On March 29, 2026, Bishop Robert Barron used Palm Sunday to soften the Church’s warnings about Judas, hell, and damnation. Scripture, the Roman Catechism, and the Catholic tradition say otherwise.
There is something grotesque about using Palm Sunday to rehabilitate Judas.
That is what Bishop Robert Barron effectively did in his March 29 Fox News column. He acknowledged that the overwhelming theological tradition regarded Judas as damned, then shifted the reader’s attention to the Vézelay image beloved by Francis, floated the hope that Judas might have been saved, invoked postconciliar caution about naming anyone in hell, and folded the whole thing into his familiar theology of overwhelming mercy. Instead of an exhortation to fear betrayal, despair, avarice, sacrilege, and final impenitence, it was another attempt to blunt the edge of Christ’s warnings.
Barron’s defenders will say that he did not preach formal universalism. They are right in the narrowest, most lawyerly sense. Word on Fire itself says Barron is not a universalist because he does not claim certainty that all are saved. But the same Word on Fire page also says Barron has a “reasonable hope” that all will be saved, and it quotes him saying that we may hope and pray that all people finally surrender to grace. That is the game: deny the name of the error while keeping its emotional and pastoral effect.
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