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For a time, MAGA had its own “Catholic Coalition” manned by right-wing stalwarts over issues like abortion and similar traditional values,” said Letters from Leo writer Christopher Hale. But President Donald Trump’s self-imposed war in Iran is now blasting even that MAGA alliance to pieces.
“For years, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester has been the Catholic right’s most careful diplomat — a man who built a media empire by threading the needle between orthodoxy and the MAGA movement, rarely picking fights he didn’t have to pick,” said Hale.
Barron was careful to never directly contradict MAGA arguments online while going head-to-head with liberal politicians over birth control. But recently the claims of one MAGA influencer was one bridge too far.
In a lengthy public statement, the bishop addressed Catholic convert and Former Miss California Carrie Prejean Boller’s claims that “anti-Catholic” persecution and “Zionist” control of the U.S. Religious Liberty Commission was the reason for her removal in February.
President Donald Trump created the commission to draft a report on how to encourage religious liberty, and it is tasked to collect personal accounts from Jewish Americans who have faced antisemitism.
While the Commission’s was collecting interviews Boller was apparently keeping her own tabs.
“Since we’ve mentioned Israel a total of 17 times, are you willing to condemn what Israel has done in Gaza?” Boller asked one witness. “You won’t condemn that? Just on the record.”
Boller then turned on the commission after a smattering of “boos.”
“Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know. So are all Catholics antisemites?” the demanded of the panel, which Jewish Insider described as “a mix of Jewish professionals, Christian activists and members of the Washington Jewish community. “I want to be clear on what the definition of antisemitism is. If I don’t support the political state of Israel, am I an antisemite, yes or no?”
The Religious Liberty Commission chairman removed Boller from the commission soon after, claiming “no member of the Commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda.”
Anti-Israel social influencer Candace Owens quickly tweeted her support of Boller and slammed the Commission: “Carrie didn’t hijack anything. You hosted a performative Zionist hearing meant to neuter the Christian faith.”
The MAGA fold are divvying themselves into two warring factions over Trump’s invasion of Iran, with one team arguing that Trump is being led on a leash by Israel to attack Iran. Owens and Influencer Tucker Carlson number themselves among that group.
But now the aloof Bishop Robert Barron is drawn into the fray.
“… Boller has complained that she was removed from the Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty because of her Catholic beliefs, and she has called out myself and other Catholic members of the commission for not defending her. This is absurd,” said Barron on X. “… Boller was not dismissed for her religious convictions but rather for her behavior at a gathering of the Commission last month: browbeating witnesses, aggressively asserting her point of view, hijacking the meeting for her own political purposes.”
Barron added that the Catholic position “on matters of ‘Zionism,’ to which I fully subscribe, is as follows: all forms of antisemitism are to be unequivocally condemned; the state of Israel has a right to exist; but the modern nation of Israel does not represent the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism.”
“If Mrs. Prejean Boller were dismissed for holding these beliefs, it is difficult to understand why I am still a member of the Commission,” Barron insisted. “To paint herself as a victim of anti-Catholic prejudice or to claim that her religious liberty has been denied is simply preposterous.”
Hale says Barron’s intervention shows the festering anti-Israel wound inside of MAGA is boiling into its major organs and threatening the whole body.
“The aftermath has been just as revealing,” reports Hale. “It shows that the burgeoning civil war among the Evangelical and Catholic Right is just beginning and threatens the presidential ambitions of both JD Vance and Marco Rubio [who are both Catholic].”