Trump’s Oval Office prayer masterminded by accused ‘con artist’ with phony degrees: report

The organizer behind Catholic bishops praying over President Donald Trump has a past that should have raised alarms, a new report shows.

Mario Enzler, a senior adviser at the Heritage Foundation who arranged Thursday's Oval Office prayer, was once called a "con artist" by professors who found he had claimed academic degrees he never earned, Christopher Hale of Letters from Leo reported Friday. Hale built on reporting from The Pillar, which found Enzler spent weeks inviting bishops to the event.

Enzler served in the Pontifical Swiss Guard under Pope John Paul II from 1989 to 1993 and has since turned that stint into a memoir and a speaking career. He went on to work in banking, teach at the Catholic University of America and, in 2020, take over as business school dean at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.

His tenure there ended in 2022. Faculty members digging into his background discovered the Italian university where he said he earned a Ph.D. doesn't award doctorates, and the school he listed for his bachelor's degree is a high school, according to the Houston Chronicle. An accounting professor later told The Chronicle of Higher Education that Enzler acknowledged he had no doctorate.

The Pillar also found that in a 2022 speech, Enzler claimed a finance doctorate from a university in Milan while St. Thomas was billing him as a doctor of music. Heritage hired him in 2025.

Denver Archbishop James Golka led the Oval Office prayer as 11 other bishops gathered around the Resolute Desk.

"Most of these guys just don't think this way," a source familiar with the meeting told The Pillar, adding, "Still, what were they thinking? It's two weeks away from the midterms."

A senior official at the Vatican's Dicastery for Bishops called the gathering "a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo," Hale reported. A spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said it was "not organized with or by the USCCB," and a source close to conference president Archbishop Paul Coakley said he was "deeply frustrated."

The White House is standing behind the meeting. Spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the National Catholic Reporter that "there has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump."