Pope Francis Invited Anthony Fauci to the Vatican. MAGA Wants to Throw Him in Jail.
Fauci opened the Vatican’s 2021 “Unite to Prevent and Unite to Cure” summit, and Francis delivered its closing address. A contempt vote lands next week — and seventeen state attorneys general are hunting for a charge.
Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday morning and declined to answer Kentucky GOP Senator Rand Paul’s questions.
“Although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government,” the 85-year-old physician said, “under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment.”
He repeated some version of that sentence, by Fortune’s count, more than one hundred times.
The hearing capped a weekend spectacle. Paul subpoenaed Fauci and released roughly 1,100 pages of his private pandemic diary — typewritten pages Fauci kept from December 2019 through December 2022 — pages the committee obtained when Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s health department produced them, arguing that a man’s diary belongs to the government if he typed it on a federal computer.
Paul opened the proceedings by promising “the capstone to Anthony Fauci’s 40 years of abuse of power at NIH.” A committee vote to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress is expected next week.
Florida’s attorney general announced a state investigation within hours of the hearing, joining the seventeen state attorneys general who have spent a year and a half — Joe Biden’s preemptive pardon notwithstanding — hunting for an invisible legal theory that would somehow allow them to prosecute a federal official for federal decisions.
In short, they are trying to throw this man in prison.
Harvey Levin has spent thirty years reporting on celebrity misbehavior at TMZ without much visible ideological attachment. He watched Wednesday’s hearing and called it “one of the most heartbreaking things I have seen in government in my lifetime.” “We are in a Senator Joseph McCarthy climate,” Levin said, describing Fauci as an “amazing public servant” and Paul’s inquiry as a witch hunt.
When TMZ’s founder is the one reminding the United States Senate about McCarthyism, something has fallen apart in American public life.
Second-guessing the people who managed the pandemic is legitimate, and Monday morning quarterbacks are a permanent feature of every public crisis — the general who fought the last war, the coach who should have run the ball, the columnist who knew all along. Fauci got things wrong. So did everyone else charged with steering a country through a novel airborne virus, because the evidence changed weekly and the decisions could not wait for it.
Oversight examines those judgments and learns from them. This has become something else entirely: a prosecution in search of a crime, aimed at a man who spent 54 years at the National Institutes of Health and advised seven presidents of both parties.
The American people can tell the difference. In Annenberg Public Policy Center polling from last August, 57 percent of Americans expressed confidence in Fauci to provide trustworthy information on public health. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the sitting health secretary, the man whose department handed over the diary — stood at 39 percent. The gap held when Annenberg asked again this past winter. The country trusts the defendant far more than it trusts the prosecution.
Now consider who the loudest voices for prosecution have been. Media Matters documented last year that a Florida telemedicine company called All Family Pharmacy paid a roster of right-wing hosts — Laura Ingraham, Dan Bongino, Donald Trump Jr., Matt Gaetz — to read advertisements for mail-order ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, buy one bottle, get one free. Pierre Kory, who told the Senate in 2020 that ivermectin was a “miracle drug,” charges as much as $1,650 for a long-COVID consultation, and his own published research on the drug was retracted over flawed data.
This is the multi-level-marketing wing of American medicine — affiliate codes, miracle cures, supplements sold on grievance — and it has captured the machinery of federal public health. The men who sold their audiences dewormer want to imprison the doctor who helped bring actual cures into the world.
So let me tell you about that doctor, because his biography is a Catholic story from its first page.
Fauci was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where his father, a Columbia-trained pharmacist, ran the family drugstore — Fauci Pharmacy, in nearby Dyker Heights — with the family living upstairs. His mother and sister worked the register while Anthony delivered prescriptions on his bicycle. He was educated at Our Lady of Guadalupe grammar school, won a seat at Regis High School — the tuition-free Jesuit academy in Manhattan — where he studied four years of Latin and three of Greek, and went on to the College of the Holy Cross for a classics degree on a premedical track. A Jesuit education like that leaves fingerprints.
He has never stopped saying so himself. “I credit very much the Jesuit training in precision of thought and economy of expression,” Fauci has said of his ability to explain frightening science to frightened people. When Georgetown hired him in 2023, he reached back to the start of it all: “The Jesuit call to serve others was again among the key factors that led me to start my career as a physician-scientist by joining the NIH in 1968.”
Fauci no longer practices the faith, and he is honest about that too. “I identify myself as a Catholic,” he told the BBC. “I was raised, I was baptized, I was confirmed, I was married in the Church.” The Church may wish he still came to Mass on Sunday. What its schools formed in him is beyond argument.
That formation shows up in the record. When AIDS began killing gay men in the early 1980s and most of official Washington looked away, Fauci turned his laboratory and then his institute toward the disease. The playwright Larry Kramer called him “a murderer” and “an incompetent idiot” in print, and Fauci responded by picking up the phone — “I thought, ‘This guy, I need to reach out to him.’ So I did, and we started talking.”
He brought ACT UP’s activists inside the government’s clinical-trial system, and in 1989 he championed the “parallel track” that let dying patients take experimental drugs like ddI years ahead of formal approval — the genuine article of the “medical freedom” his persecutors now campaign on.
Of Kramer, Fauci later said: “It was an extraordinary 33-year relationship. We loved each other.” Two decades after those years in the trenches, he helped George W. Bush design PEPFAR, the American AIDS-relief program that Fauci says “has saved 25 million lives” over two decades of bipartisan budgets.
The Vatican noticed the through-line even if the Senate cannot. In May 2021, Fauci opened the Vatican’s global health conference, “Unite to Prevent and Unite to Cure,” a gathering that Pope Francis closed personally — and Fauci used the moment to talk about reaching vaccine-hesitant believers through their own pastors rather than through “me with a suit.” Pope Leo has carried that witness forward, calling health care a moral imperative for every nation on earth.
Levin’s McCarthy comparison cuts deeper in this community than he may realize, because Joseph McCarthy was one of ours — a Catholic senator whom much of Catholic America adored. The Catholics remembered well from those years are the ones who broke with him while it still cost something.
Bishop Bernard Sheil of Chicago stood before a United Auto Workers education conference in 1954 and condemned McCarthy and his methods while the senator’s numbers still ran high — and donors abandoned the bishop’s projects for it. That June, the Army’s counsel Joseph Welch asked the question that history keeps on file: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” The Senate censured McCarthy in December, and the men who rode his crusade spent the rest of their lives explaining what they had done.
Which brings me to the men running this one. Jesus tells the crowd in Matthew’s Gospel that “the measure you give will be the measure you get.” Rand Paul and the attorneys general now building machinery to criminalize scientific judgment should consider whose hands will operate that machinery next, because what goes around in American politics reliably comes back around, and the ledger of a deeper Judge stays open long after the committee gavels out. Persecutors always imagine themselves permanent. None have ever been.
This is why I am asking Catholics to come to Anthony Fauci’s defense, publicly and by name. Every crucifixion has a crowd, and the crowd’s preferred posture is silence — a silence that costs us more than we ever admit.
The Church that gave Fauci his precision of thought owes him the use of its voice while men who sell dewormer by mail measure him for a cell.
Pope Leo teaches that Christians have no enemies, only brothers and sisters, and that teaching binds us here. Fauci is a son of our schools, a servant of the sick, and right now, a test of our nerve.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Anthony Fauci — and with every public servant dragged before the cameras for the offense of doing a hard job in an impossible hour.
The McCarthyite machinery being rebuilt in Washington will not stop with one 85-year-old doctor, and it will never be dismantled by people who wait quietly to see whom it summons next.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something sturdier than rage and snake oil.
They want the Church’s social teaching applied to the world as it actually is — a world where human dignity gets measured against subpoenas, profit margins, and prime-time ad reads.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill defending human dignity against show trials and sham medicine — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Thank you Christopher. We all need to not just cover our noses when the stench of McCarthyism rises. Time to speak up. Thank you for doing so.
What the GOP did was disgraceful