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Sign our letter asking the 12 bishops who participated in the President Trump photo-op to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.
The dam has broken.
Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez of Palm Beach, whose diocese takes in President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, reminded his flock on Monday that the Catholic Church “does not endorse or support any political candidate or political party.” He never named the twelve bishops who prayed over Trump in the Oval Office last Thursday, and he did not have to.
“Such actions, when undertaken in the name of the Church, even in the form of ‘prayers’ or ‘blessings,’ are contrary to its nonpartisan mission and should be regarded solely as expressions of individual political preference,” Rodríguez wrote.
Look at the quotation marks he put around the word “prayers.” Coming from the bishop of Trump’s winter home, that bit of punctuation says more than a page of diplomatic regret.
Pope Leo’s man in Palm Beach
Pope Leo XIV named Rodríguez bishop of Palm Beach last December, choosing a Dominican-born pastor from Our Lady of Sorrows in Corona, Queens. It is the largest parish in the Diocese of Brooklyn, and migrants make up most of its 17,000 parishioners.
The Associated Press called him a staunch advocate for migrants on the day the Vatican announced the appointment. At his installation in February, he told the cathedral that “in the Church there are no foreigners or immigrants — only brothers and sisters,” crediting the line to both Pope Francis and Pope Leo.
So Leo sent a pastor of immigrants to shepherd the place where Trump spends his winter weekends. On Monday, that pastor spoke.
Kansas City splits
Two more statements came out of Kansas City on Monday. Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Naumann, who stood behind Trump’s chair on Thursday, put the blame on the White House: his office said in a statement that “the bishops were assured that no photographs would be made public,” according to TIME.
His successor wanted no part of it. Archbishop Shawn McKnight told TIME that Naumann went “in his own individual capacity,” and that “his actions and presence at that event were not on behalf of, or representative of, myself or the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.”
American archbishops rarely put daylight between themselves and the men they replaced, least of all in print. McKnight did it on the record, eight days before an election.
An evangelical script
Writing for Religion News Service, in a story America magazine carried on Friday, Claire Giangravé noted that the gathering echoed the prayer sessions Trump holds with his evangelical supporters. I think she has it exactly right.
In July 2017, evangelical pastors laid hands on Trump in the same room, in nearly the same pose. Paula White-Cain, whom one of those pastors credited with the idea, was standing in the Oval Office again on Thursday.
Evangelical preachers who have endorsed Trump turned that image into a campaign ritual years ago. Catholic bishops had no business borrowing it twelve days before a national election.
The man who arranged it
Of all the threads in this story, the one that has drawn the least attention is the Heritage Foundation official at its center. Mario Enzler, a former Swiss Guard who now advises Heritage’s president, spent weeks inviting prelates to the Oval Office, The Pillar reported, and some turned him down because of how a prayer with Trump would look this close to an election.
As I wrote last week, his résumé does not hold up. The Houston Chronicle found that the Italian university where he claimed a doctorate does not grant one, and that the school listed for his bachelor’s degree is a high school; he left his post as a business dean in Houston in 2022 after professors went to the board.
A man with that record brokered a moment of prayer between successors of the apostles and a president twelve days before an election, which is a corrosive thing for the Church to absorb. Golka never mentioned him, and Heritage now tells Religion News Service that Enzler “didn’t set anything up.”
Why the dam broke
I have two updates on why bishops are moving now.
The first comes from Rome. Sources I have spoken with at the Vatican, and others connected to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, made clear to me that the Holy See expected American bishops to start distancing the Church from the Oval Office photo. Last week, a senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops told me it was “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.”
The second is impatience at home. According to my sources, frustration had been growing among brother bishops over the slow drip of statements from the twelve, and many wanted a cleaner break much sooner.
Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob’s apology, the first, arrived three days after the prayer (by then The Pillar had reported that USCCB president Archbishop Paul Coakley was “deeply frustrated”).
That frustration is what pushed bishops like Rodríguez, who never set foot in the Oval Office, to speak for themselves.
The people of God are speaking
None of this happened in a vacuum. More than 2,500 of you have signed our letter asking the twelve bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.
Four of the twelve have now spoken. Grob apologized on Sunday, and Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines said the White House exploited the meeting. Denver Archbishop James Golka, who led the prayer, told his own paper he never meant it as an endorsement, and Naumann has now pinned the photos on the White House.
The rest of the bishops on the White House’s list have said nothing at all, among them Edward Burns of Dallas, Michael Barber of Oakland, Thomas Hennen of Baker, Steven Raica of Birmingham, Scott Bullock of Rapid City, James Wall of Gallup, and Elias Zaidan of the Maronite eparchy in Los Angeles. We will keep pressing every one of them.
Lay Catholics have a real stake in how their bishops act. As the people of God, our task is to walk alongside our shepherds and, when they stray, to hold them accountable to the flock they were sent to serve.
I am proud of every one of you who spoke up. I am also sorry to keep filling your inbox with this story, but the updates keep coming, and you deserve to have them.
Eight days
Starting now, I am going to try my hardest to get back on program. The election is eight days away, and in this busy stretch I want to put the issues that matter, and the candidates who are running, at the front and center.
I have said this before. Next Tuesday, two names may sit side by side on your ballot, yet what we will really decide is our posterity, which is to say the future we hand to our children.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Rodríguez and with every shepherd who refuses to let a prayer become a campaign prop, especially the immigrant families in his diocese who live a few miles from Mar-a-Lago.
We pray for our leaders at every Mass, and we always will. A blessing belongs to God, though, and the people who need it most were nowhere near the Resolute Desk on Thursday.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for shepherds who speak plainly, and for a laity brave enough to ask them to.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
No apology needed, Christopher Hale, for continuing to "bird dog" this scandalous event on the part of 12 Bishops. Please keep doing this work!!! Your clear, discerning, moderate voice telling the truth is what is needed now. Thank you!!
The bishops who have not responded must surely know that this isn’t just going to fade away. Whether they are actually Trump supporters or merely hopelessly naive, they have to know how their actions are perceived by their parishioners, by their fellow bishops, and by the Pope and the Vatican. Their silence only makes it appear to have been a political choice to support Trump on the eve of the midterms.
The only positive note in all this is the perhaps surprising absence of a thirteenth bishop— Bp. Robert Barron. I cannot imagine that he wasn’t invited, and am gratified that, despite what we know of his politics, he chose not to participate so soon before the election. He deserves credit for his decision.