On June 3, 2020, Francis used his Wednesday audience to name George Floyd, denounce racism, call for national reconciliation, and entrust the United States to Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was a full, public, moral intervention delivered from the papal pulpit to the world, and Vatican channels amplified it immediately.
Now consider September 2025. Charlie Kirk, an evangelical Protestant activist, VP confidant, and perhaps the most recognizable youth organizer on the American right, is assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University. Authorities say the motive is still under investigation; reporting to date describes a suspect with left-wing online influences and confirms the killing occurred mid-event, on stage, in front of thousands. Whatever one thinks of Kirk’s politics, this was a public execution of a Christian public figure in the middle of an American campus.
What was Rome’s response? Not an Angelus appeal. Not a general-audience prayer. Instead, Leo raised the murder privately with the U.S. ambassador: a line tucked into the embassy’s readout about a “warm and constructive” meeting. In other words, a backroom mention without a front-facing word to the faithful. The contrast with 2020 could not be starker. Francis took to the balcony and the airwaves for Floyd; Leo whispered condolences in a diplomatic parlor for Kirk. The same Vatican that speaks loudly when it tracks with elite narratives suddenly prefers sotto voce when the victim is an unfashionable Protestant culture warrior.
Some will object that Kirk wasn’t Catholic. True, and irrelevant to the point. The Holy See routinely speaks publicly about non-Catholic victims when it wishes to shape the moral conversation. If anything, Kirk’s Protestant identity sharpens the inconsistency: Francis publicly mourned a non-Catholic “victim of injustice” in 2020; Leo confined his comments about a slain Protestant to private diplomatic chatter in 2025. That asymmetry isn’t pastoral prudence. It’s optics. Meanwhile, the American Church gets the message: some deaths deserve Rome’s megaphone, others merit a parenthetical.
Kirk’s own religious positioning makes the silence more telling. He rose as a standard-bearer of Christian nationalism, frequently partnering with Catholics and speaking in explicitly Christian terms, even as outlets noted his evangelical background. If Rome wanted to warn against political violence, defend free speech, or simply pray publicly for his soul and grieving family, it had every precedent and every microphone. It chose discretion. That choice speaks louder than any allocution.
The Bishops’ Silent Treatment
The USCCB never misses a chance to flex its moral megaphone when the victim fits the world’s narrative. Four days after George Floyd’s death, Archbishop José Gomez had a polished statement on racism, police brutality, and reconciliation ready to go, stamped with the full authority of the bishops’ conference. The talking points landed right in line with CNN. The institutional Church bent over backward to show it “got it.”
Fast forward to 2025. Charlie Kirk is gunned down on stage in front of thousands of college students; a political assassination of a Christian public figure. Four days pass. And from the USCCB? Nothing. Not a single collective statement, not even a boilerplate “we pray for the repose of his soul and the comfort of his family.” Silence.\
MOre: https://bigmodernism.substack.com/p/from-floyd-to-kirk-the-selective
No comments:
Post a Comment