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Bishop Robert Boxie III sat down with Catholic News Service in Rome on Sept. 7 and answered a question that American Catholics have spent decades tiptoeing around: why does the Church in the United States have so few Black bishops?
“The short answer is racism,” he said. “People may not want to hear that. People may not agree with that. But the short answer is racism.”
The clip went up on X early Thursday morning, and by Saturday it had passed 2.4 million views. Most of those views did not come from people who wanted to hear the rest of the interview.
Some biography first, because the men attacking him have skipped it.
Boxie grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana. After Vanderbilt and Harvard Law School he practiced law in Washington, until he left the firm for the seminary; Cardinal Donald Wuerl ordained him a priest in 2016, and he spent the last several years as the Catholic chaplain at Howard University.
Pope Leo XIV named him an auxiliary bishop of Washington on May 1. He was ordained at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on July 7, the first African American bishop ordained in this country in nearly a decade, and in his mid-forties he is the youngest bishop in the United States.
I met him years ago in Washington, not long after his ordination, and I can vouch for him. He is careful and prayerful, and, for the readers who will assume otherwise, no progressive; what he does is describe the thing in front of him.
The thing in front of him in seminary was a Confederate flag in the room next door.
“I was totally taken aback by that,” he told CNS. “I would never go in his room. We would talk outside in the hall. I wouldn’t go in his room as long as he had that flag up.”
Seven years later, during the summer of 2020, the former seminarian (by then teaching at a Catholic school full of Black and Hispanic students) wrote to apologize. “I accepted his apology,” Boxie said. “We had a real honest conversation about race, the Church, and how we can be healers.”
Here is how Catholic Twitter received that story.
Calvin Robinson, the British broadcaster and cleric who has cycled through four church bodies in three years and had his priestly license revoked twice in 2025 (by the Anglican Catholic Church, after a Nazi-style salute at the National Pro-Life Summit, and by a Reformed Episcopal bishop nine days after granting it), called Boxie “a victim merchant” and told him to “stop with the critical race theory.”
John Daniel Davidson of The Federalist explained that conservatives had wanted an African pope at the last conclave “because we know the African bishops don’t traffic in this gay bullshit.”
The anonymous accounts did the rest. “Nauseating to see a bishop speak like this,” wrote one, to 1,200 likes. Another called him a “race-baiter” who needed to be “put in his place with a single withering stare.” The blogger behind Mahound’s Paradise labeled him “a race grifter” and said he had “the vapors” over the flag.
The flag itself found defenders.
In the comments under Catholic World Report’s write-up, a reader dismissed it as “nothing but a local cultural relic” and accused Boxie of having “read racism into a situation which didn’t exist.”
Catholic Atlanta, an account that spent two days answering these people, summarized its mentions on Thursday night: “Bishop Boxie is lying about the confederate flag incident. Wow! The confederate flag is not racist. Also, wow!”
I am a Tennessean.
I grew up around that flag, and I can tell you what it means, because the men who first carried it told us. It was raised for the Confederacy, and the Confederacy existed to keep human beings in chains; the heritage talk came a century later, as a way of avoiding that sentence. Boxie’s neighbor eventually understood that, and said so. His defenders on X have not caught up.
Now consider the man they are calling a grifter, in his own words.
On Jan. 18, 2019, then-Father Boxie preached the homily at the Archdiocese of Washington’s Youth Rally and Mass for Life at Capital One Arena, in front of some 20,000 young people (his count) gathered for the March for Life.
He opened with a confession. As a deacon, on Ash Wednesday, he had brushed past an elderly woman asking for coffee money, and when he turned around to make it right she was gone.
“I truly believe I had an encounter with Jesus Christ hidden behind the face of that elderly woman,” he said.
Then he turned to the unborn, and to everyone else the culture prefers not to see:
“The womb is that sacred place where God first encountered us. God encounters us in the womb, and he seeks to encounter us and show his face to us every moment of our lives until the very last breath we take.”
“It’s really a symptom of a sickness that afflicts our country, a symptom of a larger problem that we face as a nation, and it is our failure to encounter one another and to see the image of the living God and the face of Christ in our brothers and sisters. Simply put, it’s our failure to love.”
“Marching today for these innocent hidden unborn lives, because we are pro-life, means that we march and stand up for every single human life, inside the womb and outside the womb, and most especially for those in our communities who are poor, forgotten, marginalized, and neglected, those whose lives are devalued because of the sin of racism and discrimination of any kind, the immigrant and the refugee.”
Seven years separate that homily from the CNS interview, and the man has not changed his mind.
Neither, on paper, have the bishops of the United States.
In November 2018, two months before that homily, they approved Open Wide Our Hearts, a pastoral letter against racism, and wrote: “As bishops, we unequivocally state that racism is a life issue.” Boxie has never said anything the conference did not put in writing first.
He also has company in his seminary story, and the company should give his critics pause.
Clarence Thomas, a Black Catholic, no one’s mistake for a liberal, and the longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court, walked away from his Missouri seminary in 1968 after a fellow seminarian, hearing that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, said, “I hope the son of a bitch dies.”
Thomas tells the story himself in his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. Nobody on the right calls him a race grifter for it.
Pope Leo XIV knew exactly whom he was appointing. In Magnifica Humanitas, the pope apologized for the Church’s own role in the slave trade, an admission Boxie called “really earth-shattering” in the same interview.
Leo has spent the summer telling young people to tear down “walls built by prejudice” and defending, on the eve of America’s 250th birthday, the diversity of the American experiment. A bishop who names racism in the American Church is carrying out the program of the pope who consecrated him.
Gloria Purvis, whose EWTN radio show was canceled in 2020 after she discussed police brutality on air, put it plainly on Friday: “All these hit dogs hollering confirm there is a problem.”
Nothing aimed at Bishop Boxie this week rose to the level of an argument. He named a sin, and the people screaming at him have spent three days proving it exists.
We stand with Bishop Boxie.
Watch the full conversation and judge the man for yourself.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Robert Boxie and the millions of American Catholics, along with countless others of goodwill, who believe that every human life carries the image of God and that a bishop who names the sin of racism deserves better than a mob.
In an era poisoned by cruelty and cynicism, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and contempt.
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 a love made visible in action, and right now, as the loudest voices in American Catholicism turn on one of Pope Leo XIV’s first Black bishops, that hunger has never been more urgent.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Your headline is incorrect. Let me fix that for you: Apostates attack Pope Leo XIV, the first Black Pope because Pope Leo has a soul, believes racism is evil and actually adheres to the teachings of Jesus.
Calvin Robinson, the virtue-signaler who has to tell everyone he’s great because he’s not WOKE, and who sold mugs with HIS OWN FACE on them, calling a humble and honest man a virtue-signaler. Classic narcissist projection.