President-elect Donald Trump on Friday announced he’ll nominate west suburban Catholic school board leader Brian Burch as the next U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.
Burch, the co-founder and president of the conservative political action committee CatholicVote, is the president of the Seton Montessori School board in Villa Park and lives with his wife Sara and nine children in the western suburbs.
“He has received numerous awards, and demonstrated exceptional leadership, helping build one of the largest Catholic advocacy groups in the Country,” Trump said in a statement. “He represented me well during the last Election, having garnered more Catholic votes than any Presidential Candidate in History!”
In a social media post, Burch said he was “committed to working with leaders inside the Vatican and the new Administration to promote the dignity of all people and the common good. I look forward to the confirmation process and the opportunity to continue to serve my country and the Church.”
Burch couldn’t immediately be reached for direct comment.
His organization has encouraged parents to scour local library shelves for Pride Month displays and preemptively check out titles “pushing eroticism and trans ideology” to keep them away from children.
CatholicVote’s “Hide the Pride” campaign targeted up to 100 libraries nationwide, Burch told the Sun-Times in June 2022.
“We’ve urged parents to exercise responsibility in their community to remove what we believe to be inappropriate books from these displays, so kids’ innocence is protected,” Burch said then. “These books provoke conversations best reserved for families, at the time and place and manner of the parents’ choosing — not libraries.”
The CatholicVote political action committee, which is based in Madison, Wisconsin, raised $1.7 million in support of Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.
Joe Donnelly, President Joe Biden’s most recent ambassador to the Vatican — a post formally known as ambassador to the Holy See — stepped down in July. Laura Hochla has served in Donnelly’s place as chargé d’affaires since then.