Bishop Barron and the Political Moment

Some Thoughts on Metaphysics and History

Over the past month, the National Catholic Reporter’s digital editor John Grosso has written two scathing criticisms of Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota and his relationship to the Trump administration. In the first, written last month, Grosso primarily challenges Barron over the bishop’s failure to issue statements condemning the administration’s immigration policies and the freezing of foreign aid, both of which have had a huge impact on Catholic charitable agencies. In the second, written earlier this month, Grosso criticizes Barron’s reflections on attending President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on March, in which the bishop expressed dismay at the gestures of protest made by some Democrats while, again, having little say about the president’s remarks pertaining to immigration or annexing Greenland.

Since the November elections, I’ve taken a particular interest in how the bishops, as pastors of the Catholic Church in the United States, respond to the Trump administration and its policies, and Bishop Barron is a particularly significant case given his extensive media presence and popularity. On the one hand, I agree with certain key points raised by Grosso in his two articles. For example, it is disappointing that Bishop Barron hasn’t drawn on his media savvy and the resources he has available to produce compelling overviews of Catholic teaching on immigration (for example, drawing on the US and Mexican bishops’ Strangers No Longer and Pope Francis’s teachings) and the importance of foreign aid (my recent explainer is available as a source!). On the other hand, Grosso is a bit uncharitable in his criticisms of Barron.

Given all that, I wanted to attempt a more charitable analysis of Barron’s response to the Trump administration that takes into consideration the bishop’s theological and pastoral approach to politics but also offers a more nuanced criticism of that approach that isn’t reduced to partisan attacks.

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Robert Barron really rose to public prominence while he was a priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago with the founding of Word on Fire Ministries in 2000. Originally focused on radio and television programming that aired locally on WGN and nationally on the Catholic network EWTN, Word on Fire soon spread to social media, and in particular established a niche on YouTube by producing well-crafted videos on different aspects of the Catholic faith. Word on Fire represented an innovative and successful example of the New Evangelization first proposed by Pope John Paul II.

Barron and Word on Fire’s profile skyrocketed with the airing of the ten-part documentary series Catholicism on PBS in 2011, exploring aspects of the Catholic faith including key doctrines, the sacraments, and the saints. The so-called New Atheism of the early 2000s inspired a wave of Christian apologists who defended the reasonableness of belief in God and Christian revelation, but Barron emerged as a 21st-century Chateubriand, the early 19th-century French author who responded to Enlightenment rationalism by not only defending Christian doctrine, but likewise extolled the glories of Christian literature, art, and architecture and the benefits Christianity had bestowed on European society.

In 2015, Pope Francis appointed Barron as the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles (headed by Archbishop José Gómez), and then in 2022 Barron was named the bishop of Winona-Rochester. Even with these new pastoral responsibilities, Barron has continued to be involved with Word on Fire, regularly appearing in new videos and providing commentary on the organization’s web site. Bishop Barron was also a participant in the Synod on Synodality in Rome in both 2023 and 2024.

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Bishop Robert Barron, World Youth Day 2016 in Poland (Photo: Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Although often more focused on explaining this or that spiritual practice or engaging with the culture, broadly construed, Barron’s videos and commentaries have often addressed Catholic social teaching over the years. For example, Barron produced a video on Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, on care for Creation, soon after its publication, and similarly he produced a video on Pope Francis’s later social encyclical Fratelli Tutti, with the video focusing on themes like the common good and the universal destination of goods. In 2020, Word on Fire published the Catholic Social Teaching Collection, an anthology of substantial excerpts from most of the key documents of Catholic social teaching.

Throughout these materials, Barron frequently emphasizes that Catholic social teaching does not neatly fit into the political ideologies of either liberals or conservatives. The Catholic Church stands apart from partisan politics. Barron, however, seems to take this not just as a descriptive statement about the Catholic Church’s place in US society, but, rightly or wrongly, takes it as a normative statement, as well. Over the years, Barron has rarely weighed in on particular matters of political debate, and when he has—for example, on the debate on the budget and government spending centering around then vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan in 2012—he typically focuses on the broader principles derived from Catholic social teaching without making concrete political judgments. As a bishop, Barron seems to leave it to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to make statements on particular policies while seeing his own episcopal responsibility as forming the faithful in the Church’s social doctrine in a nonpartisan way.

Whatever its pros and cons, I think this pastoral stance goes a long way toward explaining Bishop Barron’s approach to dealing with the Trump administration. It would be unfair to interpret his relative silence as signaling sympathy for mass deportations or indifference toward thousands, or even millions, of the global poor potentially losing access to vital medicines as a result of the shuttering of USAID. Rather, they represent the hesitance of a religious leader to wade into partisan politics and concrete questions of policy, matters which, from this theological perspective, are better left to the laity. If Barron’s response to Trump administration policy is inadequate, then I think it’s better that this criticism be raised not as a personal attack but as a criticism of a particular way of thinking about the Church’s role in public life, one undoubtedly shared by many other bishops, as well. That being said, I think Barron’s theological work provides further insight into his approach to politics that are more unique to him personally.