Frankman says he is fighting for both spiritual and political renewal in our nation.
By Catholics for Catholics
John Frankman announced Tuesday night that he is entering the race for Florida’s 1st Congressional District. Frankman is a convert to Catholicism and served in the US Army until being forced out due to his refusal to take the COVID vaccine.
In an exclusive interview with Catholics For Catholics, Frankman said he always believed in God and prayed to Him on a daily basis. As a child, he was taken to a variety of churches of different denominations by his parents, and he was baptized in an Episcopalian church at age 13, but still had questions about where he really belonged. When Frankman was 15 years old, he attended a Catholic school and particularly loved what his religion teacher taught in class, saying it “just made sense to me.” He started walking to a nearby Catholic parish, and realized that “of all the churches that I’d been to, there was some spiritual aspect to the Mass that I hadn’t experienced anywhere else.”
After graduating from Wheaton College (Illinois), Frankman entered a Catholic seminary and spent four years studying for the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. and the Military Archdiocese, intending to become a chaplain, before discerning that God had other plans for him.
Frankman then entered active duty in the US Army as an Infantry Officer and completed a number of courses including Airborne School, Ranger School, the Special Forces Qualification Course, SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape), and the Military Free Fall Course. According to his campaign website, of all of Frankman’s military accomplishments, “he considers refusing the immoral and illegal COVID vax his proudest moment.”
I just announced I’m running for Congress in Florida’s 1st District. Even with a GOP majority, DC is broken and nothing is getting done.#FL01 is one of the most conservative districts in America — and it deserves a fighter, not a placeholder.
— John Frankman (@JohnFrankmanFL) January 14, 2026
Let’s take our country back! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/nLnCsGJZNp
Indeed, as of 2023, Frankman was a Captain in the US Army when he was forced out due to his refusal to get the COVID shot. Knowing that the fetal cells used in the research and development of the vaccine had to have come from babies whose kidneys had already developed, he would not take the vaccine. “I thought, I just can’t be involved in this evil for a disease that I have a 99.99% chance of surviving,” he said.
“As a Green Beret, we learn how psychological operations are used to overthrow another country, and the fact that we didn’t see that psychological operations were being used within our own country to force this mandate and have more government control was crazy to me.”
Frankman is still seeking to hold military leaders accountable for the disastrous effects of the COVID vaccine mandate, and he is one of the original 231 signatories of the Declaration of Military Accountability (DMA), which specifically names several military leaders for breaking the law and suppressing the free exercise of religion in enforcing the mandate. General Mark Milley, who served the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023, is the first leader named.
Wanting to round out the education he received in the seminary, Frankman went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Systematic Theology from Mount St. Mary’s and completed his thesis on St. Thomas of Aquinas under the direction of Dr. Michael Hahn, son of Catholic convert and apologist Dr. Scott Hahn.
Frankman says he is fighting for both spiritual and political renewal in our nation: “Jesus Christ talks about the two swords – that there’s the spiritual sword and then there’s a temporal sword, and we need to be building temporal power to enact laws in accordance with the natural law.”
“The natural law is a reflection of how God rules and orders the universe,” Frankman continued. “You don’t put sand into a gas tank in the car and wonder why it doesn’t work. So, legislatively, we need to be enacting and enforcing laws in accordance with natural law.” Once we do this, we will start to flourish.
“Everybody says that politics is downstream from culture,” Frankman said. “My goal as a congressman and what I would love to do would be to be a beacon of light and to bring culture up to politics.”
He describes patriotism as a virtue and connects it to the Catholic teaching on subsidiarity, emphasizing that first and foremost, our responsibility is to our own people, and only if we are able to properly take care of our own country will we actually be able to help other countries if needed.
Frankman is very concerned about addressing the fraud happening in our nation and believes the perpetrators need jail time, not just fines. He wants to prioritize tackling our country’s $38 trillion in debt, saying that we’re effectively robbing our children in the future.
St. Ignatius of Loyola has been a great inspiration to Frankman. After leaving the military, he went on an 8-day Ignatian retreat, wondering if he should re-enter the priesthood. Through prayer and discernment, he felt God calling him to politics, and on July 31, 2023, St. Ignatius of Loyola’s feast day, his first op-ed in “The Floridian” was published and he was “thrust providentially into the public sphere.”
Save and Share This Catholic Patriotic Minute!
