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.
Stephen Herreid spent years as a political editor inside CatholicVote’s news operation, which relaunched in January as Zeale, a platform built for younger Catholics. By his own telling, the outlet published “arguably more than any other Catholic outlet” on the mistreatment of Palestinians by Israeli forces and settlers. On Wednesday night, he sat across from Tucker Carlson and accused the organization of killing that coverage.
Soon after the Napa Institute’s summer conference in late July (the annual gathering of wealthy conservative Catholic donors in Napa Valley, attended this year by Brian Burch, the founder of CatholicVote and the United States ambassador to the Holy See), Herreid was told Zeale was adopting a new editorial policy on Israel: “drastically reduce our coverage.”
At one point, he said, the policy was presented to him as “a total prohibition,” with “no coverage of Israel until the elections” and any exception “explicitly brought to the CEO.” The directive, by his account, was framed as a takeaway from leadership’s Napa meetings “with donors and from our meeting with the ambassador.”
Herreid went straight to his supervisor and told him, “I think this violates my conscience.” By the time the interview aired, he had resigned, and a clip of the exchange, amplified by the aggregator Mario Nawfal, was tearing across X.
Before resigning, Herreid told CatholicVote’s executives that the request was “unmistakably a moral scandal.” For the ambassador and the CEO to urge a change in Israel coverage “is inherently scandalous,” he argued, “especially in light of how outspoken our Holy Father has been.” He invoked the courage of Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, and “the clergy on the ground in the West Bank” as well.
“I will not be complicit in such a scandal,” he told them.
At 1:22 on Thursday morning, CatholicVote answered.
The rebuttal, posted to X under the name of president and CEO Kelsey Reinhardt, and marked “last edited” beneath its 1:22 a.m. timestamp, runs nearly 700 words. Its thesis lands early: “The bottom line is this: we are dealing here with an editor who does not want to be edited.”
As readers of this newsletter know, I am friends with Brian Burch, despite our political differences. We’ve held similar roles on opposite sides of the aisle within Catholic politics, but that friendship makes me more determined, not less, to scrutinize what’s happening here.
We can be friendly while searching for the truth. If the nation’s leading conservative Catholic organization is being pressured to downplay Israel’s role in the persecution of Christians and Israel’s misdeeds in military action — especially when Pope Leo XIV has spent much energy talking about both — then we need to know that. Catholics across the nation need to know that.
The Napa Institute gathering is quite a big deal among conservative Catholics. I have often been to Napa events as one of the only progressives there. It does strike me as viable that Burch perhaps had a conversation with Reinhardt and expressed concern about any anti-Israel editorial bent coming from CatholicVote publications. I must say it does seem rather sloppy to make that request so blithely of the editor shortly after the conference.
Burch co-founded CatholicVote in 2005, and in 2024 the organization spent more than $10 million reaching some two million Catholic voters. The investment paid. Trump carried Catholics 56 to 41 percent in the Washington Post exit poll, a ten-point improvement on his 2020 margin. When Trump rewarded Burch with the embassy to the Holy See, making him the first movement activist to hold the post since full diplomatic relations began in 1984, the Senate confirmed him 49 to 44.
Hold on to that timeline. I found CatholicVote’s middle-of-the-night long response on Twitter to be very legally precise but, in some ways, lacking. It’s clear that the organization did intervene on coverage of Christian persecution in Israel and Israeli military actions.
Start with the flattest denial: “there never was and never will be a Zeale-wide prohibition on covering Israel.” Herreid never alleged a company-wide ban. He described what his bosses told him, the editor who produced the Israel coverage. Reinhardt confirms the operative fact herself: “The additional review of certain stories applied only to Mr. Herreid.” An outlet whose Israel reporting runs through one desk has no need of a company-wide prohibition, because supervising that desk does the same work.
The donor denial deserves equal care. “No donor at the Napa Institute pressured Zeale News to change its coverage of Israel,” Reinhardt writes, before confirming she held “several conversations with donors and friends of the organization” about “the gap in perceptions about Israel between age groups.” That gap is the polite name for a hard truth: younger conservatives, the audience Zeale was built to reach, have turned against Israel’s war. Donors discussed the problem with the CEO at Napa, and the new editorial regime followed on the conference’s heels. Whether anyone used a verb as crude as “pressured” is almost beside the point.
As a veteran of these types of encounters, there can be things that are unsaid but strongly implied. It’s possible that no one gave that explicit command to CatholicVote, but that the intended message was clear. These are professionals. They know how to operate in ways that advance their objectives without being nakedly obvious. The fact that the editor knew that these conversations happened and that it changed an editorial bent is noteworthy.
It is the ultimate weakness of organizations like CatholicVote, which rely primarily on big donors. With big donors comes big influence. I’ve managed political organizations, I’ve managed political nonprofits, I’ve managed Catholic organizations, and I know this pressure in the flesh. Throughout my career, I’ve done my best to ignore it in pursuit of the truth. That is what is great about this newsletter: we are not funded by big donors. We are funded by the generosity of everyday people like you, so you can be assured that we’re not responding to an outside agenda.
Then there is the ambassador.
According to the statement, Herreid agreed on air when Carlson said Burch was “aiding and abetting the genocide of Christians in the Holy Land,” an assertion Reinhardt calls “absolutely slanderous.” The statement stresses that Herreid “was not in the meeting.” He says so himself — “I wasn’t privy to this conversation” — but told Carlson that three CatholicVote executives independently confirmed it had taken place, two of them present.
Against that backdrop, she confirms a roughly 35-minute meeting with Burch, attended by two other CatholicVote staffers, during which she (and she stresses it was she) raised Israel for about five minutes. According to Reinhardt, his “only observation”…“was that reporting accurately from Israel can be difficult because information often passes through multiple sources before it can be independently verified.”
Let’s do the simple math here.
By CatholicVote’s own account, the single thing the ambassador said about Israel was a comment on sourcing.
What was the one thing Reinhardt claimed to muzzle her long-time editor on? His sourcing, which leaned on Jason Jones’s Vulnerable People Project, the humanitarian group that has carried much of the Christian world’s on-the-ground witness from Gaza and the West Bank. The ambassador never had to ask for friendlier coverage. The observation he offered inside the organization he co-founded did all the work.
The statement’s counterattack concedes more. Zeale declined a VPP story pitch, “a simple story about Christian scouts,” for “the first time in three years,” Reinhardt writes, at which point she alleges Jones threatened to “bury” her in the Washington Post for “surrendering to ‘the Zionists.’”
The allegation is hers alone for now. Yet by her own telling, Zeale had never once turned down a VPP pitch in three years, an admission of exactly the reliance the new policy was built to end.
Two of Herreid’s claims go unanswered. The statement never disputes that the policy arrived immediately after Napa, and nowhere does it engage the phrase Herreid says he was given: no Israel coverage “until the elections.” For a document assembled overnight, one that misspells its own longtime editor’s name two different ways, the silences are as legible as the denials.
The most important claim the statement never denies is “until the elections.” There seems to be a growing sense within the Catholic right that the question of Israel is rightly a political issue that is dividing the MAGA Catholic base. It’s intriguing to me that Zeale was ordered, according to this editor, to stay silent on these issues until the election ended — the obvious reading being that the coverage was a liability for Republicans heading into November.
Support arrived from an unexpected quarter on Thursday morning. Eric Sammons, editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine and among the fiercest critics of Israel’s war in conservative Catholic media, wrote that he could “honestly see both sides.”
Editors decline stories for reasons as ordinary as timing or saturation, he noted, and he has spiked pieces he agreed with, including anti-Israel ones, because “it’s not always a ‘cover-up’ or some conspiracy.” Even his defense left the harder possibilities standing: “It might have been the case that Burch told CV to stop. It might have been some big CV donors told them to cut it out.”
The deeper story is one I reported in March: the wars of the Middle East are breaking the MAGA Catholic coalition apart. Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, where Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Bishop Robert Barron both serve, has already had its own version of this fight. In February, commissioner Carrie Prejean Boller asked at a hearing on antisemitism whether “speaking out about what many Americans view as a genocide in Gaza should be treated as antisemitic.”
She also asked witnesses whether declining to support Israel, “a foreign country” in her words, made her an antisemite, and her defense of Candace Owens drew a sharp reply from Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon: “You should look up more of her statements.” By the end of the hearing, she stood accused of the very antisemitism the panel had convened to examine. By March she was off the commission.
Barron dismissed her complaints of anti-Catholic bias as “absurd,” a judgment Dolan endorsed “wholeheartedly.” Barron himself sat with Ben Shapiro to defend the president’s war in Iran and sand the edges off Pope Leo’s condemnation of it.
Above the fractured coalition stands the pope. Leo XIV has been unsparing about Israel’s conduct for the length of his pontificate, and as recently as Sunday, at Castel Gandolfo, he renewed his appeal “for an end to the ongoing violence against the Palestinian civilian population in the West Bank” — words delivered as settler attacks batter Taybeh, one of the West Bank’s last Christian villages. Conservative Catholic institutions in America spent a generation fusing their faith to their politics.
I think the unbearable truth is that Israel’s top patrons within the Catholic political movement are standing toe-to-toe against the pontificate of Leo XIV. He has made his position on Israel’s military actions and on the persecution of Christians abundantly clear. He has repeatedly, from the funeral of the priest Israel killed in Lebanon to this Sunday’s appeal at Castel Gandolfo.
Herreid’s story, whatever a fuller accounting shows, is about what this strain is causing in MAGA Catholicism. Reinhardt’s statement asks readers to believe this is “a dispute over ordinary editorial standards.” But her own admissions, including the donor conversations, the ambassador’s observation, the one-editor review regime, and the timeline she never contests, tell a fuller story than her denials do, and no reader needs a PhD in Catholic insider baseball to know what kept CatholicVote up all night.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with everyone who refuses to stop telling the truth about the suffering of God’s people in the Holy Land, whatever that truth costs them. The Gospel gives no one permission to look away from a persecuted Church because the timing is politically inconvenient, and neither does this community.
People join this movement because they are hungry for something deeper than spin — for a faith that measures every power, including our friends’, against the dignity of the human person. That hunger built the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country, and stories like this one are the reason it keeps growing.
If you believe Catholics and people of goodwill need independent reporting on the Church, the White House, and these wars — writing nobody can quietly halt “until the elections” — 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 members receive our exclusive biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation and investigations like the Epstein-Bannon files, alongside the Sunday scripture reflections that keep this community rooted in something older than the news cycle.
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.
Catholic MAGA would be an oxymoron in any sane world. But we need to be honest and concede that Democrats are equally dependant on cash support from the Israeli government lobby. Trump and his associates represent everything I was taught that Jesus preached against, but so many Democrats also support the Trump line on the slaughter imposed by the Israeli government on Palestinians , Christians, and others from so many nations that try to provide humanitarian relief to the suffering in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Any organisation that uses Catholic in its title and constraints condemnation of this Israeli government imposition uses a title it has no right to use.
At some point one has to recognise that people who put a worldly politics ahead of the Universal Church; who undermine the very grace and compassion that the Mother of God embodies; and seeks to attack the pastoral care of Christ’s Vicar, are not Catholic in any truthful sense. They’re solely activists within certain elective affinities that appear to resemble catholic religiosity but not the Catholic Faith.