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A 22-foot effigy of Donald Trump, wrapped in gold leaf, now stands at his Doral golf course in Miami. The president boasted about it Thursday morning on Truth Social with the all-caps line: “The Real Deal — GOLD.”
Before the unveiling, the figure was blessed. Pastor Mark Burns — Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser and a candidate for Congress in South Carolina’s 3rd District — assembled a circle of evangelical and Jewish clergy at the foot of the gilded statue and consecrated it.
What happened at Doral is not unusual; in fact, it is ancient — the modern American repetition of the oldest act of unfaithfulness recorded in scripture.
The Catholic Church has spent two thousand years explaining exactly why a ceremony like the one Pastor Burns staged is a sin against the living God, and the moral content of the act is older than any of the men who participated in it.
In the thirty-second chapter of Exodus, while Moses was on Sinai receiving the law, Aaron took the people’s gold, cast it into the form of a calf, and presented it for worship. “These are your gods, O Israel,” the people cried, “who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” Moses came down, smashed the tablets, ground the idol to powder, and forced the people to drink it.
The first commandment that followed was unambiguous: “You shall not make for yourself an idol.”
Catholic teaching has never softened the prohibition. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2113, says it plainly: “Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God.”
The teaching is not exotic. Catholic schoolchildren can recite the first commandment, and every weekday Mass opens with the recognition of one God. The cult of personality unfolding in American politics — culminating in a 22-foot gilt effigy at a billionaire’s golf resort — is the doctrine of that Mass turned inside out, performed in front of cameras by clergy who should have known better.
What Pastor Burns and the men with him staged is a clinical example of the Catechism’s warning. A creature — a 79-year-old American politician, however powerful — was honored in the place of God.
I keep thinking about what Pope Leo XIV said in Cameroon this April. Standing in St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Bamenda, he warned of “a handful of tyrants” ravaging the world — and delivered a sentence the men at Doral should have read before they raised their hands: “But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”
That is what occurred at Doral. The sacred was dragged into filth. A Christian pastor bent religion into the service of a man who calls his own gilded image “the real deal,” and the clergy who should have refused stood beside him while he did it.
There is a word for the act in the Hebrew Bible, and the Catechism describes it in painstaking detail. Pope Leo XIV repeated the warning from Cameroon last month, in case anyone in the American Church had forgotten.
This is the moment the Catholic Church in America must decide what it is for. A faith that cannot say no to a golden calf is not Catholic. The Church that watches a man receive the worship reserved for God — and offers no rebuke — has chosen its side. American Christianity, in the year of our Lord 2026, is being tested in the same way the people of Israel were tested at the foot of Sinai.
The American bishops cannot meet this moment without action. Evangelical leaders who have not yet bent the knee owe their congregations more than another sermon about civility. The lay faithful — Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and people of goodwill — must do what the Church has always done in the presence of an idol: refuse to bow.
That refusal is the only response the Gospel permits. Idols are not toppled by argument. The collapse always begins with the people whose silence had been their foundation choosing, finally, to walk away — and that is the decision now in front of every Christian who watched a pastor lift his hand at Doral.
Pope Leo XIV has shown the American Church the path forward — naming the tyrant in Cameroon, warning the world against those who manipulate God’s name, calling the faithful across denominations and continents into a movement of resistance to the worship of power. The hour now belongs to those of us who claim to follow him.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and people of goodwill who refuse to bow before any gilded man. The first commandment is also the first commitment of this movement — to refuse idols of every kind, especially those wrapped in gold leaf and blessed in the name of God.
The Church does not exist to provide moral cover for politicians. Its purpose is to proclaim the one God, to feed the poor, to welcome the stranger, and to reject every effort to enthrone power in the seat reserved for the Almighty.
Letters from Leo exists to defend that mission against a movement, dressed in religious language, that has decided the ancient prohibitions no longer apply to the man it has chosen to worship.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in America because readers are hungry for a faith that means something — a Gospel that names the golden calf and refuses to soften the word “idolatry” because the man at the center of it happens to wear a red tie.
What they want from us is courage: clergy and laypeople willing to stand against this godless movement, and a Church confident enough in Christ to refuse to negotiate with it.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the living God against the cult of the golden man — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
