Lay Catholics Should Be Partisans. Bishops and Priests Should Not.

In response to my Barron piece, two clerics I respect called me a partisan Democrat. Guilty. The Second Vatican Council makes it clear: lay people should do partisan politics. Prelates shouldn’t.

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, who led the U.S. bishops’ conference from 2013 to 2016, speaks at a 2020 demonstration for racial justice as a masked protester raises a sign reading “Black Catholics for Life and Dignity — That’s Why Black Lives Must Matter.”

Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

On Tuesday, I published an essay arguing that Bishop Robert Barron contradicted Pope Leo XIV on empathy in the service of a MAGA culture war.

By Wednesday morning, two clerics I respect had answered me on X, and their answer deserves more than a reply in a thread.

Fr. Matthew Schneider is a Legionary of Christ who teaches theology at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut. “There is a decent argument to be made that Barron is overly deferential to right-wing politics,” he wrote, before adding that I sound hypocritical making it, since I am “more deferential to left-wing politics than he is to right-wing politics.”

Fr Matthew P. Schneider, LC🇻🇦@FrMatthewLC

@ChristopherHale There is a decent argument to be made that Barron is overly deferential to right-wing politics. However, you sound hypocritcal making it as you are more deferential to left-wing politics than he is to right-wing politics.

12:42 PM · Sep 9, 2026 · 744 Views

---

5 Replies · 1 Repost · 26 Likes

Joseph Nolla is a Jesuit in formation for the priesthood, an Air Force veteran now studying theology in Paris. He granted that “one can make the argument that Barron has been deferential on the mass deportation programs,” then wrote that “Hale’s partisanship is leagues more egregious than what Bishop Barron is doing.”

Setting aside the superlatives, they are both right that I’m a partisan.

I’ve never claimed otherwise. I am a Democrat.

I ran for Congress in Tennessee’s Fourth District in 2020 as one (and lost, as anyone who has driven through Grundy County could have predicted), I served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, and I have spent a good part of the years since trying to rebuild a Catholic left inside that party.

Here’s what I told Jon Favreau in detail this spring about being a “heterodox Democrat.”

I plead guilty, and my conscience is clear, because the Second Vatican Council told me this work was mine — and yours.

Gaudium et spes, the Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, assigns the work in its 43rd paragraph.

“Secular duties and activities belong properly although not exclusively to laymen,” the bishops wrote in 1965. They warned the laity against expecting their pastors to run the world for them: “Let the layman not imagine that his pastors are always such experts, that to every problem which arises, however complicated, they can readily give him a concrete solution, or even that such is their mission.”

The same paragraph allows that Catholics will disagree with one another on these questions “with equal sincerity,” and it forbids anyone to “appropriate the Church’s authority for his opinion.”

Pope Leo XIV turned his Wednesday catechesis to this document last week, and he described the Council’s demand this way: “We cannot remain as unengaged spectators; rather, we must listen with our hearts, allow ourselves to be challenged, and become involved.”

Politics in a republic runs through parties. If I wanted to make no difference whatsoever, I could try to operate in an ineffectual third-party alternative, but for anyone who cares about getting political results in 2026, only two secular vehicles are available in the United States — the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

“Reality,” Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV argue, “is greater than ideas.”

So inevitably, a layperson who becomes involved in the way the Council asks will find himself inside one of them sooner or later, with all the difficult tensions that entails.

The clergy was handed a different assignment, and John Paul II made sure nobody would think otherwise.

In the spring of 1980, he ordered the Jesuits to pull Fr. Robert Drinan out of Congress, where the Massachusetts Democrat was preparing to run for a sixth term, and Drinan obeyed.

Fr. Robert Drinan, SJ, the Massachusetts Democrat who served five terms in the U.S. House, stands outside the Capitol in an undated photograph. John Paul II ordered him out of Congress in 1980, and he did not seek a sixth term. (Boston College Law School Magazine)

Three years later, on the tarmac in Managua, the pope wagged his finger at Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, the Sandinista culture minister who knelt before him after years of ignoring Rome’s demand that he resign his government post, and told him to set his affairs right with the Church.

Pope John Paul II admonishes Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaragua’s Sandinista culture minister, as the priest kneels before him at the Managua airport on March 4, 1983. The pope suspended Cardenal from priestly ministry the following year. (Archive photo)

That same year the pope promulgated a new Code of Canon Law, and the rule went into the text. Canon 285 forbids clerics “to assume public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power,” and canon 287 adds: “They are not to have an active part in political parties.”

It is worth remembering who bore the brunt of that discipline. Drinan, the former dean of Boston College Law School, had gone to Congress in 1970 as an antiwar liberal; the Nicaraguan priests were serving the Sandinista revolution. John Paul was right to remove them anyway.

As far as I can tell, the principle has never depended on which side a priest picks, and a cleric who becomes a party’s protagonist has stopped being the Church’s witness to every party.

This is where my critics’ argument collapses. Two vocations are in play, and they carry opposite rules.

A bishop guides and, when the moment calls for it, rebukes, and he owes both to Republicans and Democrats alike. The layman walks into the party of his choice and tries to make it a little more like the Kingdom, knowing it never fully will be.

I have sat through enough Democratic Party functions in Tennessee, Washington, and elsewhere to know how far from the Kingdom the work starts.

So yes, I work inside the Democratic Party, as a Catholic who believes its positions on immigrants, on war, on labor, and on the poor sit closer to the Gospel than the alternative, and who fights the party where it strays. I want the same from my counterparts across the aisle.

I disagree with Kelsey Reinhardt, the president of CatholicVote, on most days of the week, and I still believe the Republican Party is better for having a sincere Catholic in the room.

John Carr, who ran the U.S. bishops’ justice and peace office for a quarter century before founding Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, put the goal this way in February:

“What if you had a ‘dignity caucus’ in each party that would support the best of their party, but challenge the things that go against our teaching?” That is the partisanship the Council imagined, and it belongs to laypeople like Reinhardt and me.

Bishop Barron has crossed the line the Council drew in many ways since he accepted a seat on Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission in May 2025.

During Holy Week this year, the bishop co-hosted an event at which clergy compared the president to the risen Christ. In May, he told Fox News that the real threat to the Church is wokeism and called Democrats “borderline communists”; two days later, he was headlining a Trump-backed partisan prayer rally on the National Mall.

In my article yesterday, I listed over 30 public instances of Bishop Barron being explicitly partisan in the past two years alone.

Barron knows what he’s doing. He even said so last month: “I know I’ve been posting a lot recently…”

Bishop Robert Barron@BishopBarron

I know I’ve been posting a lot recently, but as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus used to say, “it’s a target-rich environment” right now. The governor of Massachusetts just signed into law a statute that permits abortion up until the moment of birth, as long as mother and doctor give…

3:42 PM · Aug 12, 2026 · 432K Views

---

1.51K Replies · 4.23K Reposts · 18.8K Likes

Picture another bishop doing all of that for the Democratic National Committee, and every Catholic conservative in the country would call it a scandal. They would be right.

The Council anticipated him. “The Church, by reason of her role and competence,” Gaudium et spes declares in its 76th paragraph, “is not identified in any way with the political community nor bound to any political system.” A bishop who ties his ministry to a movement forfeits the standing to judge that movement, and the whole Church loses a voice she needs.

The retreat from partisanship that the Council asks of Bishop Barron was never asked of the laity. Fr. Schneider and Joseph Nolla are good men, and I am grateful they took the time to push back, but the charge they leveled describes a vocation rather than a vice.

You and I carry the responsibility, handed down at the Council and renewed by Pope Leo XIV this month, to make both political parties in this country better vehicles for Christ’s justice and love.

One final note.

I think it is a fine thing that two men of the cloth are willing to argue with a layman in public and in good faith, and I hope they keep doing it. Fr. John Jenkins, the former president of Notre Dame, wrote an underappreciated essay for the Wall Street Journal in January 2013 that I agree with wholeheartedly.

“What if, instead of demonizing opponents, we took steps to persuade them?” he asked. “I have to understand their position, which means I have to listen to them. I have to appeal to their values, which means I have to show them respect.”

They did that for me, and I hope this essay returns the favor.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the Council fathers of 1965 and with the American Catholics who carry their faith into precinct meetings, campaign offices, union halls, and county conventions in both parties, trusting that Christ meant for his Church to shape the world through their hands rather than through a bishop’s cable-news hits.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a Church that speaks to power without being owned by it, and right now, as a bishop with 3.6 million subscribers lends his miter to one party’s culture war, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill working inside every party for the dignity of every person — I am asking you to join us.

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

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

• 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 ongoing series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, our exclusive investigations, including the Epstein-Bannon files, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.

Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $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.