Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, has gone after a cardinal of the Church in public.
"Well, another Cardinal has come out with a, shall we say, puzzling take on evangelization," Barron wrote on X on the evening of Oct. 28. He was answering Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, the archbishop of Algiers. "Excuse me, but…what?"
Barron set Christ's command to make disciples of all nations against the cardinal and said: "Sure sounds like conversion to me." He granted that no one wants evangelization done in a "brow-beating, overbearing, or disrespectful manner (proselytization), but for God's sake, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater." He closed: "If I really thought that the Church does not exist to bring people to Christ, then I would resign and get an honest job."
The post drew more than 17,000 likes and 1,100 replies, mostly from young people, by Thursday morning, according to X's public metrics. LifeSiteNews ran it under the headline "Bishop Barron rebukes cardinal who said Church should not 'convert' people."
Vesco gave the interview to Christophe Herinckx of the Belgian Catholic outlet CathoBel, published Oct. 23. "We are the Church of this people. Not a proselytising Church, not a Church that is there to convert, but a Church that aspires to be one of the components of this people," he said.
Asked what Christians in Europe should do, Vesco set a fortress against fraternity. "Do we see ourselves as a besieged fortress?" he asked. He granted there are reasons to see it that way. "Or do we choose fraternity? For me, it is the only worthwhile option."
Later in the interview, on Christian-Muslim relations: "In monotheistic religions, proselytism is poison, because it implies considering the other person's religion false," he said. Such talk, he said, "puts an end to dialogue."
Barron has never lacked a hard word. The question is whom he spends it on. This month he has spent it on German academics and on a cardinal.
On Oct. 22 he answered a German Catholic academy still arguing over the Josef Pieper Prize he received in Münster in 2025. "Gosh, I'd love to attend this debate. But I'm pretty sure I have a MAGA rally to attend that night…" he wrote. "If you have any doubt that the German Catholic academy has fallen into clownish irrelevance, look no further than this inane and ginned-up 'controversy.'" He called the 2025 protest "25 desultory septuaginarians holding signs" and said "that sound you hear in the background is Josef Pieper turning in his grave."
The prize had drawn protests from Catholic groups and political organizations, and protesters accused him of promoting "exclusionary identity politics," EWTN News reported. Barron did not back off. He mocked them.
In December 2018, Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, asked him on The Daily Wire's "Sunday Special" what the Catholic view was of a man like himself. "So what's the Catholic view of me?" Shapiro asked.
Barron called Christ "the privileged route to salvation." Those outside the explicit Christian faith, he said, are "saved through the grace of Christ, indirectly received." Then he told Shapiro: "if you're following your conscience sincerely, or in your case, you're following the commandments of the law sincerely, yeah, you can be saved." He added: "But no, you can be saved."
He did not tell Shapiro that he needs to be baptized. He did not tell him what the council says of the man who knows the truth and turns from it: "Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved" (Lumen Gentium 14). A Jew who has heard the Gospel from a bishop on a national broadcast was owed that sentence.
This year Carrie Prejean Boller, a Catholic, was removed from the Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty. At a Feb. 9 hearing on antisemitism she said, "I'm a Catholic, and Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know," and asked witnesses whether they would "condemn what Israel has done in Gaza," the National Catholic Register reported. The commission's chairman, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, said "no member of the commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue."
On March 20 she wrote to Barron, a fellow commissioner, on X. "Your Excellency, you shared with me through text message to me that my position reflects Catholic teaching, especially that the modern state of Israel is not the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy," she wrote. "Please speak up. Please stand up for Catholics. Be brave, Bishop Barron. The world needs brave men."
Barron responded publicly the same day. "This is absurd," he wrote. She was removed, he said, "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." He said the modern nation of Israel "does not represent the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism," and called her claim of anti-Catholic prejudice "simply preposterous."
He agreed with her on the doctrine and was blunt with her anyway. A Catholic laywoman asked her bishop for cover against the people who pushed her out, and he sided with them. He was gentle with the Jewish commentator and hard on the Catholic laywoman. With Vesco, he finally aimed the hard word at a churchman who had earned it.
On Vesco, Barron is right, and the Church is with him. Christ's last command to the apostles reads: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Mt 28:19-20).
The Second Vatican Council drew the conclusion. "Therefore, all must be converted to Him, made known by the Church's preaching, and all must be incorporated into Him by baptism and into the Church which is His body," the council taught. "And hence missionary activity today as always retains its power and necessity" (Ad Gentes 7).
Vesco faults proselytism because it treats another religion as false. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in Dominus Iesus, ruled out "that mentality of indifferentism 'characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that 'one religion is as good as another''". It taught that followers of other religions, "objectively speaking", are "in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation" (No. 22).
Pope St. John Paul II wrote that "dialogue does not dispense from evangelization" (Redemptoris Missio 55). Pope St. Paul VI wrote that "the respectful presentation of Christ and His kingdom is more than the evangelizer's right; it is his duty" (Evangelii Nuntiandi 80).
That duty runs to every nation, Shapiro's included. Barron found the words for Vesco this week. Command will be glad to see him use them the next time Shapiro, or the next commission, asks.
