Crosses stand in a row at the Wounded Knee Memorial in South Dakota. / Credit: Von Roenn/Shutterstock
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 22, 2025 / 15:24 pm (CNA).
Rapid City, South Dakota, Bishop Scott E. Bullock and South Dakota Jesuit leaders criticized U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for honoring U.S. soldiers who carried out an 1890 assault on a Lakota reservation near the Wounded Knee Creek.
“Those who died at Wounded Knee are sacred,” the joint statement read.
“Jesus stands with all who suffer and die at the hands of others,” the statement added. “Those who committed the violence are also sacred; for this reason, Jesus offers them mercy and healing. Yet the acts themselves were grave evils and cannot be honored.”
On Dec. 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers killed nearly 300 Lakota people in an assault now known as the “Wounded Knee Massacre” or the “Battle of Wounded Knee” in South Dakota. Most of the Lakota killed were civilians, including unarmed women and children, and 31 American soldiers were killed.
After a review, Hegseth announced last month that 20 U.S. soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor for actions at Wounded Creek will retain those honors. The Medal of Honor is the nation’s highest military honor, awarded by Congress for risk of life in combat beyond the call of duty. A review panel commissioned by former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recommended they retain their honors in October 2024.
“That panel concluded that these brave soldiers should, in fact, rightfully keep their medals for actions in 1890,” Hegseth said in a Sept. 25 post on X.
Hegseth criticized Lloyd for not issuing a final decision on the inquiry last year, saying “he was more interested in being politically correct than historically correct.”
“We’re making it clear — without hesitation — that the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 will keep their medals, and we’re making it clear that they deserve those medals,” Hegseth said. “This decision is now final and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate. We salute their memory, we honor their service, and we will never forget what they did.”
Bishop, Jesuits call for ‘prayerful correctness’
Bullock, whose diocese serves western South Dakota where the assault took place, was joined in his statement by the De Smet Jesuit Community of West River, South Dakota.
They said their opposition to the Medals of Honor is not rooted in “political correctness,” as Hegseth called it, but rather in “prayerful correctness, grounded in truth, conscience, and compassion.”
Bullock and the Jesuits said soldiers massacred civilians: “This was not a battle. To recognize these acts as honorable is to distort history itself.”
“We acknowledge the government’s intent to honor its troops, yet we reject any narrative that erases the humanity of the victims or glorifies acts of violence,” they said.
The statement said as Catholics and followers of Christ, “we proclaim the infinite dignity of every human life. We confess that humanity — capable of love and goodness — is also capable of terrible evil.” It added that the Crucifixion and Resurrection “reveal that true victory comes not through killing but through suffering love, mercy, and truth.”
“If we deny our part in history, we deepen the harm,” they said. “We cannot lie about the past without perpetuating injustice and moral blindness. Even if we are not personally responsible for Wounded Knee, we bear a moral responsibility to remember and speak the truth.”
Susan Hanssen, a history professor at the University of Dallas (a Catholic institution), told CNA Wounded Knee “was a complex historical event” that had “many conflicting narratives.” She said military records show conflicting accusations, investigations, and personal rivalries among military officers.
She said, with historical events, there is not always “easy moral clarity.”
She said the events “cannot simply be viewed as an unprovoked massacre, racially motivated against all Native Americans indiscriminately.”
Hanssen expressed concern that the effort to revoke the honors for soldiers at Wounded Knee is part of an ongoing effort to target “American and Western culture,” which includes destroying statues of Christopher Columbus and attacks on George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, among others.
“It is perfectly reasonable for the United States government to refuse to revoke Medals of Honor from over a hundred years ago,” she added.
No Medals of Honor have been revoked for any reason in more than a century. The only time medals were revoked was in 1917, when Congress commissioned a comprehensive review of Medal of Honor recipients and revoked more than 900.
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