The American episcopacy’s most effective evangelist is under fire. I speak of Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota. So prolific and well known is he that any attempt on my part to describe the many ways he has impacted the American Church seems silly. Suffice it to say, nobody has done more (or come particularly close to doing more) to revive the reputation of the Catholic Church in the United States as a purveyor of truth and beauty in the aftermath of its near self-destruction at the hands of bad priests and clueless bishops surrounding the sexual abuse of children. He has done so by combining theological acumen, cultural sensitivity, and a mastery of contemporary media. 

I have benefited from Barron’s movie reviews and other reflections upon the culture, but it is Barron the theologian whom I know best. His book The Priority of Christ is, I believe, among the most significant books written by an American Catholic in the twenty-first century. Recently, I learned a lot more about his various influences from the excellent monograph by Matthew Levering, The Theology of Robert Barron. (It never occurred to me to connect Barron and Andrew Greeley!) From Levering, I also came to see that one of the reasons I resonate with Barron’s theology is that his journey is like my own. He was raised in the “beige Catholicism” of the 1970s, discovered the intellectual potencies of his ancestral faith through the writings of post-conciliar theologians such as Karl Rahner and David Tracy, and, over time, came to reject the domestication of divine revelation in their systems. The key to Barron’s power as an evangelist is the epistemic sovereignty he gives to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. It colors everything he and his media company, Word on Fire, produce.

Yet, for all his troubles, this indefatigable preacher and teacher has become the target of an increasing number of attacks. Of course, criticism is the price of influence. Barron has taken strong positions on matters Catholic. He has garnered, accordingly, the expected objections from progressives who judge his depictions of 1970s Catholicism as overly negative. Comparably, some more traditional Catholics find him insufficiently Thomistic or too eager for the salvation of all—like his favorite theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Most of the nasty energy, however, concerns his involvement in the political sphere. Or, more precisely, his noticeable failure to hold the politics of the majority of Church-going Catholics in disdain. Over the past few years, Bishop Barron has appeared on the podcasts of Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and even Tucker Carlson. He also preached movingly about the death of Charlie Kirk (and others) to a group of lawmakers. He agreed to serve on President Trump’s Commission on Religious Freedom. Finally, he attended Trump’s last State of the Union as a guest of a Republican congressman, and had some nice things to say about the experience.

In response, the National Catholic Reporter has clearly decided that denigrating the bishop brings joy to its readers and garners clicks on social media. Here they take Bishop Barron to task for not joining other prelates in criticizing Trump before his second term began. The strong implication is that he had been seduced by power. Here, Barron’s Word on Fire is condemned for a sympathetic engagement with Vice President JD Vance’s use of the ordo amoris to discuss the moral complexity of immigration policy. Here, the problem is Barron reminding his readers of the twentieth-century butcher’s bill brought by the “warmth of collectivism” Mayor Mamdani promised New Yorkers in his inaugural speech. The author of the last is Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for NCR and a particularly sharp opponent of Barron, whom he calls “an apparatchik.” My favorite is a frame-by-frame refutation of Barron’s impressions of attending the State of the Union. The analyst relates a passage only to “devastate” it with a Democratic talking point. 

More serious, I suspect, is the attack in another liberal Catholic magazine, Commonweal. The instrument is the theologian Massimo Faggioli, an Italian ex-pat who seems to have decided to make a career as a leftward critic of American culture and the American Church. A throwback of sorts, he penned a book-length panegyric to the newly elected forty-sixth president, Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States. It should not surprise, therefore, that his objections to Bishop Barron are partisan in nature. In an incendiary article for the run-up to the 2024 election titled “Will Trumpism Spare Catholicism?,” Faggioli posited an “axis” of Catholic leaders and the Trump administration. Although his ire was directed mostly at the forcibly retired Bishop Strickland, he included Barron’s Word on Fire. After a threat of litigation, the offending passage was removed and replaced with this: “With the author’s permission, the editors have removed a paragraph that originally appeared here because Bishop Robert Barron’s media ministry, Word on Fire, informed us that they consider it slander for them to be in any way associated with Donald Trump or Trumpism.” Pretty nasty.

For those interested in reading a spirited defense of Barron, the inimitable Larry Chapp has provided one. Chapp, who informs us that he does not “like Donald Trump and would never vote for him,” rightly points out that Faggioli never defines the “Trumpism” he so fears, nor does he exhibit any intellectual curiosity as to why so many practicing Catholics supported him over either Biden or Kamala Harris. In considering the threatened lawsuit by Word on Fire, Chapp concludes: “Good on Word on Fire for saying the bullies must either fight or get off of the school yard. And shame on Commonweal for fueling the false narrative of a surging movement of backwardist American Catholic deplorables and their alleged ‘axis’ with Trump.”

More recently, a new player has emerged intent on inflicting even greater damage on Bishop Barron’s reputation. His name is Christopher Hale, a Democratic politician from Tennessee and a Substacker of the misleadingly named “Letters from Leo.” I hesitate to draw any attention to this author because I find him so irresponsible. I won’t give a link to his “Bishop Barron Goes Full MAGA: A Silence and a Scandal Behind His Rightward Shift.” It is for subscribers and . . . gross. That said, it offers a prime example of a concerning trend. Needless to say, he repeats the common criticism that Barron speaks up on the wrong things and stays silent when he should not. In other words, he should stay silent on issues that concern politically conservative Catholics and speak out on issues of concern to politically progressive Catholics. For example, he criticizes the bishop for needlessly “amplifying” the problem of fraud in Minnesota and weighing in on the uprisings in Iran when he should have been trashing the Trump administration for its support of genocide in Gaza and the dangers of ICE. Barron, he charges, “gets fired up about the latest minutiae in the never-ending culture war” but never finds time to challenge the rise of authoritarianism. 

All this is quite typical, but Hale goes further by speculating on two possible motives for Barron's choice of topics. The first is that the once even-handed commentator on Catholic affairs has grown bitter at being passed over for plum diocesan assignments. Seeing that Pope Leo XIV favors bishops who focus on social justice, Barron has “thrown in the towel on trying to please the Vatican…. and discovered that dunking on socialists and ‘woke’ progressives earns him instant hero status in MAGA-world.” The other is that Barron’s rightward turn is a “defensive maneuver” in anticipation of a scandal yet to be revealed. This is a form of character assassination and clearly inappropriate in Catholic discourse.

My purpose here is not so much to defend the good bishop from the charges coming from The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, and Substack. For one thing, he needs no defense and is supremely capable of providing one whenever he chooses. Rather, my aim is to consider what this uptick in attacks says about our present moment with respect to the intersection of politics and Church leadership.

Critics of Barron invariably contrast him with other American prelates who have made public statements against the White House, such as Blase Cardinal Cupich, Joseph Cardinal Tobin, or Archbishop Timothy Broglio. Broglio, who oversees U.S. Catholic military chaplains, said in an interview with a British journalist that it could be “morally acceptable” for soldiers to disobey an order to invade Greenland. Earlier, Broglio issued a statement questioning the legality of the Trump administration’s military-style attacks on purported Venezuelan drug boats. Cupich, for his part, released a video in October on “Standing with Immigrants.” A few days ago, Cupich joined with Cardinal Tobin of Newark and Cardinal McElroy of Washington DC issued a broadside on the morality of Trump’s foreign policy in Venezuela, Ukraine, and Greenland. Finally, on January 26, Tobin called upon Congress to defund ICE, calling it “lawless” and a “machinery of death” that has “slaughtered” protestors. 

These prelates surely have a right to express their views, and Catholics ought to take seriously what they say, especially those who tend to support the Trump administration. As I said in a previous newsletter, it is appropriate for Catholic leaders to call out the government when they believe it is guilty of injustice. This is particularly the case when policies unjustly limit the ability of the Church to carry out its divine mission or involve clear violations of Catholic Social Teaching. Some are better than others, but all are worthy of our attention.

That said, when the issue is at the level of policy or relates to a particular event in the news, I would suggest that our bishops keep in mind that they are operating in a new environment powered by social media. Catholics who are likely to read to their statements or see their posts on X or YouTube have seen other such posts on the very same topic. While those who get their news from social media are most likely less informed than those who continue to read newspapers or magazines, they certainly get more commentary. Indeed, it is very difficult to find the news of the day apart from a particular ideological slant. More and more people learn about the events through their preferred podcaster. One could debate, of course, whether this is good or bad or wax nostalgic for the days of “objective news.” It is also possible that things will change and that one day there will be enough people who desire straightforward information to make producing it a profitable enterprise. 

For now, however, a bishop who wishes to enter into the political fray must know that many of his hearers or readers will already have an already formed opinion on the matter. They will know, for example, whether you neglected to note that the issue is “illegal” immigration or whether you posted a video when an American citizen was killed by someone with no right to be in the country. They might Google to see what, if anything, you said about the anti-Catholic policies of a previous administration. Of course, what goes for Republican-leaning Catholics goes for those inclined to vote Democrat, as the criticisms of Barron demonstrate.  

The upshot is that if bishops wish to be effective communicators of their views on political matters, they will simply have to take this new reality into account. I have in mind, as a good example, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann’s carefully wrought statement on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. Naumann argues in light of both Catholic principles and awareness of both sides’ political arguments. Like every good speaker, he anticipated the concerns and possible responses of a variety of viewpoints, particularly of those likely to be suspicious of his conclusion.

It is never effective for a bishop to sound like a partisan. This is supremely difficult in the American context of a two-party system increasingly hardened into ideological camps. I am old enough to remember the sincere efforts of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) during the Reagan administration to weigh in on nuclear war and the economy with pastoral letters. I do not know whether either The Promise of Peace (1983) or Economic Justice For All (1986) made much of a difference, but together they raised the question of whether such detailed policy documents were a proper use of the episcopal office. At the time, Avery Dulles argued that “in actual practice, the influence of such statements and the assent they elicit depend chiefly on the intrinsic qualities of the documents and on the reception accorded to them by discerning critics and by the general public.” In other words, Dulles was warning the bishops that when they entered into the details of governmental policies, they could not expect their religious authority to pertain in the way it would when teaching on matters of faith or the principles of Catholic social doctrine. What held in the 1980s holds in today’s wilder and more partisan political environment. It is especially unwise to jump into a still-evolving situation with partial information, employing the kind of rabble-rousing language common to social media influencers.

To return to Barron. The attacks on him are almost exclusively from left-leaning partisans who either wish to silence him or cajole him to speak as they wish. This has only intensified in recent weeks, given the troubles in Minnesota. As I was writing this, I received in my email another taunt by Christopher Hale on Barron’s silence, this time over the death of Alex Pretti. The overwrought essay is introduced by a deceptive AI picture of the bishop donned in a MAGA hat standing next to Trump. One has to read the caption to know it’s fake. Although I find Hale’s work here reprehensible, I would be pleased if Barron made a statement. The events seem to call for it—although deferring to the Archbishop of Minneapolis-St. Paul might be the better course.

That said, if he does speak out, I fully expect, given what I have already seen, that he will be respectful of the various and informed perspectives of his audience, and, more importantly, assess the situation in view of the principles of Catholic teaching that flow from the mystery of Christ.