The Department of Homeland Security has brought on as cultural outreach director a Catholic theologian who has criticized the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for their defense of immigrant rights.
Chad Pecknold is a longtime theology professor at Catholic University who has drawn attention in recent years as a conservative commentator. Pecknold, like Vice President JD Vance, has worked to offer religious — specifically Catholic — arguments for President Donald Trump’s policies on topics including immigration enforcement and the Iran war at a time when many U.S. bishops and Pope Leo XIV have been critical.
Pecknold did not respond to a request for comment about his appointment. The DHS media office released a brief statement from him saying he is “excited to confirm I’ve joined the Trump Administration as the Principal Director for Cultural Outreach at the Department of Homeland Security. It is truly an honor to serve my country in this capacity.”
DHS did not immediately respond to questions about the position, which appears to be newly created.
Pecknold is among the best-known U.S. Catholic figures in a conservative movement called “post-liberalism,” which argues that the government should take a stronger role in promoting traditional morality and a shared national identity. He praised former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, who while in office said he was defending Europe’s White Christian identity from Muslim immigration.
Vance, who like Pecknold converted to Catholicism, also has described himself as part of the post-liberal right.
Critics say post-liberalism has reactionary or authoritarian leanings. James Patterson, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee who has written about post-liberalism and Catholicism, said “there is a very big gap” between Pecknold’s interpretation of Catholic teaching on immigration and the positions of Pope Leo and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is the organizing body of American bishops.
Patterson predicted that Pecknold will be “interpreting the stated position of the papacy as conservatively as possible” in his job at DHS, trying “to make the position of the administration look more consistent with the church line.”
Because Pecknold teaches at Catholic University, which was founded by the U.S. bishops and is thus seen as “officially” aligned with the church, Patterson said, Pecknold’s new perch “is almost a counter balance to the pope.”
The university did not immediately return a call for comment Friday on Pecknold’s appointment.
Like Vance, Pecknold was once a strong Trump critic. In 2016 he and other conservatives signedan “Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics” that said Trump was “unfit” for the presidency and that “his campaign has already driven our politics down to new levels of vulgarity. His appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility.”
Another person who signed that document was Brian Burch, who during Trump’s second term is serving as Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican.
The letter praised Trump for talking about the “breakdown in immigration law,” but said Catholics should support other candidates “who do not exhibit his vulgarity, oafishness, shocking ignorance, and — we do not hesitate to use the word — demagoguery.”
Pecknold has since became more publicly aligned with the Trump administration, including on immigration. In a June 2025 letter, Catholic bishops and other clergy criticized Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill budget legislation, saying it would fund “mass deportation” and separate families. Pecknold told the Catholic news agency EWTN that the signers were being partisan.
Earlier this year Pecknold again criticized the U.S. bishops, this time for their activism against Trump’s proposed ban on birthright citizenship. The bishops filed a brief in court against the ban, which would have denied citizenship to children born on U.S. soil without a U.S. citizen parent. The ban was struck down by the Supreme Court in June.
“Unrestricted and unconditional birthright citizenship might have been a prudential win when America was drawing on the deposit of Christian Europe in the early 20th century. But today we must rethink all those assumptions anew,” Pecknold wrote. “Why shouldn’t citizenship have something to do with the moral and religious particularities of our country?”
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