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The Sisters of Charity of New York answered the 12 bishops who prayed over President Donald Trump on Saturday morning, and they headlined their answer with a single word: “AUTHORITY.”
The order has served New York since 1817, when three sisters arrived in Manhattan to open an orphanage. In a statement posted to Instagram, the sisters granted the point the bishops keep making in their own defense. Christians are called to pray for those who govern them. Then they asked what the Oval Office video left out.
“Where was the concern for the poor? For immigrant families being torn apart? For those suffering beneath the violence of war? For the marginalized whose dignity is threatened? For Christianity being distorted into an instrument of political power?”
“These are not partisan concerns,” the sisters wrote. “They are Gospel concerns.”
What the world was shown
On Thursday, Oct. 22, Denver Archbishop James Golka laid his hand on Trump’s shoulder at the Resolute Desk while 11 fellow bishops extended theirs, with the televangelist Paula White-Cain standing behind the president’s chair.
A White House communications adviser posted the 27-second clip that afternoon, and Trump’s campaign account shared it too. The midterm elections are 12 days away.
The sisters were careful about what they could not see. “We cannot know everything said behind closed doors,” they wrote. “But we know what the world was shown.”
What the bishops have said since has done little to change the picture. Bishop Scott Bullock of Rapid City told the National Catholic Reporter that the gathering “really was not intended to be a political meeting per se.”
He also told the paper that a Heritage Foundation representative invited him, and that “the USCCB was not unaware of this meeting” (a claim the conference’s own spokesperson, Chieko Noguchi, has contradicted by saying its leadership was never informed).
Eleven of the 12 bishops did not answer NCR’s questions at all.
Golka spoke to his own archdiocesan paper instead. NCR reported Saturday that he acknowledged many viewers took the video as an endorsement and called that “never my intention.” He said he was heartbroken that people were hurt.
In the same breath, he faulted “people intentionally using this moment to sow disunity,” and as I reported Friday, he stopped short of an apology.
The Sisters of Charity anticipated that defense. “Images carry messages,” they wrote. “Silence carries messages, too.”
The women who spoke first
Few Catholics in America have earned the right to say so more than these women. The Sisters of Charity nursed Civil War wounded in New York, ran St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, and cared for AIDS patients there when much of the country recoiled from them.
Today the order numbers about 123 sisters, with an average age of 86. They still stand outside the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, and they pay for passports so that the American-born children of detained parents can stay in the country.
Their statement named that history plainly. Women religious, they wrote, “have served the Church without the institutional power granted to its hierarchy,” and when conscience demanded it, they “challenged the very institutions to which we belonged.”
The Church has a long memory of women doing exactly that. Catherine of Siena, a laywoman with no office, wrote to Pope Gregory XI in Avignon and urged him back to Rome; he returned in 1377, and she is now a Doctor of the Church.
In 1979, Sister Theresa Kane stood before John Paul II at the National Shrine in Washington and asked him to hear the women of this country. None of them held a bishop’s crozier, yet each acted on a baptism that made her responsible for the Church she loved.
Canon law says as much.
The faithful “have the right and even at times the duty” to make their views known to their pastors on matters touching the good of the Church, according to canon 212. When shepherds fail to lead, the baptized are called to stand up and speak, and Catholic women have answered that call for centuries.
Leo’s Church
Pope Leo XIV has prepared his Church for a moment like this one. In his first weeks as pope, he named Sister Tiziana Merletti secretary of the Vatican office that oversees religious life. This June, he chose Montse Alvarado to run the Dicastery for Communication, and on June 30, he made Sister Alessandra Smerilli prefect of the dicastery responsible for migrants and the environment.
Women now lead three of the Vatican’s 16 dicasteries, two of them Leo’s own picks. Just two of Donald Trump’s 15 department secretaries are women, which means, as I wrote in June, that the pope has put a larger share of women atop his government than the president has atop his.
Think about that for a moment.
The Holy See office charged with defending immigrant families is led by a religious sister, appointed by an American pope, while a dozen American bishops posed for a campaign video with the president whose deportation machine the U.S. bishops’ conference has repeatedly condemned.
The women around him reach further still. Sister Raffaella Petrini, whom Leo confirmed in May 2025 as president of the Governorate of Vatican City State, runs the city-state itself, and in February he added her to the Commission on Reserved Matters. On the night of his election, he blessed Sister Nathalie Becquart, the French undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops and the first woman ever to vote in a synod, at the Palace of the Holy Office.
In this fight, an aging order of nuns in the Bronx sounds far more like Leo than the men who gathered around the Resolute Desk.
That is why so many Catholics refused to stay quiet this week. More than 1,800 people have now signed our letter asking the 12 bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.
Watching ordinary Catholics find their voices these past few days has been one of the most inspiring things I have seen since Leo’s election.
We are doing this to protect our Church and to protect our pope. Trump has spent months attacking Leo, and his White House has now used Catholic bishops as props in the final stretch of a campaign.
Our baptism does not allow us to shrug at that.
The sisters closed their statement with a line every bishop in America should read before the November meeting in Baltimore.
“Our first allegiance is not to a president, a political party, or even an institution,” they wrote. “It is to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the Sisters of Charity of New York and with every Catholic woman who has served the poor while the powerful looked away. Pope Leo XIV has trusted women to lead his Church, and the immigrant families those women serve deserve better than bishops who trade their dignity for a photo opportunity.
The Gospel was never meant to decorate a campaign. It belongs to the hungry, the stranger, and the prisoner, and it calls every baptized person to speak when silence would be easier.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for shepherds who smell like the sheep and for a Church that refuses to kneel before power. Right now, as bishops lend their hands to a political spectacle, that hunger has never been sharper.
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The Bishops picked hate over love. Picked racism, pedophilia and the rich over Jesus. They did not pray for Trump, they pray for hate. All those Bishops need to be defrocked.
Well done Sisters.