Bishop Barron Rewrites Pope Leo’s Anti-War Message on Ben Shapiro’s Show

After being in the White House as Trump was compared to the risen Christ, Barron told Shapiro the pope’s Palm Sunday rebuke wasn’t about Iran — and the Pizzaballa incident was overblown.

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support the mission, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester has spent Holy Week on a whirlwind tour of right-wing media — the Will Cain Show, the Ben Shapiro Show, the Hugh Hewitt Show — after sitting like a potted plant at the White House while Paula White compared Donald Trump to the risen Christ.

The most consequential of the three interviews was Shapiro’s, where Barron offered the conservative commentator exactly what he needed: theological permission to ignore the pope.

The conversation, recorded in Rome during Holy Week, centered on Pope Leo XIV’s Palm Sunday homily — a message the pope delivered just days ago in St. Peter’s Square.

Leo quoted the prophet Isaiah directly at those waging war: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood.” The pope described Jesus as the “King of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war.” He said God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”

The words landed during a week when American bombs continued to fall on Iran, when Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had just prayed for “overwhelming violence” at the Pentagon, and when the White House hosted an Easter prayer event where Trump’s spiritual advisor Paula White declared to the president: “Because he rose, you rose up. Because he was victorious, you were victorious.”

Trump himself interrupted a scripture reading to announce, “They call me King. Now do you believe it?” Barron sat through all of it — then decided to appear on Shapiro’s show.

Shapiro opened the segment by playing audio of Leo’s homily and calling the pope’s language “inartfully broad” and “a strange statement.” He said he assumed the pope was talking about unjust war, “because otherwise it makes no sense.”

Shapiro listed Old Testament figures who prayed while waging war — Moses, Joshua, King David — and rattled off crusade-blessing popes from Urban II to Clement V. His argument amounted to a claim that the pope had contradicted Catholic teaching by condemning war in general terms rather than applying just war criteria to Iran specifically.

Barron agreed. “No, I think that’s the right distinction, the one you made,” the bishop said. He acknowledged that Pope Leo is an Augustinian, “shaped by the Augustinian intellectual and spiritual tradition,” and that Augustine himself was “the first major figure in Christianity to give us a just war theory.”

But Barron used this theological genealogy to dilute the pope’s words rather than amplify them. He told Shapiro the pope was “certainly critiquing an unjust war or someone who’s invoking God to support an unjust war” — and added that Leo was “not referring specifically or precisely to the Iran war.”

That claim requires ignoring the context in which Leo spoke.

The pope delivered his Palm Sunday homily after weeks of sustained public opposition to the American-led bombing campaign.

He has called for the permanent abolition of aerial bombing. He walked out of Castel Gandolfo days ago and implored Trump to find “an off-ramp” to end the war by Easter. Cardinal McElroy has declared the conflict “not morally legitimate.”

The pope’s own words — “your hands are full of blood” — quote Isaiah 1:15, a passage addressed to those who perform religious rituals while perpetuating violence. In the same week that Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence” and Paula White compared Trump to the risen Christ, the target of Leo’s message could not have been clearer.

Barron chose instead to offer Shapiro’s audience a reading of the pope that made the homily unthreatening — a generic meditation on unjust war rather than a pointed rebuke of the administration Barron has spent the past year serving.

The conversation then turned to Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, who was physically blocked by Israeli police from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate Palm Sunday Mass.

For the first time in centuries, Christian leaders were barred from Christianity’s holiest site. Shapiro framed the incident as a security misunderstanding caused by missile-defense protocols in the Old City and suggested that those who saw it as an affront to Christian worship were leaping “to the most extreme interpretation of events.”

Barron agreed with that framing too. “It got resolved pretty quickly,” the bishop said. “All well that ends well, I suppose.”

He added that construing the incident as “some massive attack on Catholicism is unwarranted.” A photograph of Pizzaballa shaking hands with an Israeli police official, Barron suggested, “should put an end to it.”

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem does not share that assessment. Neither do the Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Coptic patriarchs who jointly condemned the restriction.

The leaders of every major Christian communion in the Holy Land described the incident as unprecedented, and the Vatican’s own response signaled alarm rather than the reassurance Barron offered on camera.

This was Holy Week — the holiest days of the Christian year. Barron sat silent at the White House as a president’s advisor compared him to the risen Christ, then embarked on a tour of exclusively right-wing media to explain away both the pope’s anti-war message and the barring of the Latin Patriarch from the tomb of Jesus.

Across roughly 45 minutes of combined airtime on the Will Cain Show, the Ben Shapiro Show, and the Hugh Hewitt Show, Barron did not once criticize the Iran war or acknowledge the pope’s campaign to stop it.

Barron’s trajectory from Catholic intellectual to apologist for the Trump administration is well documented at Letters from Leo.

He serves on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. He has used his Word on Fire platform to attack Democratic politicians over isolated remarks about collectivism while staying conspicuously silent on the administration’s war, its deportation flights, and its weaponization of Christian language to justify violence.

His media tour was the latest station on that road — a Catholic bishop, in the heart of Holy Week, lending his authority across three right-wing platforms to the argument that the pope’s words carry less weight than they plainly do.

The pope quoted Isaiah at those whose hands are full of blood. Barron’s response, delivered across three right-wing programs to millions of conservative listeners, was to assure them that Leo probably meant something else.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of American Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who heard the pope’s Palm Sunday message for what it was: a moral condemnation of an administration that invokes God while waging war, that compares its leader to Christ while dropping bombs on Iran, and that sends its bishops onto cable news to explain away the words of the Vicar of Christ.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for voices that refuse to launder the theology of empire.

They want a faith that speaks truth to power rather than offering power the cover of faith — and in this moment, when American bombs fall during the holiest week of the year, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the baptism of violence — I am asking you to join us.

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

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

• 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 biographical series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, access to The Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and the complete archive of the Lenten Reflection Series.

Whether you give $7, $70, or $7,000, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.

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