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Denver Archbishop James Golka stood at President Donald Trump’s right hand beside the Resolute Desk on Thursday afternoon and asked God to bless him.
“We lift up our president today,” Golka prayed, while a ring of American bishops bowed their heads around the seated president. Paula White-Cain, the televangelist who leads the White House Faith Office, stood just behind the president’s chair.
White House aide Margo Martin posted the video a little before 3 p.m., captioned with a red heart, and Trump’s campaign account pushed it out too. Americans vote in 12 days.
It was a despicable decision. In the hours since, Catholics across the country have said so, from Chicago classrooms to Denver newsrooms.
The bishops broke their own rule
The bishops’ own teaching forbids this. In Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the voting guide the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reissues every election cycle, they wrote that “the Church is involved in the political process but is not partisan.” The very next line reads, “The Church cannot champion any candidate or party.”
Stephen Schneck, president of Catholics for the Future, put that question to Vatican watcher Rocco Palmo within hours, “at this point as the election is literally underway.”
Golka knows the principle well, because he wrote it down. In April, after Trump called Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the archbishop declared the president’s remarks “not acceptable” and added, “Pope Leo’s role is pastoral, not political.” Six months later, he lent his own pastoral office to the president’s campaign feed.
As I have argued before, lay Catholics should be partisans, and bishops should not. Thursday’s footage is what it looks like when a prelate forgets the difference.
Whom they blessed
Consider the man under those hands. Trump has spent much of this year at war with the first American pope. He claimed that “if I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican” and posted an image of himself in a biblical robe, healing a bedridden man with light from his fingers. By May, he was calling the pope “useless.”
On the same afternoon the bishops prayed over him, Trump urged Vivek Ramaswamy to keep airing an ad in which Amy Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calls the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor “a liar.” Acton has said her stepfather sexually abused her as a girl and that her mother stayed with him.
The court records back her up. An Ohio grand jury indicted the stepfather on a rape charge in 1978, according to documents reviewed by FactCheck.org, and the couple left town before he could be tried. Trump, writing on Truth Social, called Acton “defective, dishonest, and incapable” and said the ad was “hitting pay dirt.”
The preacher at his side
White’s presence made all of it worse. At the White House Easter lunch this spring, she told Trump he had been “betrayed and arrested and falsely accused,” then called it “a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us.” In 2019, she said Christians who opposed his agenda would “stand accountable before God one day.” Kyle Clark of 9NEWS in Denver flagged that history within the hour.
The Archdiocese of Denver answered with a statement saying Golka asked “God’s blessing upon the president and our nation” and invited the faithful “to pray for our nation and its leaders.” That is the charge St. Paul gave Timothy, to offer prayers “for kings and for all in authority.” Paul never told anyone to stage those prayers for a campaign camera two weeks before an election.
Who else was in the room
Palmo, who writes Whispers in the Loggia, identified three more prelates in the frame: Bishop Edward Burns of Dallas, Bishop Scott Bullock of Rapid City, and Archbishop Joseph Naumann, the retired archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas.
He said other American bishops stood in the shot too, though he declined to name them “without full clarity.” I reached out to Golka, Burns, Bullock and Naumann on Thursday, and none had responded by publication. I also asked the USCCB about the meeting and have not heard back (the conference told the National Catholic Reporter it played no role in arranging the gathering).
Rich Raho, a theologian at DePaul College Prep in Chicago, noted the sequence: Trump and Vice President JD Vance criticize Pope Leo, and then the bishops show up for a photo op.
The timing also defies the conference’s own vice president. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville told the National Catholic Reporter in September that “we need to restore a certain self-restraint,” and he asked his brother bishops to stop “revving up the anger” before the midterms.
Willing or played
An official at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, organized the meeting, according to several sources who spoke to The Pillar. In Rome, the reaction was blunt. A senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops, the Vatican office Pope Leo ran as a cardinal before his election, spoke to me on background Thursday night and called it “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.”
Only two explanations survive. These bishops walked into the Oval Office knowing the cameras would roll and the campaign would post the footage, or Heritage and the White House stooged them into serving as props. Either way, men charged with guarding the Church’s witness let a president turn it into an ad 12 days before an election.
The prayers of the faithful at Sunday Mass routinely include those who govern, and no Catholic objects to that. What happened Thursday served another master. It was an abomination and an embarrassment to the Church, committed by shepherds who should have spotted the trap from the hallway; as politics, it was flagrantly dumb too.
We cannot let this stand. Catholics should write to their bishops this week and ask, plainly, whether they knew about the meeting and whether the conference will say anything before Nov. 3. Holding our bishops’ feet to the fire is how we make sure the altar never becomes a campaign stage again.
We are just getting started on this story, and I will have more in the days to come.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, whose role Archbishop Golka himself once called pastoral rather than political, and with the millions of Catholics who refuse to let the faith be rented out to any party or any president.
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Yes, this is repulsive. At a minimum the bishops put their finger on scales of partisan choice. Second it's a disgrace that they showed favor to one of the most immoral men to have ever held the presidency. Third, he thinks they're fools and is only using them. Ask Mike Pence what Trump told him how he views religious people.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mike-make-pray-trump-reportedly-mocks-pences-religiosity-152748785.html
As a Catholic I am disappointed with these bishops. This is wrong wrong wrong and more wrong.