SACRAMENTO, California (LifeSiteNews) — “The Governor is a practicing Catholic, thanks.” The terse November 13 email to LifeSiteNews from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s communications director was surprising.
Two previous emails to Newsom’s press office, asking about his current religious affiliation and how often he attends Catholic Mass, had gone unanswered. I had recently criticized Newsom’s hard-left politics and expected Izzy Gardon would ignore the inquiry. He did sidestep the question about Mass attendance.
Most surprising was the fact that Newsom still calls himself a practicing Catholic at all. His record in public office and pattern of behavior in his personal life should disqualify him from claiming the label.
Newsom, a likely candidate for president in 2028, cites the Bible to portray his extreme policies as compassionate Christianity. In 2022 he rented billboards in conservative pro-life states to pledge California’s support in procuring abortions. Some billboards included Jesus Christ’s words in the Gospel of Mark: “Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than these.”
Newsom gave shout-outs to the books of Matthew, Isaiah, Luke and Proverbs during a press conference last month to criticize the federal government shutdown and the suspension of food stamp benefits. He also highlighted his experience as a student at the Jesuit-run Santa Clara University before ridiculing Republican lawmakers for “sitting there in their prayer breakfasts” with “an edited version of Donald Trump’s Bible.”
“Boy, they’re going to have a lot to reconcile at the pearly gates,” Newsom said at another press conference earlier in October, suggesting President Trump’s congressional allies may not get into heaven due to their support for his immigration enforcement policies.
Newsom’s executive actions, however, should make him more worried about his own salvation.
Ensuring California remains the most pro-abortion state in the nation, he signed a bill into law in September that permits doctors to prescribe abortion pills anonymously and allows the prescriptions to be filled without listing pharmacy information on the label. The goal is to evade federal restrictions and out-of-state lawsuits related to the dangerous drugs.
The nation’s most LGBT-friendly governor, Newsom has relentlessly pushed anti-parent measures concerning gender-confused minors and woke educational mandates for radical gender ideology and critical race theory. Public policy in California under Newsom’s watch directly contradicts the Catholic Church’s positions on abortion, euthanasia, same-sex “marriage” and transgenderism.
Soon after becoming mayor of San Francisco in 2004, Newsom grabbed the national spotlight by illegally issuing “marriage” licenses to same-sex couples. He provocatively chose the city’s historic Mission Dolores Basilica for a family Mass to celebrate his inauguration to a second term in office in 2008. He was by then divorced and had admitted to a sexual affair with a subordinate who was also the wife of his close friend and campaign manager.
READ: Newsom’s efforts to crush GOP representation could derail his presidential hopes
Newsom married Kimberly Guilfoyle during a high-profile wedding Mass at St. Ignatius Catholic Church in 2001 while still a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. They filed for divorce three years later.
He married his current wife, Jennifer Siebel, in a ceremony including horses at her parents’ ranch in Montana in 2008. The celebrant that time was a Bay Area clairvoyant with a special devotion to Quan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy and compassion. Newsom himself has officiated at same-sex “weddings” as an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church.
Newsom today appears to be a lapsed Catholic in an invalid marriage, with no desire to seek an annulment or return to the sacraments.
“You know, I don’t go to church that often,” Newsom said in a 2008 interview with The Santa Clara, his university alma mater’s student newspaper. “But I have an incredibly strong sense of faith that is perennial: day in and day out, every day of my life. And so I don’t feel the need to exercise that formally in a symbolic setting, a Church.”
Newsom has not publicly attended Mass in years, not even at Christmas or Easter. Presenting himself for Holy Communion would scandalize faithful Catholics and generate widespread publicity.
Then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was banned in May 2022 from receiving Communion in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, where Newsom currently lives, due to her adamant promotion of abortion. Newsom would likely be denied Communion for that reason and because he is still married to Guilfoyle in the eyes of the Church.
Yet the Vatican’s attitude toward open defiance of Church doctrine changed dramatically under the late Pope Francis. Pelosi was allowed to receive Communion during a papal Mass in June 2022 at St. Peter’s Basilica, where she was personally greeted by Francis.
Then-President Joe Biden, after a private meeting with Francis at the Vatican in 2021, reported that the pontiff told him he is a “good Catholic” who should continue receiving the sacrament.
Biden urged Congress to codify the right to an abortion in federal law and to pass the pro-LGBT Equality Act, neither of which occurred. His Department of Justice imprisoned nonviolent pro-life activists, investigated Catholics favoring the Traditional Latin Mass and ignored hundreds of attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic churches.
Francis approved non-liturgical “blessings” for same-sex couples the week before Christmas in 2023, a major step toward reversing the Church’s 2,000-year-old teaching that homosexual acts are intrinsically sinful.
Francis named Cardinal Robert McElroy the archbishop of Washington, D.C., a few months before the pontiff’s death last spring. A vocal proponent of “radical inclusion,” McElroy has called for the Church to “address the exclusion of divorced and remarried and L.G.B.T. Catholics, particularly on the issue of participation in the Eucharist.”
Pope Leo XIV has so far done nothing to clarify the doctrinal confusion caused by his Jesuit predecessor, who denigrated faithful believers for supposedly being intolerant and out of touch with the modern world. The Vatican continues to effectively condone Newsom’s heterodox brand of faith, suggesting the emergence of an inverted reality about what it means to be a Catholic in good standing.
“Will Gavin Newsom Renounce His Catholicism?” asked a 2023 headline in The American Spectator, part of the magazine’s Golden Boy Gavin series. “Newsom has done more than anyone in this century to cause American law to contradict the moral precepts of the Church,” the article stated.
If Newsom is a practicing Catholic, the term has officially become meaningless.
Robert Jenkins is a Catholic writer living in Sacramento, California.
