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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.
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.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
The bishops would have been better advised to have done an exorcism in the Oval Office.
He was invited, and willingly went to trumps White House. Okay.
My question is, what did he think was going to happen? Maybe trump would beg forgiveness or have a confession?
Getting really tired of religious people acting like anything trump does is normal.