Roaming Romans

07/07/2026

Fascinating! 😑

Barron Stands Where Spellman Stood: Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Vietnam War, and the Case of Bishop Robert Barron.

Cardinal Francis Spellman was the most powerful Catholic in the United States. He ran the Archdiocese of New York for a quarter century, served as Military Vicar of the Armed Forces, and made himself the most well-known religious supporter of the War in Vietnam. Pope Paul VI called for peace and negotiations while Spellman blessed the American escalation and the fighting. Eventually, the American bishops abandoned their most powerful member and followed the pope. As a result, Cardinal Spellman lost his influence and ended his life isolated. Bishop Robert Barron stands today where Spellman stood -- cheering on an increasingly unpopular American president engaged in an increasingly unpopular policy — now of mass deportations rather than na**lm — while the pope criticizes the president’s policy as inhumane and unjust. History tells us that the Catholic Church that abandoned Cardinal Spellman in favor of the Pope will not follow Bishop Barron either.

Cardinal Spellman helped to build the alliance between American Catholicism and American power in Vietnam with his own hands. He met Ngô Đình Diệm at a Maryknoll seminary in New York in 1950, promoted him, and helped assemble the Washington lobby that sold the Diệm government to the American press under the joined banners of Catholicism and steadfast anti-Communism. He pressed Eisenhower toward intervention in 1954. As Military Vicar he blessed the American enterprise in Vietnam as it grew, and continued to support it even as many American religious leaders turned against it -- from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Rev. John C. Bennett to members of his own faith, such as Fr. John L. McKenzie, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, Fr. Philip Berrigan, and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

By the mid-1960s Cardinal Spellman had become one of the Vietnam War’s most prominent supporters. He traveled to Saigon in December 1966, spoke to American troops in military dress, told them to fight for total victory, and blessed the conflict as a “War for Civilization.” He described the fight as “Christ’s war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.”

In Rome, Pope Paul VI was begging the world to end that war and all wars. He had gone to the United Nations in October 1965 -- becoming the first sitting pope to visit the United States -- and pleaded that there be no more war. Just months earlier, in July 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson had drastically increased U.S. military commitments by deploying an additional 50,000 ground troops. Pope Paul VI’s speech at the United Nations calling for “No more war; war never again,” clearly addressed the escalating American military intervention in Vietnam. He begged the international community to use the UN framework to guarantee security without resorting to weapons and arms. Later that day, more than 90,000 people packed Yankee Stadium to listen to Pope Paul VI call for peace, and an estimated 100 million Americans watched the broadcast on television.

When Cardinal Spellman pressed for total American military victory in Vietnam that December, the Vatican announced that Paul VI did not share his view. Just days after Spellman’s speech, the Vatican issued an unusual and immediate clarification to the global press as the Vatican officially announced that Cardinal Spellman did not speak for the Pope or the Holy See, and that his “total victory” comments were strictly his personal opinion.

Pope Paul VI explicitly used his subsequent public appearances to counter Spellman’s rhetoric. While Spellman was calling for military victory, the Pope addressed massive crowds in St. Peter’s Square, stating that the war could not be won on the battlefield. He repeatedly demanded an immediate cessation of the U.S. bombing campaigns over North Vietnam and urged both sides to enter into immediate, compromise-based peace talks. The Pope used the disagreement with Spellman and U.S. policy to apply Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in terris, and reminded the global Catholic community that the Church had moved away from traditional “Just War” absolute victories in the nuclear age.

Cardinal Spellman reacted to Pope Paul VI’s peace initiatives with furious but quiet insubordination, remaining entirely unmoved and aggressively doubling down on his pro-war rhetoric.

Caught between the ultra-patriotic, anti-communist, and militaristic rhetoric of Cardinal Spellman and the peace pleas of Pope Paul VI, the American Catholic hierarchy underwent one of the most profound institutional shifts in American Catholic history. In 1966, the American hierarchy reorganized into the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) under its first president, the consensus-minded Archbishop John Dearden of Detroit. Initially, the NCCB mirrored Spellman’s staunchly anti-communist, Cold War mindset. In its November 1966 collective statement, “Peace and Vietnam,” the conference formally declared that the U.S. military presence in Vietnam was morally justified. It prioritized national loyalty and the defense of Southeast Asia over the Vatican’s diplomatic calls for an immediate halt to the violence. However, this pro-war consensus cracked rapidly as specific high-ranking prelates began breaking ranks to align directly with Pope Paul VI. Even before Spellman’s controversial Christmas 1966 call for “total victory,” Cardinal Lawrence Shehan of Baltimore issued a groundbreaking pastoral letter titled “Peace and Patriotism.” Cardinal Shehan forcefully warned that an all-out, unrestrained war violated the Christian conscience. Following Spellman’s speech, Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston also publicly rejected the crusade-like rhetoric, demanding that the United States implement the Pope’s framework for a negotiated settlement.

This rebellion against Cardinal Spellman and the war was amplified at the grassroots level by regional groups like the newly founded Association of Chicago Priests (ACP), which collaborated with anti-war leaders to organize peace educational meetings in local parishes. This growing alliance between key archbishops and local clergy effectively isolated Cardinal Spellman, stripping him of his role as the undisputed spokesperson for American Catholicism. Cardinal Spellman died on December 2, 1967, as an iconic but increasingly isolated titan of a bygone era, and a bellicose advocate for military force who was wholly out of step with the Magisterium, the Catholic faithful, and the American people.

After Spellman’s death, the devastating aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive and the radical actions of the Catholic peace movement -- such as the draft board raids led by the Berrigan brothers -- pushed the institutional Church to its breaking point. The NCCB could no longer reconcile the escalating human toll with traditional Catholic “Just War” doctrines. In November 1971, under the leadership of Archbishop John Dearden, the NCCB issued its landmark “Resolution on Southeast Asia.” In a total institutional reversal, the American bishops officially declared that the war no longer met the moral criteria for a just conflict. Fully embracing Pope Paul VI’s stance, the NCCB demanded an immediate, unilateral end to U.S. involvement, solidifying a permanent shift in mainstream American Catholic leadership toward peace activism.

In the conflict between Cardinal Spellman and Pope Paul VI, the American Catholic Church chose the pope. American Catholicism first produced some of the war’s fiercest religious opponents, such as Dorothy Day and the Berrigan brothers, and the hierarchy eventually followed. In November 1971 the American bishops officially declared that the Vietnam War did not meet the conditions for a just war, reaching the judgment that Pope Paul VI had held for years.

Cardinal Spellman’s isolation and abandonment by the American Catholic Church hierarchy holds a lesson for today. The prelate who fuses the faith with American power can hold the media, the money, and the access, and the Church will still move past him to the pope, when the pope speaks the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Cardinal Spellman had faced off against lay Catholic activist Dorothy Day many times before and during the Vietnam War. In January 1949 the gravediggers who tended the cemeteries of the Archdiocese of New York went on strike. Cardinal Spellman called the walkout Communist-inspired, sent Maryknoll seminarians and his own diocesan students to break the strike by digging graves, and held out until the union accepted the archdiocese’s terms. Dorothy Day stood with the workers. She wrote to Cardinal Spellman in defense of their dignity and their right to organize and pressed him to make peace. “It is easier for the great to give in than the poor,” she told him.

The Catholic Church has since chosen between them. At the request of Cardinal John O’Connor, the Archdiocese of New York opened Dorothy Day’s cause for canonization in 2000 and gave her the title Servant of God. The American bishops endorsed the cause in 2012, Francis praised her before the United States Congress in 2015, and in 2021 the archdiocese closed its local inquiry at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and sent the cause to Rome, where it stands today. Spellman has no cause, no title, and no process. The archdiocese he ran for nearly thirty years is petitioning Rome to canonize the woman who defied him.

The verdict on holiness matches the verdict on the war. Cardinal Spellman’s power and connections won him nothing in the most significant declaration about a person’s life that the Church reserves to itself, and the woman who took the workers’ side against him, and took the side of peace when he campaigned for war, holds the honor he does not.

In our own time, Bishop Robert Barron has built the largest Catholic media platform in the United States. He attended President Trump’s address to Congress in March 2025 and likened the evening to a high liturgy of democracy, faulting only the Democrats who declined to applaud. He prayed at a National Day of Prayer in the Rose Garden and accepted a seat on the president’s Religious Liberty Commission. Like Spellman, he is close to a president who is sharply at odds with the pope. Cardinal Spellman blessed a war in Southeast Asia and the killing it required, and Bishop Barron rationalizes and defends Trump’s mass deportations and his threat to strip U.S. citizenship from the American-born children of undocumented immigrants. While Pope Leo condemned the strikes on Iran and the killings in the Caribbean, Bishop Barron told Ben Shapiro’s audience that the pope was not speaking of Iran, argued that judging a war is not the Church’s task, and kept silent on the boat strikes that Archbishop Broglio called illegal and immoral.

The story of Cardinal Spellman, the Vietnam War, and the American Catholic Church points to how the story of Bishop Barron and Donald Trump will end. The American Catholic Church rallied to Pope Paul VI and left Cardinal Spellman behind, and it will rally to Pope Leo XIV and leave Bishop Barron behind.

There is a recurring temptation for the Church, or for some of its most powerful clerics, to align itself with great wealth, state power, and military force, and history shows the Church’s eventual rejection of this temptation through the guidance of the Holy Spirit working through the papacy, the Magisterium, and Catholic social teaching.

This post is also available on Substack: https://mikefoxcatechist.substack.com/p/barron-stands-where-spellman-stood

06/15/2026

Every once in a while, this hard-core and a MAGA influencer gets it right:

So let me get this straight: we bomb them, and then we have to pay for the repairs too? Wow.

This doesn’t sound like winning to me. It sounds like a win for the military-industrial complex, not for the American citizen.

For years, Americans have been told that foreign interventions are necessary for our security. But if taxpayers are expected to fund both the destruction and the reconstruction, it’s fair to ask who actually benefits from these endless cycles of conflict.

06/04/2026

Former USAID global health director Nicholas Enrich, author of "Into the Wood Chipper," on how Elon Musk's ignorant destruction of crucial public health infrastructure has had a horrifying human toll that will be a permanent moral stain on America.

🦩 Read more: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-elon-musk-killed-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people

06/03/2026

MAGA CATHOLICS THIS WAS WRITTEN FOR YOU! 🙏

The Crisis of American Christianity: Christianity in America is in Grave Danger of Succumbing to the Fate of the German Evangelical Church

American Christianity is speeding along the path that nearly destroyed German Christianity under Hi**er. Christianity surrenders itself to the world of power the moment it claims that a nation, a political movement, or a political leader is a source of revelation beside Christ. German Christians made that surrender in 1933 and created a church — the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (the German Evangelical Church) — to lead and enforce it. In our own time and in our own country, a dangerous and determined movement, widespread among white American Protestants and joined by a number of social-media-savvy white American Catholics tied to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, is making that surrender now and hopes to lead American Christians into the disastrous heresy of Christian Nationalism.

The people carrying forward the white American Protestant version of the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche include Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Paula White-Cain, Lance Wallnau, and Eric Metaxas. These leaders of what could be called an American Evangelical Church share a theology that blends Christian Nationalism and theological conservatism, emphasizing that America has a divine purpose and that Christians are called to ensure that American government and culture align with and enforce what they call “biblical values.”

These so-called biblical values include preserving the traditional social and political order, defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman, supporting hard national borders, applying narrow male and female gender categories, using the military to enforce American economic advantages, increasing the use of the death penalty, opposing laws that require racial or gender equality, prohibiting the teaching of history that criticizes past American atrocities such as slavery and the genocide of indigenous people, and seeing their political opponents as agents of demonic forces. They have identified a set of opposing values as both anti-Christian and anti-American and labeled these values “woke” or “wokeness.”

While not nearly as numerous as these Protestant leaders, or as influential within their own communion, some prominent white American Catholics have joined the trend toward Christian Nationalism. Vice President JD Vance and Bishop Robert Barron stand foremost among them, attempting to provide legitimacy for Catholic participation in the nationalist mission of the American Evangelical Church that has now coalesced around the person and the poltical movement of Donald Trump.

The decisive capitulation of German Christianity to Hi**er came earlier than the death camps and the world war. In 1933, before any death camp existed and before a shot had been fired to secure a new German Reich, a movement called the Deutsche Christen won the German Protestant church elections, seized the governing machinery, and fused the regional churches into a single N**ified body, the German Evangelical Church.

Its program was to finish what it called the work of the Reformation by purging Christianity of its Jewish inheritance. At a Berlin rally in November 1933, Reinhold Krause, who led the German Evangelical Church in Berlin, demanded that the churches drop the Old Testament and the writings of the apostle Paul. Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller ordered the removal of pastors of Jewish descent. Krause put the creed plainly. “Hi**er isn’t God” he said, “but he alone has God’s orders for the German Reich” A leader had become a source of revelation beside Christ.

Some Protestants resisted. In May 1934 an anti-N**i Protestant movement calling itself the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) gathered at Barmen and issued declarations drafted by Swiss theologian Karl Barth rejecting any claim that Christianity could recognize “other events and powers, figures and truths” as God’s revelation beside the one Word of God in Jesus Christ. But the membership of the Confessing Church were always a small and persecuted minority and the N***s quickly suppressed it through imprisonment and executions.

The N**i’s capture of German Christianity deepened. In April 1939 the German Evangelical Church published the Godesberg Declaration, calling Christianity the unbridgeable opposite of Judaism, and founded an institute at Eisenach to strip the faith of its Jewish roots, producing a New Testament with the Jewish elements removed and teaching that recast Jesus as an A***n enemy of the Jews.

The war led German Christianity even further from Christ and deeper into the abyss.

On December 17, 1941, the leaders of seven regional churches endorsed the decree forcing Jews to wear the yellow star, repeated the regime’s claim that the Jews had started the war, and cut off all fellowship with Christians of Jewish descent. Baptized Jews were expelled from their own congregations as the deportations ran. The German Evangelical Church gave the war its chaplains and its blessing, a defensive struggle against the enemies of both the German people and Jesus Christ.

On the Catholic side, the capacity for protest within Christianity existed. In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued Mit brennender Sorge (“With Burning Anxiety”), written in German rather than the customary Latin, smuggled into Germany, and ordered it read aloud from all German Catholic pulpits on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937. The encyclical condemned N***sm as incompatible with Christianity. Pius warned the faithful to “beware of that growing abuse … of the name of God” that cloaked a pagan agenda, and he attacked the N**i creed of racial supremacy, declaring that “whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State … and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.” Against the regime’s effort to purge the faith of its Jewish roots, he insisted that “the sacred books of the Old Testament are exclusively the word of God” and that “nothing but ignorance and pride” could deny their worth. He thanked those who had kept their Christian duty “in the teeth of an aggressive paganism.”

The deeper collaboration between Christianity and N***sm ran through German Protestantism, with the German Evangelical Church leading the way while most other Protestant denominations capitulated and followed.

The current crisis of American Christianity splits the same way. The German word for the Protestant churches, evangelisch, is the root of the English word evangelical, and the deeper danger of a Christian capitulation to nationalism and racism sat on the Protestant side in Germany as it sits on the evangelical side in the United States now.

The German Christians acted out an older temptation, especially but not solely Protestant: the wish to fit the Christian faith to xenophobic patriotism and the idea of a uniquely superior or divinely blessed national spirit. Pope Leo XIII had described the American form of it in 1899. His letter Testem Benevolentiae warned against adapting Catholic doctrine to the temper of a particular country and exalting the national virtues above Catholic ones. He gave this cluster of nationalistic ideas a name, Americanism.

What Leo XIII condemned was an attitude more than a specific program, an attitude that recurs whenever the attempt is made to press Christianity into the service of nationalism, or a particular political movement, or the dictates of a secular ruler.

The Deutsche Christen attempted to Germanize the Gospel. The New American Evangelical Church that has gathered around Donald Trump now strains to Americanize it.

Evangelical political theorist Stephen Wolfe, the primary intellectual architect of the modern Protestant “Christian Nationalism” movement in America, argued in The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022) for a Christian government that privileges Christianity by law and favors a people bound by blood and heritage. The book has become the movement’s best-known manifesto, widely discussed across conservative evangelical media.

The New Apostolic Reformation, through figures such as Texas preacher and televangelist Lance Wallnau, promotes a “Seven Mountains Mandate” that assigns Christians the conquest of seven aspects of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. Surveys find that a large share of American Christians accept its founding premise that God wants believers to occupy the seven mountains of society, that roughly half of white evangelicals endorse the mandate outright, and that close to a third of all Americans register as Christian Nationalism “adherents” or “sympathizers.”

The court-chaplain role fills out the structure. Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, and Paula White-Cain have supplied Donald Trump with the language of divine appointment, casting elections as spiritual warfare and the candidate as God’s chosen instrument. When Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself dressed as the pope in 2025, the gesture was clearly and terrifyingly like the one the German Evangelical Church performed -- the sacralizing of one man and his ultra-nationalist project.

In contrast, the Catholics who serve this American Christian Nationalist movement, such as Vice President JD Vance and Bishop Robert Barron, must break from their own Church to join it.

Vance, who entered the Catholic Church in 2019, defended the administration’s mass deportations in early 2025 by invoking the ordo amoris, the order of charity, to argue that a Christian’s love belongs first to fellow citizens and only afterward to the stranger. Pope Francis corrected him by letter within weeks, through the parable of the Good Samaritan. Barron, from a seat on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, has lent the same project a bishop’s authority.

The Catholic figures around Trump are much fewer in number than the Protestant leaders and carry less weight inside their own communion, but they lend the movement a touch of Catholic legitimacy it could not generate on its Protestant Evangelical preaching alone.

A religion that attempts to sacralize a particular nation, a particular racial or ethnic group, a political movement or a political leader is not Christianity regardless of what it calls itself. The German Evangelical Church that declared its allegiance to Hi**er and N***sm was not Christianity, and neither is the American Evangelical Church that now kneels before Donald Trump. In Mit brennender Sorge, the Catholic Church identified the national religion as idolatry and as a departure from Christian faith, long before it took its current American form. The Catholic Church knows that whoever divinizes a nation or a national leader stands “far from the true faith in God."

This post is also available on Substack at https://mikefoxcatechist.substack.com/p/the-crisis-of-american-christianity

05/28/2026

Very long, but a great read it’s why you see me share so many posts coming from MARK SHEA! MAGA CATHOLICS if you wanna know the difference between the Republican Jesus and the real Jesus, I strongly suggest you read this and like his page! 🙏

Bishop Barron’s Fraudulent Response to "Magnifica Humanitas" --
How Word on Fire Distorts and Defangs Pope Leo’s Indictment of the Powerful

Just days after Pope Leo XIV issued Magnifica Humanitas, Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries published “Rebuilding Brick by Brick: Leo XIV’s ‘Magnifica Humanitas’,” which claimed to be an analysis of the encyclical. The article’s named author was Word on Fire’s Editor-in-Chief Tod Worner. Its opening sentence about the encyclical is:

“In an age of anthropological uncertainty -- of technological wonder, intellectual confusion, and spiritual apathy -- Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), has as its foremost priority the pressing need to remind us what we are: beloved children of God.”

While there can legitimately be different views about the “foremost priority” or central thesis of Magnifica Humanitas, it surely is not the long-established and thoroughly non-controversial belief that we are all beloved children of God.

The assertion that the “foremost priority” of Pope Leo’s brilliant and far-reaching social critique Magnifica Humanitas is to remind us that we are “beloved children of God” is so far from the truth and so far from the critical spirit of the encyclical that even Tod Worner, a medical doctor with no academic training in Catholic doctrine or catechesis, must have known that it was false – and false in a particular way that banalizes and neutralizes its critical content and its special relevance to the particular issues of our time.

The pope is thanked for reminding us of our God-given dignity. His indictment of the people and systems assaulting, undermining, and attempting to destroy that dignity is waved away and ignored.

A far more honest statement of the thesis or “foremost priority” of Magnifica Humanitas is this: Artificial intelligence has transferred decisive power over human life from governments and democratic institutions to private transnational actors whose resources exceed those of most governments and who are accountable to no one. That transfer of power is not a neutral technological development. It is a structural crisis -- for labor, for human freedom, for democracy, for international order, and, especially, for the God-given human dignity of the most vulnerable -- the poor, the sick, the immigrant, the politically oppressed, and the victims of war, racism, ethnic cleansing, and xenophobia.

The fundamental Judeo-Christian belief that we are beloved children of God, made in the divine image, is of course present throughout, but it functions as the theological ground of the encyclical’s indictment of those in power, not as the encyclical’s most critical and urgent content. The urgent content of the encyclical -- the true “foremost priority” or purpose of Magnifica Humanitas -- is to serve as an indictment against our current world’s most powerful people, institutions and organizations -- those who Mary in the Magnificat called “the arrogant of mind and heart,” “the rulers” and “the rich” -- in the extraordinary passage from Luke with which Pope Leo XIV closes his encyclical, calling it Mary’s “revolutionary song of hope which glorifies the God who delivers the humble and oppressed, dislodges the privileged from their positions of power, and continues to make all things new.”

The encyclical’s full title is Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Its five chapters address, in sequence: the tradition of Catholic social doctrine as a living body of structural engagement with historical conditions; the principles governing that engagement; the specific dynamics of AI and private technological power; the concrete demands on democratic truth, labor policy, and human freedom; and the geopolitical conditions for or against a civilization of love, including the normalization of war, autonomous weapons, and the crisis of multilateralism.

The Word on Fire article reduces Pope Leo XIV’s five-chapter social encyclical to its underlying theological starting point -- that we are all beloved children of God. Of the encyclical’s five substantive chapters, the Word on Fire article draws material from one: the Introduction, and selected passages from Chapter III. Chapters IV and V receive no quotation, no paraphrase, and no acknowledgment that they exist.

Chapter IV is titled ‘Safeguarding Humanity at a Time of Transformation: Truth, Work, Freedom.’ Its sections address truth and democracy, the manufacture of political misinformation, an ecology of communication, the dignity of work in the AI era, the problem of unemployment, an economy that values dignity, digital dependency and new forms of slavery. Chapter V is titled ‘The Culture of Power and the Civilization of Love.’ Its sections address the normalization of war, force without limits, weapons and artificial intelligence, the crisis of multilateralism, and what the encyclical calls ‘a supposed political realism’ -- the invocation of national interest as a moral trump card that the tradition of Catholic social teaching has consistently rejected.

A reader of the Word on Fire article would have no way of knowing that any of this beautifully written, deeply referenced in scripture, and devastating criticism of “the arrogant of mind and heart,” “the rulers” and “the rich” exists.

The section headings of Chapters IV and V of Magnifica Humanitas are themselves a refutation of Word on Fire’s attempt to reduce the encyclical to a non-controversial reminder of God’s love: a document containing sections titled ‘The Problem of Unemployment,’ ‘Breaking the Chains of New Forms of Slavery,’ ‘The Normalization of War,’ and ‘The Crisis of Multilateralism’ is not a document whose foremost priority is a spiritual reminder about humanity loved by God. It is a document that charges that those currently in power in our world are actively depriving, for their own financial profit, most of humanity of the dignity that God’s love demands.

Magnifica Humanitas does not shy away from specific demands: Let us establish standards for discernment -- the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace -- and let us translate these standards into practices such as responsible planning, the assessment of human and social impact, the inclusion of the most vulnerable, the promotion of digital literacy and guiding research and industry toward justice and peace. (MH ¶14)

This is not a call to remember who we are. It is a list of demands, based on God’s love, specifically addressed to the powerful.

The Word on Fire article quotes none of this text.

The Word on Fire article does quote one passage bearing directly on structural power. It quotes the sentence that technology ‘takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it and use it’ (MH ¶9), using it as a point about the moral ambivalence of technology in general -- the Babel versus Jerusalem choice that everyone faces -- without following it to its immediate context in the encyclical, which is one of the document’s most specific passages:

“It is necessary to establish adequate regulatory tools capable of upholding justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power. Nevertheless, the issue is not limited to regulation. As Pope Francis warned, we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it… In the past, it was largely up to the State to guide and direct innovation. Today, however, the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments. Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.”

The encyclical does not ask whether technology is good or bad in the abstract. It asks who holds this power today. It identifies the holders as private, often transnational actors whose resources exceed those of governments. It frames that configuration as an unprecedented danger to the common good and demands that we ask about it “realistically.” (MH ¶5)

The Word on Fire article offers this account of the sociological framework the encyclical invokes: “Magnifica Humanitas addresses something grander than that proposed by German sociologist Ulrich Beck. Beck’s ‘Risk Society,’ a fearsome theory that society risks breaking down under the uncontainable devastation that awesome technology forever poses. The pope doesn’t speak of Chernobyl-style nuclear carnage or Ultron-esque AI domination.”

Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1986) does not argue that society risks breaking down under the devastation of awesome technology. Beck’s argument is that industrial modernization generates systemic risks that are invisible, unequally distributed across class and geography, and structurally beyond the management capacity of existing legal, political, and insurance institutions -- not because catastrophes are inevitable but because chronic, diffuse harms are produced as normal byproducts of rational economic activity. The paradigmatic risks Beck analyzes are not dramatic disasters. They are environmental contamination that crosses national borders, financial system fragility that punishes those least responsible for it, and technological displacement that strips communities of economic viability while the benefits flow elsewhere.

That economic-political system, which is in power today, is exactly what the encyclical addresses. The concentration of private technological power exceeding governmental capacity (paragraph 5), the algorithmic engineering of dependency and control (Chapter IV), the structural displacement of workers without social remedy (Chapter IV) -- these are Beckian phenomena analyzed through a Catholic social teaching lens. The encyclical and Beck are not in tension. They are in alignment.

Chapter IV of the encyclical opens with a sustained treatment of truth as a structural precondition for democratic self-governance. The section headings are ‘Truth and Democracy,’ ‘Communication and the Collective Imagination,’ and ‘Toward an Ecology of Communication.’ The encyclical treats the deliberate manufacture and distribution of false information not as a cultural nuisance but as a structural assault on the institutions through which democratic self-government is possible. It calls for an ‘ecology of communication’ -- a systemic, institutional response placing responsibility on governments, media platforms, educational institutions, and those who shape the information environment. The Word on Fire article contains no reference to this section of Magnifica Humanitas.

Chapter IV’s second major section addresses labor in the AI era through subsections titled ‘The Value of Work,’ ‘The Problem of Unemployment,’ ‘An Economy That Values Dignity,’ and ‘Families and Young People: The Social Conditions for Hope.’ The Word on Fire article quotes one passage adjacent to this material -- the encyclical’s warning against the ideology that human worth must be earned through efficiency (MH ¶51): “I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.” But the encyclical does not offer this observation as a consolation, as the article implies. Instead, it offers the observation as an indictment of specific ideological commitments and specific economic arrangements -- and it moves from that indictment immediately to institutional consequence. What follows in the encyclical are demands for unemployment support, labor protections, wage floors, the right to organize, and the social conditions that allow families to sustain a dignified life. The phrase ‘an economy that values dignity’ is not a disposition to be cultivated. It is a policy standard against which specific governments, specific labor markets, and specific regulatory regimes are to be judged and found wanting or sufficient. The Word on Fire article completely ignores the encyclical’s demands regarding the obligations of the powerful to ensure the dignity of human labor.

Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them. (MH ¶51)

The ideology Leo XIV identifies here is not an abstraction. It is the operating premise of the Trump administration’s domestic program in May 2026 -- applied with consistency across every population the administration has targeted. Migrants do not earn their rights; they are removed. The disabled and the elderly do not produce sufficient economic value; their programs are cut. The unemployed have not justified their worth; their benefits are conditioned and reduced. The poor have not achieved enough to deserve the social supports that cushion failure in a just society. The final sentence of the encyclical’s passage is the most radical statement in a document full of radical statements: there are rights that apply to every human being simply by virtue of being human, and no human power -- no executive order, no congressional majority, no efficiency doctrine, no theory of national sovereignty -- can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them. Word on Fire quoted the first two sentences of this passage and declined to quote the third. The third is the one that matters.

Chapter IV’s third section is titled ‘Protecting Freedom Against Dependencies and Commercialization.’ Its subsections are ‘Dependencies and Societal Control’ and ‘Breaking the Chains of New Forms of Slavery.’ The language is deliberate. Leo XIV applies the term slavery to the algorithmic engineering of human dependency -- the deliberate design of digital environments to maximize engagement at the cost of autonomous human agency, for the financial benefit of platform owners, without the user’s meaningful ability to resist.

In Catholic social teaching, the term slavery carries theological weight accumulated across 135 years of social encyclicals. It is not applied casually. When Leo XIV applies it to platform dependency and digital control, he is making a specific moral judgment about a specific set of actors -- those who design, own, and profit from these systems -- and holding them accountable to an obligation they are violating.

The Word on Fire article’s closest approach to this subject is the observation that one risk AI poses is that ‘children flag for want of authentic human connection eclipsed by technological distraction’ -- that is, grow listless and diminished. Distraction is what happens when something engaging competes for attention. Slavery is what happens when a system is deliberately engineered to capture and monetize attention at scale, for the financial benefit of its owners, in ways designed to defeat the user’s capacity for autonomous choice. The encyclical uses the stronger term because it is making the stronger claim: not that technology distracts us, but that specific actors are deliberately constructing a form of domination and calling it a service. Word on Fire substitutes the weaker term because the weaker term carries no institutional accountability and names no actor.

The Word on Fire article does not mention Chapter V. Not a section, not a sentence, not an acknowledgment that the encyclical addresses war, weapons, or international order. For a reader of the Word on Fire article, Chapter V does not exist.

In May 2026, the American government led by Donald Trump had withdrawn from or undermined multiple international frameworks, conducted foreign policy on an explicitly transactional rather than principled multilateral basis, expanded AI-enabled drone warfare programs, and resisted international agreements that would constrain autonomous weapons development. The encyclical’s chapter addresses each of these orientations and condemns them. It does not name the government, but it names the orientation precisely enough that no name is needed.

Word on Fire does quote one phrase drawn from Chapter V’s framework -- the contrast between a ‘culture of power’ and a ‘civilization of love,’ and the question of whether we follow Nietzsche or Christ. The phrase is quoted as a rhetorical flourish, a vivid way of naming what is at stake, without engaging the chapter whose detailed argument produces that contrast. The chapter is the case. The contrast is the conclusion. Word on Fire quotes the conclusion, suppresses the case, and thereby allows its readers to receive the encyclical’s most alarming geopolitical analysis as an uplifting sentiment about hope.

The Word on Fire article quotes the encyclical’s Nehemiah passage at length, including Leo XIV’s vision of the rebuilt city in which ‘love and faithfulness will finally meet, and righteousness and peace will embrace.’ The article does not quote the sentence immediately preceding that vision, which identifies who must be included for the city to qualify as just: “The ‘rejected stones’ -- the poor, the sick, the migrants and the least among us -- will become the cornerstone” (MH ¶16). Word on Fire left it out.

The Trump administration, as of May 2026, had conducted the largest mass deportation operation in American history -- removing migrants with pending legal claims, long-term residents with community ties, and parents of American citizen children. The encyclical says migrants are the cornerstone. The administration was building without them, and breaking what had been built. The connection between the sentence Worner omitted and the policy underway at the moment of his article’s publication is not inferential. It is direct. The encyclical identifies migrants as the test of justice. The article removes the identification from the record it claims to be presenting.

The Word on Fire article opens with Chesterton, uses Eliot as an epigraph, invokes Yeats, dismisses Beck, and closes with Bernanos. The accumulation of prestigious names is not incidental. Each citation performs the same operation: a serious thinker’s authority is placed on the page, the intellectual altitude is established, and the analytical content that authority would require is quietly removed.

Chesterton’s parable of the man who has forgotten his name is genuine, and the connection to the encyclical’s anthropological concern is real. But Worner uses it to frame the encyclical as a response to spiritual amnesia -- the interior condition of having forgotten who we are before God. That frame licenses a purely spiritual response: remember, return, renew. The encyclical’s own response to the same diagnosis is also structural. It moves from the recognition that we have forgotten our dignity to the demand that we build institutions that protect it. The Chesterton frame stops at the diagnosis and calls it the prescription.

The Choruses from ‘The Rock’ appears as the opening epigraph -- Eliot’s lament about knowledge without wisdom, endless experiment without stillness. Worner uses it to establish that the encyclical operates on the plane of cultural and spiritual depth. What goes unengaged is that Eliot’s diagnosis of spiritual emptiness is inseparable from a critique of the social and economic arrangements generating it. To invoke Eliot’s lament and then read the encyclical as a purely spiritual call is to deploy Eliot against his own method.

Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ appears as a foil for papal hopefulness. Yeats’s pessimists lack conviction; Leo XIV supplies it. The reference stops at the poem’s first stanza. Yeats wrote the poem in 1919 watching a European political order dissolve under pressures that liberal institutions had proved inadequate to contain. The poem is about the failure of structures -- political, institutional, moral -- to hold against forces already shaping the next catastrophe. Word on Fire takes the poem’s famous imagery and moves on.

Bernanos closes the piece. The sentence the article quotes -- ‘It is a matter of reclaiming man, of restoring to him, along with the awareness of his dignity, faith in the freedom of his spirit’ -- is beautiful and true. Bernanos was also the author of The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon (1938), his incendiary denunciation of French Catholic silence before Nationalist atrocities during the Spanish Civil War, written at personal and professional cost, alienating former allies on the French Catholic right. Bernanos understood that reclaiming man required naming, specifically and publicly, the people and institutions engaged in diminishing him. The sentence the article quotes captures Bernanos’s aspiration. The method Bernanos used to pursue it -- confrontational, specific, politically costly -- is the method the article refuses. To close a piece on Catholic social teaching with Bernanos’s aspiration while refusing his method is to appropriate the saint’s authority for a purpose he would have recognized and condemned.

The Word on Fire article takes its title and its closing movement from the Nehemiah image. Leo XIV concludes the encyclical with a call to rebuild, and Worner quotes the passage generously -- except for the sentence that specifies what the rebuilding requires:

I see in him a striking parable of our own vocation, which is not to be passive spectators of social and cultural fractures, nor mere commentators on what is crumbling, but men and women prepared to enter the construction sites of history -- research laboratories, tech companies, schools, the media, institutions and local communities -- in order to rebuild what has collapsed and protect what is threatened.

The encyclical identifies the construction sites explicitly: research laboratories, tech companies, schools, media institutions, civil and governmental institutions, local communities. These are not metaphors for interior renewal. They are literal sites of structural contestation where specific actors are making specific choices about AI governance, labor conditions, democratic institutions, and international order -- choices the encyclical has spent five chapters analyzing and demanding be changed.

The Word on Fire article closes with the Nehemiah image and reads it as a call to personal and communal spiritual rebuilding, brick by loving brick. The construction sites the encyclical names do not appear. Tech companies are not mentioned as a construction site requiring entry and reform. Media institutions are not mentioned as a construction site -- though Word on Fire is one. Governmental institutions are not mentioned as sites where the encyclical’s demands must be brought to bear. What remains is the image of persevering labor, detached from every specific location and actor the encyclical assigned to it.

The encyclical explicitly rejects this reading of the Nehemiah vocation. It says directly that the vocation is ‘not to be passive spectators of social and cultural fractures, nor mere commentators on what is crumbling.’ The Worner article is a commentary on what is crumbling. The encyclical says that is not enough. Worner quotes the encyclical saying that is not enough -- and then produces exactly what the encyclical says is not enough.

The Word on Fire article carries Tod Worner’s byline. Worner writes as Editor-in-Chief of Bishop Robert Barron’s journal, distributed through Barron’s platform, to Barron’s audience. The piece is institutionally Barron’s. Its errors are errors the Barron enterprise has committed before.

In March 2025, Barron attended a joint session of Congress as the guest of a Republican congressman and subsequently described the ceremonial atmosphere in terms drawn from liturgical theology -- the gravity of the occasion, the quasi-sacred dignity of the proceedings. He offered no comparable treatment of the session’s policy content. The session included proposals directly contrary to Catholic social teaching on immigration, labor, and international cooperation. Barron aestheticized the ceremony and remained silent about its substance. The pattern is identical to the Worner article’s treatment of Magnifica Humanitas: aestheticize, then go silent.

The encyclical is aestheticized throughout the article: its Chesterton connections admired, its Eliot resonances noted, its Bernanos aspirations honored. Its substance is suppressed throughout: the Babel image invoked without asking who is building Babel in May 2026; the Nehemiah vocation celebrated without entering the construction sites the encyclical names; the rejected stones mentioned without the sentence that names migrants as cornerstones; the section on truth and democracy absent; the treatment of labor and slavery absent; Chapter V absent in its entirety.

The tradition of Catholic social encyclicals that runs from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Magnifica Humanitas has never operated this vague and toothless way. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum did not aestheticize the conditions of industrial labor. It named them, analyzed their causes, identified the responsible actors, and specified what justice required. The Catholic social tradition demands the same from those who claim to represent it. The Word on Fire article’s opening sentence is false. The encyclical the article then describes is not the encyclical Leo XIV wrote. The encyclical’s own term for this kind of construction is the Babel syndrome: building an impressive structure that looks like the city of God while excluding, brick by careful brick, the people and demands that would make it just.

Pope Leo XIV closed Magnifica Humanitas with Mary’s Magnificat -- a song by the Mother of God that does not console the powerful but indicts them -- and celebrates their overthrow. She sings: “For he has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness; behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed. The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him. He has shown might with his arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty.” (Luke 1:48-53).

Pope Leo XIV chose that sacred text as the final word of a document whose every chapter has been building toward it. The God of the Magnificat is not the God who reminds us gently that we are beloved. The God of the Magnificat is the God who overthrows the rich and the privileged from their positions of power and raises up the hungry and the vulnerable -- including the victims of the political program Bishop Barron has adopted as his own.

This post is also available to read on Substack: https://mikefoxcatechist.substack.com/p/bishop-barrons-fraudulent-response