Pope Leo XIV has once again named a pastor critical of the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy to a high-ranking church position — this time overseeing a deeply conservative diocese.
According to Christopher Hale’s “Letters from Leo,” Father Emilio Biosca Agüero, who runs the Shrine of the Sacred Heart in D.C., will now be the Bishop of Naples, a diocese that covers much of southwest Florida.
“The Shrine of the Sacred Heart, the Capuchin-run parish in D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood where Biosca has served as pastor since 2019, draws most of its 5,600 members from El Salvador,” said the report. “Since federal immigration enforcement intensified in the District last August, more than forty of those parishioners have been detained or deported, according to reporting by the Associated Press. Six were arrested by ICE in a single recent stretch — among them an usher on his way to evening Mass, a man preparing for marriage, and a parishioner enrolled in confirmation class.”
An NBC News profile last year revealed Biosca’s frustration with how the raids are disrupting the community’s ability to hold religious services, as attendance at Sacred Heart’s services have dropped 20 percent, not just from the deportations themselves but from people being too scared to be seen in public.
Biosca, who has done over a decade of missionary work in New Guinea and Cuba, “had thought the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement would target violent criminals. But then, he said, they began to go after his congregation,” said that report. “‘It became very unbearable,’ he said, adding that the targets seemed like anyone who ‘just looked Hispanic.’”
“The Diocese of Venice covers most of southwest Florida — Fort Myers, Naples, Sarasota, and the counties stretching along the Caloosahatchee,” wrote Hale. “Donald Trump carried every one of those counties in 2024. It is reliably Republican Catholic territory. It is also home to a large and rapidly growing Hispanic Catholic community of Cuban, Mexican, and Central American descent.”
This follows a series of other moves by the pope to appoint people with close ties to Central America in prominent church positions that oversee pro-MAGA areas. In December, he appointed Rev. Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez, a Dominican-born pastor, as bishop of Palm Beach, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is. More recently, he appointed prelate Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, a former undocumented immigrant, as bishop of West Virginia.
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