“You Rose Up” — Leaked Video Shows Bishop Barron Clapping as Trump Was Compared to Christ
Barron co-hosted the event during Holy Week, abandoning his Minnesota flock for a 64-minute spectacle where clergy cast Trump as a figure of the risen Christ.
Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Dear friends —
Bishop Robert Barron skipped part of Holy Week in his own diocese to attend a White House prayer meeting today. The Trump team accidentally broadcast the event to the public. I watched all 64 minutes.
What the video captured is extraordinary. Trump compared himself to Jesus Christ during the Holy Week scripture reading. Paula White told Trump his suffering mirrors the passion of our Lord and Savior. Franklin Graham called Iranian leaders “Islamic lunatics” and cast Trump as the biblical Queen Esther. And Barron — a bishop whose Minnesota flock is waiting for him for the Easter Triduum — sat through all of it, including a racist tirade against Somali immigrants in his own state, before rising to bless the president.
Letters from Leo has spent the past year building the record on Barron’s transformation from Catholic intellectual to MAGA loyalist — the Trump appointment, the silence on ICE killings in his own diocese, the Vatican alarm, the legal threats against Catholic magazines that told the truth.
Paid subscribers will find the full account below the essay, with links to every investigation we’ve published.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help this Holy Week:
Subscribe as a paid member and gain access to our exclusive investigations, including the Epstein-Bannon Investigation and the ongoing biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation.
Make a one-time gift of any amount to support this work directly.
Share this post with someone who needs to see it.
We stand with the Catholics of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and with every believer who refuses to let a bishop trade his vocation for political access during the holiest week of the year.
Bishop Robert Barron is supposed to be in Minnesota this week. Holy Week — the most sacred stretch on the Christian liturgical calendar — calls every Catholic bishop to his cathedral, to his people, to the ancient rites of washing feet and breaking bread and keeping vigil at the tomb. Barron leads the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, where 130,000 Catholics count on their shepherd to walk with them from Palm Sunday through the Easter Vigil.
He wasn’t there. On Tuesday of Holy Week, Barron was at the White House, seated among administration loyalists at what was billed as a prayer meeting for Easter. The Trump team accidentally broadcast the event to the public. The video was meant to stay private. It didn’t. And what it captured over 64 minutes will follow Barron for the rest of his episcopate.
The Tape
Trump opened with approximately 45 minutes of political commentary before a single prayer was offered. He discussed military operations in Iran and Venezuela, attacked Democratic judges and Supreme Court justices, mocked the British prime minister and French president by name, celebrated the dismantling of the Department of Education, and urged his audience to mobilize for the 2026 midterms.
“We got to do it for the midterms,” he told the room of pastors and clergy. “Otherwise they’re going to take it all away.”
The segment about Somali immigrants in Minnesota was particularly vicious. Trump called them “low IQ people,” “bad people” with “94 percent unemployment” who “stole $19 billion” and buy Mercedes-Benzes with stolen welfare money.
He attacked Representative Ilhan Omar as a “stone-cold crook” who married her brother. He called the governor and attorney general of Minnesota “crooked” and “stupid.” Barron — bishop of a Minnesota diocese, shepherd to the neighbors of the people being slandered — sat through every word and said nothing.
When Trump turned to the Holy Week scripture reading, he interrupted his own recitation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. “They call me King,” he told the room. “Now do you believe it?” Reading about Christ’s betrayal and arrest, he added: “We know the feeling. Many of the people in this room went through hell.”
Then came the prayers. Paula White, the president’s longtime spiritual advisor, stood before the room and told Trump directly: “No one has paid the price like you have paid the price. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us, but it didn’t end there for him and it didn’t end there for you.” She declared that “because he rose, you rose up. Because he was victorious, you were victorious.”
A pastor comparing the president of the United States to the risen Christ — on Wednesday of Holy Week.
Franklin Graham followed with a prayer invoking the Book of Esther, casting Trump as God’s chosen instrument against Iran and calling Iranian leaders “Islamic lunatics.” Another pastor called Trump “the leader not only of our nation but of the world” and framed his political opponents as agents of “a battle between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan.”
Barron prayed last among the featured clergy. His prayer was measured by comparison — he asked God for compassion, meekness, love for the poor, and to “order our freedom toward your truth.” He called on the Lord to make American soldiers “righteous warriors” and closed by declaring “we are a nation under God.” Taken in isolation, the words read like a standard episcopal intercession. But context demolishes isolation.
Barron delivered these words immediately after Trump demeaned immigrants and compared himself to the Messiah, and immediately before fellow clergy declared Trump a figure of Christ-like resurrection. His polished prayer provided the theological sheen that made the rest of the event presentable. His presence validated the entire spectacle.
Catholic theology has a term for this kind of cooperation.
It is called scandal — not in the tabloid sense, but in the moral-theological sense of leading others into error by lending the appearance of approval to wrongdoing.
When a bishop stands alongside voices that equate a political leader with Jesus Christ and does not object, his silence communicates consent. The faithful watching this video — and millions now have — see their bishop endorsing what that room produced.
The people of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester need their bishop at the Chrism Mass, at the altar on Holy Thursday, at the cross on Good Friday, in the darkness of the Easter Vigil. Instead of preparing, on Wednesday, he was at the White House, lending his collar to a spectacle that Catholic teaching should have compelled him to refuse.
The Making of a MAGA Bishop
The trend is not new. Letters from Leo has tracked Barron’s rightward trajectory for months, documenting a pattern that has accelerated beyond what even his early critics predicted. The White House prayer meeting is the latest entry in a record that now stretches back more than a year.
In March 2025, Barron attended Trump’s Joint Address to Congress as a guest of a Republican congressman. He then recorded a seven-minute video comparing Trump’s speech to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — a comparison so theologically reckless that Catholic commentators across the spectrum recoiled.
