Bishop Barron, the Religious Liberty Commission, and the Transpolitical Mission of the Church

Bishop Robert Barron’s decision to serve on the White House Commission on Religious Liberty under the Trump administration—Timothy Cardinal Dolan will also serve—has prompted a predictable murmur from certain quarters of the Catholic commentariat. The logic of the critique is familiar: when a bishop steps into the political arena, he imperils the evangelical mission of the Church by appearing to lend her authority to a partisan agenda. In its more vulgar expressions, the critique simply amounts to a complaint that Barron does not champion a partisan set of concerns that the complainer champions. But this is to misunderstand not only the nature of the Church’s mission, but the nature of politics itself.

There is no denying that political entanglements can distort the witness of the Church. In the American context, this has taken the form of pastoral letters that read like warmed-over policy white papers, ecclesial committees that mimic the bureaucratic priorities of the earthly city, and public moral pronouncements filtered through the logic of advocacy rather than the salvation of souls. No one saw this danger more clearly than Fr. Ernest L. Fortin, whose withering analyses of the U.S. bishops’ pastoral documents in the 1980s remain instructive not because they are hostile to the bishops’ aims, but because they remind us that the Church should not be a policy shop. “Political issues,” wrote Fortin,

are inherently controversial and divisive. They rarely admit of clear-cut solutions and leave room for reasonable disagreement on the part of decent and thoughtful persons. By taking sides on such issues, the Church inevitably commits itself to a partial view of justice and runs the risk of compromising its integrity. (Fortin, Human Rights, Virtue, and the Common Good, 253–254)

Yet this does not entail political quietism. The Church’s mission is transpolitical, not apolitical—and the distinction is decisive. The Church cannot be reduced to the dynamics of the temporal order, but neither can she be indifferent to it. The political order, properly understood, is the sphere within which human beings deliberate about common action and justice in view of the common good. It is not the final horizon of human thought and action, but it is the stage on which persons pursue goods that are subordinate to, but not severable from, the highest good. Because man is by nature a political animal—and because grace perfects nature rather than abolishing it—the Church must speak to political realities, though she must never be subsumed by them.

This transpolitical character of the Church means that the Church can speak about politics without becoming political in the partisan sense. It also means that she can, under the right conditions, take part in the work of political structures in order to bear witness to truths that transcend those structures. This is especially true in matters touching on the natural moral law or the freedom of the Church herself. Here, the classical and Christian traditions converge. The Christian tradition inherits from antiquity the conviction that politics, rightly ordered, is not merely about power but about truth and human flourishing. Political communities cannot thrive without some orientation toward the truth about man and his destiny. But precisely because that truth transcends politics, the Church must be careful not to reduce her voice to merely political idioms.

This is where criticism of Barron’s participation in a religious liberty advisory council misses the point. Such criticism tends to assume that any involvement with a politically charged administration is a betrayal of the Church’s transpolitical character or a descent to merely partisan aims. But the question is not whether a bishop appears too close to Caesar, but whether he forgets that Christ is Lord even of Caesar. To speak and act on behalf of religious freedom is not to bow before the temporal power, but to remind it of its limits. As Pope Benedict XVI insisted in Caritas in Veritate (see §§1, 9, and 78), and again in his address to the Bundestag in 2011, the state must be open to the truth that transcends it—or else it collapses into will and proceduralism. Religious freedom is not merely one civil good among others, but the juridical recognition that man’s highest obligation is not to the political community, but to God. When the state protects that obligation, it tacitly acknowledges the limits of its own authority.

Bishop Barron’s role on such a council is therefore not to baptize the political goals of the Trump administration, but to clarify the moral and theological stakes of religious liberty in a contemporary context that increasingly regards transcendence with suspicion (See Washington State’s new law that requires priests to violate the seal of the confessional). The question is not whether the administration is perfect (it isn’t), or whether its motives are pure (they seldom are), but whether this specific role allows the bishop to serve the transpolitical good that the Church is uniquely equipped to articulate. In this case, it does. And to say so is not to make an idol of politics—it is to refuse to let politics become an idol.

Transpolitical Engagement and the Question of Religious Freedom

What makes Bishop Barron’s participation in this particular forum defensible—indeed, desirable—is not a calculation of political gain, or even the prudential balance of ecclesiastical risk and reward, but the nature of the issue at hand: religious freedom. Unlike debates over marginal tax rates or regulatory policy, which belong properly to the prudence of the laity and the autonomy of the temporal order, the question of religious freedom bears directly on the Church’s ability to carry out her mission. This makes it not merely a “political” matter, but a domain where temporal governance intersects with the perennial claims of conscience and worship that transcend politics.

Religious freedom, rightly understood, is not a concession of the state to the private whims of belief. It is the civil expression of a deeper metaphysical truth: that man is ordered to the divine, and that his obligations to God precede and exceed his obligations to Caesar. It was this truth that Pope Benedict XVI emphasized repeatedly—not only in Caritas in Veritate and his Bundestag address, but also in his consistent calls for the recovery of reason in public life. As he put it in his 2011 message for the celebration of the World Day of Peace,

Religious freedom expresses what is unique about the human person, for it allows us to direct our personal and social life to God, in whose light the identity, meaning and purpose of the person are fully understood. To deny or arbitrarily restrict this freedom is to foster a reductive vision of the human person; to eclipse the public role of religion is to create a society which is unjust, inasmuch as it fails to take account of the true nature of the human person; it is to stifle the growth of the authentic and lasting peace of the whole human family.

Religious freedom is not an accidental concern of the Church but a natural implication of her sacramental presence in the world. Christianity’s unique claim is that the truth about God has been revealed definitively in Christ, and that this truth transcends the political order. Religious freedom, in this light, is not merely a legal protection, but a recognition—however indirect—of the primacy of the truth revealed in Christ over the goods of the political order.

What, then, should a bishop do when invited to speak for the defense of religious freedom? If the invitation is genuine, and if the forum allows him to bear witness to the truth without compromising it, then refusal would not be a mark of religious independence but an abdication of religious duty. Bishop Barron’s decision to serve on the commission is defensible precisely because the issue at stake—religious liberty—is one where the Church’s teaching has direct and authoritative bearing. In such contexts, the bishop does not politicize the Gospel; he reminds the political order that it is not the Church.

This is not to say that every such invitation should be accepted, or that political regimes are always sincere in their interest in religious liberty. Prudence remains essential.

The Risk of Misidentification and the Path of Witness

To say that a bishop may rightly engage in political discourse—particularly on matters touching religious liberty—is not to deny the risks. The danger is real: that the Church will be seen as merely another “stakeholder” in public life, her sacramental character blurred into mere “advocacy,” her religious mandate mistaken for partisan ambition. The modern state has a genius for and a tendency to flatten higher and lower orders into a comfortable, secular frame. When the Church speaks too facilely about politics and policy that are the arena of legitimate prudence and deliberation because each side is unclear and partial, she risks being taken as one more special interest. The episcopal voice must remain recognizable as a theological voice, not reducible to partisan talking points or administrative jargon.

This is what makes Bishop Barron’s presence on a religious freedom commission uniquely defensible. He is a well-known public theologian and Catholic evangelist.  His life is committed to the Church and to spreading the saving message of the Gospel.  His participation is not in service of a legislative agenda, but of a deeper witness: that religious liberty is not the product of political will, but the recognition of an antecedent truth about the human person. For this he is uniquely well-suited.

Image by wideonet and licensed via Adobe Stock.