NEW YORK - Earlier this year, President Trump pushed for stimulus funds to help Catholic and other non-public schools. Thursday, he asked them to return the favor.

“It was my great honor to help the Catholic Church with its schools. They needed hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide, and I got it for them. Nobody else. I got it for them,” Trump said. “I hope you remember that on November 3rd.”

What You Need To Know

  • Al Smith Dinner usually brings together presidential candidates for a good-natured roast

  • This year’s event went virtual, with both candidates providing pre-recorded remarks

  • Trump asked for a “really big” Republican win, alleging anti-Catholic bias among Democrats

  • Democrat Joe Biden highlighted his Catholic faith

Trump’s comments came in pre-recorded remarks delivered during Thursday’s annual Alfred E. Smith Dinner, which traditionally brings the presidential candidates together every four years for a roast at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The pandemic forced the event to go virtual this year.

The format made it impossible for the candidates to draw audience laughs, so Trump used the opportunity to make a naked appeal for the Catholic vote – even though the New York Archdiocese bills the event as “one of our culture’s last bastions of non-partisan unity.” 

Trump pointed to his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Catholic, to the Supreme Court, and suggested she was the victim of anti-Catholic bigotry.

“It predominates in the Democrat Party, and we must do something immediately about it, like a Republican win,” Trump said. “And let’s make it a really big one.”

Democrat Joe Biden, meanwhile, highlighted his Catholic faith during his remarks, and described his meetings with Pope Francis.

“We all live in an amazing country, where an Irish-Catholic kid like me from Scranton, Pennsylvania, would one day befriend a Jesuit Pope,” he said.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan said the event raised $5 million for Catholic charities. 

In a telling moment following Trump’s remarks, he seemed to allude to the President’s repeated failure to promise a peaceful transfer of power in the event of a Biden victory.

Alfred E. Smith, who was governor of New York and the first Catholic to become a major-party presidential nominee, was known as the Happy Warrior, Dolan noted.

“I also dare remind them that Al Smith was a happy warrior,” Dolan said, “but he was never a sore loser.”