When President Trump dramatically expanded a policy that prevents federal funding of foreign groups that provide or promote abortions-known as the "Mexico City Policy"- Christie said her doubts about him subsided.
As someone who grew up in Latin America, Christie saw Trump's policy as a victory against "ideological colonization" of groups that promote abortions in developing countries.
"I know that he [Trump] has surrounded himself with really good people," she said, "who really understand in a deeply philosophical way the issues of human dignity, marriage, and family."
Nina Shea, an expert in religious freedom at the Hudson Institute, also warned about Trump's candidacy in 2016. She recalled thinking that he did not have the foreign policy background required to promote religious freedom and defend persecuted religious minorities overseas.
A year later, Shea watched Vice President Mike Pence promise a summit on international Christian persecution that promoting religious freedom would be a priority for the administration.
The direct assurance was a departure from earlier administrations' seeming reluctance to promote religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy, Shea said. Since then, she noted that Trump's "speeches, initiatives, and directives" on religious freedom "have set the high water mark" for the issue.
Not all conservative Catholics who opposed Trump in 2016 support his re-election four years later.
Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review and a Catholic, wrote an Oct. 15 column he said was "a case for principled abstention."
Ponnuru wrote that in his view, Trump's "character flaws" are bad enough to "keep him from meeting the threshold conditions to be entrusted with the presidency."
The president is "deficient" in "judgment, honesty, and self-control," Ponnuru wrote, lamenting "a more degraded and less honest political culture, the cheapening of the president's word, and a decline in trust."
But in the same column, Ponnuru said he would also not be voting for Biden.
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Biden "says he now favors taxpayer funding of abortion. He may seek to enlarge the Supreme Court to make room for more justices who won't make room in American law for unborn children," Ponnuru wrote.
"If there's a persuasive case for recognizing abortion as a grave injustice and voting for Biden anyway, I haven't seen it," the columnist said, while explaining why he will abstain from voting for a presidential candidate.
George Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, helped in March 2016 to initiate a petition urging Catholics to support alternative candidates to Trump during the Republican primary.
Weigel told CNA that he is grateful the Trump administration has defended religious freedom "at home and internationally" and has been "firmly pro-life."
But the author lamented "continued coarsening of public debate, the deliberate polarization of opinion and sentiment, and the lack of any magnanimity toward opponents."
Weigel said his focus is on the future. The author said that in his view both Trump and Biden are "seriously flawed in numerous ways."