THE AMERICAN POSEIDON ADVENTURE

                                                                                                            Sent by email: bishop@dowr.org

                                                                        April 5, 2026

Most Rev. Robert Baron

Diocese of Winona-Rochester

The Chancery

2907 Jeremiah Lane

Rochester, MN 55901

Dear Bishop Baron:

I write as a Catholic to ask you: how and why?

As a bishop, you are called to be a shepherd, which your staff symbolizes. How did you passively sit through a 45-minute diatribe of insults and demeaning slurs directed at public officials and citizens in the very state your diocese serves?

On April 1^st, April Fool’s Day, and during Holy Week, you chose to leave your flock and travel to Washington to attend an Easter luncheon at the White House alongside other “faith,” or perhaps faithless, leaders. You then took the stage after the President publicly demeaned Minnesota’s governor, a member of Congress, the mayor of Minneapolis, ethnically insulted Somali Americans, surely among those entrusted to your pastoral care, derided former presidents as “stupid,” and mocked other world leaders. He concluded by urging you to prepare for the midterm elections.

What, exactly, was prayerful, or Christian, about what you participated in?

You stood as the President was likened to Jesus Christ, an assertion so outrageous as to be not only offensive, but plainly blasphemous. Yet there was no visible witness to our faith?

And there is more. During Holy Week, the President issued statements threatening to “bomb them back to the stone age,” culminating in an Easter message laced with vulgarity: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!… Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah,”. Ah yes, so Christ-like.

Why did you not speak out against such dehumanizing, and violent rhetoric? Why did you, a bishop, sit silently, listening, smiling, applauding?

Is this conduct consistent with the Easter message of redemption, love, and peace? 

What has happened to you?

As Monsignor Arthur Holquin wrote: “I pray that the silence of Holy Saturday gives him (Bishop Baron) the courage to remember what he once knew so well: that the Lord Jesus did not go to Jerusalem to bless Pilate. He went there to tell the truth.”

 Why did you go there?

Sincerely, 

Robert Detor