(RNS) — There once was a time when it was only Catholic bishops in the business of denying organizations the right to call themselves Catholic. Now CatholicVote, an advocacy organization founded by the Trump administration’s current ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, is in that business too. Or at least they want to prevent a rival organization from using the word “Catholic” with the word “vote.”
With a July 22 cease and desist letter sent to Catholics Vote Common Good, attorneys for CatholicVote have asserted that “the CATHOLICVOTE name and CATHOLICVOTE Mark are valuable assets of CatholicVote” and have asked the organization to “cease using the name ‘Catholics Vote Common Good.’”
The cease and desist may reflect an effort on the part of CatholicVote to use its trademark to clear away competition for voter support. While Catholics Vote Common Good pushes for affordable healthcare and housing, living wages, welcoming and humane immigration, environmental protections and combating threats to democracy among other policies, CatholicVote pushes for pro-life legislation, religious liberty, traditional marriage and parental rights to challenge LGBTQ material in public schools and libraries.
And all this just 104 days before midterm elections take place.
Both CatholicVote and Catholics Vote Common Good are 501(c)(4) organizations, meaning they enjoy tax exempt status but donations are not tax deductible because they can engage in political lobbying.
Before we go further, there is something we should say about the law in a situation like this. U.S. law requires trademark holders to defend their trademarks if they want to keep them. After all, a trademark is meant to preserve the distinctiveness of a brand. When CatholicVote’s attorneys write that “it is the policy and practice of CatholicVote to defend these assets,” they’re announcing a perfectly ordinary and responsible intention. The question is not whether a trademark should be defended. The more interesting questions are about why CatholicVote is defending its brand this way at all, and what sequence of events led to this.
It is not exactly ordinary for 501(c)(4) advocacy organizations to trademark their names. Many 501(c)(4) organizations of more general types do trademark. Overwhelmingly, they are organizations in commercial settings. But my own search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s public database reveals that trademarking is less common among 501(c)(4)s that engage primarily in issue advocacy the way CatholicVote does. Only five of the top 11 spenders have bothered to register trademarks. Three of the biggest dark money spenders — Future Forward USA Action, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, and Working Families Organization — either have no trademarks or only dead ones.
This makes sense. Advocacy organizations do not have the same kind of business interest that commercial enterprises have. Brand confusion between issue advocates seems less worrying than brand confusion between toothpastes. Few people could tell the differences between toothpastes by taste. Anyone can tell the difference between CatholicVote and Catholics Vote Common Good simply by looking at them.
Timing is another reason why all of this is interesting. CatholicVote’s initial trademark application was denied on Nov. 24, 2024, (nine days after the presidential election, while Joe Biden still was president) with final action for the denial on March 14, 2025, (just 43 days into the second Trump administration). Later, the trademark was granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after reconsideration on Oct. 1, 2025, — eight months into the second Trump administration, also after the new administration began its campaign to reshape the civil service.
Not much later, we would learn about emerging patterns of cronyism within the U.S. Department of Commerce that is home to the Patent and Trademark Office. This administration believes in helping its friends and itself.
Among the exhibits submitted to the Trump administration’s Patent and Trademark Office supporting CatholicVote’s successful trademark reconsideration we find news articles with the headlines, “Trump nominates CatholicVote president and culture warrior as Holy See ambassador” and “CatholicVote organization endorses Trump in presidential primary.” Brian Burch was nominated to become U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See just less than one month after the original trademark application was denied. Announcing his nomination, Trump said on his social media site Truth Social that Burch “represented me well during the last Election, having garnered more Catholic votes than any Presidential Candidate in History!”
The cease and desist letter from CatholicVote’s attorneys offers an interesting turn of phrase: “CatholicVote has recently become aware that your organization is using the name and mark ‘Catholics Vote Common Good’ in connection with mobilizing Catholic voters to engage in political participation.” “Recently” is the interesting word there.
Catholics Vote Common Good has been engaged in advocacy as a 501(c)(4) since 2018. Both organizations vied quite publicly for Pennsylvania Catholic voters in 2024. Both organizations and their leaders were reported about frequently in tandem throughout the 2024 campaign. It is difficult to believe that CatholicVote, having Googled itself so many times to apply for its trademark, only became aware of Catholics Vote Common Good “recently,” especially if there is some reasonable concern that these organizations could be confused for one another.
That 2024 rivalry to win Catholic voters finally points us toward an unsettlingly persuasive explanation of what really could be at work here. Catholic voters remain a large segment of the overall electorate. The overwhelming movement of Catholic voters to Trump in 2024 was an important factor in his victory. Now, for a lame duck president facing what always was going to be a difficult midterm cycle, suppressing Catholic voices that might be raised against Republicans could be an important part of an overall midterm strategy. Let us not forget, after all — Vice President J.D. Vance has been deployed to blunt the words both of Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV. Tying Catholics Vote Common Good up in a trademark action is a much less fraught proposition that could yield more fruitful results.
Waiting for late July to send a cease and desist to Catholics Vote Common Good triggered 30-day and 60-day clocks, compelling the organization to weigh whether or not to abandon its own brand during critical weeks in the midterm cycle. This distraction can only disrupt their work whether or not CatholicVote makes good on its veiled threat to seek “remedies” in the federal courts. All this comes to the Republican Party’s advantage. That might have motivated CatholicVote to forget about Catholics Vote Common Good’s existence during the nine months between being awarded its trademark by the Trump administration and notifying Catholics Vote Common Good about its trademark.
None of this proves that the Trump administration did Brian Burch and CatholicVote a favor by granting the trademark or that there is an overall plan to frustrate Catholic voters and organizations who do not support Trump. There are only coincidences and appearances. But the trouble with having an administration that has been so bold in its cronyism and corruption is that people will tend to believe it is corrupt and helping its cronies.
The trouble with a Catholic advocacy organization so much allied with a cronying and corrupt administration is that the Roman Catholic Church teaches us something different. Catholics believe that politics is not meant to benefit cronies or corrupt interests. Pope Leo spelled out how the Catholic Church feels about this quite clearly in his recent encyclical — “Politics has the task of orientating … [society] … to the common good.”
One might observe that there is an even clearer, more direct way to say that most Catholic thing about politics: Catholics vote common good.
(Steven P. Millies is a political theorist and professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
