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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.
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.
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Just when I thought things might change with the new pope.
These are men with decades of leadership development, along with political and media savvy. Historic video. Disgusting.