Kathy Hochul Is Not Catholic: She Publicly Left the Church in August 2022

The claim is that Governor Kathy Hochul is Catholic. The verdict is false — as of August 2022, she is not. Hochul publicly and explicitly renounced her Catholic affiliation in her own words, at a public event, on the record.

The decisive evidence is direct and unambiguous. According to Associated Press reporting from August 2022, Hochul told congregants at a Brooklyn church, 'I'm not Catholic anymore,' and stated that she now attends a non-Catholic Christian church. The New York Times corroborated this, noting it as a notable and deliberate departure from her earlier religious identity. This is not a matter of interpretation — it is a first-person declaration from the governor herself.

The steelman of the claim is real and worth taking seriously. Hochul was raised Catholic in Buffalo, attended Catholic schools, and identified publicly as a practicing Catholic for most of her life and political career. Her official biography, as noted on the governor's official website, references her Catholic upbringing and education. Older profiles, including coverage from the Buffalo News, described her faith in explicitly Catholic terms through at least the early 2010s. For decades, calling her Catholic would have been entirely accurate.

But that history is precisely where the claim breaks down. It conflates a past identity with a current one. Hochul's Catholic background is genuine — her departure from the Church is equally genuine. Citing her upbringing or decade-old biographical profiles without acknowledging her 2022 statement is cherry-picking outdated data and ignoring the most recent, most direct evidence available: her own words.

What is genuinely true: Hochul has deep Catholic roots, a Catholic education, and spent the majority of her public life as an identified Catholic. None of that is in dispute. What changed is her current affiliation. As of her August 2022 declaration, she self-identifies as a non-Catholic Christian — a distinction that matters both factually and in the context of how her religious views have been discussed publicly, particularly around policy debates.

The manipulation pattern here is one of the most common in biographical misinformation: freezing a person's identity at a convenient point in time and ignoring subsequent, documented changes. Watch for this whenever a claim about someone's religion, party affiliation, or stated position relies entirely on older sources while more recent, primary-source evidence exists. If the most current evidence is a person's own public statement, that statement takes precedence over any profile written years earlier.