EWTN News portal reports that Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar and self-identified Catholic, publicly declared that Roman Catholic Church leaders should “stay out of politics” and “stick to fixing the Church” in response to President Trump’s personal denunciation of antipope Leo XIV. Homan, whose role involves enforcing immigration policies that have included family separations and mass deportations, claimed that “a secure border saves lives” and is “the most humane thing this country can do.” Multiple bishops, including Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson Pérez, Bishop Robert Barron, USCCB President Archbishop Paul Coakley, and Archbishop Mark Rivituso, rushed to defend the antipope’s “Gospel of peace” and urged prayer for Trump while affirming Leo XIV’s role as a “spiritual leader who speaks from the Gospel.” This entire spectacle — a public official dictating to Church leaders the boundaries of their moral authority, and bishops genuflecting before both temporal power and an antipope while invoking “peace” without defining justice — is a textbook manifestation of the conciliar revolution’s reduction of the Church to a therapeutic NGO, stripped of her divine mandate to judge the moral order of nations and reduced to offering vague platitudes about “dignity” while remaining silent on the specific moral evils of the age.
The Heresy of Silence: When Caesar Draws the Line
Tom Homan’s demand that Church leaders “stay out of politics” is not merely a political opinion — it is a direct assault on the divine constitution of the Church and a repetition of the very errors condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors. Proposition 20 states: “The ecclesiastical power ought not to exercise its authority without the permission and assent of the civil government.” Proposition 27 declares: “The sacred ministers of the Church and the Roman pontiff are to be absolutely excluded from every charge and dominion over temporal affairs.” Homan’s statement is a verbatim echo of these condemned propositions. He does not merely disagree with a policy — he demands that the Church surrender her divinely ordained authority to pronounce on matters of morality that touch the temporal order.
The Church has never accepted the modernist dogma that faith is a purely private matter. As Pope Pius XI taught in Quas Primas: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” And further: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them 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.” The Church’s mission is not to “fix the Church” as though she were a mere human institution with internal management problems — it is to teach, govern, and lead all to eternal happiness, and this mission necessarily encompasses the moral evaluation of all human actions, including those of border czars and presidents.
Homan’s framing reveals the liberal Catholic mentality perfectly: the Church has “issues” that need “fixing,” and therefore she has no standing to speak on temporal matters. This is the logic of the conciliar revolution — first reduce the Church to a human institution riddled with problems, then use her alleged dysfunction as grounds to silence her prophetic voice. It is the same logic that says a doctor with a cold cannot diagnose cancer.
The Antipope’s “Gospel of Peace” and the Bishops’ Genuflection
The response of the bishops defending Leo XIV is, if anything, more revealing than Homan’s attack. Archbishop Nelson Pérez praised the antipope for speaking “with clarity and compassion with calls for peaceful resolutions to complex challenges in a manner that upholds the sanctity and dignity of all human life.” Bishop Robert Barron called Trump’s comments “disrespectful” and urged the president to apologize. Archbishop Coakley said he was “disheartened.” Archbishop Rivituso encouraged the faithful to pray for the president.
Not one of these bishops defined what justice requires. Not one cited the natural law or the Church’s social teaching on the rights of families, the limits of state power, or the moral obligations of nations toward migrants. Not one quoted Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, or Quas Primas. Instead, they offered the conciliar Church’s characteristic fare: “peace,” “dignity,” “compassion,” “respect” — empty signifiers that mean everything and nothing, that offend no one and bind no one, that can be deployed by any political faction for any purpose.
This is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place: bishops who occupy the structures of the Vatican and claim apostolic authority, yet who refuse to exercise the prophetic office that is the very reason for the Church’s existence. They do not teach — they mediate. They do not judge — they facilitate “dialogue.” They do not anoint kings or rebuke tyrants — they issue press releases expressing being “disheartened.” As St. Pius X warned in Lamentabili, proposition 7: “The Church, in condemning errors, has no right to require any internal assent from the faithful to the pronouncements issued by the Church.” The conciliar bishops have internalized this condemned proposition so thoroughly that they cannot even conceive of demanding assent to defined doctrine, let alone pronouncing judgment on the moral acts of public officials.
The Idolatry of “Border Security” and the Cult of Humane Cruelty
Homan’s claim that “a secure border saves lives” and is “the most humane thing this country can do” deserves particular scrutiny. This is the language of naturalistic humanitarianism — the reduction of morality to a calculus of physical safety and temporal order, with no reference to the supernatural end of man, the rights of the family, the natural law right to migrate, or the divine command to welcome the stranger.
The Church’s authentic social teaching, as articulated by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum and by subsequent pontiffs, recognizes both the right of sovereign states to regulate their borders AND the natural law rights of persons to migrate in order to sustain life and family. These two principles must be held in tension and adjudicated by the moral law. But Homan — and the bishops who failed to correct him — reduce the entire question to “border security,” as though the state’s temporal authority were the highest good and the Church had nothing to say about whether specific policies violate the natural law.
Pius XI in Quas Primas was explicit: “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: “Christ possesses the so-called executive power, for all must obey His commands, and this under the threat of announced punishments, which the obstinate cannot escape.” The border czar’s claim that his policy is “the most humane thing” is a claim to have resolved a moral question that belongs to the Church’s competence — and the bishops’ silence is a surrender of the Church’s judicial authority to the secular power.
The Deeper Apostasy: A Church That Dare Not Speak Its Name
The most damning aspect of this entire episode is what it reveals about the state of the conciliar sect. Here is a public official — a Catholic, no less — telling the Church to shut up and stay in her lane. And the “bishops” respond not by asserting the Church’s divine authority, not by teaching the faithful what the moral law requires, not by warning Homan and Trump that they will face the judgment of Christ the King if they violate justice — but by defending the antipope’s right to speak vaguely about peace while simultaneously refusing to define what peace actually requires.
This is the conciliar method: maintain the appearance of authority while hollowing out its content. The antipope speaks, the bishops affirm that he speaks, the faithful are told to pray — and nothing is defined, nothing is condemned, nothing is required. The Church becomes a echo chamber of pious sentiments, while the world burns and souls perish.
As the Syllabus of Errors condemns in proposition 55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” Homan’s demand is precisely this condemned error. And the bishops’ response — failing to assert the Church’s right and duty to pronounce on the moral order of the temporal sphere — is a practical acceptance of the very separation that the Church has always condemned.
The faithful must see this for what it is: not a political disagreement, but a revelation of the conciliar apostasy. The structures occupying the Vatican have no authority to bind or loose, no courage to teach, no will to judge. They are, as the title of Pius XI’s encyclicle suggests, a kingdom that has abandoned its King — and in doing so, has become nothing more than a chaplaincy to whatever temporal power happens to be in office.
Non possumus — we cannot be silent in the face of such betrayal. The Church of Christ does not “stay out of politics.” The Church of Christ is the politics of eternity, and her silence in the face of evil is not prudence — it is apostasy.
Source:
Border czar Tom Homan calls for Church leaders to ‘stay out of politics’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 14.04.2026