“Here before me lies a baby killed by abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy,” Father Frank Pavone said as he gestured to the blackened body of a terminated fetus, laid out between two lit candles on what appeared to be an altar.
“Today, we are going to pray with this baby, and we are going to let this baby’s body bear witness to our nation as we begin the process to elect our next president,” he continued, during a 45-minute livestreamed sermon recorded in a room Pavone often uses as a chapel.
It was only two days until the 2016 election, and Pavone, working from his Priests for Life organization’s Staten Island headquarters, was doing everything he could to put abortion in the forefront of voters’ minds. In that last week, he delivered daily sermons, made phone calls, and posted on social media with a simple message: Hillary Clinton supports abortion. Donald Trump does not. With this final video, he left voters of conscience with one choice.
“Don’t pretend that one isn’t better than the other: You have the opportunity here to make a real difference for children just like this,” he said as he wiggled the sheet supporting the tiny corpse.
In a Facebook post accompanying the video, Pavone reiterated that point: “Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform says yes, let the child-killing continue (and you pay for it); Donald Trump and the Republican platform says no, the child should be protected.”
The video generated controversy within the Catholic Church and among anti-abortion activists. The Archdiocese of New York denounced it, with spokesman Ed Mechmann calling Pavone’s use of the aborted fetus “absolutely appalling.” Pavone’s own bishop, Patrick Zurek of Amarillo, Texas, condemned the video and, distancing himself from Priests for Life, said that the diocese was “opening an investigation about all these matters.” Pavone was also pilloried in the press for placing the fetus on an altar, even by those who would normally count themselves among his allies.
Since that incident, Pavone’s legitimacy in the Catholic Church as an anti-abortion political advocate has been an open question. Pavone, 61, said that he is under no “restrictions,” nor has he received any “penalties” either for his ministry or his advocacy work — and that Zurek’s threat of an “investigation” into his 2016 video was hollow. Pavone also said that he is pending transfer out of the Diocese of Amarillo, telling the Washington Examiner that he asked for an intervention from the Vatican after Zurek refused to give him “the blessing” for his anti-abortion work. The Diocese of Amarillo could not be reached for comment.
While Pavone, who has written op-eds for the Washington Examiner, has become more polarizing among Catholic leadership, since 2016, he has cemented his position as one of President Trump’s top surrogates to Catholic and anti-abortion voters. The priest serves on the president’s Catholics for Trump campaign coalition, alongside former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp, and longtime Republican operative Mary Matalin.
Pavone co-hosted the coalition’s launch event in early April, where he spoke highly of Trump’s “Catholic values,” which include the president’s position on abortion, his free market economic planks, and the protection of United States borders from “criminal aliens.”
“This coalition is going to be truly a movement when Catholics rise up and say, ‘Hey, look, everything the church has been saying, we’re seeing it unfold before our eyes,'” Pavone said. “Not like magic but with a strong, united effort under this president.”
A Trump victory is especially important in 2020, Pavone said, when the alternative is former Vice President Joe Biden, whom Pavone has often criticized as not holding fast to Catholic moral teaching.
Pavone’s support for Trump runs deep. And it’s not just because Pavone enjoys the blunt oratory of a fellow New Yorker, though he does. Trump’s ascendancy, Pavone says, marks a major shift in the degree of seriousness to which politicians must address abortion and other issues valued by religious voters. For this reason, the priest keeps a portrait of Trump in his office: a reminder that if he had not been elected in 2016, Priests for Life, as well as many other anti-abortion groups, “wouldn’t be where we are today.”
And for similar reasons, the priest acts as the campaign’s unofficial chaplain, often attending events, all moved online because of the coronavirus pandemic, to lead the people working to reelect the president in prayer. Faith, Pavone said, is a language that the majority of people in America understand, and Trump is wise to wield it in his campaign.
“There is a significant portion of the electorate that is moved by it because that is where they are at in their own lives,” Pavone said. “To miss it is a big mistake.”
And it’s the “big mistake” that Pavone has been combating for most of his career, both as a priest and an advocate. Ordained in 1988, Pavone took control of Priests for Life in 1993. By that point, he had already become a familiar face on the circuit of activists pushing their causes in both chambers of Congress on Capitol Hill. He frequently made statements on abortion, stem cell research, and euthanasia, often castigating politicians who identified as Catholic for not voting according to their church’s teaching.
In 1998, Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade, announced that she was becoming Catholic and credited Pavone for her conversion. Already an anti-abortion activist, McCorvey said that she felt that God, through Pavone, was calling her to continue her work in the church “Jesus Christ himself founded.” It was a watershed moment for Pavone, whose profile within the anti-abortion movement was already rising through his work in the Vatican under Pope John Paul II and his TV series broadcast on the Catholic Eternal Word Television Network.
As he became more politically prominent, Pavone found himself more consistently backing Republican candidates and supporting the Republican Party. In the 2000 elections, Pavone announced an ad campaign to target Catholic candidates who “don’t come around to the church’s teaching.” That same year, after meeting then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Pavone threw his support behind Bush, declaring that the candidate’s anti-abortion positions were “a breath of fresh air for all of us who have suffered through the Clinton/Gore era.”
After Bush was elected, Pavone became even more firmly entrenched in the Republican Party. He spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention, saying that on abortion, he was a “single-issue” voter and that Bush had won him over on that issue. As the campaign progressed, Pavone also went on the attack against Democratic candidate John Kerry, who had become the subject of ecclesiastical controversy when Cardinal Raymond Burke, a prominent conservative in the church, said that he would deny Kerry communion at mass because of his positions on abortion. Pavone pushed the anti-Kerry animus a step further, saying on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor that he believed it to be “a sin” to vote for Kerry.
Yet Pavone at the time was still careful to assure people that while a political priest, already an uncommon position for a member of the American clergy, his work was not committed to one party.
“If, in the end, our educational activity benefits one candidate or party more than another, that’s not because we’re partisan,” he said of Priests for Life in 2006. “That’s because the candidate or party in question has taken a particular position. That’s independent of our duty to stand up for what is right.”
But at the same time, Pavone’s high-profile and often combative rhetoric put him in a tenuous position with church authorities. After transferring in 2005 to the Diocese of Amarillo to found an anti-abortion religious order, the Missionaries of the Gospel of Life, Pavone clashed with then-Bishop John Yanta — and the order was shut down in 2007.
Zurek, Yanta’s successor, raised the stakes of the conflict, suspending Pavone in 2011 from traveling outside the diocese. Zurek cited “deep concerns” over Pavone’s handling of the budget of Priests for Life, which reportedly spent less than 63% of its funds on its programs between 2006 and 2008. Zurek also complained that Pavone’s rhetoric, which often criticized bishops for not being outspoken enough on abortion, coupled with his refusal for diocesan oversight, was an “incorrigible defiance of my legitimate authority as his bishop.”
Pavone fought back, and, after a series of intrachurch disputes, in 2012 was granted permission to minister from the Priests for Life headquarters in Staten Island, where he would answer to Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York City. But that arrangement also ended in acrimony when Pavone refused to allow Dolan to review Priests for Life’s finances. Dolan said in a 2014 letter to U.S. bishops that Pavone’s lack of cooperation made him “want nothing further to do with the organization.”
Despite the controversy, Pavone has retained control of Priests for Life, and in the Trump presidency, has risen to a resurgent prominence in the anti-abortion movement. When reflecting how he got there, Pavone said that he sees his struggles with his bishops as analogous to the way that many people spoke out against their leaders in the years leading up to Trump’s election.
“People elected this man, a totally unconventional candidate, because they were sick and tired of politicians speaking and not saying anything, always trying to mollify everybody and compromise,” he said. “They didn’t say what the American people were really thinking and feeling. And they didn’t fight for the stuff they had to fight for.”
In the same way, Pavone said, Catholics are sick of “milquetoast” bishops, not only because of the recent sexual abuse scandals but because they hesitate from frequently jumping into the political fray with church teaching, especially on abortion.
“Just as people are sick and tired of conventional and institutional politicians, I think a lot of Catholics are sick and tired of the institutional bishops and their attitude of political correctness,” Pavone said. “That’s a lot of what I end up having to struggle against.”
And that struggle, Pavone said, often consists of convincing priests to condemn the Democratic Party and its candidates for the positions it takes on abortion, while pointing out that the Republican Party, especially Trump, opposes abortion.
“There are some who will say, ‘Oh, he’s endorsing Republican candidates.’” Pavone said. “Meanwhile, all I am doing is articulating a moral teaching.”
The priest finds it frustrating that so few members of the Catholic clergy are as outspoken as he is as the election draws near. And, to make a point, he’s willing to push his the bounds of his advocacy right to the moment that ignited so much controversy in 2016 — only this time, Pavone said, he would place the aborted fetus in an open casket and on a table that could not be mistaken for an altar.
It’s important to be respectful to the victims of abortion, he added, but people will not be moved to make political changes on the issue unless they see its gruesome effects.
“Nothing garners more response, attention, and reaction,” he said, “than when we actually show pictures of the baby that’s been aborted, or in this case, the actual body of such a baby.”
