Joined By Anti-Catholic Pastors, Barron and Dolan Speak at Trump’s Prayer Rally
Pastor Robert Jeffress, who calls the Catholic Church “satanic,” headlined the same Trump-backed rally. Ten days earlier, Dolan had called Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo “very unfortunate” on Fox News.
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On Sunday, May 17, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the retired archbishop of New York, and Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, lent their voices to “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” the Trump-backed prayer festival on the National Mall. Barron took the stage in person, while Dolan participated via a pre-recorded video.
The event was organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership with the White House.
The program featured Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard by video, alongside evangelist Franklin Graham, White House faith adviser Paula White-Cain, Eric Metaxas, and pastor Robert Jeffress. PBS reported in advance that the gathering had been criticized for promoting Christian nationalism.
Father Mike Schmitz, the Minnesota priest whose “Bible in a Year” podcast has built one of the largest Catholic audiences in America, was originally announced as a speaker. In early April, his team informed the White House he would be unable to attend. The lineup that emerged in his absence made clear why his judgment was sound.
Anyone tuning in expecting an ecumenical day of national prayer encountered something else: a stage built by Christians who have spent decades telling American Catholics their Church is a fraud.
Consider the two most visible of them.
Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas and a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, has been calling the Catholic Church satanic since at least 2010.
In a sermon series at his own parish, he told his congregation that “much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word. It comes from that cult-like pagan religion” — what he called the “Babylonian mystery religion” that “spread like a cult throughout the entire world.”
He has never retracted any of it. Last month, with Trump publicly attacking Pope Leo XIV as “weak on crime” for opposing the Iran war, Jeffress went on Fox News and announced that the president understands the Bible better than the pope.
Eric Metaxas, also a Religious Liberty commissioner, used his time at the microphone to argue that God had “raised up a great man” — Donald Trump — to finally build a ballroom on the White House grounds, two centuries after the British burned the building in the War of 1812.
The audience laughed, but Metaxas was not joking.
He has spent the last several years describing Donald Trump as an instrument of divine providence. Guests on his radio show have called Pope Francis “an atheist who is cynically trying to destroy the church from within.” In his celebrated biography of Martin Luther, the Reformation appears as the rescue of “the true Gospel” from its “crushing welter of ecclesiastical and political medieval structures.”
This is the stage Cardinal Dolan addressed by video. “In every chapter of the American story,” he said, “our faith in God has been the bedrock of our greatness, the source of our success.”
Bishop Barron, speaking from the platform, echoed the theme: “As we reflect on our history, we can see this consistent thread, the conviction that human dignity, equality, rights, freedom, and the rule of law are all grounded in God.”
Read aloud in a parish hall, those lines would not raise a Catholic eyebrow. The trouble is everything that surrounded them on Sunday’s program. Decades of public ministry by the men who shared that stage with Dolan and Barron have been built on the conviction that the Catholic Church is a counterfeit faith. The price of access to that platform on Sunday was Catholic legitimacy, and two American bishops of the Church handed it over.
Ten days earlier, Cardinal Dolan had sat across from Martha MacCallum on Fox News to discuss Trump’s series of attacks on Pope Leo XIV — the president’s claim that the pope was “weak on crime” for opposing the Iran war, his social-media taunts, his charge that Leo was “terrible for foreign policy.”
Dolan called the president’s remarks “very unfortunate.” He invoked his “love and respect and admiration and tremendous devotion” for the Holy Father.
Then on Sunday, the same cardinal sent a recorded message to a White House festival featuring the pastor who had just told that same network that Donald Trump understands the Bible better than Leo XIV does.
No coherent theory of conscience explains both gestures. They came from the same man, in the same media ecosystem, performed for two different audiences in the span of a week and a half.
Pope Leo XIV has spent his first year insisting that the Church belongs to no political faction, that the fusion of God and flag now branded as “Christian nationalism” is a counterfeit faith, and that the “inhuman treatment” of migrants by his own country’s government violates the Gospel.
His friends in the American hierarchy are supposed to back that vision. On Sunday, two of the most visible American prelates instead chose to share a podium with the men leading the public attack on him.
Father Schmitz, whose participation would have delivered far more Catholic households to organizers than either bishop, understood what the stage was for and pulled out. That is the contrast worth marking.
A campus priest with a podcast read the room with sharper institutional judgment than the cardinal of New York and the bishop appointed to chair the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis.
American Catholicism survived the Know-Nothings, the Klan, and two centuries of evangelical Protestantism that refused to admit Catholics belonged in the American story. The Church did not survive by negotiating the terms of its own faith for political access.
What was offered on Sunday was the oldest deal in American religious life: a seat at the table on the condition that the new guest agree not to notice that the men around him have spent their lives insisting he should not be at it.
Father Mike Schmitz refused that deal. What the cardinal of New York and the bishop of Winona-Rochester did on Sunday morning was something else.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of American Catholics — and countless people of goodwill — who refuse to let the Church be laundered into the religious infrastructure of an administration attacking the pope. We believe the price of Catholic access to American power cannot be silence about men who have spent their lives insisting that Catholics are not real Christians.
In an era when bishops are being asked to perform alongside the people most hostile to their Church, we remain rooted in a faith that does not negotiate its own legitimacy for proximity to a podium.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than ecclesial vanity and political access. They are looking for courage, for truth, for fidelity to the Gospel made visible in moral action — and right now, as American prelates trade the Church’s good name for a seat on Trump’s stage, that hunger has never been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity and integrity of the Church against partisan capture — I am asking you to join us.
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Shame on Dolan and Barron!
Such a sad response. I truly enjoyed Bp Barron’s work until his lovefest with Trump. So disappointing. And Archbishop Dolan….I don’t have any thing to say. Just a BIG disappointment.