“Disrespectful and Violent” — Bishop Rodríguez Rebukes Trump From Mar-a-Lago’s Diocese
Bishop Rodríguez had his statement defending Pope Leo read at every Palm Beach Mass on Sunday. Today, Bishop Barron published another whitewash of the president's Iran War.
Dear friends —
On Sunday morning at the Mass of every parish in the Diocese of Palm Beach — thirteen miles from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — a statement from Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez was read aloud from the pulpit, calling the president’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV “disrespectful and violent” and closing with a direct appeal to pray for the safety of the Holy Father.
Letters from Leo called this moment in December, when Pope Leo XIV named Rodríguez to Palm Beach — we told CBS News the new bishop would be “a thorn in the president’s side.”
We’ve spent the past few months tracking the moral confrontation between Pope Leo — and the Gospel of Jesus Christ — and the Trump-Vance administration: the ceasefire demands on Iran, the bomb threat that arrived at the home of the pope’s brother, and an American hierarchy that has split hard over how to answer.
Below, paid subscribers will find the full account of what happened yesterday in Palm Beach — and Bishop Robert Barron’s newest whitewash of the moral atrocity in Iran, posted today from a bishop seated on the president’s own Religious Liberty Commission. Your support makes this work possible.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Rodríguez and every Catholic leader — and every person of goodwill — who refuses to let the Gospel be managed into silence while the Holy Father is attacked by the most powerful politician on earth.
In a country where the president calls the pope “WEAK on Crime,” strips Catholic charities of $11 million amid his feud with Rome, and counts on the American hierarchy to look the other way, the need for a Catholic voice willing to tell the truth has never been more urgent.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because American Catholics are hungry for something deeper than silence from the pulpit and theological cover for a White House in an unjust war and a one-sided fight with the Successor of Peter.
They are looking for pastors who will shepherd them, plain truth from the pulpit, and a Church that stands with the pope the Spirit gave us — and right now, with that pope under direct attack from the White House and bishops on the president’s commission softening every blow, that hunger matters more than ever.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity, migrant lives, and the Holy Father against a president who is attacking all three — I am asking you to join us.
If you’d like to invest in our mission this Easter season, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo XIV and to help sustain this work.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might need to read it.
Paid subscribers also have access to our ongoing series on the biographical life and formation of Pope Leo XIV, the Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and the best of our full archive — the essential collection for understanding this moment in the Church and in America.
Whether you give $0, $1, $100, $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.
On Sunday morning, across the Diocese of Palm Beach — thirteen miles from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez had the same statement read aloud at the Sunday Mass of every parish in his diocese.
“The Diocese of Palm Beach stands firm with our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, and strongly rejects the disrespectful and violent attacks that Donald J. Trump has directed against the Holy Father,” the message read. “These attacks also constitute a grave violation of the religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution of the United States and, as such, harm the rights of the American Catholic faithful.”
The bishop closed with a single line: “Please pray for the safety of the Holy Father.”
For readers of Letters from Leo, the statement closes a loop.
When Pope Leo XIV named Rodríguez the sixth Bishop of Palm Beach last December, we covered the appointment as more than a run-of-the-mill personnel decision. Rodríguez is Dominican-born, came to New York in 2009, and became a U.S. citizen in 2018.
He spent seventeen years pastoring Our Lady of Sorrows in Corona, Queens — a parish of 17,000 mostly immigrant faithful — and his team helped families facing ICE deportation long before it was politically useful. We called the appointment exactly what it was: Pope Leo sending a migrant bishop to Mar-a-Lago.
We told CBS News the new bishop would be “a thorn in the president’s side.”
Five months in, the thorn has arrived.
Sunday’s statement followed a week of escalation readers of this movement have tracked in real time. Pope Leo spent most of March and April calling the Iran war a “scandal for humanity” and demanding a ceasefire.
Trump responded on Truth Social, where he branded the pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and took credit for the conclave that elected him.
Pope Leo, for his part, told reporters he has “no fear” of the Trump administration. Within seventy-two hours, the White House stripped $11 million from Catholic Charities, and a bomb threat arrived at the home of the Holy Father’s brother in suburban Chicago.
Bishop Rodríguez inherited all of it — a president who had spent the week treating the pope as an enemy, and a diocese that sits at the political center of that enmity. His response was to release a statement read in every parish of Palm Beach and ask Catholics to pray for the pope’s life.
Read the statement again.
It names Trump by name, calls his rhetoric against Pope Leo “violent,” and identifies the constitutional harm at stake — a president attacking the religious leader of the American Catholic Church in a way that collides with the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom.
What Bishop Rodríguez asks of his people is simpler and more urgent than any political program: stand with the Holy Father, and we pray for his safety. This is what a bishop is supposed to do when the baptized are being confused about where the Church belongs in a political fight.
Rodríguez did not come to this moment unprepared. His whole priesthood has been a school for it. He spent years accompanying undocumented families, standing at immigration hearings, and defending the dignity of the poor long before any of it was useful to him.
Pope Leo chose a pastor who would not flinch in Florida. When Trump attacked the Holy Father last weekend, the pastor responded at Sunday morning Mass.
He is not alone. Cardinal Blase Cupich joined Cardinal McElroy in calling the Iran war “not morally legitimate.”
At New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Mass, Archbishop Ronald Hicks stood with immigrant families during Trump-Vance ICE raids.
Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski went further still, celebrating Christmas Mass at “Alligator Alcatraz” in open defiance of the president’s detention camps.
What Rodríguez added on Sunday was proximity — a diocese that includes Mar-a-Lago, a rebuke that arrives at the president’s Florida zip code.
At his ordination, a Catholic bishop promises to remain in the unity of the Church under the authority of the successor of Peter. That promise is not decorative.
Defending the person of the pope against public attacks from the most powerful politician on earth is an act of the bond that makes a bishop a bishop, and Rodríguez kept it on Sunday morning in the Diocese of Palm Beach, within a short drive of the president’s Florida home.
With Rodríguez’s message read in every parish of Palm Beach, the only question still facing the American Church is which instinct wins.
Two Ways Forward
Eleven hundred miles northwest of Palm Beach, another American bishop was writing a different kind of message — Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota.
