Beware the Wolf in Shepherd’s Clothing
During a Sunday service on November 23, 2025, Rev. Phillip Phaneuf, a United Methodist pastor in Rochester, New York, announced to his congregation that he was transitioning from male to female. Among other things, he said: “I’m affirming to all of you that I am transgender. The best way to put this is that I’m not becoming a woman; I’m giving up pretending to be a man… Are my parents OK with this? Absolutely not! They texted me this morning and asked me to tell you all that they do not support me and have chosen their convictions and beliefs over supporting their child… We all have to live the way that we live.”
Phaneuf stated that his name would become Phillippa and that his preferred pronouns are she/her. He delivered the announcement from the pulpit while wearing a rainbow stole and claimed that the bishop, the church, and its theology all supported his transition. The previous year, the United Methodist Church had reversed long standing rules that condemned LGBTQ identities, according to its official website.
This is a profound tragedy. A man raised by good, loving Christian parents, instilled with biblical values, has gone from teaching and preaching the Word of God to promoting a worldview that is antithetical to Christianity. He is profoundly confused and deeply disordered, living in denial of both biblical truth and biological reality. Tragically, he has fully embraced the culture’s disordered, egocentric, self-absorbed glorification of the self—the precise opposite of Christianity’s call to selfless, altruistic glorification of God. We should keep him and his family in our prayers. What is far more insidious, however, is his attempt to present this disordered worldview as a legitimate “Christian” value, thereby leading innocent souls into spiritual peril.
Regrettably, spiritual problems with religious leaders are not limited to the United Methodist Church. Devout Catholics have long been frustrated by an episcopate that has also lost its way on many issues. At this moment in salvation history—when our culture is in freefall and the American family is under withering attack from the forces of evil—too many pulpits preach politically liberal talking points, while they are conspicuously silent about grave sin. This is a profound dereliction of duty.
As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) gathered for their Fall 2025 Plenary Assembly in Baltimore, they issued a Special Message that focused almost exclusively on immigration. It read in part: “We are disturbed… by a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement… We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants… We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people… To our immigrant brothers and sisters, we stand with you in your suffering… You are not alone!”
In response, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh offered a near-perfect rebuke on X: “I don’t recall the bishops making any sort of video like this to condemn the Biden White House for supporting, funding, and facilitating the mass slaughter of children in the womb. I also can’t remember seeing any video with solemn condemnations of the Biden White House and its support for the castration and sexual mutilation of children… Trump is neither Catholic nor is he doing anything, policy-wise, that contradicts Church teaching. Deportations certainly do not. And yet the bishops suddenly find their voice and their courage for this issue. Very strange indeed.”
Regarding the defense of traditional Catholic teaching on the liturgy, faith, and morals, Pope Francis’ pontificate was a terrible disappointment, and in the same regard, Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate is off to a bad start. In September 2025, Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich announced that U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) would receive a lifetime achievement award from the Archdiocese of Chicago. The decision drew outrage and sharp criticism from the Catholic faithful because of Durbin’s forty-year, vociferous, and unapologetic support for abortion—a position that profoundly contradicts Church teaching.
Some U.S. bishops publicly spoke out against the award to Durbin, most notably Bishop Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, the Senator’s home diocese, where Durbin has been denied the Eucharist because of his long record of support for killing unborn children. Both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI explicitly affirmed in authoritative papal documents that Catholic politicians who support abortion “must be denied any ecclesiastical recognition or honor.” Both popes unequivocally asserted that no Catholic institution is permitted to give awards or public honors to any politician who persistently and publicly supports abortion.
On September 30, 2025, Pope Leo was asked about Senator Durbin receiving this award from Cardinal Cupich. Pope Leo responded: “I understand the difficulty and the tensions. But I think, as I myself have spoken in the past, it’s important to look at many issues that are related to the teachings of the Church. Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life. Someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life. So, they are very complex issues and I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them…”
It is hard to overstate how scandalously inadequate this response was. Not only did Pope Leo fail to answer the reporter’s question, but—entirely unprompted and of his own volition—he equated abortion (the deliberate murder of more than 65 million innocent children over the last fifty years) with the death penalty (the execution of approximately 1,651 criminals, convicted of heinous acts of violence against innocent human life, over the same period of time).
Just as grievously, Pope Leo then equated abortion with the alleged “inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States.” This is unfathomable. Since immigration records began in 1820, the United States has welcomed nearly 100 million legal permanent residents—more than any country in world history by a vast margin. Even with this staggering volume, the United States consistently ranks in the top ten nations worldwide for humane immigrant-integration policies focused on rights, health, education, and family unity.
If Pope Leo was actually referring to illegal immigration but awkwardly omitted that crucial word, the statement becomes even more problematic. Is he drawing a moral parallel between abortion—the direct killing of innocent human life—and a sovereign nation’s legal right and moral duty to enforce its own immigration laws? If so, he has ventured far outside his proper expertise. There is nothing immoral, nor anything opposed to Church teaching, in enforcing immigration law.
On the immigration issue, Pope Francis, Pope Leo, and virtually all U.S. bishops have proven themselves hypocrites of the highest order. They maintained complete silence about the “inhuman” suffering caused by the Biden administration’s four years of wide-open borders—a policy that inflicted harm on Americans through the massive influx of violent criminals into our communities, the flood of deadly fentanyl that killed hundreds of thousands of American youths, the entry of international terrorists, and the overwhelming strain on public resources. Yet they also ignored the suffering of immigrants themselves: human trafficking of women and children into the sex trade or other forms of enslavement, hundreds of thousands of migrant children gone missing and unaccounted for, and the infiltration of violent criminal gangs, primarily into immigrant communities. If the popes and bishops truly cared about immigrants in particular—or human suffering in general—where were their voices during all this, under a self-proclaimed “Catholic” President Biden?
To combat the confusion and moral ambiguity now being sown by our religious leaders, we must return unequivocally to biblical truth. We must once again fill our churches in great numbers and insist on being nourished with the authentic faith. For Catholics, the Catechism of the Catholic Church remains one of the surest and most reliable guides, firmly rooted in more than two thousand years of faithful tradition and unwavering fidelity to biblical principles. The true faith has withstood every heresy raised against it, as well as every failing of weak and wayward clergy.
We must encourage our fellow Christians—and indeed our fellow citizens—to truly come to know, love, and serve God in this life, so that we may be happy with Him forever in the next. In pursuing this quest, however, we must ourselves remain faithful, offer fraternal correction to those who are leading souls astray, and—above all—stay ever vigilant, always beware of the wolf in shepherd’s clothing.