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Adam Hamilton stood beside his campaign bus on Monday, open Kansas farmland behind him, and recorded a message for JD Vance, hours before the vice president took the stage in Topeka to rescue Sen. Roger Marshall. Hamilton, the founding pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, had every reason to answer Vance in anger. Instead, he invited him to church.

“Before he attacks me or the church again, I’d like to invite the vice president to actually attend a service,” Hamilton said. “If he accepts the invitation, he’ll meet many thoughtful Christians, including some who actually voted for him and President Trump just two years ago.”

That invitation explains why, one week before Election Day, a Methodist preacher has a real chance to become the first Democrat Kansas has sent to the Senate since George McGill won reelection in 1932.

A pastor on the ballot

Hamilton, 62, started Resurrection in 1990 with a few people meeting in the chapel of a funeral home. It grew into a congregation of roughly 25,000 members across the Kansas City area, the largest United Methodist church in the United States. He married his high school sweetheart at 18, and he still leads the church he founded.

He won an 11-candidate Democratic primary in August after raising nearly $3.7 million in his first 62 days, a state record for a Senate launch. The Cook Political Report moved the race to Toss Up on Oct. 6, and the RealClearPolitics average had the two men tied at 45.8 percent as of Oct. 10.

Hamilton talks about his faith the way he lives it. “I slip to my knees, I offer my life to Christ, I pray for the Holy Spirit to lead me, I read scripture,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl this month.

He carries a small Bible in his back pocket, and he has pulled it out for reporters on the trail.

The doctor who sued his patients

Marshall has given Kansans plenty of reasons to look for someone new. Before Congress, he spent decades as an obstetrician in rural Great Bend, and a New York Times investigation published Sept. 8 found that he sued more than 700 of his patients over unpaid bills. Some owed as little as $101.

His lawyers routinely charged 18 percent interest and garnished paychecks, and 81 patients were arrested after missing court dates. Many of the people he took to court were new mothers in rural Barton County, where his practice was often the only option.

Marshall has offered Kansans no apology. In a statement, he complained that the Times had decided “a rural doctor keeping the hospital’s lights on is some kind of scandal,” and the senator called the story a “hit job” orchestrated by Chuck Schumer.

At the Kansas State Fair debate, he defended the lawsuits as a “common business practice.”

Hamilton’s reply fit in a single post: “Medical bills should not ruin lives. We must do better than this.”

Vance goes after a pastor’s faith

Unable to defend his own record, Marshall has gone after Hamilton’s faith. He calls Hamilton a megachurch pastor who is “too woke for Kansas.”

At a Sept. 14 rally in Olathe, Vance played clipped soundbites from old sermons, declared that Hamilton’s preaching “is not Christianity,” and called it “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”

On Oct. 19, President Trump claimed in Park City that Hamilton “openly mocks Jesus,” without citing a single sermon.

Bishop David Wilson, who leads the Great Plains Conference of the United Methodist Church, called the attacks “inaccurate and unwarranted.”

He noted that the people of Resurrection were the ones being criticized. Vance, who wrote 304 pages about finding God, returned to Topeka on Monday and went after Hamilton’s faith once again.

“He doesn’t know me, doesn’t know anything about my faith,” Hamilton told Karl. On Monday, he went a step past the complaint.

He described a congregation that is “roughly equal parts Republicans, Democrats, and independents,” and he asked the vice president to come see it for himself.

Pope Leo XIV told Catholics last month that believers “cannot remain as unengaged spectators” in public life. Hamilton has shown what that engagement can look like when it is rooted in a congregation where Republicans and Democrats share the same pews every Sunday.

“We have to do better than picking on small groups”

The same instinct shaped Hamilton’s answer when KMBC’s Cody Holyoke asked about transgender Kansans, whose driver’s licenses and bathroom access Kansas Republicans have moved to restrict. Hamilton began by admitting what he did not know, and then he reached for the Gospel.

“I don’t think we should take a small group of people and bully them, pick on them, and hurt them,” he said. “Jesus told me I was to love my neighbor as I love myself.” Republicans, he added, have “turned a group of people into a campaign issue because it polls well.”

Hamilton is no ideologue here. At last Wednesday’s debate, he said he does not want “biological men or boys” competing against his 12-year-old granddaughter in sports.

That position puts him alongside plenty of his Republican neighbors, and he still refuses to make vulnerable people a punch line for votes.

A path back into MAGA country

Hamilton belongs to an unusually large class of clergy running as Democrats this fall, and Religion News Service is tracking 11 races featuring faith leaders.

In Texas, James Talarico has cited Pope Leo XIV and two of his predecessors in pledging to work with Catholics to reduce abortion.

These faith-forward Democrats are showing their party how to walk back into places it abandoned.

Hamilton packed a theater in Hutchinson, in a county Trump carried by about 34 points, and one Republican who voted for Trump three times told ABC News he is knocking doors for him.

Two former Republican governors, Bill Graves and Mike Hayden, have endorsed him.

As I reported in September, MAGA-country Catholics are already standing up to Trump, and Hamilton is giving them a candidate to stand with.

Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years. On Nov. 3, it can send a pastor who met a vice president’s contempt with an invitation to worship.

Against an incumbent who hauled new mothers into court over hospital bills, Hamilton has run on the plain words of the great commandment. Hamilton would be an extraordinary senator.

His victory would also tell every Christian in America that the faith still belongs to those who serve their neighbors.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the people of faith in Kansas who refuse to let a vice president decide whose Christianity counts. We stand with the new mothers Roger Marshall dragged into court over medical bills, and with every neighbor who has been turned into a campaign issue because it polls well.

In an election season soaked in contempt, we remain rooted in a Gospel that asks more of us than outrage. Jesus sat at table with the people the powerful mocked, and he told us that whatever we do for the least of his brothers and sisters, we do for him.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that heals. They want leaders who keep the church doors open, and right now, with Kansas a week from a choice that could change the Senate, that hunger has never felt more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against politicians who weaponize the faith, I am asking you to join us.

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Pope Leo XIV told the religious leaders of the world on Tuesday that “there is no such thing as a holy war: only peace is holy.”

He said it by video.

The Community of Sant’Egidio had gathered hundreds of leaders from dozens of countries in Assisi for “Unarmed and Disarming Peace,” and Leo had planned to close the meeting in person, but his doctors advised against the helicopter flight two weeks after surgeons at Rome’s Gemelli hospital removed part of his right lung.

So he spoke from Rome, and he left no room for an exception.

“War can never be waged in the name of God,” the pope said.

The date carried its own meaning.

On Oct. 27, 1986, Saint John Paul II invited the leaders of the world’s religions to the tomb of Saint Francis to pray for peace, and Leo told the gathering he would very much have liked to stand there with them forty years later.

Instead he warned of a “troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics” and asked the faithful of every tradition to reject “the religious justification of war.”

He also quoted Magnifica Humanitas, his May encyclical on artificial intelligence, where Leo wrote that “to fight in the name of religion means attacking religion itself.”

None of this is new language for him, which is the point.

At the Colosseum a year ago, Leo took up a warning from Pope Francis and made it his own: “War is never holy; only peace is holy, because it is willed by God!”

In June, opening a consistory of the College of Cardinals, he told them that war “is never blessed by God.”

A pope who says the same thing three times in twelve months, in three different rooms, is telling you he means it.

A week before the vote

The message arrives seven days before Americans vote in the first midterm elections of President Donald Trump’s second term. It also arrives 242 days into the war the United States and Israel launched against Iran on Feb. 28, the conflict that has done more than any other to set this White House against the first American pope.

Trump has called Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and by May he was calling him “useless.”

In March, he rejected the pope’s plea for a ceasefire with a boast that the United States was “obliterating Iran.” This month, he promised there would be “no attacks before the elections,” which tells you how the White House now schedules its bombing.

The administration has also tried to argue for the war using Catholic teaching.

At a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia in April, Vice President JD Vance invoked “more than a 1,000-year tradition of just war theory” and warned that it was “very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, followed the next morning. “There’s something called the just war doctrine,” he told reporters, calling the matter “very well settled.”

The men who actually teach that doctrine had already applied it to Iran.

Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington judged the war “not morally legitimate” in March, explaining that Catholic teaching does not support a preventive war built on speculation about the future.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who shepherds every Catholic in the American armed forces, declared it unjust in April. And on the papal flight to Madrid in June, Leo told reporters that “in Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.”

The doctrine they borrowed

Now the doctrine itself is under review. In paragraph 192 of Magnifica Humanitas, Leo wrote that the “just war” theory, “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated,” while preserving a nation’s right to defend itself in the strictest sense. His cardinals took up that paragraph at their June consistory.

Vance tried to get ahead of it.

After the encyclical appeared, he told NBC News that “you have new technologies of warfare, so you have to update just war doctrine.”

That is a strange sentence from a man who, weeks earlier, held up the old version as proof that the pope had his theology wrong. Johnson, for his part, built his rebuke of the pope on a tradition whose own guardian now calls it obsolete as a license for modern war.

Tuesday’s message hardens the case.

Under Church teaching, even a just war was a rare and tragic concession to a fallen world, and the idea of a holy war has no place in it.

When Leo says that no war can be waged in God’s name, he is speaking to every leader who has tried to draft heaven into a bombing campaign, and Washington has supplied plenty of them this year.

Pete Hegseth preached a Crusade theology from the Pentagon podium in March, and Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, answered him with a sharp rebuke. In April, Trump invoked the name of God while warning Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

Then, last Thursday, a dozen American bishops led by Denver Archbishop James Golka prayed over Trump in the Oval Office, and the president’s campaign posted the video twelve days before the election. Two of those prelates have since apologized or tried to distance themselves. Leo named no American on Tuesday, though anyone in Washington could hear whom he meant.

He ended with a prayer that God would make believers “unarmed instruments of his peace,” borrowing the voice of the saint whose tomb he could not visit.

Next Tuesday, millions of American Catholics will carry that prayer into a voting booth, with the war unfinished and a president who has promised only that the bombs will wait until after the vote.

Here is the pope’s full address, with Letters from Leo subtitles.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal McElroy, and the countless Catholics and people of goodwill who refuse to let the name of God be stamped on a missile.

Jesus reserved his blessing for the peacemakers and called them children of God; nothing in the Gospel extends it to the bomb or to the boast that comes with it. In a season when politicians quote Augustine to sell a war and campaigns turn bishops into backdrops, that blessing is worth defending out loud.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth about war, even when the truth costs votes, donors, and invitations to the Oval Office.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every life a war would treat as expendable — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

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The dam has broken.

Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez of Palm Beach, whose diocese takes in President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, reminded his flock on Monday that the Catholic Church “does not endorse or support any political candidate or political party.” He never named the twelve bishops who prayed over Trump in the Oval Office last Thursday, and he did not have to.

“Such actions, when undertaken in the name of the Church, even in the form of ‘prayers’ or ‘blessings,’ are contrary to its nonpartisan mission and should be regarded solely as expressions of individual political preference,” Rodríguez wrote.

Look at the quotation marks he put around the word “prayers.” Coming from the bishop of Trump’s winter home, that bit of punctuation says more than a page of diplomatic regret.

Pope Leo’s man in Palm Beach

Pope Leo XIV named Rodríguez bishop of Palm Beach last December, choosing a Dominican-born pastor from Our Lady of Sorrows in Corona, Queens. It is the largest parish in the Diocese of Brooklyn, and migrants make up most of its 17,000 parishioners.

The Associated Press called him a staunch advocate for migrants on the day the Vatican announced the appointment. At his installation in February, he told the cathedral that “in the Church there are no foreigners or immigrants — only brothers and sisters,” crediting the line to both Pope Francis and Pope Leo.

So Leo sent a pastor of immigrants to shepherd the place where Trump spends his winter weekends. On Monday, that pastor spoke.

Kansas City splits

Two more statements came out of Kansas City on Monday. Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Naumann, who stood behind Trump’s chair on Thursday, put the blame on the White House: his office said in a statement that “the bishops were assured that no photographs would be made public,” according to TIME.

His successor wanted no part of it. Archbishop Shawn McKnight told TIME that Naumann went “in his own individual capacity,” and that “his actions and presence at that event were not on behalf of, or representative of, myself or the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.”

American archbishops rarely put daylight between themselves and the men they replaced, least of all in print. McKnight did it on the record, eight days before an election.

An evangelical script

Writing for Religion News Service, in a story America magazine carried on Friday, Claire Giangravé noted that the gathering echoed the prayer sessions Trump holds with his evangelical supporters. I think she has it exactly right.

In July 2017, evangelical pastors laid hands on Trump in the same room, in nearly the same pose. Paula White-Cain, whom one of those pastors credited with the idea, was standing in the Oval Office again on Thursday.

Evangelical preachers who have endorsed Trump turned that image into a campaign ritual years ago. Catholic bishops had no business borrowing it twelve days before a national election.

The man who arranged it

Of all the threads in this story, the one that has drawn the least attention is the Heritage Foundation official at its center. Mario Enzler, a former Swiss Guard who now advises Heritage’s president, spent weeks inviting prelates to the Oval Office, The Pillar reported, and some turned him down because of how a prayer with Trump would look this close to an election.

As I wrote last week, his résumé does not hold up. The Houston Chronicle found that the Italian university where he claimed a doctorate does not grant one, and that the school listed for his bachelor’s degree is a high school; he left his post as a business dean in Houston in 2022 after professors went to the board.

A man with that record brokered a moment of prayer between successors of the apostles and a president twelve days before an election, which is a corrosive thing for the Church to absorb. Golka never mentioned him, and Heritage now tells Religion News Service that Enzler “didn’t set anything up.”

Why the dam broke

I have two updates on why bishops are moving now.

The first comes from Rome. Sources I have spoken with at the Vatican, and others connected to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, made clear to me that the Holy See expected American bishops to start distancing the Church from the Oval Office photo. Last week, a senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops told me it was “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.”

The second is impatience at home. According to my sources, frustration had been growing among brother bishops over the slow drip of statements from the twelve, and many wanted a cleaner break much sooner.

Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob’s apology, the first, arrived three days after the prayer (by then The Pillar had reported that USCCB president Archbishop Paul Coakley was “deeply frustrated”).

That frustration is what pushed bishops like Rodríguez, who never set foot in the Oval Office, to speak for themselves.

The people of God are speaking

None of this happened in a vacuum. More than 2,500 of you have signed our letter asking the twelve bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.

Four of the twelve have now spoken. Grob apologized on Sunday, and Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines said the White House exploited the meeting. Denver Archbishop James Golka, who led the prayer, told his own paper he never meant it as an endorsement, and Naumann has now pinned the photos on the White House.

The rest of the bishops on the White House’s list have said nothing at all, among them Edward Burns of Dallas, Michael Barber of Oakland, Thomas Hennen of Baker, Steven Raica of Birmingham, Scott Bullock of Rapid City, James Wall of Gallup, and Elias Zaidan of the Maronite eparchy in Los Angeles. We will keep pressing every one of them.

Lay Catholics have a real stake in how their bishops act. As the people of God, our task is to walk alongside our shepherds and, when they stray, to hold them accountable to the flock they were sent to serve.

I am proud of every one of you who spoke up. I am also sorry to keep filling your inbox with this story, but the updates keep coming, and you deserve to have them.

Eight days

Starting now, I am going to try my hardest to get back on program. The election is eight days away, and in this busy stretch I want to put the issues that matter, and the candidates who are running, at the front and center.

I have said this before. Next Tuesday, two names may sit side by side on your ballot, yet what we will really decide is our posterity, which is to say the future we hand to our children.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Rodríguez and with every shepherd who refuses to let a prayer become a campaign prop, especially the immigrant families in his diocese who live a few miles from Mar-a-Lago.

We pray for our leaders at every Mass, and we always will. A blessing belongs to God, though, and the people who need it most were nowhere near the Resolute Desk on Thursday.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for shepherds who speak plainly, and for a laity brave enough to ask them to.

If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill keeping the altar out of any campaign’s hands, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

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Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines says the White House exploited last Thursday’s Oval Office prayer with President Donald Trump for partisan political purposes, and he wishes he had seen it coming.

His statement went up on the diocese’s website on Saturday. The Associated Press reported on Sunday afternoon that two of the twelve bishops who prayed over Trump now regret the meeting, pairing Joensen with Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob, who apologized publicly that morning.

Two bishops spoke up in a single weekend. That is a welcome step forward, and we have ten to go.

What happened in the Oval Office

The meeting took place on Oct. 22, twelve days before the midterm elections, and it was arranged by Heritage Foundation official Mario Enzler.

According to Grob, a dozen bishops spent about 90 minutes with White House domestic policy staff before being walked into the Oval Office.

Trump sat at the Resolute Desk with his head bowed. The bishops gathered behind his chair, and Denver Archbishop James Golka rested a hand on the president’s shoulder and asked God to bless him.

The bishops knew photos were being taken. What they did not know, Grob later wrote, was that someone was also shooting video, and none of them gave permission for any of it to be posted. The footage was online within hours.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the meeting was not organized with or by the conference. In Rome, a senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops (the office Pope Leo XIV led as a cardinal) told me it was “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.”

Trump, for his part, told reporters on Friday that the bishops “mostly prayed.”

What Joensen wrote

Joensen begins by explaining why he said yes. Officials connected to the White House Faith Office invited him to talk about immigration, visas for foreign clergy, abortion pills, and new federal tax credits for private schools.

The meeting fell on the Memorial of St. John Paul II, and he saw a chance to press the Church’s teaching on the people who write national policy.

He offers the president no flattery. Many things tied to this administration, he writes, are “blatantly at odds with our Catholic faith,” and he concedes that every bishop in the room knew a national election was close.

Then he reaches for Matthew 10:16, where Jesus sends his disciples out “like sheep in the midst of wolves” and tells them to be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves. Joensen turns the verse on himself.

“I wish I had been more shrewd and less simple,” he wrote, “like those who exploited our meeting for partisan political purposes.”

The sentence also tells you who the wolves were. Joensen never uses the word “apologize.” His statement still names his own failure in his own words, which is the part of contrition that matters most, and it is exactly the part Golka skipped when he told the Denver Catholic he was heartbroken and then blamed critics for sowing disunity.

Grob chose a more formal route.

Writing from the Dominican Republic, he titled his letter “A Public Apology” and said the White House had turned something sacred into a political photo opportunity.

His closing confession was simple: “I did not go without reservations. I wish I had heeded them.”

The White House shrugs

The AP asked the White House whether it had the bishops’ consent before releasing the video and photos. The press office would not say.

Spokeswoman Taylor Rogers offered a campaign line instead: “There has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump.”

That answer tells you what the prayer was for. A bishop’s hand on a president’s shoulder, twelve days before an election, is worth more than any ad buy, and the White House posted it like one.

Ten to go

On Friday, Letters from Leo launched a petition asking all twelve bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.

More than 2,500 people have signed it so far, up from the 1,800 we reported Saturday, and we will deliver every signature to the twelve bishops and to the bishops’ conference.

If you have not added your name yet, I encourage you to do so today.

Ten bishops have said nothing resembling regret. They are Golka of Denver, Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Naumann of Kansas City in Kansas, Edward Burns of Dallas, Michael Barber of Oakland, Thomas Hennen of Baker, Francis Kalabat of the Chaldean eparchy in Detroit, Steven Raica of Birmingham, Scott Bullock of Rapid City, James Wall of Gallup, and Elias Zaidan of the Maronite eparchy in Los Angeles.

Each of them can read Joensen’s statement and Grob’s letter this week. Owning the mistake cost those two men nothing, and it has already won back some of the trust the Oval Office video spent.

As I said yesterday, I know many of you won’t be quick to accept what these two bishops have offered, especially those of you scarred by the sex abuse scandal and by years of watching the hierarchy lend itself to right-wing causes.

I share that skepticism, and Joensen’s own verse tells us to keep it, because we too must be shrewd as serpents.

As your fellow Christian, I still ask you to consider being open to their words. An inch isn’t a mile, but perhaps, as Christians, we should consider that inch worth welcoming.

“God never tires of forgiving us,” the late Pope Francis wrote in Evangelii Gaudium; “we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy.”

We will keep fighting until the rest of them do the same.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every Catholic who expects their shepherds to keep the altar out of a campaign, especially the immigrant families of Iowa and Wisconsin who watched their bishops stand behind that desk.

We pray for our elected leaders at every Mass, and we always will. A bishop who admits he was used deserves our thanks, and the ten who remain silent deserve to hear, respectfully and in large numbers, from the people they shepherd. Matthew 10 sends the disciples out among wolves, and nothing in that chapter tells them to smile for the wolves’ cameras.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for shepherds who tell the truth, including the truth about themselves.

If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill asking our bishops to keep prayer out of any campaign’s hands, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers get our ongoing series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our exclusive investigations, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

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Dear friends,

Today’s Gospel is the greatest commandment, and Pope Leo XIV preached on it at the Angelus this morning, his second Sunday back at the window since his lung surgery.

It comes nine days before Americans go to the polls, and it asks what love of God looks like once it leaves the church and walks out into the world.

Some of you didn’t get last week’s Scripture reflection, on Pope Leo XIV’s first Angelus after his surgery and the coin of Caesar. You can read it here.

These Scripture reflections are available exclusively to paid subscribers. If my work means something to you, I’m asking for your help.

If you’d like to invest in our mission during this critical time, here are three ways you can help:

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Today’s Readings

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” — Matthew 22:39-40

The scholar of the law who tests Jesus in today’s Gospel already knows the answer to his own question. Devout Jews prayed the Shema every morning and every evening, and its command to love the Lord your God with all your heart was as familiar to that crowd as the Our Father is to us.

Jesus answers him anyway. Then he adds a second commandment the man never asked about, sets it beside the first, and says the whole law and the prophets hang on the two of them together.

Pope Leo XIV preached on this Gospel at the Angelus this morning, his second Sunday back in front of the crowds since surgery on his right lung. He begins by arguing one cannot love “on command,” he said, because our love for God is only ever an answer to a love that reached us first.

Then he turned to the neighbor. “Dear friends, we cannot truly love God unless this love overflows into love for our brothers and sisters,” he told St. Peter’s Square. “And we cannot truly love our neighbor except as children of the same Father who loved us first in his Son, Jesus.”

I keep coming back to his verb. Love for God overflows, and anything that overflows ends up somewhere other than where it started.

The first reading from Exodus shows us where it goes. God makes the command concrete for Israel. He names the immigrant, reminding his people that they were once immigrants themselves in Egypt, and then the widow and the orphan.

Then he gets oddly specific.

If you take a poor man’s cloak as collateral on a loan, you have to give it back before the sun goes down, “for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body. What else has he to sleep in?”

I love that question.

The God who made the stars is worried about one man shivering in the dark, and about the lender who would let him go cold over a few coins.

Love is an act that moves out. It leaves the heart and goes looking for a cloak to return. Two weeks ago, the king in this same chapter of

Matthew sent his servants out to the main roads to gather everyone they could find, and today’s readings tell us how to treat those people once they arrive.

Read more

Dear friends,

Today’s Gospel is the coin of Caesar, and Pope Leo XIV preached on it this morning from the window of the Apostolic Palace, less than a day after leaving the hospital.

It comes sixteen days before Americans go to the polls, and it asks how much of ourselves we have handed to the emperor.

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Today’s Readings

“Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” — Matthew 22:21

The coin at the center of today’s Gospel was a denarius, about a day’s wage for a laborer in Galilee. The silver ones in circulation under Tiberius carried his profile on one side, and the inscription around it called him the son of the divine Augustus.

The Pharisees and the Herodians who bring Jesus that question were not natural allies. The Herodians owed their standing to Rome, and the Pharisees resented every coin that went to it. They set aside their differences long enough to lay one trap, and they bait it with flattery. “Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man,” they begin, before asking whether it is lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar.

Jesus asks to see the coin. “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” They tell him it is Caesar’s. “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” he says, “and to God what belongs to God.”

Pope Leo XIV preached on this passage from the window of the Apostolic Palace this morning, less than a day after his discharge from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital and five days after surgeons removed part of his right lung. It was his first public appearance since the operation, and St. Peter’s Square cheered when he came to the window. He noticed something most of us skip in the story. The men trying to trap Jesus praise him for showing deference to no one, and they are right about that, even though they mean it as bait.

“In Jesus, we contemplate a God who is not afraid of history but comes instead to dwell within it,” Leo said. Giving Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s, he told the crowd, means being “truthful, free from servile fear or hypocrisy, free to do good.”

You can watch the passage here:

The Church Fathers loved this Gospel because of the question Jesus asks. If the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears his image, then something else belongs to God for the same reason. Genesis tells us that God created human beings in his own image. Saint Augustine made the point to his congregation in Hippo sixteen centuries ago, telling them that God seeks his own image in us the way Caesar seeks his on a coin.

Read more

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Sign our letter asking the 12 bishops who prayed over President Trump to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.

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Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee apologized on Sunday for joining eleven other bishops in praying over President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last Thursday, twelve days before the midterm elections.

He also accused the White House of manipulating that prayer. The administration posted video and photos of the bishops “without the consent of the participants,” Grob wrote, and turned “something so sacred” into a political photo opportunity.

In a public letter to the Catholics of his archdiocese and beyond, Grob admitted that he walked into the White House with doubts. “I did not go without reservations,” he wrote. “I wish I had heeded them.”

Plenty of Catholics will read the letter and decide it falls short. Count me out of that group. Grob is the first of the twelve to say he is sorry, and his letter is a real first step that the Church should welcome out loud.

What Grob wrote

The archbishop wrote from the Dominican Republic, where he is visiting La Sagrada Familia (Milwaukee’s sharing parish there) with a group of pilgrims.

He opens by acknowledging the flood of questions he has received since Thursday, and he tells his people he never meant to leave them confused, angry or disappointed.

Then he explains how he ended up at the Resolute Desk.

An invitation came in mid-September to join a dozen bishops for a discussion of immigration enforcement and visas for religious workers, among other matters.

The Heritage Foundation arranged it, as I reported on Friday, and organizers told the bishops it would be private, with a possible chance to pray privately with the president.

After 90 minutes with White House domestic policy staff, the bishops were ushered into the Oval Office.

Trump handed out commemorative tokens and directed them to stand behind his chair and pray.

Grob writes that the bishops did not know a video was being shot and that none of them gave permission for it, or the photos, to be posted.

Within hours, the footage was online.

The messages that followed came in two kinds, he writes. Some Catholics feared their archbishop had stumbled into a campaign event so close to a national election.

Others told him that they, or their families, had been harmed by this president’s policies, and that watching him stand there wounded them.

Grob does fault the White House, writing that the bishops “should never have been put in that position.”

He has a point, since the administration took a prayer and turned it into campaign footage. Yet the heart of the letter is about his own choice.

He writes that he heard the concerns and understands how he caused them, and he offers an apology “for any damage my actions have done.”

His closing line is one any Catholic can carry home this week: “We are, as ever, a pilgrim people. And that includes bishops.”

On Friday, Denver Archbishop James Golka told his archdiocese’s newspaper he was heartbroken that people were hurt, then blamed critics for sowing disunity. I wrote then that real contrition names the choice itself. Grob named his.

Through my most grievous fault

Near the start of Mass, Catholics strike their breasts during the Confiteor and admit that we have sinned through our own fault. The Latin says it three times, with the last one heaviest: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Nobody in the pews is excused from that prayer, and the man in the miter prays it with the rest of us.

When a crowd dragged a frightened woman before Jesus in the Temple, he told them that whoever was without sin should throw the first stone (John 8:7). They drifted off one at a time, the eldest first.

Every one of us has made a bad mistake, and most of us have made several, some of them where everyone could see.

Pope Francis returned to this truth again and again. “God never tires of forgiving us,” he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium; “we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy.” Grob did not tire of asking.

His request came in plain language, and a shepherd who admits a public mistake in public is modeling exactly what we hope for in every confessional.

A word to the skeptics

If you read Grob’s letter and found it wanting, I understand. Your skepticism was earned the hard way.

I was 12 years old in January 2002, when the Boston Globe began exposing how church leaders in Boston had covered up the sexual abuse of children. Most of it went over my head at the time.

What reached me came later, in the thinning pews of my childhood parish and in the adults who quietly stopped trusting the men at the altar.

Catholics a generation older than me carry a deeper wound. Milwaukee knows that history as well as any diocese in the country; its archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in 2011 under the weight of abuse claims.

Those Catholics watched bishops hide behind carefully lawyered statements for years, so they have every reason to be slow to trust an apology from the hierarchy.

I would still ask you to stay open to this one. A Church that greets every confession with contempt teaches its shepherds to stop confessing.

Eleven to go

On Friday, we asked all twelve bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV, and more than 1,800 of you have now signed. Grob did not mention our letter, and I won’t pretend to know what moved him.

I do know that ordinary Catholics speaking up together, with respect and in large numbers, is how the faithful ask their shepherds for accountability.

Eleven bishops have yet to follow him, from Golka in Denver to Michael Barber in Oakland and Edward Burns in Dallas. I hope each of them reads the Milwaukee letter this week and writes his own. This

is a big moment for the people of God and for the American Church, and we should want more of it.

Archbishop Grob did what a shepherd does after leading his flock somewhere it should not have gone. He turned around, and he told us so. I am grateful to him.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every Catholic who expects the altar to stay out of a campaign, especially the immigrant families in Milwaukee who watched their archbishop stand behind that desk.

We pray for our president at every Mass, and we always will. A bishop who owns his mistake deserves our thanks, and the healing of this flock depends on more of them finding the courage Grob found this weekend. Let’s keep carrying the values Pope Leo has placed at the center of our faith, and keep standing against the authoritarianism that threatens human dignity at home and abroad.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for shepherds who tell the truth, including the truth about themselves.

If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill asking our shepherds to keep the Gospel out of any campaign’s hands, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

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The Sisters of Charity of New York answered the 12 bishops who prayed over President Donald Trump on Saturday morning, and they headlined their answer with a single word: “AUTHORITY.”

The order has served New York since 1817, when three sisters arrived in Manhattan to open an orphanage. In a statement posted to Instagram, the sisters granted the point the bishops keep making in their own defense. Christians are called to pray for those who govern them. Then they asked what the Oval Office video left out.

“Where was the concern for the poor? For immigrant families being torn apart? For those suffering beneath the violence of war? For the marginalized whose dignity is threatened? For Christianity being distorted into an instrument of political power?”

“These are not partisan concerns,” the sisters wrote. “They are Gospel concerns.”

What the world was shown

On Thursday, Oct. 22, Denver Archbishop James Golka laid his hand on Trump’s shoulder at the Resolute Desk while 11 fellow bishops extended theirs, with the televangelist Paula White-Cain standing behind the president’s chair.

A White House communications adviser posted the 27-second clip that afternoon, and Trump’s campaign account shared it too. The midterm elections are 12 days away.

The sisters were careful about what they could not see. “We cannot know everything said behind closed doors,” they wrote. “But we know what the world was shown.”

What the bishops have said since has done little to change the picture. Bishop Scott Bullock of Rapid City told the National Catholic Reporter that the gathering “really was not intended to be a political meeting per se.”

He also told the paper that a Heritage Foundation representative invited him, and that “the USCCB was not unaware of this meeting” (a claim the conference’s own spokesperson, Chieko Noguchi, has contradicted by saying its leadership was never informed).

Eleven of the 12 bishops did not answer NCR’s questions at all.

Golka spoke to his own archdiocesan paper instead. NCR reported Saturday that he acknowledged many viewers took the video as an endorsement and called that “never my intention.” He said he was heartbroken that people were hurt.

In the same breath, he faulted “people intentionally using this moment to sow disunity,” and as I reported Friday, he stopped short of an apology.

The Sisters of Charity anticipated that defense. “Images carry messages,” they wrote. “Silence carries messages, too.”

The women who spoke first

Few Catholics in America have earned the right to say so more than these women. The Sisters of Charity nursed Civil War wounded in New York, ran St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, and cared for AIDS patients there when much of the country recoiled from them.

Today the order numbers about 123 sisters, with an average age of 86. They still stand outside the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, and they pay for passports so that the American-born children of detained parents can stay in the country.

Their statement named that history plainly. Women religious, they wrote, “have served the Church without the institutional power granted to its hierarchy,” and when conscience demanded it, they “challenged the very institutions to which we belonged.”

The Church has a long memory of women doing exactly that. Catherine of Siena, a laywoman with no office, wrote to Pope Gregory XI in Avignon and urged him back to Rome; he returned in 1377, and she is now a Doctor of the Church.

In 1979, Sister Theresa Kane stood before John Paul II at the National Shrine in Washington and asked him to hear the women of this country. None of them held a bishop’s crozier, yet each acted on a baptism that made her responsible for the Church she loved.

Canon law says as much.

The faithful “have the right and even at times the duty” to make their views known to their pastors on matters touching the good of the Church, according to canon 212. When shepherds fail to lead, the baptized are called to stand up and speak, and Catholic women have answered that call for centuries.

Leo’s Church

Pope Leo XIV has prepared his Church for a moment like this one. In his first weeks as pope, he named Sister Tiziana Merletti secretary of the Vatican office that oversees religious life. This June, he chose Montse Alvarado to run the Dicastery for Communication, and on June 30, he made Sister Alessandra Smerilli prefect of the dicastery responsible for migrants and the environment.

Women now lead three of the Vatican’s 16 dicasteries, two of them Leo’s own picks. Just two of Donald Trump’s 15 department secretaries are women, which means, as I wrote in June, that the pope has put a larger share of women atop his government than the president has atop his.

Think about that for a moment.

The Holy See office charged with defending immigrant families is led by a religious sister, appointed by an American pope, while a dozen American bishops posed for a campaign video with the president whose deportation machine the U.S. bishops’ conference has repeatedly condemned.

The women around him reach further still. Sister Raffaella Petrini, whom Leo confirmed in May 2025 as president of the Governorate of Vatican City State, runs the city-state itself, and in February he added her to the Commission on Reserved Matters. On the night of his election, he blessed Sister Nathalie Becquart, the French undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops and the first woman ever to vote in a synod, at the Palace of the Holy Office.

In this fight, an aging order of nuns in the Bronx sounds far more like Leo than the men who gathered around the Resolute Desk.

That is why so many Catholics refused to stay quiet this week. More than 1,800 people have now signed our letter asking the 12 bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.

Watching ordinary Catholics find their voices these past few days has been one of the most inspiring things I have seen since Leo’s election.

We are doing this to protect our Church and to protect our pope. Trump has spent months attacking Leo, and his White House has now used Catholic bishops as props in the final stretch of a campaign.

Our baptism does not allow us to shrug at that.

The sisters closed their statement with a line every bishop in America should read before the November meeting in Baltimore.

“Our first allegiance is not to a president, a political party, or even an institution,” they wrote. “It is to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the Sisters of Charity of New York and with every Catholic woman who has served the poor while the powerful looked away. Pope Leo XIV has trusted women to lead his Church, and the immigrant families those women serve deserve better than bishops who trade their dignity for a photo opportunity.

The Gospel was never meant to decorate a campaign. It belongs to the hungry, the stranger, and the prisoner, and it calls every baptized person to speak when silence would be easier.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for shepherds who smell like the sheep and for a Church that refuses to kneel before power. Right now, as bishops lend their hands to a political spectacle, that hunger has never been sharper.

If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing together for human dignity and for our pope, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive our full series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our exclusive investigations, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

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Pope Leo XIV phoned Vladimir Putin on Friday, Oct. 16, from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, three days after surgeons removed the lower lobe of his right lung.

He had one request. Leo asked the Russian president to halt the fighting in Oleshky, an occupied city on the Dnipro River where roughly 1,700 civilians, 47 of them children, have been cut off from food and medicine (the count comes from Danielle Bell, who leads the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine).

Moscow answered within hours. “The Vatican’s intention to help create the conditions necessary to ensure the safety of the town’s population and to organise vital supplies has been supported,” the Kremlin said, adding that “it has been agreed to cooperate on this matter.”

One week later, the White House announced that the truce belonged to Melania Trump.

On Friday, Oct. 23, the Office of the First Lady declared that Russia and Ukraine would stop all military action in Oleshky beginning Oct. 29, so aid could enter and civilians could leave through a safe corridor. Her office cast her as the “Exclusive Intermediary.” Her husband told reporters the ceasefire was her initiative. “What she wants to do is save children,” the president said.

The statement never mentioned the pope.

A mission that began on day one

Leo did not stumble onto Ukraine in October.

On May 11, 2025, three days after his election, he used his first Sunday address from the loggia of St. Peter’s to tell the world, “I carry in my heart the sufferings of the beloved Ukrainian people.” Then he made a demand that has defined his diplomacy ever since: “Let all the prisoners be freed and the children return to their own families.”

He phoned Volodymyr Zelensky the next day, and the Ukrainian president said afterward that they discussed “the thousands of Ukrainian children deported by Russia.”

After his inauguration Mass on May 18, Leo received Zelensky in person; the Ukrainian president gave him an icon of the Mother of God painted on a piece of an artillery box from Izium, a gift he said stood for the children Russia had taken.

On June 4, Leo called Putin and urged Russia to make “a gesture that would favor peace.”

Pope Francis began this work before him. On Feb. 25, 2022, the day after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Francis went to the Russian Embassy to the Holy See and spent half an hour there to express his concern about the war. In May 2023, he named Cardinal Matteo Zuppi his envoy, and Zuppi’s trips to Moscow focused on reuniting deported Ukrainian children with their families and on prisoner exchanges. Vatican News has reported that a number of those children made it home through the channel Zuppi opened.

His funeral carried the same work forward. On April 26, 2025, Trump and Zelensky sat face to face on two chairs inside St. Peter’s Basilica, their first meeting since their Oval Office blowup in February, and Zelensky said afterward that it could prove historic.

Zuppi stayed on the job under Leo.

The cardinal describes the mission as one “entrusted to me initially by Pope Francis and subsequently confirmed by Pope Leo XIV,” and he flew to Moscow a third time from Sept. 28 to 30, where he met Ukrainian prisoners of war for the first time.

That was the same month Mrs. Trump’s office says Oleshky first came to her attention.

From a hospital bed

Leo told the crowd in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, Oct. 11, that doctors had found a nodule on his lung and would remove it. Surgeons operated that Tuesday, and the pathology came back as lung adenocarcinoma, the most common form of the disease.

Some cardinals began voicing concern about his health in public, and at least one suggested he might need to change his routine, something cardinals almost never say about a sitting pope.

He kept working.

The Vatican said he resumed his duties on Thursday, and the call to Moscow came the next afternoon. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, told reporters the call was Leo’s initiative; a senior Vatican source told America that the Holy See placed it. Putin, for his part, wished the pope a speedy recovery.

Leo walked out of Gemelli on Saturday without help. Before getting into his car, he stopped to talk with a Ukrainian family, and a 13-year-old Ukrainian girl handed him a stuffed toy.

On Monday, Oct. 19, he called Zelensky — their third phone conversation of the pontificate. He raised the “grave situation” in Oleshky and briefed the Ukrainian president on the request he had put to Putin. “We are preparing decisions,” Zelensky said afterward.

The order of events is plain.

The pope moved Moscow first, from a hospital bed, and he had Kyiv on the phone two days after his discharge. Two days after that, his doctors said he needs no further cancer treatment.

The rewrite

The White House now says Oleshky came to Mrs. Trump’s attention during a private conversation at the U.N. General Assembly in September, and her adviser Marc Beckman told Newsmax she has been “working tirelessly now for over a month.”

Both claims come from her own team, and the White House offered both on the day of the announcement. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, have since credited her with a role.

Beckman was back on television Saturday morning with a version of events that puts the pope in second place. “As a result of her participation, I guess she caught the attention of the pope,” he told Fox & Friends Weekend, adding that Leo “stepped in and supported her efforts” a few days ago. “But ultimately, it was the First Lady that initiated the process,” he said.

The public record is different.

Leo had been pressing for Ukraine’s children since May 2025, and the Kremlin’s Oct. 16 commitment to cooperate on Oleshky answered the Vatican, a full week before the White House said a word. The Oct. 23 statement erased him from the story.

Days before the announcement, Trump called his wife “the next Eleanor Roosevelt.” HuffPost, reporting on his remarks Friday, noted that he has also called for Zelensky to be ousted and excused Putin’s breaches of an energy ceasefire Trump himself had declared. A president serious about a truce in Oleshky would hardly be working to remove one of the two men who have to keep it.

Why the Catholic vote explains it

The midterms are Nov. 3, and this administration is losing Catholics.

A Pew Research Center survey found Trump’s approval among Catholics has fallen from 47 percent at the start of his second term to 30 percent this month.

Among white Catholics, his strongest bloc in the Church, it dropped from 59 to 39.

Analysts who spoke with OSV News pointed to two causes. One is an immigration crackdown the bishops have opposed for months; the other is the attacks Trump aimed at Leo this spring.

The White House has answered with pageantry. On Thursday, Oct. 22, twelve days before the election, a dozen bishops prayed over Trump in the Oval Office, extending their hands over him as he bowed his head, and the White House posted the video.

A Heritage Foundation official recruited them, according to The Pillar. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops distanced itself from the meeting; its president, Archbishop Paul Coakley, had already urged Catholics on Oct. 14 to “put their faith before politics.”

On Friday, Denver Archbishop James Golka, who led the prayer, began walking the meeting back, telling his archdiocese’s newspaper he never meant the video as an endorsement of Trump.

More than 1,500 people have now signed our petition asking those 12 bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.

White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers offered a laughable claim. “There has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump,” she said.

Read the Oleshky announcement in that light.

One day after the prayer video, the White House took the most Catholic act of the month (a sick pope pleading for starving civilians) and credited it to the president’s family.

Catholic imagery is useful to this administration right up until a Catholic leader accomplishes something.

Prayer on the street corner

Jesus warned his disciples about the hypocrites “who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them” (Matthew 6:5). He told them to give alms in secret, where only the Father sees.

Leo has kept that instruction through this whole episode. He held no press conference from Gemelli. The Vatican put out a brief statement, Parolin answered a few questions from reporters, and the pope went back to his recovery.

His 17 months of quiet work on Ukraine have followed the same pattern, as did the three years Francis gave the cause before him. The beatitude Jesus gave the peacemakers has no clause for whoever issues the press release.

If the guns fall silent in Oleshky on Oct. 29 and the trucks get through, that is good news whatever name sits atop the statement. The families trapped there will not care who gets thanked.

American Catholics heading to the polls on Nov. 3 should care a great deal, because the administration courting their votes just tried to take the pope’s work and hand it to the president’s wife.

Leo did this with part of one lung gone and a cancer diagnosis less than a week old. The least the White House owes him is his name.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope who spent his first days out of surgery pleading for 47 children in a city most Americans had never heard of, and with the cardinal he sent back to Moscow last month to bring prisoners and stolen children home.

Every Catholic and person of goodwill who believes the hungry deserve bread before any politician deserves applause has a place here too.

In a season when the White House treats the faith as a stage prop, this community keeps telling the truth about what the Church is doing in the world.

That is why it has become the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country, because people are hungry for the Gospel at work, told plainly, with the names left in.

If you believe Catholics and people of goodwill should stand for the dignity of the people of Oleshky against a politics that steals credit for mercy, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

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Denver Archbishop James Golka gave his first full account of Thursday’s Oval Office prayer on Friday evening, in an interview with the Denver Catholic, the archdiocese’s own newspaper.

He offers real background on how he ended up at the Resolute Desk, and he comes close to an apology. Then he pulls back.

The invitation arrived months ago, Golka said, as a follow-up to a June meeting where faith leaders pressed the administration on immigration, religious freedom and visas for religious workers.

Task forces came out of that June session, and their progress encouraged him to accept. He took the decision to prayer, he said, and he knew going in that some people might use the meeting for political ends.

He learned only shortly before Oct. 22 that he would be the one leading the prayer over President Trump.

The meeting itself ran three hours with the White House Faith Office and covered religious worker visas, the protection of life, religious freedom and school choice. One in five priests in the Archdiocese of Denver serves on a religious visa, which gives Golka a real stake in that conversation.

Trump, for his part, told reporters on Friday that the bishops “mostly prayed.”

Close to an apology

Golka acknowledged that many Catholics read the video, which the administration posted 12 days before an election, as an endorsement, and he insisted that was never his intention. He said he is “heartbroken that people are hurt.”

In the next breath, he turned outward.

He faulted people he believes are exploiting the moment to sow disunity, and he warned readers about headlines crafted to provoke. When friends asked what he had been doing in that room, he told them he was simply being a Catholic priest.

Real contrition begins with the speaker’s own conduct, and Golka’s account never quite arrives there. He describes the pain of others (and the motives of his critics) while leaving his own choice untouched.

Whatever the bishops intended, the White House had its own purpose for that room.

An expedient administration wanted a tacit endorsement from Catholic bishops in the final weeks of an election, and the prayer gave it one on camera. As soon as those cameras rolled in, the bishops should have left.

What the interview leaves out

Golka never mentions Paula White-Cain, the prosperity-gospel televangelist who serves as senior adviser to the White House Faith Office and stood behind Trump’s chair while the bishops laid hands on him.

At a White House Easter lunch this spring, she likened Trump’s legal troubles to the Passion of Christ. Her office hosted the meeting, by the archbishop’s own account.

Mario Enzler is missing from the interview as well. Enzler, a senior adviser at the Heritage Foundation (the think tank behind Project 2025), spent weeks recruiting prelates for the Oval Office visit, according to The Pillar. He resigned as a business school dean in Houston in 2022 after professors found he had claimed degrees he never earned, and anyone with a search bar could have learned that in a minute.

Rome and the conference

The Vatican noticed. On Thursday night, a senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops, the office Pope Leo XIV led as a cardinal, told me on background that it was “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.”

The Church officials I have spoken with since consider it egregious, and none of them sees an excuse for it.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has kept its distance.

Contact between American bishops and the White House ordinarily runs through the conference’s government affairs office, yet spokesperson Chieko Noguchi said the USCCB neither organized the meeting nor has any affiliation with it.

Some senior conference officials learned it had happened only when the video surfaced online.

A source close to Archbishop Paul Coakley, the conference president, told The Pillar he was “deeply frustrated.”

On Oct. 14, Coakley had urged Catholics to “put their faith before politics.” Eight days later, twelve of his brother bishops did the reverse on camera.

Golka knows the principle as well as anyone. In April, after Trump attacked the pope, the archbishop called the president’s remarks unacceptable and said that “Pope Leo’s role is pastoral, not political.”

As I have argued before, lay Catholics can be thoughtful partisans, and bishops should not.

Hoodwinked, and still responsible

I do feel for Archbishop Golka. Pope Leo sent him to Denver in February, and he has a record of outreach to migrants and the homeless that few of his critics can match.

My sense is that he got hoodwinked, and badly, by people who knew exactly what that footage would be worth to a campaign.

Sympathy cannot undo the damage, though, and the damage runs deep.

The video now circulates on the president’s campaign feed with eleven days left before Americans vote.

Immigrant Catholics in Denver, Dallas, Milwaukee and Oakland watched their own shepherds bless the administration whose deportation campaign their conference has condemned.

Friday’s interview is a first step, and I welcome it. Golka promised that the Church will carry the same message to leaders of both parties, and Catholics should hold him to that promise.

Amends still have to be made. That means a plain apology to the people of God and to the Holy Father, one that names the choice itself rather than the reaction to it.

I also want to hear from every bishop in that room, because so far Golka is the only one of the twelve who has explained himself at any length.

Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee and retired Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City in Kansas stood around that desk, according to the White House.

So did Bishops Edward Burns of Dallas, Michael Barber of Oakland, Thomas Hennen of Baker, William Joensen of Des Moines, Steven Raica of Birmingham, James Wall of Gallup, Scott Bullock of Rapid City, Francis Kalabat of the Chaldean Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle and Elias Zaidan of the Maronite Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon. Each of them owes his flock an account of how he got there.

I don’t intend to be a jerk about this. Still, each of these bishops needs to set the record straight publicly and say plainly that the video was wrong and hurtful.

Asking for that accountability has nothing to do with sowing division, whatever the archbishop suggests. Holding our shepherds to account sets clear guidelines on what is right and what is wrong, and Pope Leo XIV expects exactly that of us. The divisive act was the photo op itself.

Sign our letter

Sign our letter asking all twelve bishops to apologize publicly to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV. We will deliver every signature to the bishops and to their conference.

Proof that this stings came quickly, as 1,000 people signed our letter within just a few hours.

Let’s fight for Pope Leo and against what happened in the Oval Office this week. A campaign used the hands of our shepherds as a prop, which wounds the people of God, and it must be resolved.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every Catholic who expects the altar to stay out of the campaign, especially the immigrant families whose bishops stood around that desk on Thursday.

We pray for our president at every Mass, and we always will. Thursday’s prayer served another master, because a campaign walked away with its footage from men who should have seen the trap from the hallway.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are tired of watching the Gospel rented out to whoever holds power.

If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing for a Church no politician can own, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

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Sign the petition asking the 12 bishops who prayed over President Trump to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV. More than 370 Catholics have already added their names.

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The man who arranged for 12 American bishops to lay hands on Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday once stood guard beside Pope John Paul II. Much of what he has claimed since then has not held up.

Mario Enzler, an advancement officer and senior adviser to the president of the Heritage Foundation, organized the Oct. 22 meeting, according to several sources who spoke to The Pillar. He spent weeks inviting prelates.

Some declined, worried about how a White House prayer would look with an election this close.

Twelve said yes, according to a list a White House official gave the National Catholic Reporter on Friday.

Denver Archbishop James Golka led the prayer while Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob, retired Kansas City Archbishop Joseph Naumann, and Bishops Edward Burns of Dallas, Michael Barber of Oakland, Thomas Hennen of Baker, William Joensen of Des Moines, Steven Raica of Birmingham, James Wall of Gallup, Scott Bullock of Rapid City, Francis Kalabat of the Chaldean Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle, and Elias Zaidan of the Maronite Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon stood around the Resolute Desk.

Paula White-Cain, the prosperity-gospel televangelist who runs the White House Faith Office, stood behind the president’s chair as the bishops prayed. At a White House Easter lunch this spring, she likened Trump’s legal troubles to the Passion, telling him he had been “betrayed and arrested and falsely accused.”

The Pillar’s account of how the meeting came together is careful, sourced reporting, and every Catholic who cares about this story should read it in full. What follows builds on it.

Who is Mario Enzler?

Enzler served in the Pontifical Swiss Guard from 1989 to 1993 and has built a speaking circuit, and a memoir titled I Served a Saint, around those years.

Afterward he worked in banking, founded a classical school in New Hampshire, taught at the Catholic University of America, and in 2020 became dean of the business school at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.

He lasted two years. Professors there checked his résumé and found that the Italian university where he claimed a Ph.D. does not grant doctorates, while the institution he listed for his bachelor’s degree is a high school, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Professors called him a “con artist” as they reported his apparent fraud to the university’s board, and Enzler resigned in 2022.

An accounting professor told The Chronicle of Higher Education that Enzler later admitted he lacked a doctorate, even as the university kept printing “Dr.” before his name.

The Pillar found more.

In a 2022 speech, Enzler claimed a doctorate in finance from a Milanese university, at the same moment St. Thomas was presenting him as a doctor of music. He said he had studied in Milan under Communion and Liberation founder Fr. Luigi Giussani, who left that faculty in 1990 (Enzler was in Rome with the Swiss Guard at the time).

He also told the audience he had dated two nieces of Pope St. John XXIII, a claim The Pillar could not verify. Catholic Distance University hired him anyway, and Heritage brought him on in 2025.

Hoodwinked or willing

This is the man to whom 12 successors of the apostles handed their witness 12 days before a national election. It was senseless for them to take his meeting. Anyone with a search bar could have learned in a minute who was making the calls.

“Most of these guys just don’t think this way,” one source with knowledge of the meeting told The Pillar. “Most of them seemed to see this as a real chance to have a conversation with Trump, and didn’t appreciate that they could be used politically.”

The same source then asked the obvious question: “Still, what were they thinking? It’s two weeks away from the midterms.”

As I wrote on Thursday, only two explanations survive. If that source is right, the bishops were hoodwinked, which is flabbergasting. Christ sent the Twelve out “like sheep in the midst of wolves” and told them to be “as shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.”

On Thursday the bishops brought plenty of simplicity and none of the shrewdness.

The other explanation is worse. They understood who had invited them and what the White House would do with the footage, and they walked in anyway.

Rome and the conference

As I reported on Thursday, a senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops, the Vatican office Pope Leo XIV led as a cardinal, called the gathering “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.” The Church officials I have spoken with since then consider it egregious. None of them sees any excuse for it.

The bishops’ own conference had nothing to do with it. Contact between American bishops and the White House ordinarily runs through the government affairs office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, yet spokesperson Chieko Noguchi told The Pillar the meeting was “not organized with or by the USCCB” and was “not affiliated with the conference.”

Some senior conference officials were surprised to learn it had happened when the video surfaced online.

The Pillar adds that a source close to Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, the conference president, says he was “deeply frustrated” by the occasion. As I have argued this month, Coakley has been an able leader of the conference. He called Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream a firing squad “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death,” and on Oct. 14 he urged Catholics to “put their faith before politics.”

Eight days later, 12 of his brother bishops did the reverse on camera.

The fallout is still coming.

The White House is standing by the event, and spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the National Catholic Reporter that “there has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it.”

None of the 12 has explained himself publicly beyond the Archdiocese of Denver’s statement that “praying for those in public office is a longstanding Catholic practice.” Golka, Burns, Bullock, and Naumann did not answer my questions on Thursday, and the story is far from over.

Ask them to apologize

Today, Letters from Leo launched a petition on Stand with Pope Leo that names all 12 bishops.

It asks each of them to apologize publicly to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV, whom they put in an awful position in the final days before an election in his own country.

We will deliver every signature to the 12 bishops and to the conference.

These 12 bishops can still repair some of what they broke on Thursday, and an honest apology to the Holy Father is where that work begins.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the Catholics who expect their shepherds to see a trap before they walk into it.

Our bishops owe the faithful the truth about how they ended up in that room, and a community of readers paying attention is how we make sure they hear the question.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are tired of watching the Gospel rented out to whoever holds power.

If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing for a Church no politician can own, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers get our ongoing series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our exclusive investigations, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

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Dear friends,

Today is the feast of St. John Paul II. The Church keeps it on Oct. 22 because on that date in 1978, a 58-year-old cardinal from Kraków stood in St. Peter’s Square at the Mass inaugurating his pontificate and told the world, “Do not be afraid.”

He followed it with a demand that every politburo in Europe understood: “Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of States, economic and political systems.”

It is nearly midnight as I write, and I keep coming back to that homily, because I am convinced the Holy Spirit is preaching it again, this time in an American accent.

A Polish Pope Behind the Iron Curtain

Eight months after that Mass, on June 2, 1979, John Paul II knelt and kissed the tarmac at Warsaw’s airport. That afternoon he celebrated Mass in Victory Square, a plaza the communists had renamed, before hundreds of thousands of Poles. He closed his homily with a prayer the regime had no answer for, crying out from “the depths of this millennium” that the Spirit would “descend and renew the face of the earth. The face of this land.”

The crowd answered by chanting, “We want God!” Fourteen months later, the shipyard workers of Gdańsk founded Solidarity, and in November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down.

John Paul II never fired a shot. He told the truth in public, over and over, in a language ordinary people could carry home, and he refused to let a government decide who counted as fully human.

As I wrote last October, that witness lit a long fuse under an empire built on lies.

The threat he confronted came from the far left, an atheist Marxist state that jailed priests and outlawed free unions. Here at home, in 2026, the danger to human dignity wears a red hat and speaks the language of the right.

Just as God raised up John Paul II behind the Iron Curtain to stand up to communism, God has raised up a pope from the Americas, from inside the walls of MAGA authoritarianism, to stand up to it.

“Use It Well, America”

John Paul II already told us what he thought of a country that closes its heart to the stranger. He told us twice, in fact, on consecutive days in October 1995.

On Oct. 4 of that year he landed in the rain at Newark International Airport, where President Bill Clinton was waiting on the tarmac. Clinton, a Baptist, welcomed him on the feast of St. Francis and quoted the saint’s prayer for peace. Then the pope stepped to the lectern with the presidential seal and delivered a charge to the most powerful nation on earth.

“Your power of example carries with it heavy responsibilities. Use it well, America. Be an example of justice and civic virtues, freedom fulfilled in goodness at home and abroad.”

He went on in the next breath to say what that goodness looks like. “From its beginning until now, the United States has been a haven for generation after generation of new arrivals,” he said, before adding that it “would indeed be sad if the United States were to turn away” from that spirit.

The next evening, at a rain-soaked Mass for 83,000 people in Giants Stadium, he invoked the landmark just across the harbor.

The Statue of Liberty, he said, stands as “an enduring witness to the American tradition of welcoming the stranger.” Then he asked a question that now reads like an indictment.

“Is present-day America becoming less sensitive, less caring towards the poor, the weak, the stranger, the needy? It must not!”

In the same homily, he called the unborn child “the stranger in the womb” and warned that an America that “were to turn in on itself” would mark “the beginning of the end” of the American experience itself. He refused to split the stranger at the border from the stranger in the womb.

“We Will Stand Up”

Sixteen years earlier, on Oct. 7, 1979, John Paul II became the first pope to celebrate Mass on the National Mall. An estimated 175,000 people stood on the grass to hear him. His homily that afternoon rang with a refrain.

“And so, we will stand up every time that human life is threatened.”

Among the threats he named, one could have been written for this year: “When freedom is used to dominate the weak, to squander natural resources and energy, and to deny basic necessities to people, we will stand up and reaffirm the demands of justice and social love.”

Read that homily next to a newsfeed of ICE raids and tell me which side of the Mall John Paul II would be standing on.

I am convinced that if John Paul II were alive today, he would stand foursquare against MAGA authoritarianism. The man who faced down the Kremlin would not be cowed by a 22-foot golden statue at Doral.

What Leo Learned From the Polish Pope

Robert Prevost was 24, a young Augustinian studying for the priesthood in Chicago, when John Paul II preached on the Mall. As Pope Leo XIV, he has spent the past year putting that homily into practice.

Leo learned first that a pope speaks to a nation in its own words. John Paul quoted Emma Lazarus to Americans.

Leo sent the American people a letter for the 250th anniversary, dated June 25, insisting that “defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants, whose hopes, sacrifices and contribution have formed part of the history of this country from its very beginning.”

Eight days later, at Mount Rushmore, President Trump warned of “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country.” Notice the inversion.

The pope who actually helped bring down communism told America to remain a haven for new arrivals, while this president wields anticommunism as a club against them.

Leo spent the Fourth of July with the migrants of Lampedusa rather than in Washington. I was on the island that morning. In one of the longest homilies of his pontificate, he turned the Good Samaritan loose on a continent: “before any intellectual consideration or ideological conviction, the encounter with those who lie before us, stripped of everything, calls us to be close to them.”

His predecessor also taught him that a pope cannot be enlisted.

In January, Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, then Leo’s ambassador to the United States, to the Pentagon for a lecture on American military supremacy, and an official in the room invoked the Avignon Papacy, the 14th-century era when French power bent the bishop of Rome to its will.

John Paul II knew that game. He never bought access to the Kremlin with silence. Leo has refused to strike that bargain with the White House, too.

Then there is JD Vance. The Catholic vice president told Laura Ingraham on June 30 that the Holy See’s views on immigration are “troubling” and said he hoped Church leadership had learned from what he, Marco Rubio and the president had said.

Four weeks later, sitting with NBC’s Tom Llamas at Castel Gandolfo, Leo called the people America has welcomed “one of the greatest wealths of the United States.”

What matters most is the Gospel itself. John Paul II did not oppose communism because he was a conservative.

He opposed it because it lied about the human person, and he would oppose any regime, right or left, that did the same. Leo has taken up that same argument, with the same Christ at its center.

Do Not Be Afraid

Forty-eight years ago today, the Church heard a Polish voice tell her to open the borders of states and systems to Christ. Nobody in St. Peter’s Square that morning expected the Iron Curtain to fall within eleven years.

Plenty of Catholics assume MAGA authoritarianism will outlast us. I don’t. Empires built on cruelty and lies have a shelf life, and the Church has buried every one of them.

St. John Paul II, pray for us, and for the American pope now carrying your fight into his own country. The strangers at our door are waiting to see whether America will still use its power well.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of American Catholics (and countless others of goodwill) who believe the stranger at our door bears the image of God, and that no government gets to decide who counts as fully human.

John Paul II taught a frightened continent that the truth, spoken plainly and often enough, is stronger than any regime. In an age of deportation flights and golden idols, we remain rooted in that same faith.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for courage and for a Church that refuses to bow. Right now, as the American pope takes up the fight of the Polish pope, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against MAGA authoritarianism, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers get full access to my series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation along with our Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

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Denver Archbishop James Golka stood at President Donald Trump’s right hand beside the Resolute Desk on Thursday afternoon and asked God to bless him.

“We lift up our president today,” Golka prayed, while a ring of American bishops bowed their heads around the seated president. Paula White-Cain, the televangelist who leads the White House Faith Office, stood just behind the president’s chair.

White House aide Margo Martin posted the video a little before 3 p.m., captioned with a red heart, and Trump’s campaign account pushed it out too. Americans vote in 12 days.

It was a despicable decision. In the hours since, Catholics across the country have said so, from Chicago classrooms to Denver newsrooms.

The bishops broke their own rule

The bishops’ own teaching forbids this. In Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the voting guide the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reissues every election cycle, they wrote that “the Church is involved in the political process but is not partisan.” The very next line reads, “The Church cannot champion any candidate or party.”

Stephen Schneck, president of Catholics for the Future, put that question to Vatican watcher Rocco Palmo within hours, “at this point as the election is literally underway.”

Golka knows the principle well, because he wrote it down. In April, after Trump called Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the archbishop declared the president’s remarks “not acceptable” and added, “Pope Leo’s role is pastoral, not political.” Six months later, he lent his own pastoral office to the president’s campaign feed.

As I have argued before, lay Catholics should be partisans, and bishops should not. Thursday’s footage is what it looks like when a prelate forgets the difference.

Whom they blessed

Consider the man under those hands. Trump has spent much of this year at war with the first American pope. He claimed that “if I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican” and posted an image of himself in a biblical robe, healing a bedridden man with light from his fingers. By May, he was calling the pope “useless.”

On the same afternoon the bishops prayed over him, Trump urged Vivek Ramaswamy to keep airing an ad in which Amy Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calls the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor “a liar.” Acton has said her stepfather sexually abused her as a girl and that her mother stayed with him.

The court records back her up. An Ohio grand jury indicted the stepfather on a rape charge in 1978, according to documents reviewed by FactCheck.org, and the couple left town before he could be tried. Trump, writing on Truth Social, called Acton “defective, dishonest, and incapable” and said the ad was “hitting pay dirt.”

The preacher at his side

White’s presence made all of it worse. At the White House Easter lunch this spring, she told Trump he had been “betrayed and arrested and falsely accused,” then called it “a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us.” In 2019, she said Christians who opposed his agenda would “stand accountable before God one day.” Kyle Clark of 9NEWS in Denver flagged that history within the hour.

The Archdiocese of Denver answered with a statement saying Golka asked “God’s blessing upon the president and our nation” and invited the faithful “to pray for our nation and its leaders.” That is the charge St. Paul gave Timothy, to offer prayers “for kings and for all in authority.” Paul never told anyone to stage those prayers for a campaign camera two weeks before an election.

Who else was in the room

Palmo, who writes Whispers in the Loggia, identified three more prelates in the frame: Bishop Edward Burns of Dallas, Bishop Scott Bullock of Rapid City, and Archbishop Joseph Naumann, the retired archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas.

He said other American bishops stood in the shot too, though he declined to name them “without full clarity.” I reached out to Golka, Burns, Bullock and Naumann on Thursday, and none had responded by publication. I also asked the USCCB about the meeting and have not heard back (the conference told the National Catholic Reporter it played no role in arranging the gathering).

Rich Raho, a theologian at DePaul College Prep in Chicago, noted the sequence: Trump and Vice President JD Vance criticize Pope Leo, and then the bishops show up for a photo op.

The timing also defies the conference’s own vice president. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville told the National Catholic Reporter in September that “we need to restore a certain self-restraint,” and he asked his brother bishops to stop “revving up the anger” before the midterms.

Willing or played

An official at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, organized the meeting, according to several sources who spoke to The Pillar. In Rome, the reaction was blunt. A senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops, the Vatican office Pope Leo ran as a cardinal before his election, spoke to me on background Thursday night and called it “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.”

Only two explanations survive. These bishops walked into the Oval Office knowing the cameras would roll and the campaign would post the footage, or Heritage and the White House stooged them into serving as props. Either way, men charged with guarding the Church’s witness let a president turn it into an ad 12 days before an election.

The prayers of the faithful at Sunday Mass routinely include those who govern, and no Catholic objects to that. What happened Thursday served another master. It was an abomination and an embarrassment to the Church, committed by shepherds who should have spotted the trap from the hallway; as politics, it was flagrantly dumb too.

We cannot let this stand. Catholics should write to their bishops this week and ask, plainly, whether they knew about the meeting and whether the conference will say anything before Nov. 3. Holding our bishops’ feet to the fire is how we make sure the altar never becomes a campaign stage again.

We are just getting started on this story, and I will have more in the days to come.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, whose role Archbishop Golka himself once called pastoral rather than political, and with the millions of Catholics who refuse to let the faith be rented out to any party or any president.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are tired of watching the Gospel used as a backdrop. They want shepherds who answer to Christ before Caesar, and they want someone willing to say so out loud when those shepherds get it wrong.

If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing for a Church no politician can own, I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers get our ongoing series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our exclusive investigations, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

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Vice President JD Vance stood at a podium in Cincinnati on Wednesday and told his own party to stop complaining about a television ad that calls a survivor of childhood rape a liar.

“Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” Vance told reporters. He said he was “a little bit disgusted” by Republicans “whining” about it.

Later that day, at a rally with Vivek Ramaswamy, he praised the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”

Look closely at the ad Vance chose to defend.

It features Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of Dr. Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent. Arthur looks into the camera and says her daughter “has a serious problem.” She calls Acton “a liar” who “lies about her past,” and she tells Ohioans her daughter “needs help.”

The spot surfaced Monday night.

Ramaswamy admitted on Tuesday that his campaign made it, and his team is now spending $4 million to put it on screens across the state.

Here is what the ad leaves out. Mahoning County court records obtained by WEWS show that Acton’s stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with sexually abusing her when she was 12 years old. Acton has said the abuse went on for years.

Her mother lost custody of both children.

The stepfather posted bond, fled, and lived as a fugitive until his death in 2004 — and Donna Arthur, by her own account in a 2020 interview, stood by her husband in court and left town with him.

So the woman Ramaswamy cast as a truth-teller is the parent who sided with the man charged with raping her little girl. Acton has said she has not seen her mother since that day at the courthouse. On Tuesday, she told Spectrum News what the ad leaves out.

“I was removed from at the age of 12 for severe abuse and neglect and sexual abuse,” she said. “This is a lifelong pattern with my opponent. He is trying to lie.”

She is right about the pattern. In April, Ramaswamy described Acton as a “frequent flyer in children’s services” and said she was just “complaining about something done to me” in her childhood, as she recounted to WEWS. A man willing to mock a girl who passed through children’s services was always going to end up here.

Acton’s younger brother, Philip Stearns, lived through the same house. He called the ad “a despicable low” and put the plainest fact on the record. “Our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died,” he wrote. Then he recorded his own ad.

“I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it,” Stearns says. “She continued to receive that abuse because she knew she had to protect me.”

That is the story of Amy Acton. A child shielded her little brother from a predator, survived a winter in a tent outside Youngstown, became a physician, and led Ohio through the first terrifying months of a pandemic. She has told that story publicly since at least 2019, years before she ran for anything.

This ad has backfired, and the revolt is coming from the right. Sen. Jon Husted, who is on the Ohio ballot with Ramaswamy this fall, told the Associated Press,

“I would not have run that ad.” Lydia Mihalik, a member of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s cabinet, wrote that exploiting “someone’s childhood trauma is wrong.”

Nikki Haley called Ramaswamy “a bad guy.” Casey Putsch, who ran against him in the Republican primary, called the spot “pretty damn low” and said he would vote for Acton.

Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review, one of the most respected conservative pro-life Catholic voices in the country, answered the vice president’s remarks on Wednesday. “You are talking about childhood sexual abuse being used against a candidate,” she wrote. “Stop while you’re behind, please.”

Vance did not stop.

I want to speak to that as a Catholic, because Vance asks us to judge him as one. This is a man who wrote a book about his conversion, credits Dominican friars with guiding him into the Church, and tells crowds that his faith shapes his politics.

No institution on earth has paid a heavier price for disbelieving children than the Catholic Church. For decades, bishops protected abusers and treated the children who came forward as liars and threats to the institution’s reputation.

The Church is still atoning for it.

Last month at Lourdes, Pope Leo XIV called the Church to repent for that sin, and he embraced survivors who had waited a lifetime to be believed.

The vice president of the United States, a Catholic, just looked at a survivor of child sexual abuse and blessed the ad calling her a liar. By his own account, he did it because winning Ohio matters more to him than whether the ad was appropriate.

That is an embarrassment to his faith, and it should embarrass every Catholic who has ever defended him as a man of conviction.

It also tells you something about the movement he now leads. MAGA wraps itself in crosses and Bible verses, but when the choice comes down to a wounded woman or 13 more days of political advantage, it chooses power every time. Call it what it is: a godless movement.

None of this is new for Vance. In February 2025, Pope Francis wrote to America’s bishops to correct his theology on immigration, and that same month the future Pope Leo XIV shared a column with a blunt headline: “JD Vance is wrong.”

Two popes rebuked him in a single year, and since then he has warned Leo to be careful when he talks about theology. Wednesday showed why both men spoke up.

Amy Acton deserves to be believed. In 13 days, Ohio voters will get the chance to tell the vice president that a child’s suffering was never his to use.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Amy Acton and her brother Phil, and with every survivor of abuse who has been told that the truth of their own childhood is a lie.

The Church learned, at a terrible cost, that believing survivors is the beginning of justice. We will not let politicians who claim our faith unlearn that lesson for a few points in a governor’s race.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that protects the vulnerable instead of exploiting them, and for a politics that tells the truth about the powerful.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against cruelty dressed up as courage — I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers get our ongoing series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, our Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

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More than 5,000 of you have now written to Pope Leo XIV through our Get Well Letter, and Letters from Leo will carry every one of them to the Vatican. If you haven’t added yours, sign your name and a prayer here.

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Pope Leo XIV needs no further treatment for his lung cancer.

His doctors, Dr. Luigi Carbone and Prof. Stefano Margaritora, said Wednesday that the final lab analysis of the tissue removed during the pope’s Oct. 13 surgery confirmed a pulmonary adenocarcinoma and showed that “the disease was localized.”

A follow-up review by oncologists, they added, “confirmed that no further therapy is required.”

In practical terms, there will be no chemotherapy or radiation, and no second operation is planned. Thanks be to God.

As I told Newsweek, this is a welcome conclusion to what has been a very terrifying week.

It began on Oct. 11, when Leo told the world from the Angelus window that doctors had found a nodule in his lung. Two days later, surgeons at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital removed the lower lobe of his right lung and confirmed it was cancer. He went home on Saturday.

On Wednesday morning, he went back to work.

Pilgrims began lining up in the rain around 5 a.m. for Leo’s first general audience since the operation, and the rain stopped just before the white popemobile rolled into St. Peter’s Square at 9:40, America’s Gerard O’Connell reported.

Leo waved with his right hand (the side where surgeons had operated), stopped again and again to bless babies held up from the crowd, and smiled at shouts of “Viva il papa!”

Then he took his chair and opened his catechesis with a word of gratitude.

“The first thing I would like to say is thank you!” Leo said in Italian. “Thank you for the support of your prayers. Thanks be to God for his generosity. Let us all renew our trust in God’s goodness and mercy.”

He was in surprisingly good form. Leo looked far stronger than he did leaving Gemelli on Saturday, and stronger even than at Sunday’s Angelus, where he promised only to “gradually resume” his activities.

On Wednesday he spoke in a strong, clear voice, and before the final blessing he led the square in singing the Our Father in Latin, eight days after losing part of a lung.

The Vatican did lighten the load.

Readings in Arabic and Chinese were dropped, and the formal program ran about 30 minutes instead of the usual 45. Leo stayed in the square for more than 90 minutes anyway, posing for a photo with over 100 married couples before greeting the cardinals and bishops.

He had already addressed a Vatican conference on holiness at the Augustinianum earlier that morning.

His theme was the family. Continuing his series on the Second Vatican Council, he turned to Gaudium et spes and called the work of protecting marriage and family life “more urgent than ever before.”

None of this would surprise the people who treated him. Margaritora, who directs thoracic surgery at Gemelli and performed the operation, told Vatican News that on the second day after surgery the staff turned around to find the pope arranging the chairs in the hospital chapel himself.

When they offered to take over, Leo answered, “It doesn’t matter. I can do it, so I will.”

“What can I say?” the surgeon added. “He really was an absolutely ideal patient.”

Readers of our series on Pope Leo’s life and formation will know where that answer comes from. Robert Prevost spent most of two decades as an Augustinian in Peru, where a priest who waits for someone else to set up the chapel usually waits a long time.

His candor this month came from the same place.

Leo announced the nodule himself, before the surgery, rather than leaving Catholics to piece his health together from rumor, and so the whole Church could pray with him instead of guessing about him.

More than 5,000 of you have written to him through our Get Well Letter, and Letters from Leo will carry every one of those letters to the Vatican.

We still need to keep watching.

Cancer brings follow-up scans long after the surgeons are finished, and Leo has said nothing, at the Angelus or on Wednesday, about the Nov. 6–17 trip to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru, though his surgeon has said it can go ahead.

I’m confident his medical team will keep a close eye on him, and we will report every development here.

For now, the pope set the right example from St. Peter’s Square. He said thank you first, and then he asked the rest of us to trust in God’s goodness and mercy.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with every family that has sat in a hospital waiting room this year, praying for a scan to come back clean.

Wednesday’s news is a gift, and a gift calls for gratitude. Leo chose that word to open his first audience after cancer surgery, and we choose it too, for his doctors and nurses and for the pilgrims who stood in the rain to welcome him home.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for news about this pope that is honest and written with love. When the word “cancer” came out of the Vatican last week, tens of thousands of you came here first, and thousands of you stayed to write to him.

If you believe this movement matters (Catholics and people of goodwill keeping vigil with Pope Leo XIV and standing for the dignity of every sick and vulnerable person), I am asking you to join us.

If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:

• Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.

• Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.

• Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.

Paid subscribers receive our exclusive series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, including how two decades in Peru shaped the man who sets out his own chapel chairs, along with the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.

Subscribe

Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work

More than 5,000 of you have now written to Pope Leo XIV through our Get Well Letter, and Letters from Leo will carry every one of them to the Vatican. If you haven’t added yours, sign your name and a prayer here.

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-su…

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