EWTN News Staff reported on April 26, 2026, that Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and Bishop David Bonnar of Youngstown, Ohio, issued statements condemning the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., where a gunman injured a Secret Service agent and forced the evacuation of President Donald Trump and other officials. The bishops called for prayer and emphasized that “violence is never the answer,” with Bonnar adding the platitude that “we all must look deeper into the human heart to build each other up rather than tear each other down.” Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, similarly posted on X that “Jesus commanded us to love our enemies, and that includes our ideological opponents.” Yet in this torrent of pious-sounding but theologically vacuous verbiage, not a single one of these men — occupying positions of authority in the conciliar sect — thought it necessary to remind the faithful that the root cause of such violence is the organized rejection of Jesus Christ and His Law by civil society, precisely the evil that Pope Pius XI identified nearly a century ago when he wrote that “this kind of outpouring of evil has afflicted the whole world because very many have removed Jesus Christ and His most holy law from their customs, from private, family, and public life” (*Quas Primas*, 11.12.1925). The statements are not merely inadequate; they are symptomatic of the spiritual bankruptcy of an institution that has abandoned its divine mission.
