WASHINGTON (OSV News) — Three U.S. Catholic bishops and a parish priest were among religious leaders President Donald Trump appointed to an advisory board of his recently established Religious Liberty Commission.
Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco; Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill.; and Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort-Wayne-South Bend, Ind., will support the commission’s work. Joining them is Father Thomas Ferguson, pastor of Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Alexandria, Va..
Bishop Rhoades is chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Religious Liberty, which issues an annual report on the state of religious freedom in the U.S. He also serves on the bishops’ ad hoc Committee against Racism and Committee on Doctrine, and previously served as that latter committee’s chairman.
Bishop Paprocki is chairman of the USCCB’s Canonical Affairs Committee and Church Governance, and initiated the “Fortnight for Freedom,” the U.S. bishops’ annual June 21-July 4 campaign on defending religious liberty first launched in 2012. Archbishop Cordileone sits on, and previously led, the USCCB’s Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth.
Father Ferguson is the author of “Catholic and American: The Political Theology of John Courtney Murray,” published by Sheed & Ward in 1993. A Jesuit, Father Murray was a key 20th-century thinker on religious liberty and whose ideas influenced the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Declaration on Religious Liberty, “Dignitatis humanae.”
The four Catholic leaders join seven other U.S. religious leaders on the commission’s Advisory Board of Religious Leaders.
The commission’s 13 members, announced May 1, include Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York and Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minn. Bishop Barron is a member of and Cardinal Dolan is a consultant to the USCCB’s Committee for Religious Liberty.
“Religious liberty is a critical issue in our time that needs to be defended and addressed,” Archbishop Cordileone said in a May 15 statement about the appointment published by the Archdiocese of San Francisco. “I am happy to join my brother bishops in providing a Catholic voice on this important topic at a national level.”
On May 16 the Trump administration also announced the commission’s six legal advisers, including Gerard Bradley, a professor emeritus of law at the University of Notre Dame, and Francis Beckwith, a Catholic who teaches philosophy and politics at Baylor University in Texas. The administration also named nine lay leader advisers.
In its May 1 announcement about the commission, the White House said it will advise its Faith Office and the Domestic Policy Council, and is tasked with producing “a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty in America, strategies to increase awareness of and celebrate America’s peaceful religious pluralism, current threats to religious liberty, and strategies to preserve and enhance protections for future generations,” and that some of its areas of focus include school choice and conscience protections.
The U.S. bishops’ 2025 report “The State of Religious Liberty in the United States,” published Jan. 16, highlighted the targeting of faith-based immigration services, elevated levels of antisemitic incidents, in vitro fertilization coverage mandates, the “scaling back of gender ideology in law,” and promoting parental choice in education as areas of concern for the bishops’ conference.
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