German lay group opposes Bp. Barron award over ‘anti-trans’ stance

A lay committee in Germany’s Münster diocese has criticized the decision to award a prestigious Catholic philosophical prize to U.S. Bishop Robert Barron, accusing him of making “anti-queer statements” and supporting President Donald Trump’s transgender policies.

Bishop Robert Barron. ARC Forum/wikimedia CC0.

The founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries is due to receive the award July 27 from the Münster-based Josef Pieper Foundation, which promotes the work of Pieper, a 20th-century Catholic philosopher.

The Josef Pieper Prize, established in 2004, is presented every five years by the foundation for exemplary work expressing “the Christian view of humanity.”

Previous winners include the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, French philosopher Rémi Brague, and German philosopher Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz. When Gerl-Falkovitz received the prize in 2019, it was endowed with 10,000 euros (around $11,000).

The foundation said that by awarding the prize to Barron, it wanted to honor “a theologian and academic teacher who, like few others, uses modern media to support Christian proclamation.”

“With his books, radio, and television programs, and online videos, he reaches an audience of millions — in the U.S. and around the world. And in his lectures and presentations, he repeatedly draws on the thoughts and writings of Josef Pieper,” it said.

The diocesan committee of the Münster diocese said May 26 that its members were concerned by Barron’s nomination for the award.

“Barron has repeatedly made anti-queer statements and supports US President Donald Trump’s policies against trans* people,” it said in a press release, which did not cite any specific statements by the bishop.

Bishop Barron did not respond to a request from The Pillar for comment.

In Germany, the word “queer” is often used as a catch-all term referring to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. For example, the German bishops’ conference appointed in 2024 its first national “commissioner for queer pastoral care,” Bishop Ludger Schepers.

The diocesan committee’s press release referred to “trans* people” using the “gender star,” a German grammatical innovation that employs an asterisk to indicate gender neutrality.

In 2022, Regensburg’s Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer opposed the gender star’s use in German “synodal way” documents, saying it would indicate “an unmistakable commitment to gender ideology and thus a contradiction of biblically based anthropology.”

The committee, originally known as the Diocesan Committee of Catholics in the Diocese of Münster, was established by the diocese in 2002 to bring together lay initiatives and apostolates under a single umbrella body, with delegates drawn from various diocesan lay bodies like parish councils.

Committee members discussed the award for Bishop Barron at their spring plenary meeting at the Franz Hitze Haus, a Catholic academy in the Münster diocese with links to the Josef Pieper Foundation. Barron is due to receive the prize during a July 26-27 symposium at the Franz Hitze Haus and Borromeo Seminary in Münster.

Markus Gutfleisch, a participant in the diocesan committee’s spring plenary meeting, asked the committee how it planned to respond to the honor for the Bishop of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota.

“I expect there will be protests surrounding the award ceremony,” he said.

Gutfleisch highlighted sections of the diocesan committee’s mission statement that commit the body to standing “for human freedom and the protection of human beings’ inviolable and inalienable dignity, given by God,” and against “political and religious extremism.”

Committee chairman Ulrich Vollmer said that since Barron was announced as the prize’s 2025 recipient, there had been “concerned and quite critical inquiries from the member associations of the diocesan committee.”

He noted the committee had received no response to a letter it sent to the Josef Pieper Foundation’s board in March.

“In it, we spoke out against the award to Bishop Barron because it contradicts our values,” Vollmer said.

Johannes Sabel, the director of the Franz Hitze Haus academy, wrote in a March op-ed that the institution had received messages calling for the prize ceremony to be canceled.

He said it was “a good sign” that there was debate about “the question of whether Josef Pieper’s thought is substantively connected to the form of preaching and theology advocated by Robert Barron.”

Josef Pieper helped to inspire a revival of interest in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas in 20th-century philosophical circles. He is arguably best known for his 1948 book “Leisure, the Basis of Culture.” He died in Münster in 1997, at the age of 93.

The Josef Pieper Foundation, a non-profit, was founded in 1991 “to ensure that Josef Pieper’s literary life’s work remains accessible and present in the consciousness of as many people as possible for as long as possible.”

Barron has previously cited Pieper’s work, recommending three of the German’s books — “Faith, Hope, Love,” “The Four Cardinal Virtues,” and “The Silence of St. Thomas” — to students interested in philosophy.

Sabel wrote that Barron’s “conservative theological or political leanings should not be a reason to cancel the Josef Pieper Foundation’s symposium at the academy’s premises.”

He said this was especially true given the diocese had launched a campaign in January with the slogan “Human! Live Freedom,” in response to a rise in support for German far-right parties.

He said the academy’s role was to be “a place of plurality, discussion, and constructive debate.”

“This includes positions that can be attributed to conservative Catholicism, for example, and may even have affinities with Donald Trump’s policies,” he wrote.

“The academy must not become a place of ‘correct attitudes,’ where only what one political or religious orientation or another deems appropriate takes place.”

Sabel said the July symposium would be accompanied by “events and an exhibit addressing the LGBTQI movement in the Church,” and followed by a discussion of “what alliances can be observed between the Neue Rechte and certain forms of Catholic conservatism.”

LGBTQI is an acronym standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex. Neue Rechte, or New Right, refers to a right-wing German political movement formed in opposition to the New Left movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Sabel’s op-ed linked to a German report on a January statement by U.S. bishops’ conference Archbishop Timothy Broglio, responding to Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders after his inauguration.

Broglio said that orders “recognizing the truth about each human person as male or female” could be viewed positively.

Last year, Pope Francis opened a Vatican international symposium titled “Man-Woman: Image of God” by calling gender theory “the ugliest danger of our time.”

In February, Bishop Barron and Bishop David O’Connell issued a statement welcoming the executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” saying it “protects opportunities for women and girls to compete in sports safely and fairly.”

Also in February, Barron welcomed a presidential executive order banning federal funding for “transgender medical interventions” for minors.

Speaking in his role as chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth, the bishop said that “so many young people who have been victims of this ideological crusade have profound regrets over its life-altering consequences, such as infertility and lifelong dependence on costly hormone therapies that have significant side effects.”

On May 1, President Donald Trump named Barron to serve on his newly created “Religious Liberty Task Force,” with the bishop leading prayers in the White House Rose Garden during a National Day of Prayer event.

However, while publicly supporting some acts of the Trump administration, Barron has in the past signalled his distance from the wider Trump political project.

Last year, the magazine Commonweal redacted a portion of an essay entitled “Will Trumpism Spare Catholicism?” after receiving a cease and desist letter from the bishop’s Word on Fire Media project objecting to it being described as having a “relationship to Trumpism.”

Barron has previously expressed misgivings about the German synodal way.

In a 2023 article reflecting on his experiences at the Vatican’s synod on synodality, he wrote: “It is troubling to see that some of the members of the German bishops’ conference are already using the language of the synod report to justify major reformulations of the Church’s sexual teaching. This, it seems to me, must be resisted.”

The see of Münster is currently vacant, following the resignation of its Bishop Felix Genn in March, shortly after he turned 75, the typical retirement age for diocesan bishops.

In 2024, the diocese, which serves around 1.6 million Catholics, overtook Cologne archdiocese as Germany’s most populous diocese. That year, more than 22,000 people formally left the Church in the Münster diocese.

The Münster diocese, which is split into two parts geographically, is located in northwestern Germany. It had no priestly ordinations in 2023 or 2024, but is due to have two new priests in 2025.

In 2021, the diocese had 379 priests in active ministry, but expects to have 120 by 2040, serving around 1.38 million Catholics.