As Trump Attacks Pope Leo XIV and ICE Raids Catholic Parishes, Bishop Barron Tells Fox News the Real Threat Is Wokeism
Before headlining Trump's prayer event with Cardinal Dolan, Barron dismissed Pope Francis’s defining critique of capitalism — and accused the Democrats of being “borderline communists.”
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Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester sat for Fox News this week to do what he has been doing for months — attack American Democrats, defend American capitalism, and step around the Catholic teachings he finds inconvenient.
The interview aired two days before Rededicate 250, the controversial Trump-backed prayer event Barron will headline on Sunday on the National Mall alongside Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is delivering the video address.
Father Mike Schmitz, originally listed as a speaker, prudently removed his name from the partisan lineup last month — and we will have more to say about the event tomorrow.
His targets on Fox were Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, and an unnamed group of fellow Catholics in Rome who, in Barron’s telling, had irritated him by quoting Pope Francis.
“Sometimes when I was over in Rome for the synod on synodality,” Barron told Fox, “I would hear people talking about the economy that kills. And the reference was to capitalism. I would say the economy that kills — socialism is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people the last 100 years or so.”
The economy that kills carried the central social thesis of the Francis pontificate — his enduring critique of a culture of indifference, not the synodal chatter Barron makes it sound like on Fox.
Pope Francis issued Evangelii Gaudium in November 2013. Section 53 reads: “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.”
Francis returned to the phrase for the next decade — in addresses to the World Meeting of Popular Movements, to executives gathered at the Vatican, to young economists at the Assisi gathering he convened in 2022. It became the moral signature of his papacy.
A Catholic bishop should not need to be told this. The man holding that office, with a worldwide media platform, regular travel to Rome for Vatican synods, and the chairmanship of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, certainly should not.
Yet on Fox News, with the Rededicate 250 stage two days away, Barron treated Francis’s defining critique of capitalism as the muttering of unnamed synod attendees whose theology he had come to correct.
Consider the timing. Donald Trump has attacked Pope Leo XIV publicly more than once in the past month — accusing the pope of “endangering a lot of Catholics,” threatening retaliation, and telling Catholic audiences he would have done things differently if he were not in the White House.
Asked by Fox News this week to name the principal threat facing religion in America, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester did not mention the president, the war, or the deportation flights. The threat he named was “wokeism.”
The Fox interview ranged wider than Francis. Here’s what happened.
