(LifeSiteNews) — Bishop Robert Barron said that he is taking a heterodox priest and “population control” supporter as his “model” in his new role on President Donald Trump’s White House Religious Liberty Commission.

Trump appointed Bishop Barron, who founded the Word on Fire media group and leads the Diocese of Winona, Minnesota, to the commission on Thursday. 

“I am grateful to President Trump for appointing me to serve on the Commission on Religious Liberty,” the Minnesota bishop wrote on X, adding, “I see my task as bringing the perspective of Catholic social teaching to bear as the Commission endeavors to shape public policy in this matter.”

“In assuming this responsibility, I take as my model Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, the legendary president of the University of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987,” he continued. “In the course of his career, Hesburgh served on 16 separate presidential commissions over several decades in both Republican and Democrat administrations.”

Fr. Hesburgh is known as a driving force behind the secularization Catholic education in the United States and contradicted Catholic teaching, for example, when he endorsed “women priests.”

“I have no problem with females or married people as priests, but I ­realize that the majority of the leadership in the Church would,” Hesburgh said in a 2008 interview. The Catholic Church teaches that it is impossible to ordain women to the priesthood and that this teaching is part of the deposit of faith. 

Hesburgh also promoted “population control” efforts as a board member of the globalist Rockefeller Foundation, collaborated with Planned Parenthood, and unsuccessfully pushed Pope Paul VI to try to reverse Catholic teaching on contraception.

“In 1963, Father Hesburgh began hosting meetings on the population issue in (Notre Dame’s) Memorial Library, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Historian Donald Critchlow of Arizona State University candidly described the meetings as ‘a liberal forum to create an oppositional voice within the Catholic Church on the issue of family planning,’” the pro-life Population Research Institute noted. 

“Prompted by those conversations, in 1964 Father Hesburgh recommended to Pope Paul VI that he include Mrs. Patty Crowley, founder of the Christian Family Movement in Chicago, to be a member of the Papal Birth Control Commission. The Commission had been formed to advise the Holy Father on the family planning methods at the dawn of the ‘sexual revolution’ that had begun following the introduction of the contraceptive pill.

The majority of the Papal Commission’s members voted in 1966 to support a reversal of Catholic moral teaching, and its members were confident that Pope Paul would confirm their views. When Pope Paul surprised them with the promulgation of his encyclical Humane Vitae on July 25th, 1968, reaffirming the truths of the Natural Law and the timeless teaching of the Church, Father Hesburgh and Mrs. Crowley were both stunned.” 

Hesburgh became the chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1977, by which time it was openly funding pro-abortion groups. In 1994, he co-chaired the legal defense fund of scandal-plagued Democratic President Bill Clinton, a militant abortion supporter. 

The Notre Dame president was also known for overseeing the infamous “Land O’ Lakes Statement” declaring the “autonomy” of American Catholic universities from Church authority. The statement was also authored by Theodore McCarrick, then-president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. 

Bishop Barron, for his part, has repeatedly scandalized faithful Catholics as well, for example, when he described Jesus as the “privileged route” – rather than the only way (Acts 4:12) – to salvation, praised a book by notorious LGBT activist Father James Martin, S.J., suggested that hell may be empty, and told a homosexual commentator that he would not seek to reverse sodomitic “marriage.”

“I don’t think I want to press it further,” Barron told Dave Rubin about homosexual “marriage” in a 2017 interview. “I think it would probably cause much more problems and dissension and difficulty if we keep pressing it.”

“I wouldn’t want to get on a crusader’s tank and try to reverse that,” he added. Rubin is a “married” homosexual who has since procured children through in vitro fertilization and surrogacy.

Join Bishop Strickland’s novena for a holy pope: