The EWTN News portal reports that on October 22, 2026, Denver “Archbishop” James Golka and seven other conciliar “bishops” entered the Oval Office to pray with and for President Donald Trump, discussing “religious freedom, school choice, religious visas, and life policy” under the auspices of the White House Faith Office. The event, explicitly disavowed by the USCCB, culminated in a prayer thanking God for the “gift of our beautiful nation, the gift of our government, and the gift of this office of the presidency,” with nary a mention of the Social Kingship of Christ or the duty of the State to profess the Catholic Faith. This spectacle of conciliar prelates functioning as chaplains to a secular regime exposes the complete capitulation of the post-conciliar structure to the religion of the State.
The Civil Religion of the Americanist Heresy
The prayer led by Golka is a textbook manifestation of the condemned heresy of Americanism, which Leo XIII denounced in Testem Benevolentiae (1899) for confusing the Church’s mission with the ideals of liberal democracy. Golka thanks God for the “gift of our beautiful nation” and the “gift of this office of the presidency” — placing the secular State and its magistracy on the level of divine gifts co-equal with the Incarnation. He speaks of Jesus as “right here with us” in a vague, immanentist sense, stripped of His regal authority in caelis et in terra (Matt 28:18). There is no petition for the conversion of the President to the one true Faith, no invocation of Christus Regnat, no demand that the laws of the nation conform to the lex divina. This is not Catholic prayer; it is the liturgy of the civitas terrena masquerading as piety.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, teaches with unmistakable clarity: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed”. The encyclical establishes that “the State is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men” and that rulers “must fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness” by public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ. Golka’s prayer does the opposite: it sacralizes the very laicism Pius XI condemns as “the plague that poisons human society,” offering the State a religious blessing without demanding its submission to Christ the King.
“Religious Freedom”: The Condemned Error as Policy Agenda
The meeting’s stated agenda — “religious freedom, school choice, religious visas, and life policy” — reads like a catalog of Syllabus errors. The Syllabus of Pius IX (1864) condemns as error Proposition 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” and Proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship”. The conciliar “bishops” do not go to the Oval Office to demand the droit public of the Church — the recognition of Catholicism as the State religion, the suppression of public false worship, the conformity of legislation to Canon Law. They go to negotiate “religious freedom,” i.e., the libertas perditionis condemned by Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos as “that most pestilential error… whereby the liberty of conscience and of worship is asserted as a right.”
“School choice” is the modernist euphemism for the secularization of education, condemned by Pius IX in Proposition 47: “The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools… should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, control and interference, and should be fully subjected to the civil and political power”. The true Catholic principle, reiterated by Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri (1929), is that “the Church has the right to educate” and that the State must subordinate its schools to the Church’s supervision. To petition a Protestant President for “school choice” within a secular framework is to accept the Masonic principle of the école laïque.
False Ecumenism on Display: The Maronite “Bishop” and the Heretical “Spiritual Adviser”
The presence of “Bishop” Abdallah Elias Zaidan of the Maronite Eparchy alongside Paula White-Cain — a Pentecostal prosperity-gospel preacher and Trump’s longtime “spiritual adviser” — is the perfect icon of the conciliar church’s falsa oecumenismo. The Maronites, though historically Catholic, here function as tokens of the conciliar sect’s “dialogue” with Eastern schismatics, while White-Cain represents the Protestant sectarianism that the Syllabus condemns in Proposition 18: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church”.
Pius XI in Mortalium Animos (1928) condemns unequivocally: “The Apostolic See cannot on any terms take part in [non-Catholic] assemblies, nor is it anyway lawful for Catholics either to support or to work for such enterprises; for if they do so they will be giving countenance to a false Christianity, quite alien to the one Church of Christ”. The Oval Office prayer circle, led by a conciliar “archbishop” and joined by a schismatic “bishop” and a heretical Pentecostal woman, is precisely the conventiculum the Church forbids. It signals to the world that the conciliar sect regards all “faith leaders” as equal functionaries of a generic civil religion.
The USCCB’s Feigned Distance: A Symptom of Institutional Schizophrenia
The USCCB’s statement — “This was not something that the USCCB organized. It is not affiliated with the Conference” — reveals the fragmented, anti-hierarchical nature of the conciliar structure. True bishops, united under a true Pope, act in communion with the Roman Pontiff; they do not freelance as individual agents of a secular government’s “Faith Office.” The fact that eight “bishops” can bypass their own “conference” to attend a White House photo-op demonstrates that the USCCB is not an episcopal conference in the canonical sense (can. 287 §2 CIC 1917) but a bureaucratic NGO managing a religious corporation.
The “bishops” present — Golka, Burns, Wall, Naumann, Joensen, Grob, Barber, Zaidan — are all appointees of the usurper line beginning with John XXIII. As manifest heretics who profess the errors of Vatican II (religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality, liturgical reform), they have ipso facto lost all jurisdiction by the principle articulated by St. Robert Bellarmine: “A manifest heretic… by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church” (De Romano Pontifice, lib. 2, cap. 30). The same principle applies to bishops: a manifest heretic cannot be a member of the Church, therefore cannot be its head in any diocese. Canon 188 §4 of the 1917 Code confirms: “Every office becomes vacant by the mere fact and without any declaration… if the cleric publicly defects from the Catholic faith”. Their participation in this Masonic-style civil ritual is public defection.
The “Life Policy” Deception: Selective Morality as Political Currency
The article notes “sharp disagreements” between the USCCB and the Trump administration on “the administration’s failure to reverse the Biden administration’s policy on mail-order abortion drugs, the president’s support of IVF, and the administration’s mass deportation efforts.” This exposes the conciliar sect’s politica selectiva: they treat the murder of the unborn as a negotiable “policy issue” while collaborating with a President who supports fecundatio in vitro — intrinsically evil, condemned by Pius XII in Allocution to Italian Midwives (1951) as a violation of the natural law and the dignity of procreation.
Pius XI in Casti Connubii (1930) teaches: “Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin”. IVF compounds this by separating procreation from the conjugal act, creating embryonic human beings destined for destruction or freezing. A true bishop would denounce IVF as crimen abominabile and refuse any collaboration with a regime that promotes it. The conciliar “bishops” instead pray for the President, blessing his authority while he advances anti-life policies.
The Theological Bankruptcy of “Policy in Action”
White House Faith Director Jenny Korn’s claim that the meeting was “not politics but policy in action ending with meaningful prayer” is a semantic evasion worthy of the pater mendacii. There is no sphere of human action exempt from the Kingship of Christ. Pius XI in Quas Primas declares: “It matters not whether individuals, families, or states, for men united in societies are no less subject to the authority of Christ than individuals”. The distinction between “politics” and “policy” is a liberal construct designed to privatize religion and exclude the Church from the public order. By accepting this frame, the conciliar “bishops” concede the Masonic principle: the State is sovereign in the temporal order, the Church may only advise.
St. Pius X in Vehementer Nos (1906) condemns the French law of separation precisely because it “upsets the divine constitution of the Church” by denying her potestas directa in temporal matters pertaining to salvation. The Oval Office meeting is the Americanist equivalent: the “bishops” petition the State for favors (“religious visas,” “school choice”) as supplicants to a sovereign power, implicitly recognizing the State’s plenitudo potestatis over the Church’s freedom. This is the servilitas of the concordata mentality condemned by Pius IX in Syllabus Proposition 43: “The secular Power has authority to rescind, declare and render null, solemn conventions… entered into with the Apostolic See… without the consent of the Apostolic See”.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in the Seat of Power
The spectacle in the Oval Office is not an anomaly but the logical fruit of the conciliar revolution. Men who have abandoned the integral Faith, who reject the Social Kingship of Christ, who embrace religious liberty and ecumenism as dogmas, inevitably become functionaries of the secular State. They offer the world a “Church” that blesses the revolution, that prays for the preservation of the very order that crucifies Christ anew in its laws and institutions.
The true Catholic response is not “dialogue” but convertimini — a call to the President and all rulers to subdere se Deo, to recognize Christ as King, to conform the Constitution and laws to the lex Christi, to end the slaughter of the innocents, to suppress IVF, to restore the Catholic confessional State. Anything less is traditio proditorum. The “bishops” who knelt at the Resolute Desk did not serve Christ; they served the princeps huius mundi. Non est haec via, non est haec veritas, non est haec vita.
Source:
Catholic bishops pray with President Trump (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 22.10.2026