Bishop Barron Shouldn’t Have to Do This Alone

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 31, 2026

It has not been a good week for the credibility of the Catholic bishops when addressing public matters. There is one standout exception, the usual one, and I will get to that in a moment. But first, consider the week that was.

I am probably the only Trump-friendly Catholic who cringed when he saw an image of a handful of bishops praying with President Trump around the resolute desk in the Oval Office. I knew immediately what the result would be and, sad, to say, a few of the bishops present lived down to my low expectations. You can read the groveling apologies here.

For what, exactly, were they apologizing? For being “manipulated” into praying for the President who overturned Roe v. Wade? Who defended the Little Sisters of the Poor from attempts to make them violate their faith? Who defended biological reality against gender ideology?

No, of course not. Trump’s wins for the Church seem not to be much on their minds one way or the other. What was on their minds was the scorn of the left. And look, I get it. The scorn, I mean. Had the same thing occurred with then-President Biden, that close to an election, I would have flipped my lid too. That’s not the part that frosts me.

Rather, I knew the moment I saw that image that the apologies would be coming because many bishops fear the left. And I knew that, if the shoe were on the other foot, there would be no similar apology to outraged pro-life and pro-family Catholics. The bishops’ esteem for public opinion often seems the inverse of the public’s esteem for the faith. The more hostile, the more you will be catered to, the more faithful, the more you can be safely ignored.

As if the apologies were not confirmation enough, consider what happened next. Cardinal Cupich has announced that he will honor Michael Sacks with the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Nostra Aetate Award. Sacks, a billionaire, has given over a million dollars to abortion groups just in the last six years.

So what did Cupich do when Catholics complained? He accused them of antisemitism. As a Jewish Catholic who has fought Catholic antisemitism, Cupich’s duplicity makes me ill. The criticism of Cupich’s awarding Sachs was about killing babies, not about Sachs being Jewish. Pro-lifers made the same complaints a year earlier when Cupich tried to honor pro-abortion Catholic politician Dick Durbin. Cupich somehow managed to show a lack seriousness on both abortion and antisemitism in one fell swoop.

As if some of the bishops weren’t weird enough lately, consider the people who speak on their behalf. On October 22, the USCCB’s general counsel submitted a formal public comment to the Commerce Department arguing that illegal immigrants should be counted in the U.S. census. It’s a practice the Trump Administration is trying to stop and the USCCB, in opposing the effort, seems not to know that it has put itself on the side of antebellum Southern slaveholders who wanted their slaves counted in the census to benefit themselves while otherwise exploiting them.

And that’s just politics. Have you seen theology lately? Amy Welborn’s tweet is hard to top:

Against all this, I offer the shining counter-example of Bishop Robert Barron. When Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco said “the Church is not there to convert” and “Christians should approach other religions through fraternity rather than seeking conversions,” Barron let him have it. I appreciate that Algeria is not the U.S.A. but Vesco’s response to Barron still falls flat for failing to make the distinctions articulated by, again, Amy Welborn here.

I’ve noted before how Bishop Barron is almost the only bishop speaking to these matters. I was half-joking in that earlier column when I accepted a description of his trajectory as Bishop Barron having undergone a “MAGAfication,” a description I’m sure Barron himself would reject. As Bishop Barron’s exchange with Cardinal Vesco shows, what’s happening here—indeed, with all the examples I’ve listed above—is quite a bit bigger than politics.

Too often, the Catholic Church has an episcopal leadership that seems like it would rather apologize for Catholicism than defend it. When someone does defend the faith, as Bishop Barron does, it seems like he’s doing it mostly on his own. I’m not saying that every bishop has to be a “culture warrior.” Or that the Church should be an arm of the Republican Party. But we do need a Church whose leaders don’t seem embarrassed by their own faith.

Pope Leo, whose job it is to “strengthen” his brothers in the faith (Luke 22:31-32,) is key here. He can provide the leadership that would make Bishop Barron’s interventions less, well, lonely. The bishops need to know that a courageous proclamation of unpopular truths—even truths unpopular on the left—will be supported by Rome.

And that the strange antics of Cardinal Cupich and others will be called out. The successors of the Apostles should be proclaiming the Gospel to a world that needs to hear it, not kowtowing to a world that doesn’t want to.