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Bo French posted the photograph at 7:52 on the morning of Sunday, September 13. It showed a crowd of University of Texas students, many of them South Asian, roaring in the stands the night before as the Longhorns came back to beat Ohio State in Austin.
“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
French is the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, the three-member body that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. He chaired the Tarrant County Republican Party until last year, and in June, in a post about “the threat of Islam in Texas,” he wrote that he “won’t rest until every muslim is gone.” The photograph was in keeping with the record.
Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth answered at 3:16 that afternoon. French lives in his diocese. “This is racist and sinful rhetoric that seeks to harm and to divide,” the bishop wrote. “It is disturbing that it comes from a candidate for public office. An apology is called for.”
The post has been seen more than 850,000 times. Senator John Cornyn had condemned French the same day: “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct.”
House Speaker Dustin Burrows told French to delete the post. State Rep. Jeff Leach of Plano said French “thinks it’s a ‘problem’ they don’t all look like and have the same skin color.”
The students in the picture answered too.
Several of them spoke to the Texas Tribune; one, a senior named Dhairya Gupta, is a naturalized American citizen. “When I look at that picture, I don’t see a problem,” he said.
Lisa Varghese, a sophomore, said: “To complain about skin color and to complain about other people ‘taking over’ UT Austin and how disappointing that is is just disgusting.”
French deleted nothing. Before the bishop ever posted, he had already told critics that he “cheered the win” while weeping “for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans,” and that it was “like they hate white Americans and prioritize everyone else.”
On Monday, he went on the Mark Davis radio show and blamed “the less-conservative people in Texas” for the criticism.
By mid-morning he had posted a fundraising appeal: “The radical left and their allies are attacking me.” The link went to WinRed, and the post has been seen 1.9 million times.
The bishop got the treatment French’s followers reserve for clergy who get in the way. Jack Posobiec, who had already told his audience to “Stand with @bofrench,” asked what was wrong with “pointing out that there is an immigration cartel in TX.”
Under Olson’s post, the replies called him an apostate who should “go join Prevost in Rome and pray to Pachamama,” a shepherd who cares “more for the wolves than for his own sheep.” One account informed him that “Racism is not sin.”
That last line is the whole fight, and Olson knows it. He gave an interview to Kevin Clarke of America magazine, published Friday, and repeated the charge. French’s refusal to apologize, and his decision to raise money off the uproar, left the bishop “astounded and disturbed.”
The photo, he said, was “a point of political exploitation,” and its logic was plain: “there’s no knowing if those young people are citizens or not. All that is known is that they are of a different complexion.” These were, in his reading, “not even ‘dog whistle’ words.” The students in it “were being disqualified from participation in American society — even in something like a football game, as important as that is in Texas — by the color of their skin.”
Why speak at all, when a bishop could have let the politicians handle it? “I [had] to say something about that,” Olson told Clarke. “It’s a moral issue. It is so at odds with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Olson has led the Diocese of Fort Worth since 2014, and the subject is not new to him.
In June 2020, weeks after the killing of George Floyd, he issued a pastoral letter on racism that reads today like a brief filed in advance. “The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men and women or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion,” he wrote then, adding that “Justice is the need and responsibility of everyone.”
Six years later, a candidate for statewide office in his own diocese put that teaching to the test in public, and the bishop did what the letter said he would.
He also named the machine that makes men like French possible.
Social media, Olson told America, “makes us feel comfortable with our prejudices.” “Right now people are just as addicted to anger and the irascible appetite and the passions of anger as they are to the passions of lust,” he said. The message of the algorithm, in his paraphrase, is that “there is no other authority but you and Alexa.”
I wrote last September that the algorithm is making us hate and kill each other, and Pope Leo XIV said much the same at his general audience last Wednesday, warning of “delegating to algorithms decisions that are the sole preserve of the human conscience.”
Leo said something else that Wednesday, and it lands squarely on Bo French’s photograph.
“The diversity of people and peoples in the world must not be considered as a danger or a threat,” the pope said at that audience, “but rather as a resource for enrichment and growth.” The pope in Rome and the bishop in Fort Worth were reading from the same page of the same book, and the book is the Gospel.
That matters because the pattern is no longer isolated. Just last week the same swarm went after Bishop Robert Boxie, the first African American bishop ordained in this country in nearly a decade, for naming racism as racism. Detroit’s archbishop drew the same fire in August for confronting Christian nationalism. The American bishops demanded an apology from the White House in February over a racist post about Barack Obama.
Every one of those men was told to stay in his lane. Olson answered the question of where the lane runs: “In the preaching of the Gospel, everything that is the poison of sin, including racism, needs to be addressed.”
Meanwhile the men with the actual power in Texas have chosen the other lane. Governor Greg Abbott’s response to the photograph was that “a selective picture of Longhorn fans celebrating our biggest home victory ever actually shows a way that Texans unite,” and he left it there.
The Texas Tribune reported on Friday that the party’s leaders have condemned French’s words while few have withdrawn their support for his candidacy.
French remains on the November ballot, and as of Saturday he was still asking supporters to “chip in to help save Texas.” Cornyn has said he will not vote for him; most of his colleagues have said nothing of the kind.
A Catholic bishop in Fort Worth said more in three sentences than the governor of Texas has managed in a week.
He was called an apostate for it, and he answered by giving an interview in which he repeated himself, slowly, for the record.
That is what a shepherd looks like when the wolves are inside the fence. The Republican Party of Texas may yet find its voice before November. The Church in Texas did not wait.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Michael Olson and with the students in that photograph, the young Texans who were told by a candidate for statewide office that their faces were a problem. We stand with the millions of American Catholics, and countless others of goodwill, who believe that every human being carries the image of God and that no election is worth the price of pretending otherwise.
In a season when a racist post is a fundraising strategy and the men who could stop it choose silence, we remain rooted in a faith that names sin when it sees it (racism included) and refuses to bow before the idols of fear and blood.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They are looking for courage, and for love made visible in action, and a bishop in Fort Worth just showed them what that looks like.
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Of course the disgraced, MAGA Barron won’t say a word. His false idol/God won’t let him. The orange,fat Epstein loving and file hiding, fat one did tell Barron to get involved in the NY Mayor race so hiding in his small diocese won’t help MAGA Barron. I know multiple parishes are sending letters to Pope Leo asking for potential excommunication of MAGA Barron. Just like we did with “retired” Cardinal Dolan. Barron was not even considered for New York. Yikes
Now the Texas Bishop is showing MAGA Barron what a real man of God is. No wonder Barron finished last in the latest USCCB election.
Thank you for the newsletter, Chris I am glad of the rebuke. I will pray for Pope Leo and this nation.