Bishop Barron interviews Representative Riley Moore on Christian persecution, immigration, AI, and the 2028 election
Bishop Robert Barron interviews West Virginia Congressman Riley Moore on the Bishop Barron Presents channel.
Summary
Representative Riley Moore, Republican congressman from West Virginia's second congressional district, joins Bishop Robert Barron to discuss the global persecution of Christians, immigration policy, AI and Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity, and speculation about the 2028 presidential race. Moore describes his firsthand visit to Nigeria, where he met internally displaced Christians living under constant threat from Islamic extremist groups, and outlines the recommendations he presented to President Trump following a formal congressional investigation. The conversation also touches on Moore's personal reversion to Catholicism, his prayer life, and his concerns about technology's effect on children and human dignity.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the State of the Union Invitation
Bishop Barron: I'm delighted to welcome to our table of conversation Representative Riley Moore, who represents the second congressional district of the great state of West Virginia. Good to have you here.
Riley Moore: Bishop Barron, thanks so much for having me.
The first time we met was a couple of years ago when, out of the blue, I received an invitation to the State of the Union address. I was at a conference and someone from your office came up to me. I thought, "Oh, wow, that sounds interesting." And I learned it's the prerogative of every member of Congress to invite a guest. I was honored to be invited and enjoyed that trip very much. We met on that trip and have stayed in contact since. You're someone who's involved in a lot of different interesting issues and I want to talk about as many as we can today. Delighted you're here.
Riley Moore: I'm delighted to be here. It made me very popular among the Catholics in Congress having you there, but it was a real honor.
Bishop Barron: I was very surprised. I've been involved this last year with the Religious Liberty Commission. There are a lot of Catholics in government — at high levels, but also at middle levels, lower-level staffers and administrators — and I've been struck by that. A lot of them know me because of my social media work. I've been telling them: bring Catholic social teaching into the halls of power. I've been struck by the number of Catholics who are involved in government right now.
Riley Moore: As you recall, you did that Mass as well, which was very well attended.
Bishop Barron: Yes, and in the course of the past year I've had a lot of really good conversations with people there. It's an interesting moment that we're in.
Christian Persecution — The Global Picture
Bishop Barron: I want to talk to you about a lot of things, but first: Christian persecution. I just finished a little book on this topic. I know you've been very involved in it — in fact, you've been something of a point person. The president turned to you to lead the way in investigating this, especially in Nigeria. This problem — and here's the first thing — still a lot of people don't know about it. It still doesn't get the attention it deserves. Why do you think that is?
Riley Moore: I think it unfortunately falls outside of the typical narrative of victim and oppressor, the colonization framework that the left has certainly gravitated toward. We had a public hearing specifically on the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. We had Bishop Anag actually testify remotely — he's in Nigeria — and they just flat out rejected everything he was saying, and he is literally living in it. I visited with Bishop Anag in Nigeria. I saw the conditions he's living in, the threats on his life, the dire security situation his flock is under. It just doesn't comport with that narrative, unfortunately. But the reality is it's the most persecuted faith on the planet right now — by leaps and bounds. It's not even close.
This is something that has always bothered me, but I now happen to be in a position where I can do and say something about it. It's always weighed heavy on my heart, particularly our brothers and sisters in Christ who are suffering just for the profession of their faith in our Lord and Savior. I feel called, since I'm in this position, to do and say something about it, and I'm not going to stop. I'm going to continue to ramp that up wherever it is — whether it's in Africa, the Middle East, or even here at home, as we saw Catholics being spied on in the last administration, which was very unfortunate and very disheartening, particularly from a president who certainly identified himself as Catholic. It's kind of weird where people who want to go to Latin Mass are treated like far-right lunatics being harassed.
Bishop Barron: Yes. It doesn't fit the narrative, but it is absolutely reality.
The Nigeria Investigation — How It Began
Bishop Barron: How did you get involved? And how did the president get so interested — did you go to him, or did he come to you?
Riley Moore: I went to the White House. Flashing back to his first term, President Trump had designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern, which is a very specific designation under the International Religious Liberty Act. Once that designation is in place, it gives the president about fifteen different levers he can pull — sanctions, visa restrictions, security assistance restrictions, and many other things. He had that designation on Nigeria in his first term.
The Biden administration had actually taken that designation off, led by his then-Secretary of State. They had concluded that the conflict between Christians and Muslims — which is really a one-way conflict, because only one side is armed, which is the Muslim side — was being precipitated mostly by climate change, disputes over arable land, a herder-farmer conflict. We hear that a lot.
Bishop Barron: What's your answer to that objection?
Riley Moore: Certainly, the Fulani ethnic Islamic group in the middle belt of Nigeria — are they herders? Are they grazing cattle across not only Nigeria but the Sahel in general? Yes. They've been doing that for a very long time. Historically and generationally, the Christian populations have always been farmers. Yes, that is part of it. But that does not explain burning down over 20,000 churches. That doesn't explain killing men, women, and children. It doesn't explain attacking IDP camps where internally displaced people are living. And in the context of a state like Benue State, which is over 80% Christian in Nigeria, almost 100% of the IDPs — of the 6.5 million people living in Benue State, 650,000 are in IDP camps — and they're all Christians. The math doesn't math on that.
Bishop Barron: I've lived long enough to know that everything is complex and there are always multiple causes. I must confess that when I read those explanations — that it really isn't religious conflict, it's more about land and tribal dynamics — I'm sure that's part of it. But as I did my own study of these cases, it is exceptionally hard not to say these are religiously motivated attacks, and that Christians are being persecuted, in some cases killed outright, kidnapped, for their faith. To water it down and say, well, it's that and many other things, is a little facile, I think.
Riley Moore: Well, and then the "many other things" lead the narrative. That becomes the narrative. They haven't addressed or pushed back on what's happening in the northern part of the country, where you have ISIS and Boko Haram. ISIS put out an edict just recently: here's your choice, Christians — convert, die, or pay the tax. Those are your choices. That's pretty clear where they stand. We just had a strike on the number two of ISIS — not ISIS in Nigeria, but number two of ISIS globally — right there in the northern part of Nigeria, which is a real hotbed of traditional Islamic terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Boko Haram.
They're more battling over the middle belt, which unfortunately is where you do see most of the killing. Why? There are just more Christians there. If there were more Christians up north, I'm sure you'd have more Christians killed up there as well.
Bishop Barron: And you found a similar thing in the Middle East — that same all-or-nothing mentality: convert, be killed, or pay the tax.
The Presidential Mandate and the Congressional Delegation
Bishop Barron: When you met with the president prior to your trip to Nigeria, what was on his mind?
Riley Moore: I communicated to him through channels in the White House and eventually was able to get his attention — and the vice president's attention — on this issue as well. I asked him to please redesignate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern. Then on Halloween last year he did that, and to my surprise he announced in a Truth Social post not only that he was designating them, but that he was telling Congressman Riley Moore from West Virginia to go investigate this and report back to him with recommendations — which is then what we did.
Bishop Barron: Is that how you found out?
Riley Moore: Yes, that's how I found out. I knew things were moving in the right direction on the designation. I didn't know I'd be getting on a military aircraft to go to Nigeria.
Bishop Barron: Who did you organize as part of your team?
Riley Moore: He asked myself and the chairman of the appropriations committee, which I'm on — Tom Cole. Mario Díaz-Balart, who is the chair of what used to be called the State Foreign Operations subcommittee, now NSRP, led the delegation as chair of that subcommittee. It was a bipartisan congressional delegation — all appropriators. We had Scott Franklin, myself, Norma Torres from California, and obviously Mario Díaz-Balart. We held meetings in Abuja.
Bishop Barron: Were you welcomed by the government? Were they open to your arrival, cooperative with you?
Riley Moore: They were, I think, a little surprised that we showed up. I think they thought they were going to deal with this at arm's length from afar, and then we said, "No, we're coming." We did have good meetings with them. I'd say they were productive. Some of the commitments made there I don't think have been lived up to at this point. I think that's why the president is getting frustrated. I'm frustrated as well. But good conversations.
On the Ground in Nigeria — IDP Camps and Bishop Anag
Bishop Barron: Tell me about the people you met there.
Riley Moore: We went to Benue State, which is many hours from Abuja. We flew down there and were met with a military and security convoy. We had to move in armored vehicles all through Nigeria — guys on MRAPs and Humvees taking us to visit Bishop Anag and people in the internally displaced camps. That's where you really saw the horrors of it.
The most moving part was going into what I can only call a compound where Bishop Anag is. All of the priests are there, sisters are there as well. We get out and I'm just welcomed with hugs. These people are so moved that the United States government is here. They've watched it on TV, they've seen some of these things, and now here I am in real life. The first thing I did when I got there was pray with them. We prayed together. Many of them gave me rosaries. The bishop blessed a rosary and gave it to me. He also has a book that he gave to me.
Then the thing that just sticks in my mind is meeting those folks in those internally displaced camps. I met a woman who had her husband and her two children murdered right in front of her, and they actually killed her unborn child as well — which she survived. Truly barbaric, horrific acts. I met another woman who had all five of her children killed. Her whole family is gone. And they live in IDP camps which are routinely attacked by these jihadists.
So yes, they are living under the threat of death from Islamic extremist groups every day of their lives. I've reflected on this a lot. I live in America. I don't see this type of rampant violence all the time — people being murdered or hacked up or any of these terrible things. And yet these folks' faith was so incredibly strong. It was really astounding.
The bishop was steady as steady can be. He was a real unifying, organizing force. When I met with him, he brought in all the Christian denominations. He's kind of the organizing principle in a lot of this. The different Protestant sects were there and everybody's just locked in step. Nobody's looking at it like, "Well, you're a Catholic so maybe you're 90% bad," or "You're evangelical, you're 80% bad." If you believe in Jesus Christ, that's a problem. If you're a Christian, that's a problem. So they've got to band together to survive this.
I think about salvation through suffering, and these people are suffering. Their faith is so strong. I think about us here in the United States, the West generally — perhaps their suffering might be offering us some salvation if we pay attention to it. That's why I can't stop working on this.
Back home in West Virginia, there's not a church I don't visit — whether it's Southern Baptist, Evangelical, Catholic, or otherwise — with priests and pastors calling me, thanking me. This Christian persecution issue really bothers everybody across the spectrum.
Bishop Barron: It's what led me to write that little book. It was frustrating me that it wasn't talked about sufficiently and wasn't on people's radars. It's horrific the more you look at it. We've been focusing on Nigeria, but there are lots of other examples in Asia, in the Middle East, and in the West in a more mitigated way. Our ecclesiology teaches us that these are our brothers and sisters in the Lord — we're members of the same mystical body. We can't say, "Well, that's your problem over there."
I've been looking at these issues of religious liberty in our country, which are serious enough, but we're not being murdered for our faith. The grossest possible violation of religious liberty is offensive to us as Christians, but also as Americans — it's a deep principle for us. Were there formal hearings when you were there? Did you have formal sessions where people came in to testify?
Riley Moore: We had formal meetings with all the different Christian denominations that were there, formal meetings with the IDP community, and a very formal meeting with the Nigerian government in Abuja. The meetings with the government went well. They heard what we were saying. They understood pretty clearly — and I think people understand even more so now — that President Trump doesn't just say things to say them. If he says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. He says it in his way — some of the language I'm not going to repeat here — but he is very serious about this. He is very committed to it.
Bishop Barron: He seems passionate about it.
Riley Moore: He is. He'll mention it in remarks. It's something he is proud to have actually stepped up and done something about. From an elected official's position, from a US government standpoint — look, we are a Christian nation. I think we have a duty as a government to do something, and in our own personal capacity as people of faith, we have a duty to do something. But even as a government, these people — no one is going to come help them. Nobody. If it's not us, no one's going to help them.
Bishop Barron: I remember years ago reading Bill Clinton's autobiography, where he said the single greatest regret of his presidency was not intervening in Rwanda during the massacres there. I remember that time very well. It was a different situation — not so much anti-Christian persecution — but there was this terrible violence going on, and Clinton said that was his greatest regret, that he didn't do anything to intervene. I think about that when this slaughter and persecution of Christians is going on. How is the world responding to it?
So you finished the investigation, talked to the government, talked to people on the ground, talked to bishops. You got there yourself in person, which I think is very important. You weren't just commenting from a distance. I'm sure people were a little afraid for their own safety while you were there.
Riley Moore: I was. I wanted to attend Mass while I was there, but our government did a security assessment and said, "You can't go." Luckily, I talked to my priest before I went and got a dispensation — because I was worried that might be the case.
Recommendations to the White House
Bishop Barron: Then you came home. Was there a formal report you put together?
Riley Moore: Yes, we put together a formal report and presented it to the White House with a range of recommendations, some of which you can see playing out right now.
Bishop Barron: What are the top two or three recommendations you made to the president?
Riley Moore: One that I'm continuing to push on — and I see this very clearly — is that Nigeria has a centralized security force. Their police is a national police force. The states — and it's a very large country, 250 million people, the largest country in Africa — have unarmed police. None of them are armed. So if there's an issue that needs to be addressed, people have to come out of Abuja and drive all the way down to wherever. By then it's over — if they even respond. So what I'd like to see is devolved police powers, an armed police presence in these states, giving them the authority to protect their own people.
Two is looking at leveling perhaps some sanctions on the Fulani specifically. They have a cattle association there, and some of that beef is consumed internally in Nigeria and some is exported to countries that we deal with.
Three is trying to find ways we can engage with Nigeria if they're going to do the right thing. This is all based on confidence-building measures on their side — seeing what they're going to do, engaging with them, and perhaps increasing economic cooperation between our two countries, which I think would be very helpful for them and for us. Because in the back of all this, you have China.
Bishop Barron: China.
Riley Moore: China is currently mining illegally in Nigeria — rare earth minerals and other things. What they'll do is go in and bribe the local governor and pay a lot of the terrorist groups to leave them alone, then go do whatever they want. It is in China's interest, in their calculation, to have a destabilized Nigeria without the rule of law so they can continue to illegally mine these rare earth minerals. They want destabilization. We're trying to bring stability to the whole country.
I do want to mention something, because people always say, "Well, you're only talking about Christians in Nigeria. The country's 50% Muslim, 50% Christian. You don't care about those lives." Of course I care about those lives. All lives are sacred. Bringing stability to that country for everybody is important, because there are Muslims who get killed for not bowing down to ISIS or Boko Haram. Their lives are just as important as anybody else's.
Bishop Barron: That Chinese connection is very interesting. The kind of imperialistic aspirations of China are often expressed economically rather than militarily at first. The same thing is happening in the DRC right next to Rwanda — they're essentially running mining operations in the Congo, with what amounts to slave labor, children involved, mining lithium. And we're just kind of whatever about it. It's a human rights tragedy unfolding over there in many regards.
Riley Moore: When we got back and debriefed the president, we gave him a menu of options. The report is public now — you can find it on my website. We gave the president and the administration a menu of options, some of which we're continuing to work through now, particularly the middle belt, which is really complicated.
ISIS and Boko Haram are your typical franchise terrorist organizations that we've seen in the world for a very long time. They have leaders, finance guys, weapons — highly organized structurally. The Fulani are not. They're very decentralized. There's not really an organizing principle other than some influential sheikhs who are involved, but there's no single leader. It's an ethnic group in one sense, with guys on two-way radios saying, "Hey, let's go attack this village."
Bishop Barron: Who are some Democrats who are working with you on this? You mentioned the bipartisan nature of the team.
Riley Moore: I think some of their eyes have started to open on this. Norma Torres, who went with us — I think the trip was eye-opening for her. We were politically very different, the two of us, but we really got to know each other well and became friends through that experience.
Bishop Barron: I've always thought this issue, a bit like human trafficking, is one that ought to bring everybody together. Everyone should say, "Yeah, this is really terrible that Christians are being slaughtered in different parts of the world." So please God we can make some real progress, and I'm grateful for what you did there to make that a reality.
Riley Moore: We're going to keep working on it.
Riley Moore's Background and Return to the Catholic Faith
Bishop Barron: I want to ask you a bit about your background. We share a common ethnic heritage — Irish, with a little English and Scottish. You've got a Catholic background but had something of a reversion to the faith later in life. What brought you back to a fuller appreciation of Catholicism?
Riley Moore: My grandparents on my mother's side — particularly when my grandmother died relatively young, so I was young too. They had this beautiful funeral Mass for her that everybody still talks about, my mom included, and I couldn't fully participate in it. My grandfather, also Catholic, fell into poor health as well and lived for quite a bit longer after that. I thought, I think I'm missing something here.
My mom had grown up going to Mass with her grandfather, Walter McGowan — a great Irish guy, from Sligo, Ireland, a good Catholic family. This was pre-Vatican II, so he was a daily Mass-goer. My mom grew up going with him and things had kind of fallen to the wayside over the generations. It's interesting, this generational transmission. Walter McGowan has this influence over us and in our hearts even though he's been gone for so long. I think he strengthened my grandmother's faith, and by way of transmission strengthened my faith. I started thinking: we've probably been Catholic for over a thousand years. Why would I not go back to our faith?
And so I did. My mother's Catholic, I'm Catholic, my kids are Catholic, my wife's Catholic, and it feels like everything's been put back into place where it was originally supposed to be. We had tried a couple of other things — a Baptist church and this and that — and nothing against the Baptists, great people, but I always had this calling in the back of my head: return.
Bishop Barron: And you're an intellectual type. You read Catholic authors. Who are some of your favorites?
Riley Moore: For me, I have to give him big props right now — and I know he's a contemporary, he's alive right now — but the work that Scott Hahn has done on the St. Ignatius Study Bible, and all his works.
Bishop Barron: He's from your neck of the woods, right?
Riley Moore: He is. Steubenville is not too far from West Virginia. Where my district is, I can see Steubenville from across the river. A lot of my constituents go to Franciscan.
Bishop Barron: When I visit him, you fly into Pittsburgh, cross over a little bit of West Virginia, and then get into Ohio.
Riley Moore: That part of West Virginia is my district.
I really loved his books. He's very intellectual, very thoughtful, but particularly that Study Bible. They first had the New Testament and now they've come out with the full Old Testament as well. The liner notes in there are just so helpful. I just went back through and read the New Testament recently and am now doing the Old Testament again. I try to read the Bible every night before I pray.
Bishop Barron: He's got these great books — everyone knows The Lamb's Supper and all the rest.
Riley Moore: I've seen it help other people in their lives as well. That's why I'm so high on him. I've seen a lot of young people from southern West Virginia who grew up Evangelical or Southern Baptist who are now Catholics because of some of the things he's done — and some of the things that you've done. You're hugely influential over these folks in their conversion to the Catholic faith. Think about people living in the southern coalfields of West Virginia, and now with platforms like this, anybody can reach them. I asked one of them, "Why did you decide to become Catholic?" And in a word: truth. They want the depth of it, all the way down to the bottom.
Bishop Barron: The thing I thank God for is that when I was a young guy, you had to go to a library or maybe drive a long way to a bookstore if you wanted to get Augustine or Aquinas. Now they're available with a few presses of a button, or the books arrive from Amazon the next day. There's a kind of golden moment we're going through in terms of evangelization, and I think it's one reason why a lot of younger people are making their way back to the faith. With all the negativity of social media — which I'm well aware of — it's also a grace that these tools have been given to us.
Prayer Life and Family Faith
Bishop Barron: How do you pray? What's your prayer life like?
Riley Moore: First and foremost, it's instructing my own kids in the basics.
Bishop Barron: Your kids are how old?
Riley Moore: Four, six, and eight. My daughter just received her First Communion, which was an extremely emotional event for myself and my wife. I want them to know the Our Father, the Hail Mary — they've got those down. They've even got the St. Michael prayer down. We're working on that one, even though some of those words are a little trickier. Prayers at meals, things like that.
For me and my wife, a lot of times before we go to bed we'll pray the Rosary. When I'm traveling, I like to pray it on a plane. I travel a lot.
But there's one thing I pray every day, every day of my life. Particularly in the job that I'm in, with the choices I'm making and what I'm trying to do — I pray that I can discern God's will in my day and every day. Because it's easy to get away from it and turn it into my will, and it becomes more difficult to discern. So I try to stay grounded in that. I'll search my conscience, think about what I'm doing, and put a lot of this in God's hands. Just: whatever your will is in this, use me as an instrument.
And then I think I'm like everybody — the Hallow app. Every morning I start my morning by listening to and praying with you — the Psalm.
Bishop Barron: I remember recording those Psalms in Santa Barbara. They came to my studio there and I read every Psalm. It was an interesting exercise — difficult in a way, but also very prayerful. Over the course of several days I read every Psalm aloud, and those are the ones you listen to on Hallow.
Riley Moore: I mean, we all know this, but they're beautiful.
Bishop Barron: The Psalms are the great songbook of the Church — all the emotions we feel, all the different attitudes toward God: our anger, our love, our excitement, our frustration. They're all in there.
Riley Moore: Praying with my family as a whole is really special. My kids — one of their teachers twisted her ankle at school recently and my kids said, "Let's say a Hail Mary and an Our Father for Miss So-and-So." Just them thinking about that. Kids have a way of seeing things so much more clearly.
When my daughter got her First Communion — as I said, very emotional. Then we did the second communion, the crowning of Mary. She gets communion, comes back, and we're on the kneelers praying together. She turns to me and says, "Do you know what I think I want to be when I grow up?" I said, "What's that?" And she said, "I want to be a saint."
Bishop Barron: Wow. That's the right answer.
Riley Moore: She said, "I want to be a saint." And it reminds me of Matthew 18:3 — "Amen, I say to you, if you do not turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." I think that has a lot of meanings to it. Obviously there's humility in there, there's authority in there, but I think one of them is clarity. She has this sense of clarity — this is so clear to her. She'll look up at the mosaics of the saints and say, "I want to be one of those."
Bishop Barron: That's the right answer. We can be all kinds of things, but ultimately we want to be a friend of the Lord. We want to get to heaven.
Riley Moore: That's the ultimate answer.
Immigration — Principles and Policy
Bishop Barron: I wanted to explore how your faith is informing your political life so powerfully. Let me shift gears to another issue you've taken strong stands on, which is immigration. In that very chair have sat Tom Suozzi, your colleague from New York, and Ro Khanna, your colleague from California — both Democrats. We had conversations about a lot of things, and we came around to immigration with both of them.
I'll say to you what I said to them. As I look at it — and I don't want to speak for all the bishops, there are different views — I think a lot of bishops would agree with something like this: our country is a generous country, we're the descendants of immigrants who came here in some cases because of persecution, we have a Statue of Liberty welcoming people from all over the world, and that's a beautiful part of America. Secondly, a country has a right to maintain its border and enforce its immigration laws. An open border is actually a moral problem — all kinds of mischief happens over an open border, and it's the right of a country to monitor that border. Third, people in this country illegally who've committed violent crimes should be deported — I think most bishops would agree with that. And last, the many people in our country who are here undocumented cannot simply be mass deported; we have to find a more reasonable political solution to that part of the problem.
If I were to put those parameters out there, I think most American bishops would say somewhere in there is the right answer, and now it's up to policymakers like yourself to figure out how precisely to do that. What am I getting wrong? What would you correct?
Riley Moore: I think I could agree with probably most of that. From my perspective, particularly as a guy representing West Virginia — our view of it is we're just forgotten. Nobody cares about us. I have constituents in southern West Virginia who don't have water. They don't have jobs. McDowell County is one of the top three poorest counties in the entire country — over 30% under the poverty line. For my constituents, the idea that we need to bring people in to do jobs doesn't compute. And on the other side, foreign aid — why? We need aid. We need help.
There's a woman down in McDowell County who literally takes a mule down to the bottom of the mountain because she has no water. She fills up bottles at a natural spring, puts them on the pack mule, and goes back up the mountain. This is 2026 America. That's happening.
So for my constituents, it's a little difficult to understand why we need millions of people coming into this country. From a Catholic sense — certainly the dignity of the individual is absolute, I understand that, and the way we treat people — totally agree with that. But the Catechism does say we have a duty to regulate and control our border. We're Catholics. We believe in order. Disorder leads to violence, chaos, and all these other things that are detrimental to society.
I think part of where the rub happens is it's certainly a credal matter of how much is too much, how much is too little — what that number is is left to policymakers to determine.
Bishop Barron: I think my job as a bishop is to articulate the principles and the parameters that ought to be in place. But then it's people like you and your colleagues who disagree with each other — okay, let's get down into the weeds and figure this out.
Riley Moore: And look, we want people who want to come to this country, people who want to be a part of it, who want to be productive, who want to be American. The problem is you see many times there are folks who have recently immigrated here who outright don't like us, don't like this country, and will publicly say it. We're the great Satan, we're a colonial power — which is a very strange statement to make since we were a colony ourselves.
I think there is a problem where assimilation has become almost a four-letter word. When you have mass migration and masses of people coming in and living in areas where they're not able to assimilate into the American way of life — many of whom don't speak English — we're not helping them. The problem with that is they then have no access to the critical components of not only our culture but our way of life: governance, systems, whether that's college or banks or anything else. So they get pigeonholed into communities where there's a lot of predatory activity in terms of lending and other things.
Bishop Barron: When I was in California, I saw the maintenance of a permanent underclass because of the immigration situation, and it wasn't humanitarian — it was the contrary. It seemed to me that certain powerful people had an interest in maintaining a permanent underclass, and it was made possible by these dynamics within the immigration system. That can't be a good thing for anybody.
Riley Moore: And we have to recognize — and the president is working on changing this, and I am 100% supportive and working with him on this — we're very much a service sector economy. People come here like it's the 1950s or '60s, like they're going to get a job in a factory. Those manufacturing jobs aren't here right now. We're trying to bring them back, but many Americans are also stuck competing for those jobs as well. Many people who immigrate here — their lot in life may be cleaning a building or something like that. That's honorable work, I'm not denigrating it. But that ascendancy in terms of economic strata — that ladder is not there the way it used to be.
So I think it's a disservice not only to Americans but even to the folks who are coming here. As the president is restructuring this economy, reshoring it — going back to my people, the West Virginians — they need those jobs and they want those jobs. There's an order to this. There was that controversial topic debated with the vice president — the ordo amoris — and I think that's right. We do have a duty to take care of our people here and make sure they're okay, like the folks with no water and no jobs in southern West Virginia.
Bishop Barron: Let's talk about that a little, because that controversy about ordo amoris came out about a year ago, even when Pope Francis was still alive, and it was construed as somehow meaning that subjectively I have stronger feelings here rather than there. My argument was: it's not about the subjectivity of love. I will the good of everybody subjectively — yes, that's true, I will everyone's good equally in that sense. But the objective side of love — I will the good of the other — well, look at how much time you have, how much energy you have, how many resources you have.
The famous example: all the homes on your block are on fire. Do you run down to the fifth home to save the kids there, or do you take care of your own kids first?
Riley Moore: Yeah.
Bishop Barron: That's what St. Augustine was arguing, and Thomas Aquinas echoes him — when it comes to the apportioning of your resources, there's a certain order in how we do it. They also said, both Augustine and Aquinas, that there are exceptions to it. So let's say your house is okay but the house down the street is burning — well, yeah, you go and help the kids there. There are exceptions to the ordo amoris, but it's a question not of the subjectivity of love but of what goods that love is objectively able to make available. That distinction was lost in that discussion, often.
Riley Moore: I agree with that 100%. That's a very good way to lay it all out. And you have the rebuttal on the other side — remember the Old Testament and the stranger in Israel.
Bishop Barron: Yes, of course. But let's say I'm welcoming that stranger into my house and my house is on fire.
Riley Moore: Right. My house is not in order at all. I'm not necessarily helping them in that sense because everything's falling apart behind me right now. We have to be able to ensure that the guys in southern West Virginia and some of these other places are getting taken care of in the order of things. We do have a duty to do that as elected officials in this country.
Bishop Barron: Fair enough. You're elected as a congressman to represent your district in the United States government. You don't wake up in the morning thinking your first priority is how things are going in Thailand — nothing against Thailand, it's just that's not your first responsibility as a congressman. I think that's what Augustine and Aquinas and company are arguing there.
Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical on AI — Magnifica Humanitas
Bishop Barron: Let's talk a little about the new encyclical. As we record these words, just a few days ago Pope Leo came out with the new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — largely about AI and related things, but other themes too. Give me your first read on it. You said you've had a chance to look at it.
Riley Moore: I've read the whole thing. I really liked the way it set up the conversation, particularly talking about the Tower of Babel and Nehemiah's rebuilding of Jerusalem. What are we doing — are we building the Tower of Babel here, or are we rebuilding Jerusalem with Nehemiah? I really liked the way that was laid out at the outset.
It's a little bit the same way I've been talking about AI. I'm worried about work, about the individual, the dignity of the human being and purpose. They talk about that in this encyclical — about purpose and the value of the individual.
I was at Hill and Valley recently, with all the tech people, talking about this. By background, I used to be a welder. I started off as a welder, came from a blue-collar background, worked with my hands. I've seen the good and the bad of it. I think there are two ways to look at it.
The way I've been talking about it is that AI and robotics have the ability to make those types of jobs — which are so important — safer, to enable more longevity in those jobs, and of course to increase productivity, but not to the detriment of the worker. Or this thing could be like the nuclear weapon of the advancement of manufacturing and labor in the world. What I mean by the nuclear weapon analogy is: once that was invented, that was the pinnacle, the apex. Once it was invented, there was no weapon invented on top of it that leveled everything. Is AI going to have that effect on work in this country and around the world — and more particularly on the workers themselves?
A simple example: there are individuals who are very much in favor of fully automated trucking. All trucking automated. There are three million truckers in this country. What about the truckers? That's an explosion in the workforce — three million guys out of work overnight. What AI and robotics could do instead is make those jobs safer, make the roads safer, with essentially a co-pilot assistant helping you, ensuring that you're staying on the road, that you're awake. There are a lot of things that could be an enabler to keeping people in these jobs for longer.
People don't think about this in terms of labor, but you get hurt. I've been hurt on the job. I almost lost a finger one time, and got into a heated conversation with my employer at that time about what they were going to cover. So yes, you do need some types of protections as these new technologies emerge. We have to have these conversations. Is that handled through government intervention? Is that handled through workers deciding to organize around their rights? Labor unions? I'm not sure where we're going to go in all of it.
Bishop Barron: The question, as you lay it out very well, is: who monitors that? How do you guarantee that we make this move but not that move? Because if you get into "the government's going to monitor all this," that's a lot of power in the government's hands.
Riley Moore: That is concerning. So maybe — and I know there's a natural pushback on organized labor — but in that encyclical, organized labor is mentioned. Which is an old Catholic concern going back to Rerum Novarum, you know, the rights of workers to organize and protect labor.
And that's why I think this is such interesting timing. Obviously he's not Pope Leo by accident. We are in a new industrial revolution, and that's what this encyclical is seeking to address and answer. But I think he laid it out very clearly. There have been some folks saying, "Oh, the Pope is against AI." That's not what he said at all.
Bishop Barron: No. I thought it was a very helpful summary. I've been attending conferences and hearing people talk about AI for a couple of years, and I thought the Pope's chapter there brought a lot of the concerns under one umbrella in a helpful way.
As a former educator — I taught for a long time — I worry about young people especially. They're taking in lots of information, and AI can organize information in a shockingly rapid way. You could say, "Write a paper on Descartes' relation to Kant's epistemology," and within seconds you get a pretty credible paper. But that's just data assembly. That's not thinking. That's not understanding. And if young people are using it as a substitute for understanding — which involves working through Descartes yourself, working through Kant yourself, thinking and wondering, "Wait, that doesn't work, yes, that does" — I worry about that a lot with AI. It's covering a multitude of sins in a way.
Riley Moore: It's almost debasing our human nature. That's the deeper thing. And he says it in the encyclical essentially — I'm paraphrasing — a machine will never have a heart. He's right about that. It's not conscious. It's never going to have true empathy, sympathy, feelings.
And you mentioned students — I love that he touched on devices for children, iPads and iPhones and all these things. The Church is saying in a very definitive way: this is a problem and it has long-term consequences if we don't do something about it. My children have no devices. We don't play that game at all. I see that being a parent today is super challenging because of that.
Bishop Barron: Of course. Your kids are a little bit young — when will you make the decision where they can maybe in a limited way use a phone?
Riley Moore: Our goal is high school. And that would be limited — not an iPhone, but just if you need to call or text about soccer practice, something like an emergency. They don't need all this. When they're adults, certainly they're going to make that decision. I'm hoping I've helped inform that decision leading up to that. But even my eight-year-old daughter has friends who have iPads and iPhones, and it's dangerous — not just what they can access through it, but screen time itself. All these studies have shown it's so psychologically problematic.
Bishop Barron: The Holy Father touches on the addictive nature of this. We just did something here in Minnesota — I was very happy about it. The bishops got behind a law restricting kids' use of social media and giving parents much more control over it. It was a bit controversial, but we got behind it and it just passed. The governor just signed it.
Riley Moore: That's great. I was happy about that. I thought it was a good move to put some restrictions on it.
Bishop Barron: I found that helpful in the Pope's encyclical. The other thing was the chapter on Catholic social teaching — he kind of summarizes from Leo XIII to himself in a helpful way. Something I hope you can be part of: we're trying to organize a gathering of people in Congress or in government just to talk together about some of the principles of Catholic social teaching and see how that might impact legislative work.
Riley Moore: I would love to do that. And you've had some members of Congress come out — not even Catholics, even non-Catholics — saying, "Yeah, I think the Pope is talking about this in the right way."
Bishop Barron: It makes a framework for a good conversation. I'll tell you one thing — the American bishops, I've been in the conference now for eleven years, and how many times have we said something like, "Immigration is a broken system, it's got to be fixed"? And it's not happening. Democrats, Republicans — no one knows how to fix this system. That's why I said to you and to Ro Khanna and Suozzi: if I give you these parameters, can you fix it within them? And everyone has said, "Well, yeah, but..." and there's this opposition here and there. It is a source of frustration that we can't find a way to definitively resolve this thing.
Riley Moore: I think one of the issues in immigration — and it's what many on both sides are not willing to do — is E-Verify. A national E-Verify, because then we're putting the onus on the employer to verify that who they are hiring is here legally. We can seal the border and say the border is closed, you can't come in. Okay. But I could also open up my window at home and say, "It is illegal for you to come in my house," but put a sticker on my TV that says "free." At some point someone's coming in. That incentive structure is there. If we were willing to put some of the onus on the employers who are incentivizing this — but again, there's the problem in California. They want the permanent underclass. They can pay a slave wage.
Bishop Barron: And that's why I say it's so dehumanizing for everybody involved. That's not being friendly to immigrants.
Riley Moore: No. And that's why I say it's part of the problem we need to fix.
2028 Presidential Election Predictions
Bishop Barron: In the waning minutes, can I put you on the spot politically? We're recording this in 2026. What's your best guess for 2028 — who will the Democrats put up?
Riley Moore: Every time I say this, people are like, "You're crazy." But don't sleep on AOC — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I'm not saying she's definitely going to be the nominee, but she has more juice than people think. I know that's pretty frightening, but she has a very strong fundraising capability. She is nationally known. People could say she's a goofball, she says different things. But let me tell you — everybody laughed at her on the Green New Deal, and then it became the law of the land under the Inflation Reduction Act.
In terms of the left, which is going to be energized to push against the current administration — I see Gavin Newsom certainly trying to tack to the center a little bit while attacking Trump. Would he be a consensus candidate? Would the establishment try to push him? We saw what happened with Clinton versus Obama, and the way that went. But no, I would not sleep on her capability to perhaps get there. She'll be a player.
Bishop Barron: She did give that performance over in Europe when they asked her about Taiwan — she was just kind of hoping.
Riley Moore: And guess what? It won't matter in their primary at the end of the day. And she will ultimately, if she decides to get involved, push them to the left. She's going to drag them over there.
Bishop Barron: Well, of course. I've discussed this with people like Ro Khanna and others. I'm from a Chicago Catholic background, which meant Democrat. My whole family was Democratic. My father's heroes were FDR, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. But my father, I don't think, would recognize the Democratic Party today as his party.
Riley Moore: My grandmother wouldn't either. It's been pulled so far left. Bernie Sanders — give the guy credit — beginning in 2015 comes on the stage and successfully yanks the party to the hard left.
Bishop Barron: I find that fascinating. So give me the Republicans — JD Vance at the top of the ticket?
Riley Moore: I think JD Vance at the top of the ticket. Now I know there are folks talking about Marco Rubio. Marco has certainly said JD is running and he's not going to run. For my money, JD Vance all the way in 2028.
Bishop Barron: Both accomplished people, to be sure.
Riley Moore: Oh, no doubt. And certainly not taking anything away from Rubio — he has done a tremendous job as Secretary of State. But you're talking about your father. If I was talking to my Irish Catholic grandmother — same thing. Kennedy Democrat, labor union. If she were to show up right now, she'd be like, "What is this?"
Bishop Barron: So you think it might be the battle of the initials — AOC against JD?
Riley Moore: Yeah. Could be. I don't think they're going to allow her to get through, the way they didn't allow Bernie Sanders to get through in 2020. But I think she's going to shift the Overton window. Certainly she will, if she decides to get involved — and she hasn't said one way or another whether she's going to. But she's got some interesting takes every once in a while. I didn't know this about her, but she's just against gambling. She doesn't like casinos, doesn't like gambling.
Bishop Barron: Well, how about online gambling? Because that's something we take a position on here in Minnesota — online gambling is so addictive and so destructive.
Riley Moore: She really doesn't like it. Yeah.
Bishop Barron: Well, I'd support her on that.
Riley Moore: She's got some little pieces here and there. But JD — take it to the bank.
Bishop Barron: All right. Listen, wonderful talking to you today and I hope we can continue this relationship.
Riley Moore: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Bishop.
Bishop Barron: God bless you.
Riley Moore: God bless you.