Bishop Barron Warns Us That Commies Like Mamdani Are a Threat to Religious Freedom

Bishop Robert Barron of the Winona–Rochester diocese in Minnesota slammed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's disgraceful statement on America's Independence Day. Mamdani had the audacity to sit behind George Washington's desk, surround himself with dour-looking immigrants, and attack America as racist, greedy, and a slew of other pejoratives.

This was 'appalling,' Bishop Barron said, as he took Mamdani to task for hating this country.

What an appalling speech the Mayor of New York delivered for the 250th anniversary of the nation.

Sadly, it reflects the view of America propagated for years by Howard Zinn and his like-minded colleagues in the universities and believed by armies of the young: a dark, oppressive…
— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) July 3, 2026

"Sadly, it reflects the view of America propagated for years by Howard Zinn and his like-minded colleagues in the universities and believed by armies of the young: a dark, oppressive country where common people are denigrated by tyrants and oligarchs, where immigrants are treated with contempt, where those with “soft hands” hold the wealth created by those with dirty hands," Barron wrote. "No sensible person would claim that our country is without flaws, but the relentlessly negative picture painted by Mayor Mamdani is just absurd. And it is the fruit of the Marxism that, sadly, is all the rage today."

He's correct. And religious leaders need to start speaking out against the Democratic Socialists' takeover of the Democratic Party.

Barron is leading the charge on that, thankfully.

There are many reasons why I detest communism, but I want to draw attention to just one issue of supreme importance. Karl Marx said that the first critique is the critique of religion. He meant that, before a complete reworking of the politics and economics of a society can take place, religion has to be taken down. This is because religion, as he saw it, is the "opium of the masses," a drug taken to dull our sensitivity to the suffering caused by economic exploitation. As long as the suffering populace is lured into complacency by fantasies about God's providence and the promise of eternal life, they will never rise up and throw off their chains.
In making this clarification, Marx was taking a step beyond his teacher, Ludwig Feuerbach. That little-known but massively influential German intellectual had asserted that God is but a projection of the idealized self-understanding of human beings. We are knowledgeable, kind and powerful to a limited degree, but we would love to be omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipotent. And so we project this fantasy outward and invent the character of God. And then, pathetically, we fall on our knees and worship what we have made and ask it to give us what we want. Marx completely accepted this interpretation of religion, but he asked the follow-up question: Why would we do such a thing? His answer is the opium theory — that we do it to dull our pain.
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But there is a second reason why the elimination of religion is of paramount significance for Marx. Communism aspires to be a totalizing system, involving the government's control over education, entertainment, communication, politics and especially economics.
What stands resolutely athwart this ambition is religion, which declares that all of these societal expressions are finally under the judgment of God. If God exists, then there is an objective moral criterion by which all of it — government, politics, economics, etc. — can be evaluated and thus delimited.

The Democratic Party hasn't exactly been kind to Catholics over the years. The Obama administration has dragged the Little Sisters of the Poor through court for more than a decade, and blue states are still fighting to force the nuns to provide abortion and birth control coverage to employees. New York is going after the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, trying to force them to bend the knee to radical trans activists. Catholic pro-lifers were targeted by the Biden DOJ's weaponization of the FACE Act. Washington State tried to force priests to break the Seal of the Confessional — an offense that can get them defrocked.

And now they want to 'investigate' America 250 for invoking Christianity. They're telegraphing what their next moves are, and we must pay attention to it.

History shows that commies target religious people. They confiscate our properties, close our churches, imprison our clergy, and murder us. There's no reason to believe this current iteration of commies won't do the same thing.

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