into this something that people on the right of the spectrum would broadly welcome, which is basically freeing, as it were, states from the federal Department of Education's dictatorship over educational responsibility and authority?
And fortunately, this program is not run through the Department of Education.
It's purely a tax credit.
The Department of Revenue, Internal Revenue Service will be administering the tax credits to taxpayers across the country.
So this does not involve the Department of Education at all.
It does not involve any federal funding, any state funding.
It's all purely donor-private donations.
So with respect to states' rights, well, I've heard a lot about the lack of representation in New England in particular, the diversity of thought in our congressional leadership, you know, in the Senate and the House.
There's not one member that supported educational choice in New England.
And that was a huge block for us to get through last summer when the bill passed.
We realized that we had nobody to talk to in Connecticut.
Nobody would take our calls.
Nobody would meet with us about it at the federal level.
And as a result, we decided: hey, let's put together a petition.
We'll petition the Ways and Means Committee before it comes out of the committee to let them know we need this in New England.
New England is completely underrepresented.
And I think it would serve conservatives, social conservatives, especially, very well to understand that there are people in New England that would support school choice and other initiatives.
With the exception of Jared Polis, I think in Colorado, this is broadly worked out to be a partisan split, has it not, Anne?
In that Republican governors opting in to the program and Democrat voters are opting out.
On that basis, can you just say a few words on why this is of interest specifically to parents trying to get their kids into Catholic school, for example?
So, specifically, in terms of Catholic parents, though, what I mean is this: okay, normally, and this is something I'm going to build on over the rest of this hour, there has been a progressive drift in the United States since the 60s in terms of embracing broadly progressive leftist issues outside of the life issue.
And therefore, there's a somewhat, I would suggest, a tension here between, say, the Catholic Bishops' Conference, which has tried to poke around a little bit around the edges in favor of parental rights, because it's obviously in the interest of the Catholic Church in keeping its formation up for the reasons that you were just mentioning amongst the youth.
But it's basically forcing the institutional U.S. Catholic Church to take a public policy position in flat in face of where the majority of the Democratic Party is on this.
I'd like you to address that, if you could, to tie those things together.
Of course, I get that, but it is a political issue, you know, as pretty much everything that the state does vis-a-vis parental responsibility, individual responsibility.
You have a philosophical difference here of whether the formation of the state, the public provision of education, is part of what should be bracketed under the public good, sort of the formation of the nation's children together for social cohesion.
Or you have a different philosophical approach, which basically treats education like a commodity available on the free market.
And therefore, that would push very much more an individualistic purchaser-led approach.
Course, the debate itself, as much as one tries to take it out of the hands of partisan politics, it is inherently a political situation, and people will come down on different sides on this.
And this is really what my question to you is.
I'll ask it now, and perhaps we'll pick up just in a moment after I do a quick ad read for one of our sponsors.
But I have to ask you this question, Anne La Monica, and it's this: Do you think that decades of leftward drift for the institutional Catholic Church has somewhat enfeebled its ability here to come down very strictly on a parental rights side in this policy debate?
Well, in Connecticut, I would say that has not happened.
Our Archbishop and our bishops have been fully supportive of parental rights.
We have actually made several pleas to the state government, the state legislature, about public education, how we need to respect parental rights in public education, include parents in what's happening with their children in terms of mental health consultations.
We need to be aware of what's happening to the kids at our schools.
And so, we've fought for that repeatedly at the guidance of our bishops.
And I just don't see that happening here in Connecticut.
I feel like the bishops have, you know, they have, you know, we do have more or less say social justice Catholics, and then we have, you know, the other ones that are involved in more of the pro-life issues.
I'll come back for the wider US picture in just a couple of moments.
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Back with Anne La Monica, who is the assistant director for education at the Connecticut Catholic Conference.
And so you're saying that your bishops in Connecticut have been pretty resolute on this issue.
Regarding the wider national position, however, soundings coming up from the Catholic Bishops' Conference, let me put it like this.
I don't see the same intervention in the media as I see, for example, on the immigration issue.
where I would think the bishops have spoken far more clearly on that.
What do you make of that difference?
And do you, why has the US Catholic Bishops Conference, if we're putting the immigration issue down as a model to measure it against, why isn't the US Catholic Bishops Conference doing a full-throated throwdown here on the Democratic governors who are obstacling Catholic parents to take scholarships at Catholic schools?
The Connecticut Catholic Conference isn't agitating here for the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference as an entity to be intervening more vocally, more strongly in individual states where Democrat governors are blocking the program.
If we're, and this is firmly part of Catholic social teaching, right, that the parental responsibility for the education formation of children takes precedent over the state's role here.
If we're assuming that that is true, and I think you and I will both take that as absolutely to be true in the natural order of things, the ability for parents to have the formation that they want for their children is really a moral issue as well as a religious issue, right?
A moral and just government would encourage a parent to make the best choice for their child, whether it be a Catholic school, evangelical school, homeschool, they would encourage that government would do that.
And a governor that blocks the program in their state is effectively saying that they know better for the education and formation of the children than the parents.
So if it's a moral, so if we're taking it as a moral and religious issue and one here that is at the heart of Catholic social teaching, even though it's very rarely, I think, given the seriousness that it should have.
But it was, you know, you can, I think, is it was it gravisimus, gravissimum, um, the document from the Second Vatican Council on the formation of gravissimum, was it edicationis?
And you have Familiaris Consortio as well from John Paul II.
These are serious, sort of, there is a strong Catholic provenance here on these issues.
I want to come back to the issue, why the Catholic Bishops' Conference can't get into this a little bit more strongly, given it's not just a policy issue.
If it was simply a political policy issue, I could accept the arguments on prudential grounds that it might be counterproductive.
But given that this is, as we've established, a moral issue here, I would have thought there's a wide open opportunity for the Catholic Bishops' Conference to come in and make a very clear case in widening this program, the tax credit program, allowing that in the states where democratic governors have blocked it.
And even if that does mean that the Catholic Bishops' Conference is taking a more overtly political position, I think there's enough justification for it to do so.
I just, I do think that the USCCB helps direct the state level, the Connecticut Catholic Conference.
And, you know, all the states are working together.
All the executive directors of the state level conferences are working together on this issue.
And we are at the front lines in the states to make that.
And, you know, coming from outside of Connecticut, we're not going to have that.
That influence is not going to be as persuasive as local influence here, at least in Connecticut.
Maybe it works differently in other states, but we're such a small state that we really, our legislators and our governor is going to listen to the people of Connecticut, and they're not going to really pay attention to the people outside.
I guess that's the point I'm trying to make.
It's that it's more of a local issue here.
I would ask Congress if the USCCB could help us here.
I would ask Congress, the next reconciliation bill that they consider is to remove this opt-in option for governors.
Remove it from the law.
It's unnecessary.
It's unnecessary to create this division among the states and treating children differently in one state if you live in a red state versus a blue state.
I think it was a requirement, wasn't it, to getting the bill passed on that point?
It was a compromise in order to get it passed.
And of course, on a bipartisan issue, it is a strange inversion, I think, to have basically the Republicans, a strange inversion for Catholics, I should say, to be in a situation where they're sort of really pushing for a sort of state rights position.
Whereas, as I was saying before earlier on in the show, after many decades, apart from the pro-life issue, the whole push of Catholic representation in politics has been towards state provision,
which is, you know, and that's why I think my first question was trying to tease out of you whether I think, because it's my belief looking at this, that we're because of the leftward drift of the institutional Catholic Church since the 60s, since the mid-60s, we're now on this issue of Catholic education, Catholic formation.
We're now in the issue of seeing somewhat chickens coming home to roost.
Because in other situations, the Catholic Church, as an institution, with all the funding that it has and the spot in the public eye, it would be able to bring a great deal of issue of attention to this matter.
And it's not really doing so.
And that's my perplexity.
And I would suspect, right, knowing something about the people who tend to populate bishops' conferences, is that they tend to have a left-wing bias.
And I'm sort of thinking whether that might be in an attention hit in the bishops' conference on this issue.
Just give me 30 seconds as your reaction to that, and then we'll go into the break.
I just say let's look back at our representation in New England.
It's been an issue on this show.
Vice President JD Vance has brought it up.
And I think if you realize why we have the representation in Congress that we have, it might be a result of other factors.
And I'd like to see the Republicans in the House support school choice for everyone and in the Senate to see that there are conservatives across the whole country, not just the red states.
They have to look beyond because children in our states might move to their red state eventually.
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Back to Anne Lamonica, the Assistant Director for Education at the Connecticut Catholic Conference.
Anne, thanks for staying with us as we dig into these issues.
Now, it's often commented in the media that Pope Leo is the first American Pope.
So, my question on this is seeing this that the Pope is so keen to intervene in US domestic political issues on the immigration issue, specifically dropping all the hints at his diplomatic disposal to indicate he doesn't quite think the Trump administration has understood the subtleties and complexities of Catholic social teaching on the issue.
What can we expect?
Now, I know you don't speak for the Pope or anything, but do you think Catholics might reasonably expect the Pope to intervene on this issue in favor of, as you say, not only Catholic parents, but evangelical parents as well, Jewish parents as well, to help guarantee for them the ability to pick the education that parents want for their children?
And what, well, thank you for speaking so positively on that one.
What kind of effect do you think that will have on the domestic political situation in the United States right now, given the various positions that people are taking generally with regards to the partisan split?
I think it would be massive were he to do so, because no matter how it's framed or how it's positioned, or how much Vatican spokesman or even the US Catholic Bishops' Conference say that he's not making a partisan intervention here, it's absolutely clear, given the split between Democrat governors and Republican governors in the country, that this will de facto be a position far closer to one political side than another.
And for the reasons that we mentioned in the first half of the show, very much going against the general trend and current of the Catholic Church's activism in the political sphere.
Of course, one criticism that will be made on this is that the reason why the Pope will be intervening on this and taking that particular position, which has a particular affinity with the GOP, is because the Catholic, and this is the point that the Catholic Church is desperate, really, the institutional Catholic Church is desperate that the point the Church is desperate not to generate because the Catholic Church is defending, it has a direct interest in this issue.
Actually, that's not my suggestion, though it is absolutely, though it is absolutely my position that the Catholic Bishops' Conference has a leftward progressive stance in the political sphere because of the huge subsidies and grants it takes from the federal government to deliver its various social services.
But that's not my argument on this issue.
On this issue, my issue is that the Catholic Church will take what is a more individualistic position rather than state-led position on this issue because it has an interest in seeing as many Catholics formed as possible.
And were it not to be, were it not directly an issue affecting the formation of Catholics and Catholic family and Catholic youth, if you took the word Catholic out of that, the Catholic Church would almost certainly be landing up behind the Democratic governors on this issue.
Well, I know detractors will say that the church will make, that they think the schools will somehow profit from this.
They're not going to profit.
Our teachers are paid far less.
We have very small budgets than the public schools.
But in terms of if it weren't Catholics involved, that the church would not be involved, I tend to disagree with that because the church has a long history of academic and intellectual freedom and supporting intellectual freedom and diversity of thought.
You know, 2,000 years' worth, they inherited Roman and ancient Greek classical education and preserved it and refined it and use it as a tool for good.
So I tend to disagree with that.
I think the church would always support educational freedom, or it should, if it doesn't.
But I feel like that's the history of the church and will continue to do so.
In that case, why does the Catholic Church have a very different public policy position on the provision of health care from the provision of education in that sense?
Before we move to the next sponsorship question, let me just ask you whether you think that the church has underestimated somewhat over recent decades the degree to which aggressive secular public systems have wanted to compete against religious education.
Well, in fact, they've been fully aware of it as it had happened in early 1990s in Connecticut.
We used to be, the Catholic schools used to be part of an open choice network where students could attend if we had open seats and they could tend for free if they came from cities in need.
And in the early 90s, we were removed from that program and magnet schools were created.
And those magnet schools had a detrimental effect on enrollment in the Catholic schools.
And along with the imposition of a new state income tax, those combined reduced the income of families to be able to send two, three, four children to school to a Catholic school.
And so they chose the magnet schools perhaps instead.
So they've seen this effect for several decades now.
And we're actually, our numbers are coming back after COVID.
I think people have a renewed interest in Catholic education and what we have to offer students.
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Okay, back towards the closing segment of the show with Anne La Monica.
And I was looking at one interesting statistic here, and I was wondering whether you might just help break this down for me because it sort of illustrates somewhat the implosion in Catholic formation since the Second Vatican Council.
When we go to that final year of the Council, the school year of 64 to 65, the nationwide network of Catholic parochial schools served around 5.6 million students.
And today, its enrollment has dropped 70% to 1.7 million students today.
Given that this is your area of concern, sort of education, Catholic formation, do you think the institutional Catholic Church has truly appreciated the enormity of what has taken place over the last 60 years?
Has it directed its resources, its political capital in the political sphere in engaging in the right issues such as this?
Or has it been distracted by other political concerns?
Other than the breakdown of the family over those same years, I think that has a direct effect on attendance and Catholic formation.
But that aside, in terms of schools, you know, we did go through a period of contraction where we closed several schools and combined them into one in different towns.
But we are currently in the Archdiocese of Hartford.
We're opening, I believe, two to three new schools next year.
Two of them are classical academies.
And that is something that I know there's growing interest in, and there has been.
That's been a growing interest for the past, I'd say, 10 years.
And I'm glad to see that happening.
There's been one in New Britain, and I believe maybe one in New Haven, Connecticut.
And also, we have the Archbishop Coyne.
One of his first goals and one of the first things he did was declare that he was going to reopen a Catholic school in Hartford, the capital city.
And they are on their way to opening that up either next year or at the end of this year or next year.
There'll be a new Catholic school in Hartford to serve Hartford residents who wish to attend on an income, you know, scholarship basis.
In the beginning of the show, we mentioned how the issue of parental choice has often been framed as a conservative issue, a conservative policy cause.
And we also mentioned early on in the show, however, that the right of parents to form their own children comes straight out of Catholic social teaching.
Do you think that the church has failed somewhat to lead a debate where its own principles should have dominated?
And if you don't want to answer the question like that, let me reframe it.
Would you rate the ability, would you rate how well the church has dominated the debate on parental choice over recent years for me?
I think regular followers of our Wednesday show where we break all this kind of the positioning of the Catholic Bishops Conference and the policy positions it takes.
I think regular followers of our Wednesday show will probably have an idea of what my private response to that answer might be.
But I won't push back too heavily.
I will, however, because ask, I close with one final question, which really sort of synthesizes everything that we've discussed over the past hour.
And that is whether you think, because obviously this is, I think, the heart of this, how much you believe the church has allowed secular political coalitions to define the education debate instead of asserting its own moral vision on parental choice.
The teachers' unions in Connecticut have, and throughout New England, have a lot of control over our legislative leaders, and that's just a fact.
And I guess I think they've done their part as a matter of people going to church, the parents of the students to act and listen to their bishops and perhaps even vote on certain issues a certain way if they could or choose better leaders.
Okay, that's pretty much all we have time for on the Friday show today.
I have to respond, however, with just like 60 seconds of analysis based on what you've been saying.
Firstly, I want to thank you, Anna Monica, for coming on the war room.
Somewhat, because we do take a very, very strong position against the US Catholic Bishops' Conference, against the Vatican at times, against the Pope at times.
You have somewhat come into the lion's den today, and I'm very grateful for that, for helping us and our audience take a different perspective.
Though I think there's a lot, obviously, on the issue itself that they're going to agree with you on, and that is the insistence that parents have the first duty over the formation of their children.
When I say somewhat that you've come into the lion's den, I wouldn't be as personally as sympathetic towards the institutional American church for what has been a real collapse, I think, in terms of the provision of Catholic education since the Second Vatican Council.
It's fallen down by about two-thirds, if you look to those figures that I gave earlier.
And like you, I would very much put that responsibility at the heart of the Institutional Catholic Church, the Catholic Bishops' Conference, and individual Catholics.
I think it's been, if that kind of decline had taken place in a listed company, shareholders would have thrown out the management and voted in new management a long, long time ago.
But that's the Catholic Church that we have, and it's not exactly, doesn't respond to market forces, doesn't respond to democratic impulse.
Anna Monica, very, very grateful for you to come on the show and help chew over this with us.
Where do people go to learn more about this issue?
Perhaps to support the Connecticut Catholic Conference and the great work that you are doing there.