It is not the first time Bishop Michael F. Olson of Fort Worth, Tex., has spoken out against racism. It is probably the first time his response to racism has gone viral.

His condemnation of a post by a local Texas politician on X has drawn almost a million views and provoked thousands of comments on that social media platform. Sadly, most of them are as hateful as the post he had first deplored.

On Sept. 13, Bo French, a Republican candidate for a position on the Texas Railroad Commission, uploaded a photo depicting students celebrating during University of Texas at Austin’s comeback win over Ohio State on Sept. 12, regretting what he believed the image represented: the displacement of “American” students by “foreigners.”

Bishop Olson responded: “This is racist and sinful rhetoric that seeks to harm and to divide. It is disturbing that it comes from a candidate for public office. An apology is called for.”

Mr. French not only declined to apologize, he doubled down on his original comments and used the ensuing uproar to fundraise for his campaign. This was not the candidate’s first xenophobic rodeo. In June, he wrote, also on X: “I won’t rest until every muslim is gone” from Texas.

Bishop Olson described himself as “astounded and disturbed” by Mr. French’s willingness to foment racial discord just for “a point of political exploitation, [for] getting attention.”

“To the extent that it is relevant, there’s no knowing if those young people are citizens or not,” he said. “All that is known is that they are of a different complexion.” The hateful comments that followed “make the same presumption that these people…aren’t Americans and that they’re barely human.”

“I [had] to say something about that,” he told America. “It’s a moral issue. It is so at odds with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Mr. French’s comments on X were “not even ‘dog whistle’ words,” Bishop Olson said.

“It was clear what was being intended, that [the students in the photo] were being disqualified from participation in American society—even in something like a football game, as important as that is in Texas—by the color of their skin.”

Bishop Olson finds himself increasingly troubled by the lack of shame about public expressions of racial intolerance and animosity. He lamented a loss of decorum, deliberation and prudence among Americans, especially within the nation’s political class.

In that regret, he is joined by a majority of Americans. According to a Gallup survey published in December 2025, 64 percent of Americans worry that inflammatory political rhetoric is contributing to political violence in the United States.

On a more positive note, despite more frequent and brazen expressions of racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia in political life and contemporary media, 45 percent of Americans say that increasing racial and ethnic diversity makes the country a better place to live. Only 17 percent say it makes the country a worse place to live, according to a February poll from The Economist/YouGov.

And strong support for immigration among the U.S. public has continued after almost two years of a relentless roundup of undocumented immigrants and their family members during the second Trump administration. Though poll numbers slipped slightly from a record high of 79 percent in 2025, Gallup reported in July that 73 percent of Americans continue to believe that immigration represents an overall good for the United States.

Trump administration figures like Stephen Miller argue contemporary immigrants resist assimilation and transpose conditions from “third world counties” to the United States. But Bishop Olson points out that there is “nothing more American and there’s nothing more Texan” than cheering on your college football team.

He calls sports, like other foundational experiences in American life, opportunities for “shared joy.”

“These are the sort of institutions…that help to bring us together,” Bishop Olson said, remembering how in his native Illinois, “Michael Jordan did a lot to help bring a city together.”

Combating contemporary racism and its accelerating acceptance on social media, he said, is “a complicated problem with a simple solution: ‘I’m not going to treat people that way.’”

He condemns rhetoric that “makes us feel comfortable with our prejudices” instead of readying ourselves to confront them. It is the kind of rhetoric he too often hears from members of the Trump administration and directly from President Donald Trump.

“It’s irresponsible,” he said. “It does not help us to address the very real problems we have.” Instead, he said, it exploits contemporary anxieties and hinders meaningful social progress.

Race has become a cudgel wielded by individuals on both political extremes, he charged, but “the problem is in our hearts and in holding people accountable.”

Social media, he suggested, has only exacerbated divisions. “Right now people are just as addicted to anger and the irascible appetite and the passions of anger as they are to the passions of lust,” Bishop Olson said.

Contributing to the problem, he said, Silicon Valley teaches that “‘there is no other authority but you and Alexa, and we will help shape that by the algorithms.’”

“The basic authority of politics, the authority of our state in public service, our civil servants, the authority of those who are responsible for ministry in the church, beginning with the pope, that’s torn down, and the only authority that’s recognized is anything that reinforces my narrowly informed opinion.”

Just as Catholic bishops have condemned contemporary politicians because of their pro-choice positions, those who use racism to promote themselves or their agendas should be called out, Bishop Olson said. “In the preaching of the Gospel, everything that is the poison of sin, including racism, needs to be addressed.”

That practice does not, of course, guarantee a receptive audience. As on other issues, including contraception, the death penalty and even the racial integration of schools in its time, American Catholics find ways to ignore church instruction they do not wish to accept, to “compartmentalize it,” he said. He expects many will do the same when the church continues to speak out on the sin of racism.

The church has its own unhappy legacy on race to contend with, he acknowledged, a history of discrimination, marginalization and even the violence of enslavement. “I think the church has been very forthcoming about that, and it’s not comfortable with [its history] and in fact, is ashamed of it, as it should be.”

But the church also has had other historical moments that are worth raising up, he pointed out, among them the work of religious men and women in education for all children and of bishops who insisted on integration in churches and schools long before American law finally demanded it.

“Absolutely,” the church must continue to preach against racism, Bishop Olson said, but it also has to “exemplify” the racial justice and tolerance it seeks to secure. “And I think we do in many areas, but because we’re made up of human beings and sinners, we can always do better.”

As questions continue to be asked about immigration and who gets to call themselves authentic Americans, the church cannot retreat from the discussion.

What the church can bring to the national conversation “first is Jesus Christ,” Bishop Olson said, then its insistence on “the dignity of the human person…the importance of the social dimension in the character of the human person, that we have to live in community [and] that community is established in family life.”

Recalling Benjamin Franklin’s admonition: “A republic, if you can keep it,” he adds: “I think there’s a lot of people that don’t want to keep it on both sides.”

In what is surely a historic irony, Bishop Olson argues that this immigrant-built church, viewed so often by “real Americans” of the not-too-distant past with worry and suspicion, has a vital role to play now in preserving the great American experiment in liberty, justice and democracy for all.

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