There are moments when the most faithful thing a Christian can do is say no. No to injustice. No to colonialism. No to religious arrogance. No to the idea that God somehow belongs to the people who occupy the highest ecclesiastical office. No to the temptation to confuse proximity to power with proximity to God.

Today we remember the passing of Gregorio Aglipay y Labayán (1860–1940), a Filipino Roman Catholic priest, revolutionary, and political activist who became the first Obispo Máximo (Supreme Bishop) of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente—the Philippine Independent Church. He raises a profoundly uncomfortable question for Christians: What happens when fidelity to the Gospel requires us to challenge the church?

I have a particular affection for Aglipay because I recognize something of my own story in his.

When I was writing a weekly column on spirituality for El Mundo Newspaper in Austin (2001-2003), the editor occasionally referred to me as “el padre revolucionario”—the revolutionary priest. My views even then pushed the boundaries of acceptability. Fathom the thought, for instance, that, as I suggested in my first column, God might be just as readily encountered in the pulga (flea market) as in any church! I laughed at the editor’s suggestion. Yet as the years have passed, I have come to appreciate the compliment.

Perhaps every generation needs a few padres revolucionarios.

Not people who seek revolution for revolution’s sake. Not Christians who simply enjoy being contrarian. Rather, people of faith who are willing to ask whether the institutions that claim to speak for God are actually reflecting the God revealed in Jesus.

Gregorio Aglipay spent his life asking that question. And perhaps we should, too.

When Churches Become Too Comfortable With Empire

To understand Aglipay, we have to understand the 19^th-century Philippines. For centuries, Spain exercised colonial control over the Philippine archipelago. The Roman Catholic Church was deeply intertwined with that colonial system. Spanish mendicant orders created a frailocracia that exercised enormous social, political and economic influence. One of the great grievances of the Filipino clergy and nationalist movement was the lack of meaningful authority given to Filipino priests.

The issue was not simply theological. It was about who gets to lead, who gets to decide, and whose voice counts.

The movement for the “Filipinization” of parishes and communities became one of the rallying cries of the Philippine Revolution. Although many Filipino clergy remained loyal to Rome, some joined the nationalist movement. Aglipay became increasingly involved in the revolutionary struggle. Because of his revolutionary activities, he was excommunicated by Manila Archbishop Bernardino Nozaleda in 1899.

The Iglesia Filipina Independiente was formally proclaimed in 1902, amid the struggle for Philippine independence. Surprised to be named its first Supreme Bishop Aglipay formally separated from Rome in 1903.

There is something profoundly biblical about this story.

• The Hebrew prophets repeatedly confronted political and religious power.

• Nathan confronted David.

• Elijah confronted Ahab.

• Amos confronted the wealthy elite who exploited the poor.

• Jeremiah told the truth even when the truth made him miserable.

• John the Baptist confronted Herod.

• And Jesus himself stood before Pilate and refused to pretend that imperial authority was the ultimate authority.

Jesus was remarkably clear about the relationship between power and discipleship: “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them... It shall not be so among you” (Mt. 20:25-26). That is not exactly an endorsement of religious institutions becoming comfortable with political power!

Rome Has No Monopoly on the Word “Catholic”

This is where Aglipay’s story becomes particularly personal for me.

Every so often, someone who does not know me—usually someone who discovers Holy Family Catholic Church through social media—will feel compelled to warn faithful Roman Catholics that Holy Family is not a real Catholic church, because we are not… Roman Catholic.

I sometimes smile. More often I shake my head at the ignorance I read. After all, Rome has no monopoly on the word Catholic. The word means universal. It describes a vision of Christianity that transcends geography, ethnicity, nationality, and political boundaries.

The existence of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente is one more reminder that Catholicity has never been quite as tidy as some people would like it to be.

The Philippine Independent Church often claims to have six to eight million adherents. The 2020 Philippine census suggests that 78.8% of Filipinos identified at that time as Roman Catholic, while 640,076 self-identified as members of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente and another 818,916 self-identified as “Aglipayan.” Even if that’s not near six million, it is still an extraordinary witness.

What is especially intriguing is that the church that once emerged from a rupture with Rome eventually entered into full communion with so many other churches. The IFI has been in full communion with the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church since 1961, and with the Union of Utrecht of Old Catholic Churches since 1965.

Something even more unimaginable occurred only five years ago, in 2021, when the Philippine Independent Church and the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines jointly signed a document of mutual recognition of the baptisms performed by each church, an extraordinary step toward reconciliation after more than a century of division.

Think about that. The church once branded schismatic eventually sat down with the church from which it had separated, and both said, in effect: We recognize the grace of God at work in one another.

Perhaps that is what reconciliation looks like. Not pretending the past did not happen, that grievances were imaginary, or that everyone was equally right. Rather, recognizing that the Holy Spirit is capable of working beyond the boundaries we once considered permanent.

As St. Paul reminds us, “There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit” (1Cor. 12:4).

Aglipay and Our Own “Schism” in Austin

I cannot write about Aglipay without remembering our own journey here in Austin.

In 2011, after more than a decade as a Roman Catholic priest, I experienced my own very different ecclesial rupture. The issue involved Bishop Joe S. Vásquez, an appointee of the very conservative Papa Ratzinger, who, through his mouthpiece, asked that I disinvite Roman Catholic U.S. Congressman Luis Gutiérrez from speaking at the parish I pastored.

The words of his vicar, Monsignor Michael Sis, now bishop of San Angelo, continue to ring in my ears: “The bishop has asked that you disinvite the Congressman, and I am only being obedient to my bishop.”

The implication was clear: Your bishop expects you to obey as well. That eye-opening conversation was the proverbial straw that broke this camel’s back. A year later, I co-founded Holy Family Catholic Church, Austin’s only inclusive Catholic community, which proudly stands in the post-Vatican II Independent/Inclusive Catholic tradition.

I sometimes joke that Aglipay and I have something in common. He looked at his situation in the Philippines and essentially said, “This cannot continue.” I looked at our situation in Austin and similarly concluded, “This cannot continue.” And here we are!

I do not claim that my story remotely compares with the magnitude of the Philippine Revolution. Nor do I romanticize schism. Division in the Body of Christ is painful. I would much rather see Christians reconcile than divide. But I have learned something important: Sometimes leaving an institution is the best way for us to continue loving that institution.

Martin Luther King Jr. did not leave Christianity because the church failed him. He challenged Christianity because he believed Christianity could become more faithful to Jesus.

Dorothy Day did not abandon Catholicism because she was satisfied with the status quo. She challenged Catholics to take the Gospel seriously.

Oscar Romero did not become less Catholic when he began challenging those who murdered the poor.

And Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not become less Christian for resisting Hitler.

Jesus himself was hardly a poster child for institutional conformity!

“You’ve Got to Stand for Something”

Country singer Aaron Tippin once sang that “you’ve got to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.” That may not sound like a theological proposition, but it is remarkably close to the biblical witness.

A church that stands for nothing will eventually stand for whoever has the most money, the loudest voice, or the greatest political power.

That is precisely why Aglipay matters in this extraordinarily unordinary U.S. moment.

We live in a time when entire categories of people are being turned into political villains. Immigrants. Muslims. Transgender people. LGBTQ+ people. People who protest. People who read books somebody else does not like. People who disagree with our U.S. president. People whose skin is darker. People whose English has an accent. People whose religion is different. People who have the audacity to say that the U.S. belongs to all of us.

We have seen what happens when religion becomes too comfortable with political power. The temptation is ancient.

• Jesus called it out when he warned his followers not to imitate rulers who “lord it over” others.

• The prophet Nathan demonstrated it when he confronted King David.

• And the Book of Revelation imagines the ultimate political temptation as Babylon: an empire intoxicated by wealth, power and influence.

The question for Christians is not simply “Whose side is God on?” The harder question is: “Whose side are we on when God is standing with the vulnerable?”

That is where Les Misérables becomes unexpectedly theological. Jean Valjean’s transformation begins when someone offers mercy instead of punishment. Javert cannot imagine a world in which grace can disrupt the neat categories of deserving and undeserving!

Or consider Star Wars. The Jedi repeatedly discover that proximity to political power does not necessarily make one faithful to the Force. The Jedi Council can become so invested in preserving an institution that it fails to recognize what is happening around it!

The Handmaid’s Tale gives us an even darker warning: Religious language can become terrifying when it is fused with governmental power!

And Andor, perhaps more explicitly than almost any recent television series, asks what ordinary people do when an oppressive political system becomes normalized.

Aglipay’s life asks a similar question: When power tells the church to remain quiet, what will the church do?

The Catholic Church Does Not Need More Courtiers

I am increasingly convinced that one of the greatest dangers facing Christianity today is not atheism. It is court religion.

Court religion is what happens when religious leaders become more concerned about maintaining access to powerful people, than speaking truth to powerful people.

We see it in every age. Nathan before David. John the Baptist before Herod. Jesus before Pilate. And, in our own time, pastors and bishops who must choose whether to speak a prophetic word to our president… or join him for a photo op.

I think about people like Pastor John Pavlovitz, whose writing has consistently challenged us to resist nationalism, exclusion, and the temptation to subordinate the Gospel to political power. He unabashedly continues to warn about the dangers of Christian nationalism, and he calls for broad coalitions of people of faith and conscience to resist dehumanization. That is the padre revolucionario tradition our nation needs!

We need religious leaders who can walk into the Oval Office without losing their souls.

We need bishops and priests who can praise a president when the president does something good—and condemn a president when the president does something evil.

We need ministers who understand that access is not influence.

We need people who can say, with Jesus, “You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Mt. 6:24).

And we need enough courage to remember that sometimes the most prophetic sentence a Christian can utter is simply: No.

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What Does This Mean for Us?

Aglipay’s life does not call us to become angry. It calls us to become courageous. So, what might we actually do?

• Learn the history of a church or religious community you have been taught to dismiss. Read about the Iglesia Filipina Independiente. Learn about Old Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Catholics, and Independent Catholics. Discover how much larger the Christian family is than the structures you inherited.

• Ask where your own religious loyalties become unhealthy. Do you defend an institution because it is right, or because it is your institution? Jesus never asked us to protect an institution at the expense of human dignity.

• Practice prophetic speech. Identify one injustice about which you have remained silent because speaking would be uncomfortable. Then say something. Remember Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24).

• Refuse to dehumanize political or religious opponents. Aglipay’s story should not become another excuse for us to create villains. Speak truthfully. Challenge injustice fiercely. But remember that even those with whom we profoundly disagree remain human beings created in God’s image.

• Build relationships across ecclesial boundaries. Attend an ecumenical service. Visit another Christian community. Invite someone from another tradition to dinner. The Holy Spirit has never required membership cards.

• Stand with people whose dignity is being threatened. Immigrants. Muslims. LGBTQ+ people. Women. People experiencing poverty. People who are incarcerated. People who are politically unpopular. Catholic social teaching begins with the dignity of the human person.

• Support religious leaders who exercise prophetic courage. Don’t merely complain that clergy are silent. Encourage the people who speak. Show up. Donate. Share their work. Tell them that their courage matters.

• Examine your relationship with power. Ask yourself the question Aglipay forces upon us: If the powerful person I admire began doing something deeply unjust, would I still tell the truth?

That last question may be the most important one!

From the “Frialocracy” to the Kingdom of God

Aglipay’s life reminds us that the Gospel is always bigger than the institutions that carry it. The Roman Catholic Church survived the loss of political power in Europe. Christianity survived emperors. The Gospel survived inquisitions, wars, and corrupt bishops. The Church survived the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Heck, it even survived (so far) the Roman Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal. It survived my departure. It will survive all of us. And perhaps that is precisely why we need not be afraid to tell the truth.

Jesus did not say, “Protect the institution at all costs.” He said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn. 8:32).

Paul declared that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

And the early Christians proclaimed a kingdom in which Caesar was not God.

That is extraordinary courage. That is extraordinary faith. That is extraordinary hope!

Perhaps “Revolutionary” Is Not Such a Bad Word

There is something almost amusing about remembering Gregorio Aglipay today. A priest who challenged colonial power, became a revolutionary, was excommunicated, and helped create a new Catholic expression. A bishop whose church eventually became recognized by other Catholic churches around the world. A movement once dismissed as schismatic, now participating in ecumenical communion. And a church that has moved toward the full inclusion of women and LGBTQ+ people in ways that many Christians elsewhere still find difficult.

The IFI ordained its first woman priest in 1997 and consecrated Emelyn Dacuycuy as its first woman bishop in 2019. In 2023, it ordained Wylard “Wowa” Ledama, a transgender woman, to the diaconate. That should make us pause—because history has a funny way of rearranging the categories of “orthodox” and “radical.”

The people whom one generation calls heretics sometimes become the people another generation recognizes as prophets.

The people whom one generation dismisses as revolutionaries sometimes become those who help the church rediscover its vocation.

And the people who once stood outside the institution sometimes help those inside it find their way home!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Where have I confused loyalty to an institution with loyalty to God?

• When have I remained silent because speaking the truth might cost me something?

• Who is being villainized in my community today, and what might Jesus ask me to see differently about that person or group?

• What powerful person or institution am I tempted to flatter, rather than challenge?

• Where might God be calling me to become a “revolucionario”—or simply a courageous disciple?

• Can I recognize the Holy Spirit working beyond the boundaries of my own religious tradition?

• What would extraordinary courage look like in my life this week?

Let Us Pray

God of prophets and revolutionaries,
you called Moses to confront Pharaoh,
Nathan to confront David,
Elijah to confront Ahab,
John to confront Herod
and Jesus to confront the powers of his day.

You called Gregorio Aglipay
to stand with his people
when religious and political power
had become too closely intertwined.

Give us the courage to speak
when silence becomes complicity.

Give us humility
when we are tempted to believe
that our institution alone possesses you.

Give us wisdom
to distinguish rebellion from prophecy,
anger from courage,
and political power from the power of love.

Help us to build a church
that does not seek the throne,
but stands beside the people.

Make us extraordinarily courageous,
extraordinarily compassionate,
and extraordinarily faithful
to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

And when the world tells us
that following Jesus requires us
to bow before power,
remind us that we have already chosen
whose kingdom we serve.

Amen.

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When I was a young priest at Cristo Rey Catholic Church in Austin, someone gave me three icons that eventually decorated my office—first at Cristo Rey and later at San Juan Diego Catholic High School after I became president there in 2005.

One of them was an image I had never encountered before: La Madre de los Desaparecidos—Mary, the Mother of the Disappeared.

Unlike traditional devotional images of Mary, she does not hold the Christ child. Or even the body of her son. She holds his crown of thorns.

A white handprint mars the icon, evoking the mano blanca associated with death squads in El Salvador. The icon was created by Franciscan Brother Robert Lentz in solidarity with the mothers whose children had been abducted by death squads and authoritarian governments across Latin America. Mary becomes, in a sense, one more mother standing in the plaza, asking the terrifying question every mother has the right to ask: Where is my child?

The image was created to make visible a horror taking place far from the United States. But there is an old saying I have often used: When you point one finger at someone else, three fingers are pointing back at you!

So, as we observed yesterday the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the question confronting us in the U.S. is not merely, What happened in El Salvador?

It is also: What responsibility do we have for the people here in the U.S. and throughout the world who are disappearing in our name?

When “Missing” Becomes a Crime

Yesterday, August 30, we marked the International Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearances, established by the United Nations in 2010. This year is especially significant because 2026 marks the 20^th anniversary of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. The UN reminds us that enforced disappearance is not simply someone being “missing.” It occurs when a person is deprived of liberty by governmental authorities or with governmental support, and the state subsequently refuses to acknowledge the detention or disclose the person’s fate or whereabouts, leaving that person outside the protection of the law. The UN warns that enforced disappearance has historically been used not only to silence individuals, but also to terrorize entire communities.

That distinction matters. Not every deportation is an enforced disappearance. Not every death caused by war is an enforced disappearance. Not every person separated from a loved one meets the legal definition—but that does not make the human anguish any less real.

And when governments deliberately obscure where people are, deny families information about them, or place human beings into systems designed to make them inaccessible, we need to pay attention to what Scripture calls the “work of darkness” (Rom. 13:12, Eph. 5:11).

The biblical witness is remarkably consistent on this point: God hears the cry of the oppressed, and God sees the suffering that powerful people would prefer not to see. God asks the murderous Cain, “Where is your brother?” (Gen. 4:9). And Cain’s answer—“I do not know”—is perhaps one of the oldest excuses in the history of human evil.

Latin America Already Taught Us This Lesson

For much of the 20^th century, enforced disappearance became one of the tools by which authoritarian governments and death squads maintained power throughout Latin America.

Argentina became infamous for the desaparecidos—people abducted by the military dictatorship (1976-1983) and never accounted for. Mothers of those disappeared children began gathering in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, wearing white scarves and carrying photographs. Their simple, persistent presence eventually became one of the most recognizable acts of nonviolent resistance in modern history.

The movement spread. In El Salvador, where civil war raged from 1980 to 1992, an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 people disappeared. Many were victims of government-linked death squads or military forces. Some disappeared children were subsequently placed in adoptive homes through irregular procedures. A UN-backed truth commission documented widespread human rights abuses, but an amnesty law soon shielded perpetrators from prosecution.

The numbers of such disappearances are numbing, and every number was a person with a name and with family and friends who waited for their return.

That is why Mary matters. Brother Robert Lentz’s Mother of the Disappeared places Mary inside that story. She wears the white head covering associated with the mothers who marched. She bears the crown of thorns because Jesus, too, was seized by agents of political power. The icon’s violated surface itself becomes part of the theological message: Whenever we violate a human being, we violate an image of God!

• Mary stands where The Sound of Silence asks us whether anyone is listening.

• She stands where Where Have All the Flowers Gone? asks where all the young men have gone.

• She stands in the same moral universe as Stranger Things, where children can vanish, and everyone else is forced to decide whether finding them matters.

• And she stands with the mothers in Argentina, 1985, who discovered that sometimes justice begins simply by refusing to accept the disappearance of a human being into silence.

Those mothers in Latin America understood something profoundly Christian: Remembering is resistance.

Then We Began Disappearing People in the U.S.

This is where three fingers points back at us.

The U.S. did not invent the practice of disappearance. Nor should we casually equate every contemporary immigration detention or deportation with the legal crime of enforced disappearance—but we should not ignore the warning signs either.

In March 2025, the Trump administration deported Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT prison under the Alien Enemies Act, despite an emergency court order directing the administration not to proceed. A federal judge later found that the men had been denied due process. Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the episode as a case of people being “forcibly disappeared,” and it documented allegations that detainees were held incommunicado and subjected to torture and sexual abuse.

Fortunately, the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT were eventually released to Venezuela in July 2025, as part of a prisoner exchange. It was good news—but not a happy ending. In February 2026, a U.S. federal judge ordered the government to facilitate the return of 137 of them who challenged their deportations, but their transfer to Venezuela complicates matters and most of them remain there today.

The story of our nation’s wrongdoing did not end with CECOT. In March 2026, HRW reported that Salvadoran nationals deported by the U.S. were being detained in El Salvador without their relatives or lawyers being told where they were being held or when—or whether—they would be brought before a judge. HRW interviewed relatives who had been unable to locate family members after deportation and described the extrajudicial situation in language hauntingly familiar from Latin America’s darkest years: “Deportation cannot mean enforced disappearance.”

Meanwhile, Kilmar Abrego García became perhaps the most recognizable U.S. example of how quickly a person can disappear into a government system. In 2025, despite a 2019 immigration ruling that prohibited his deportation to El Salvador because he faced danger there, he was deported by the Trump administration and imprisoned in El Salvador. He was eventually returned to the U.S., then jailed and prosecuted on federal smuggling charges. By February 2026, a federal judge ruled that ICE could not re-detain him and said the government had no viable plan for deportation. In May, a federal judge dismissed the criminal case, finding the prosecution by then Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche vindictive. After Blanche was sworn in as U.S. Attorney General on August 10, however, the Department of Justice (a satirically-named department at this point) filed an appeal to revive the already-dismissed criminal charges.

Despite the craziness surrounding this incident, Abrego García survived his disappearance. How many others have not? That question should trouble us.

The Children “Still Missing”

And then there is another kind of disappearance: the disappearance of children from their families.

During the first Trump administration, the U.S. forcibly separated thousands of children from their parents at the U.S./Mexico border. Austin City Council Member Sabino “Pio” Renteria and I traveled to the detention center in Tornillo, Texas at that time. HRW reported in 2024 that 4,656 children were separated from their families and that, as of March 2024, 1,360—nearly a third—still lacked confirmed reunification with their parents.

Read that again. 1,360 children disappeared from their families, separated from their parents by our U.S. government and, in hundreds of cases, still not accounted for through confirmed reunification nine years later.

The Yale Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and its partners went even further, concluding that when government officials refused for days or weeks to disclose the circumstances or whereabouts of separated children, their conduct met the definition of enforced disappearance.

Our president’s propensity for separating families did not end in 2018.

A Brookings analysis published in May estimates that 145,000 U.S.-citizen children have likely experienced having a parent booked into immigration detention since January 2025, including more than 22,000 children whose co-resident parents were all detained.

Univisión found that more than 100,000 children had likely been separated from parents during immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration, with roughly three-quarters of those children likely being U.S. citizens.

We should be careful with terminology here.

A mother arrested by ICE has not necessarily been the victim of an enforced disappearance under international law—but try explaining that to her two-year-old. Or to her husband who has no idea whether his wife will ever come home.

Jesus displayed a special love for vulnerable people, such as women and children. He famously said, “Let the little children come to me” (Mt. 19:14). And in Matthew 25, he offers us an uncomplicated theological formula for the treatment of vulnerable human beings. He asks whether we feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, and visit the prisoner, the person whose name has become a case number, and the mother whose child asks, “Where did Mommy go?”

Those Who Die Without Becoming Headlines

There is another temptation in moments like this: to count only the people we can see. Sometimes people disappear from our moral imagination long before they disappear physically.

Consider USAID.

A peer-reviewed analysis published in The Lancet modeled the effect of cuts to U.S. foreign assistance and estimated that reduced USAID funding could contribute to approximately 1.78 million excess deaths in 2025 alone, including nearly 690,000 deaths among children under five. The researchers projected millions more deaths over the following years under a full-defunding scenario. These are modeled estimates, not a literal body count of people who have already died, but they are a sobering reminder of how policy decisions can move from spreadsheets to human mortality.

We should resist the temptation to speak casually of “700,000 people who were ‘disappeared’ due to cuts to USAID.” That is not what the evidence establishes. But neither should we pretend that these people do not matter because their names never appeared in our newspapers.

They had names. They had parents or children. They had plans and dreams. They had favorite songs, annoying siblings, and things to laugh about. They had someone who would notice if they did not come home. And now, perhaps, they exist only as a statistic in a mortality model.

That is another form of disappearance. Not legal disappearance. Not necessarily political disappearance. But disappearance from our moral field of vision.

And whenever Christianity allows a human being to disappear from our field of vision, Christianity has failed. Full-stop.

War Creates Its Own Disappeared

The same is true in war.

The U.S./Israeli war against Iran now enters its seventh month. The human cost has been enormous, with thousands killed and millions displaced. As recently as yesterday, August 30, U.S. forces struck Iranian missile launchers on Larak Island, with Iranian officials reporting casualties among civilians.

Meanwhile, families live through the oldest horror of war: Someone does not come home.

Sometimes we learn that a person has been killed. Sometimes we know only that communications have stopped. Sometimes a body can be found. Sometimes it cannot. Sometimes governments release numbers but not names. Sometimes names are known only to the families. And sometimes the rest of us scroll past the story between a celebrity scandal and a video of dancing cats. There is something spiritually dangerous about that.

The prophet Isaiah imagines a God who refuses precisely this kind of indifference: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?” (Is. 58:6).

That sounds suspiciously like Christian discipleship.

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So, What Can We Do?

It is tempting to conclude that we are powerless.

What can a single citizen do when governments possess armies, detention centers, surveillance systems, aircraft, drones, and billions of dollars? Quite a lot, actually.

The mothers of Plaza de Mayo did not possess armies. The women of CoMadres in El Salvador did not possess armies. Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero did not possess armies. Jesus certainly did not. What they possessed was something more difficult for empires to control: the refusal to accept the disappearance of another human being.

The Gospel calls us to cultivate extraordinary courage precisely when ordinary courage becomes inconvenient.

• Learn the names. Instead of allowing migrants, detainees, prisoners, and victims of war to become abstractions, learn individual stories. Share them. Pray their names aloud. Remembering people is a form of resistance.

• Support organizations that search for the missing. Give your time, money and voice to immigration legal services, organizations assisting separated families, and human-rights groups documenting disappearances and abuses. The UN specifically notes that relatives and organizations can report disappearance cases to its Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

• Call your elected officials—and keep calling. Ask for due process, public accountability, access to counsel, and meaningful oversight of detention and deportation practices. One phone call will not change a system. Ten-thousand calls might.

• Refuse dehumanizing language. When politicians or pundits describe human beings as “invaders,” “animals,” “vermin,” “criminals” or statistics, deliberately restore their humanity. Say mother. Say father. Say child. Say neighbor. Say the name.

• Become inconveniently visible. Show up at vigils. Attend immigrant-rights demonstrations. Write letters. Accompany families to court when appropriate. Visit detention facilities where visitation is possible. Put photographs and names on bulletin boards. Publicly pray. Jesus never suggested that discipleship would make us inconspicuous.

• Examine where your own silence becomes participation. Examine what you consume, what you repost, what you ignore, and what you rationalize because the victims are far away, politically unpopular, or linguistically unfamiliar.

The opposite of disappearance is not merely visibility. The opposite of disappearance is relationship.

We Cannot Let Them Become “Nobody”

There is a haunting line in The X-Files: “The truth is out there.”

For the families of the disappeared, the truth is not merely out there. The truth is personal. It has a name and a face. It has parents who want to know what happened. And that is why the Mother of the Disappeared has stayed with me all these years.

I began with an icon I encountered as a young priest in Austin, an image created in response to a Latin American tragedy I believed belonged to another time and another place. But perhaps the icon was never really about them. Perhaps it was preparing me to see… us.

Mary stands there with the crown of thorns of the son whose whereabouts she can no longer find. She stands there because somebody must remember. Somebody must ask. Somebody must refuse the convenient lie that a person can simply vanish, and the world can move on.

Our faith teaches us otherwise.

• The psalmist insists, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted” (Ps. 34:18).

• Jesus says that not one sparrow falls without God noticing (Mt. 10:29).

• He also tells us that whatever we do for the most vulnerable, we do for him (Mt. 25:40).

• Hebrews tells us to “remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them” (Heb. 13:3).

So perhaps the question is not merely, Where are the disappeared?

Perhaps the question is: Will we be among those who keep looking for them?

Because extraordinary love remembers. Extraordinary courage asks difficult questions. Extraordinary faith refuses to let another human being disappear into a bureaucratic file, a prison wall, a deportation flight, a battlefield, or a statistic.

And somewhere, perhaps, Mary is still standing. Still holding the crown of thorns. Still bearing the wound. Still asking: Where is my child?

May we have the extraordinary courage to answer: We are looking. We are remembering. We are not going to let them disappear!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Whose disappearance have I allowed myself not to notice? Whose suffering have I treated as somebody else’s problem?

• Do I know any names behind the numbers? Whose story might God be inviting me to learn?

• Where have I allowed political rhetoric to make another human being seem less human to me?

• What would it mean for me to “remember those who are in prison as though I were in prison with them”?

• Where might God be asking me to move from sympathy to solidarity?

• What extraordinary courage might my faith require of me in this moment?

• Who is missing from my table, my prayers, or my concern?

Let Us Pray

God of the disappeared,
God of the missing,
God of the prisoner and the migrant,
God of the mother who waits at the door,
God of the child who asks where her parents have gone:

Do not let us become accustomed to absence.

When your children are detained,
make us remember their names.

When they are deported,
make us remember their faces.

When they are separated from their families,
make us remember their tears.

When they are killed in war,
make us remember their humanity.

When their lives are reduced to numbers,
make us remember that every number was someone’s beloved.

Give us the courage of the mothers who marched.

Give us the persistence of those who searched.

Give us the faith of those who refused to accept silence as the final word.

And when we are tempted to look away,
turn our eyes again toward your children.

When we point a finger at the violence of others,
help us notice the fingers pointing back toward us.

Make us people who seek the truth,
defend the vulnerable,
welcome the stranger,
visit the prisoner,
and refuse to allow anyone made in your image to disappear.

And when we stand before the wounds of the world,
may we discover, as Mary did,
that love sometimes means simply standing there —

remembering,
waiting,
searching
and refusing to leave.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

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Ever since a freshman course at St. Louis University, I have been fascinated by psychology. Perhaps it is because psychology gives us another vocabulary for one of the most ancient human questions: Why do we do what we do? It helps us notice the fears, desires, habits and wounds that shape our words and actions—not so that we can put people into tidy boxes, but so that we might understand ourselves and one another with a little more compassion.

That fascination has followed me for decades. Over the past 19 months, I have found myself listening with particular interest as Dr. Mary Trump attempts to help us make sense of the psychological dynamics behind the behavior of the most powerful people in our nation. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s recent bestseller Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump offers another lens for considering the personalities and relationships surrounding political power. Psychology cannot explain everything, but it can sometimes help us understand why otherwise intelligent human beings behave in remarkably irrational ways.

Today we remember a person who spent much of his life asking such questions: Don Richard Riso (1946-2012), one of the principal developers of the modern Enneagram. Riso encountered the Enneagram while studying as a Jesuit seminarian and eventually devoted his life to developing its insights for self-awareness and spiritual growth. His first major book, Personality Types, appeared in 1987. He later collaborated with Russ Hudson on such works as Understanding the Enneagram, Enneagram Transformations, and The Wisdom of the Enneagram.

There is something particularly appropriate about remembering Riso during this extraordinarily unordinary year in U.S. history. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary self-awareness!

A Three with a Four Wing

When I was in seminary in the early 1990s, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Enneagram were in vogue. They fueled endless meal conversations and figured prominently in retreats. And each of us had an answer to the inevitable question: “So, what type are you?”

The MBTI always left me somewhat perplexed. Am I an introvert or an extravert? Yes. I am an introvert, but many people who encounter me in public spaces might not guess that. Put me in a room full of strangers and, because I have spent most of my adult life preaching, teaching, leading meetings, and standing in front of crowds, I can apparently pass for an extravert.

The Enneagram, in contrast to the MBTI, made more sense to me. I have long identified as a Three with a Four wing: the achiever with an artistic streak. The Three is described in the Riso-Hudson tradition as adaptable, driven, excelling and image-conscious. The Four brings creativity, self-awareness, individuality and a desire for authentic self-expression.

That combination actually explains quite a bit. The kid who loved drawing and won the third-grade spelling bee. The kid who took every available art course yet became his hometown’s first Eagle Scout on his 15^th birthday. The high school valedictorian who was enchanted by the romantic, medieval worldview and spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi. The priest, pastor, high school president, elected official, and executive director who enjoys world travel and writing in his free time.

The Three says, “Do something, accomplish something.” The Four whispers, “Yes, …but make it meaningful.”

The unhealthy Three says something rather more dangerous: “Make sure everyone notices!” Perhaps you can think of a few unhealthy Threes in our world.

And that is where the spiritual work begins.

Riso’s great contribution was his development of “levels of development”—a continuum within each Enneagram type that attempts to explain how the same basic personality can manifest in increasingly healthy or unhealthy ways. Think of it as a dial: We can “dial up” to higher levels of health and integration, and we can also “dial down” to greater depths of dysfunction and disintegration.

Thus, the question is not simply: What number or type am I? The more important question is: How am I seeking increasingly healthy ways to live into the truth of who I am?

The Enneagram Is Not a Personality Horoscope

Before we go any further, let’s be honest: The Enneagram is fascinating, it can be spiritually useful, and it can provide a remarkably evocative vocabulary for self-reflection—but it is not a scientifically validated personality assessment, unlike the better-established models used in contemporary psychological science.

A 2021 systematic review examined 104 independent samples of Enneagram research and found mixed evidence for reliability and validity. Some research found relationships with established personality constructs and evidence that people find the Enneagram useful for personal and spiritual growth. But researchers also found that factor analyses typically produced fewer than nine factors and that there was little empirical support for some of the system’s more elaborate claims, including “wings” and movement between types.

That does not mean we need to throw the Enneagram into the spiritual recycling bin. It means that we should approach it with some measure of caution and humility.

The Enneagram is perhaps best approached as a spiritual and psychological lens, not as a medical diagnosis, a neurological scan, or a divinely revealed explanation of human personality.

We also recognize the complicated history behind the Enneagram. We can’t substantiate claims that the Enneagram was handed down intact from ancient Christianity, Sufism, or other ancient traditions. The modern version developed principally through 20th-century figures like George Gurdjieff, Oscar Ichazo, and Claudio Naranjo.

And yet there is something deeply Christian about the question it invites us to ask: What is happening inside me?

That question is hardly foreign to Scripture.

• “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (Ps. 51:10).

• “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Mt. 7:3).

• “Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith” (2Cor. 13:5).

And perhaps most appropriately, the words of today’s second reading: “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2). That sounds remarkably like an invitation to spiritual self-awareness!

Nine Ways of Being Human

For those who have never encountered the Enneagram, here is an extraordinarily condensed version. The nine types are not nine kinds of people. Rather, they describe nine patterns of motivation, attention and response. The Riso-Hudson tradition calls them the Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker.

• 1 The Reformer: “There is a right way to do this, and I need to make it better.”

• 2 The Helper: “People need me, and I find meaning in being needed.”

• 3 The Achiever: “I need to succeed, accomplish and become somebody.”

• 4 The Individualist: “I need to discover and express what makes me uniquely me.”

• 5 The Investigator: “I need to understand this before I can engage with it.”

• 6 The Loyalist: “I need security, certainty, and trustworthy people on whom I can depend.”

• 7 The Enthusiast: “Life is full of possibilities, and I don’t want to miss any of them.”

• 8 The Challenger: “I need to be strong enough to protect myself and those I love.”

• 9 The Peacemaker: “I need harmony, and I don’t want conflict to destroy it.”

None of these is inherently good or bad. Each contains extraordinary gifts and temptations.

• The One can be courageous about justice… or self-righteous.

• The Two can be extraordinarily compassionate… or controlling.

• The Three can be extraordinarily effective… or obsessed with appearances.

• The Four can be extraordinarily creative… or consumed by comparison.

• The Five can be extraordinarily wise… or retreat into intellectual isolation.

• The Six can be extraordinarily faithful… or paralyzed by fear.

• The Seven can be extraordinarily joyful… or escape every painful reality.

• The Eight can be extraordinarily courageous… or domineering.

• The Nine can be extraordinarily peaceful… or passive in the face of injustice.

That is precisely why the Enneagram can become spiritually interesting. It asks not merely what we are good at, but what our gifts become when fear gets behind the wheel.

When Our Gifts Become Our Gods

Now let’s have some fun. Today’s first reading comes from Jeremiah (Jer. 20:7-9), who famously cries: “Lord, you duped me, and I let myself be duped”—not exactly an Instagram-ready picture of prophetic ministry!

Jeremiah is exhausted and angry. He feels deceived by God. He’d rather stop speaking on behalf of God, yet the word of God becomes “like fire burning in my heart” (Jer. 20:9).

Would the Enneagram help us understand Jeremiah? Perhaps. But we could never claim to know Jeremiah’s number. And that distinction matters.

The same with Paul. Better than a personality test, in today’s second reading, Paul gives us a spiritual practice much more important than any hypothetical number: “Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2). In essence: Notice yourself. Question yourself. Challenge your assumptions. Allow God to transform you.

Even Jesus and Peter offer us an extraordinary case study in today’s gospel. Last Sunday Peter received the keys to the kingdom. This Sunday Jesus tells him: “Get behind me, Satan!” The same Peter who gets something spectacularly right also gets something spectacularly wrong. That should be comforting to every human being who has ever had an awkward day.

Then there is Shebna, the official described in last Sunday’s first reading (Is. 22:19-23). He was obsessed with his high-elevation tomb, his golden chariots, and his public image. He transformed public office into a monument to himself. If the Enneagram were merely a game of assigning numbers to biblical characters, Shebna would make a fascinating case!

But the deeper question is this: What happens when our gifts become our gods?

And What Number Is Donald Trump?

Of course, whenever Enneagram enthusiasts gather, someone eventually asks, “What type is [insert a name]?” I have heard versions of that question about politicians and popes, celebrities and CEOs, and almost everyone else who has managed to attract public attention.

My answer is the same: We don’t know. None of us does.

The Enneagram Institute cautions that it is easy to misidentify others because outward behavior does not necessarily reveal underlying motivation. That is an important corrective.

We can playfully speculate about fictional characters. We might imagine Leslie Knope as a Three with One tendencies, Ted Lasso as a Two or Nine, Hermione Granger as a One or Five, and Darth Vader as, well, somebody who desperately needed spiritual direction!

But assigning an Enneagram number to a real person from a distance is a different matter.

We cannot see another person’s interior motivations—and that observation has enormous implications for our political life. Because one of the great temptations of our current moment is to assume that we understand the people with whom we disagree.

“They are stupid.” “They are evil.” “They are narcissists.” “They are communists.” “They are fascists.” “They are sheeple.” “They are crazy.”

Some people really do behave terribly, but Christian discernment requires something more difficult than assigning a label. It requires us to ask: What is happening in the human heart?

And then, even more painfully: What is happening in my own?

The Enneagram and the Gospel of Self-Examination

One reason I remain fascinated by Riso is that his work can serve as a corrective to one of our favorite human pastimes: diagnosing everyone but ourselves.

Jesus understood this tendency remarkably well. Before we remove the speck from someone else’s eye, Jesus says, perhaps we should deal with the log in our own.

The Enneagram, at its best, turns the question around. Instead of: “What type is he?” we ask: “Why am I so irritated by him?”

Instead of: “Why can’t she just get her act together?” we ask: “Why do I need her to behave differently before I can experience peace?”

Instead of: “Why are those people so obsessed with their image?” we ask: “Where do I seek affirmation?”

That is a much more uncomfortable spiritual exercise. It is also much more productive.

Riso’s model emphasizes that the same personality can move toward greater health or toward increasingly destructive patterns. That sounds remarkably like the Christian understanding of conversion. We are not condemned to remain precisely as we are. Grace does not erase personality. Grace transforms personality!

Peter remains Peter. Paul remains Paul. Mary remains Mary. You remain you. But the person God is calling you to become is not necessarily the person fear has taught you to be!

What Does This Mean for Us?

No good person is immune from the temptations of personality. In fact, our commitment to justice can become self-righteousness. Our compassion can become saviorism. Our intellectual curiosity can become arrogance. Our prophetic courage can become contempt. Our commitment to peace can become avoidance. Our political engagement can become addiction. Our desire to change the Church can become another form of domination. And our certainty that we are the enlightened ones can become precisely the kind of spiritual blindness we criticize in everyone else.

That is why self-examination is not a retreat from justice. It is preparation for justice.

The Gospel does not call us to become less passionate. It calls us to become more integrated.

It does not ask us to abandon our gifts. It asks us to surrender the ways in which our gifts become weapons.

An extraordinary justice movement needs extraordinary self-awareness, and an extraordinary Church needs people who can say: “Perhaps I am wrong.” “Perhaps my fear is speaking.” “Perhaps my ego is driving this.” “Perhaps I need to listen.” And sometimes: “Perhaps I am the problem.”

That last prayer may be the most difficult one of all.

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Ways to Practice an Enneagram Gospel

If Riso’s work is going to be more than an interesting mealtime conversation, let us put it to work.

• Learn your own patterns before diagnosing someone else’s. Spend some time reflecting on what you fear, what you desire, and what you do when you are under stress. The goal is not to acquire a clever label. The goal is greater freedom.

• Ask what your best gifts look like when they become unhealthy. Your ambition, compassion, intellect, courage, creativity, loyalty, enthusiasm, or desire for peace may all be gifts. Ask when those gifts stop serving love.

• Practice curiosity before condemnation. The next time someone infuriates you, pause before assigning a motive. Ask what you actually know, and what you are merely assuming.

• Use personality language to increase compassion, not to create tribes. The Enneagram becomes spiritually dangerous when it becomes another way of saying, “I understand myself because I am enlightened, and I understand you because you are a [insert a number].”

• Bring your personality into prayer. Do not pray for God to make you somebody else. Pray for God to make you the healthiest, freest, and most loving version of the person God created you to be.

From Personality to Transformation

Perhaps this is where Riso ultimately meets St. Paul. The goal is not simply self-knowledge. The goal is transformation.

I think about that Three-with-a-Four-wing in me. There is nothing inherently wrong with ambition. It has allowed me to accomplish things I once could not imagine accomplishing. There is nothing inherently wrong with achievement. Achievement has enabled me to build parishes and schools, serve congregations, lead organizations, and publish books. And there is nothing inherently wrong with caring about how something looks. Beauty matters.

But every gift can become an idol. The Three can begin performing instead of living. The Four can begin comparing instead of creating. And suddenly the question becomes not: “Am I doing God’s work?” but: “Does everyone know that I am doing God’s work?”

That is where psychology becomes spirituality. And that is where spirituality becomes conversion.

Jesus does not ask us to become personality-free. He asks us to become… free!

The Extraordinary Work of Becoming Ourselves

Riso devoted decades to understanding the Enneagram. According to his longtime collaborator Russ Hudson, Riso described his life’s work as the reason he believed he had been put on earth. That strikes me as a beautiful way to remember him.

Not because the Enneagram gives us the final answer to human personality. It does not. Not because nine numbers can capture the extraordinary complexity of a human being. They cannot. But because Riso devoted himself to helping people look inward. And perhaps that is precisely what we need in this extraordinarily unordinary moment.

We spend so much time asking what is wrong with them. Perhaps today we can ask what is happening in me. Perhaps we can become a little less fascinated by the personality defects of politicians, bishops, pundits, family members, and strangers on social media. Perhaps we can become a little more fascinated by our own souls.

Because the great Christian invitation is not: “Figure out what number everyone else is.” It is, to cite St. Paul’s words in today’s second reading: “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”

The boy who once came out of the library each week carrying 20 books home at a time eventually became the priest who discovered psychology, personality theory, and the Enneagram. And from time to time I still carry armfuls of books—only now I am trying to read the most difficult book of all: myself.

Perhaps you are, too.

And perhaps that is where extraordinary transformation begins!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• What personality patterns do I notice most strongly in myself? What gifts accompany those patterns? What shadows accompany them?

• When I am stressed, what unhealthy behaviors emerge most readily in me?

• Whom am I tempted to “type,” diagnose or dismiss? What might I learn if I became curious about those people instead?

• What personal gift might God be asking me to use more generously?

• What gift might God be asking me to hold more lightly?

• Where does my ego seek recognition, control, certainty, approval or safety?

• When have I mistaken my own personality preferences for God’s will?

• What would it mean for me today to “be transformed by the renewal of [my] mind” (Rom. 12:2)?

• What part of myself am I reluctant to examine because I fear what I might discover?

• What would extraordinary spiritual freedom look like for me?

Let Us Pray

God of extraordinary grace,
You created each of us with a complexity
that no number, label, or personality system can contain.

Help us to know ourselves honestly.

Give us the courage to recognize our gifts
without turning them into idols.

Give us the humility to recognize our wounds
without allowing them to define us.

When ambition becomes ego,
teach us humility.

When compassion becomes control,
teach us freedom.

When courage becomes domination,
teach us gentleness.

When peace becomes avoidance,
teach us justice.

When certainty becomes arrogance,
teach us curiosity.

When fear becomes our master,
teach us trust.

And when we become fascinated
with the faults of everyone around us,
turn our attention gently back toward our own hearts.

May we, like Paul,
be transformed by the renewal of our minds.

May we, like Jesus,
love without needing to control.

May we, like Riso,
use the gifts we have been given
to help others discover greater freedom.

And may we become, day by day,
not simply more knowledgeable about ourselves
but more compassionate,
more courageous,
more authentic
and more fully alive.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

Support Extraordinary Catholics!

Thank you for “liking,” restacking, or sharing these words with those who might need them!

Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768

Even as a child, I was a bibliophile. I loved reading! I especially loved reading during summer vacation. In what I am sure was my mother’s attempt to keep four rambunctious boys occupied, she took us to our local public library weekly, where I was allowed to check out 20 or 25 books at a time. So, of course, I did. Every week I walked out of that library with another armful of books!

One week, I apparently added an illustrated children’s Bible to the stack. I don’t remember the title, but I remember some of the images. One startling illustration is cemented in my memory: A man’s head sat on a platter.

Who was this unfortunate guy? John the Baptist, I learned. And why was his head on a platter? Because he dared to speak truth to power.

That childhood image has stayed with me for decades. It was perhaps one of my earliest lessons in the unsettling reality that, as Rabbi Harold Kushner suggests, sometimes bad things happen to good people.

Today, the Church celebrates St. John the Baptist’s passion—or his beheading, as we called this memorial prior to 2011. John’s suffering belongs to a larger Christian vocabulary of witness, sacrifice and fidelity.

Today we also remember Wayne Walter Dyer (1940-2015), the enormously successful motivational speaker and author whose book, Your Erroneous Zones, became a record-breaking bestseller fifty years ago, in 1976.

As we remember them today, John the Baptist asks: What happens when we refuse to remain silent? Dyer asks: What happens when we stop living according to the expectations that imprison us?

And together they ask an even more important question: What does it actually mean to be Christ-like?

John the Baptist: When Speaking Truth Becomes Dangerous

John’s story is familiar enough that we can easily miss how politically subversive it was. John was not merely some eccentric desert preacher shouting at passersby. People came to him, listened to him, and changed their lives because of him.

Luke tells us that Jesus regarded John as extraordinarily significant: “I tell you, among those born of women, no one is greater than John” (Lk. 7:28).

John’s presence and ministry therefore posed a problem for Herod Antipas.

John did not possess an army. He did not control a newspaper. He did not have a television network or a social-media following. He did not occupy a government office. He had something far more dangerous: moral authority.

John publicly challenged Herod’s conduct. The Gospel of Mark tells us that John repeatedly confronted Herod, saying, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” (Mk. 6:18).

And Herod responded as powerful people so often respond when someone threatens their authority: He found a way to silence John.

The ancient Jewish historian Josephus independently remembered John as a good man who urged people toward righteousness and piety. Josephus also says that Herod feared John’s influence over the crowds and ultimately had him killed. That detail matters. John did not die because he was irrelevant. He died because he was effective.

There is a lesson here for those of us who sometimes wonder whether our prophetic words matter. They do.

The person who speaks truth to power may feel insignificant. The person who writes an uncomfortable editorial may have only a few readers. The teacher who challenges injustice may feel exhausted. The person who welcomes those whom the institutional Church has rejected may wonder whether anyone notices.

But John reminds us that influence is not measured by institutional position. Sometimes the voice without a throne is the one that terrifies the throne!

We have seen versions of this story throughout history—and in popular culture.

• The Hunger Games gives us Katniss Everdeen standing before a system that demands obedience.

• Harry Potter presents a young community discovering that the truth about Voldemort cannot be suppressed simply because the Ministry of Magic finds it inconvenient.

• The Handmaid’s Tale imagines what happens when authoritarianism turns religious language into an instrument of control.

• Star Wars gives us generations of ordinary people discovering that resistance begins when someone finally says no.

• And A Few Good Men gives us perhaps the most famous courtroom version of the same human drama: the powerful person who preferred obedience to truth.

John the Baptist did not have Jack McCoy’s courtroom. He did not have Rachel Maddow’s television studio. He did not have a Substack. He had a voice—and he used it.

Herod Was Not Just an Ancient King

The danger in reading biblical stories is that we can simply leave them in the past as ancient history lessons. We can read the story and conclude, “Poor Herod, what a terrible man!” And then we continue with our day.

But Herod is not merely a character from antiquity. He represents the recurring human temptation to preserve power at any cost.

Herod’s problem was not simply that John disagreed with him. His problem was that John’s truth threatened the story Herod wanted to tell about himself.

That is one reason authoritarian systems so often attack journalists, academics, clergy, artists, judges, civil servants, activists, and anyone else who refuses to parrot approved narratives.

The issue becomes less about whether something is true, and more about whether it is loyal. That distinction should concern every person of faith.

Jesus never said, “Blessed are those who maintain the approved narrative.” He said: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness” (Mt. 5:10).

He told Pilate: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth” (Jn. 18:37). He told his followers: “The truth will set you free” (Jn. 8:32).

And the prophet Amos gave us perhaps the most powerful political theology in the Hebrew Scriptures: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24).

Justice. Truth. Righteousness. These are not partisan words. They are biblical words. And when Christians become more concerned about protecting political power than protecting vulnerable people, something has gone profoundly wrong.

Enter Wayne Dyer: Don’t Just Call Yourself Christian

I knew Wayne Dyer’s name long before I knew much about his work. In the mid-1970s, when I was more interested in children’s books, his books were everywhere: in bookstores, libraries, and on the coffee tables of people interested in psychology, spirituality, and personal growth. His first book, Your Erroneous Zones, became one of the best-selling self-help books ever written.

The Dyer quotation that interests me most today is this: “I don’t think that Jesus was teaching Christianity; Jesus was teaching kindness, love, concern and peace. What I tell people is don’t be Christian, be Christ-like.”

Dyer was not making a conventional Catholic theological argument. His spirituality crossed boundaries between religious traditions and emphasized personal transformation, compassion, and spiritual experience. That is precisely where we might both appreciate him and exercise some discernment.

Because there is something wonderfully provocative about his question. What if we spent less energy proving that we are Christian and more energy actually becoming Christ-like?

Imagine if that became our spiritual examination of conscience.

Not: Did I attend Mass this week? Or, did I receive Communion? Or, did I defend my church on social media? Or even, did I win the argument?

But: Was I Christ-like today? Did I feed someone who was hungry? Did I welcome someone whom others rejected? Did I speak for someone who could not speak for themselves? Did I forgive? Did I tell the truth? Did I resist cruelty? Did I refuse to dehumanize someone with whom I disagreed? Did I love my enemy? Did I figuratively wash someone’s feet?

That last question is particularly important because the Johannine Jesus did not merely preach servant leadership. He got down on the floor and demonstrated it. John the Evangelist tells us that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and then said, “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (Jn. 13:15).

Be Christ-like! That is a considerably more demanding spirituality than simply being “Christian.”

The Erroneous Zone of Religious Tribalism

Here is where I think Dyer can challenge us.

One of our most dangerous “erroneous zones” may be the assumption that our religious identity automatically makes us good people. It doesn’t. Jesus himself was remarkably impatient with people who possessed impeccable religious credentials but failed to practice compassion.

The Pharisee prayed. The tax collector prayed. Only one went home justified (Lk. 18:9-14).

The priest saw the wounded man. The Levite saw the wounded man. The Samaritan stopped. Only one became the neighbor (Lk. 10:25-37). The religious people knew the rules. The Samaritan knew love.

Jesus repeatedly placed the same question before us: What will you do with the person in front of you? That is why Matthew 25 remains so uncomfortable: “I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”

Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not ask whether we had the correct liturgical preferences, whether we belonged to the correct denomination, or whether we could explain the Trinity. He asks whether we recognized him in the vulnerable person standing before us. And that brings us back to John.

John put his faith in action, and he understood that truth has consequences.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

That childhood image of John’s head on a platter raises the question that philosophers, theologians, and grieving parents have asked for centuries: Why do bad things happen to good people?

Harold Kushner famously explored that question in his 1981 book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The question has never gone away.

If anything, our current moment seems determined to ask it again and again. Good people lose jobs. Immigrants are separated from families. Children grow up frightened by violence. People who speak inconvenient truths face retaliation. Communities lose resources. Families struggle to afford housing, health care and groceries. The U.S./Israel war on Iran is now in its sixth month, with thousands of deaths across the region, worldwide economic disruption, and no clear end in sight.

These are not merely political stories. They are human stories.

Behind every statistic is someone’s parent, child, spouse or friend. Somebody who had plans for tomorrow. Somebody who expected to grow old. Somebody whose name God knows.

The temptation is to become numb.

John the Baptist exhorts us not to become numb, and Wayne Dyer tells us not to surrender our inner lives to fear, resentment, and destructive patterns. Jesus tells us to love.

And somewhere in the intersection of those three voices lies an extraordinary challenge: Do not allow the cruelty of the world to determine the kind of person you become!

What Does Christ-likeness Look Like in 2026?

Perhaps the most radical thing we can do right now is to refuse the temptation to become what we oppose. We do not have to answer hatred with hatred. We do not have to dehumanize those who dehumanize others. We need not lie about those who lie. We need not show ourselves to be vengeful toward those who seek revenge.

That does not mean that we should be passive. We should not. John was not passive. Jesus was not passive. Neither was Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Óscar Romero or Hélder Câmara, whom we remembered earlier this week.

Christ-like does not mean quietly accepting injustice. It means confronting injustice without surrendering our souls to it.

There is a difference—and it is an extraordinary difference.

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Ways to Be More Christ-Like Today

• Speak one uncomfortable truth. Not cruelly. Not arrogantly. But honestly. Ask where silence might be protecting injustice.

• Defend someone who is being scapegoated. When an immigrant, LGBTQ+ person, poor person, person with a disability, or political minority becomes the target of public contempt, refuse to join the crowd.

• Replace one argument with an act of love. You do not have to win every social media debate. Sometimes the most Christ-like response is to call someone, bring them dinner, or simply listen.

• Examine your own “erroneous zones.” What fear, resentment, prejudice, or inherited assumption keeps you from becoming the person God created you to be?

• Practice courageous compassion. Matthew 25 does not tell us merely to feel compassion. It tells us to feed, welcome, clothe, visit and accompany.

• Support people who speak truth to power. Subscribe to an independent journalist. Donate to a legal organization. Support a local organizer. Encourage a teacher, journalist, activist, or public servant who refuses to surrender integrity.

• Remember that prophetic courage requires community. John had disciples. Jesus had disciples. None of us is called to carry the work of justice alone.

The Head on the Platter

I have spent most of my life surrounded by books.

Seven degrees later, with 50+ published books and with roughly 2,000 books lining the walls of my home office, I remain that kid who walked out of the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library with yet another armful of possibilities. Yet I sometimes wonder whether that illustrated Bible taught me something before I had the vocabulary to understand it.

The head on the platter was not simply a gruesome picture. It was a warning: Truth can cost us. Prophetic courage can cost us. Love can cost us. Justice can cost us.

And sometimes the people who most faithfully embody God’s love are not the ones who look most successful by the world’s standards. John the Baptist lost his life. So did Jesus. Yet neither lost his purpose. That is the distinction I carry with me.

We cannot always control what happens to us. We cannot guarantee that good people will be protected from suffering. We cannot promise that truth will triumph on our preferred timetable—but we can decide what kind of people we will become in the midst of it.

We can choose extraordinary courage over comfortable silence, extraordinary compassion over indifference, and extraordinary love over tribalism. And perhaps most importantly, we can choose to become more Christ-like, rather than merely more loudly Christian.

That little boy in rural Ohio stared at a man’s head on a platter and wondered why someone would do such a thing: why he would risk his life speaking truth to power, and why others would demand his life to silence him. All these decades later, I think I am finally beginning to understand the answer: Prophetic love threatens every system that depends upon fear.

And that is precisely why the world still needs prophets!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Where is God asking me to speak truth, rather than remain comfortably silent?

• Have I ever confused being “Christian” with actually being Christ-like? What would change if I measured my discipleship by my actions, rather than my identity?

• Who is being treated as disposable in my community, and what might Jesus be asking me to do about it?

• What is one of my own “erroneous zones”—a fear, resentment, prejudice or assumption—that keeps me from more freely loving?

• When I encounter political or religious disagreement, do I respond in a way that resembles Jesus?

• Whose suffering have I become numb to because I encounter it so frequently in the news?

• Where might courageous compassion require me to take a risk?

• If I were remembered after my death for one quality of Christ-like love, what would I hope that quality would be?

Let Us Pray

God of prophets and of the prophets’ people,

you called John the Baptist to speak truth in the presence of power.

Give us his courage.

When silence would be easier, give us voices.

When fear would be safer, give us faith.

When cruelty surrounds us, keep our hearts tender.

When injustice becomes ordinary, keep our consciences awake.

When those in power demand our loyalty, remind us that our first loyalty belongs to you and to your reign of justice, mercy and peace.

Teach us the wisdom to recognize our own erroneous zones.

Free us from the fears that imprison us, the resentments that diminish us, and the prejudices that diminish others.

Make us not merely people who call ourselves Christian, but people who actually live like Christ.

May we feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, visit the lonely, defend the vulnerable, speak truth to power, generously forgive, and extravagantly love.

And when the world tells us that kindness is weakness, remind us that the cross itself reveals the extraordinary power of love.

Give us the courage of John.

Give us the compassion of Jesus.

Give us the openness to wisdom that we can find even in unexpected teachers.

And when we encounter our own metaphorical “head on the platter,” remind us that faithfulness is never measured solely by worldly success.

May our lives proclaim, in word and deed:

Love is stronger than fear.
Truth is stronger than power.
And Christ is still calling us to become more like Christ.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

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Yesterday, somewhere between Houston and the Matagorda coast, I pulled off the highway to marvel at a cotton field. Finding it both breathtakingly beautiful and breathtakingly tragic, my mind bent toward St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), whom we remember today. Like the complicated history of cotton fields here in the South, the Doctor of Grace and founder of Pope Leo XIV’s religious community reminds us just how complicated human beings can be, how ideas can become embedded in institutions, and how even extraordinary theological insight can carry consequences—for good or for bad—that last for centuries.

Fields of Beauty—and Pain

I admit I did a double-take yesterday while driving through the coastal plains south of Houston. At first glance, the first such field I encountered looked almost as though it had been dusted with snow. Then I realized what I was seeing: cotton!

After more than 26 years in Texas, I was finally seeing the cotton fields I have heard about for decades.

At Holy Family, Father Roy occasionally tells stories about picking cotton as a child. I have never forgotten those stories. He suggests that picking cotton is brutally hard on the fingers. I suspect that is an understatement.

So as I surveyed those expansive, beautiful white fields yesterday, I pictured the young Father Roy, reaching into the plants and gathering the balls of cotton. Then I pictured generations of Black Texans and other laborers who performed that same backbreaking work—many of them enslaved, many more later trapped in systems of poverty and exploitation.

The field was beautiful. The history is not. That tension lingers with me.

It is difficult to look at a cotton field in Texas without remembering that slavery and cotton marched hand-in-hand across antebellum Texas. Plantations rapidly expanded during the 1850s, cotton dominated much of the eastern portion of the state by 1860, and enslaved people were brought from other Southern states to work the fields.

It is impossible to tell the story of Texas cotton without telling the story of Texas secession. Roughly 30 percent of Texans were enslaved in 1860, and the Texas Secession Convention subsequently wrote slavery explicitly into the state’s constitutional order, declaring the emancipation of enslaved people… illegal!

Then came the Civil War. And the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. And, yes, Texas’ resistance for nearly two and a half years to—in God’s words to Moses—“let my people go” (Ex. 5:1). Juneteenth celebrates this painfully delayed encounter with freedom on June 19, 1865.

A beautiful cotton field, then, can contain an entire theology of memory. Beauty. Suffering. Human labor. Human exploitation. Freedom proclaimed. Freedom delayed. And the uncomfortable truth that the things we inherit are not necessarily the things we should preserve.

That last thought brought me directly to Augustine.

The Saint Whose Theology We Inherited

August 28 is the feast of St. Augustine of Hippo.

When I was a freshman at St. Louis University, I read his Confessions and was fascinated by this complex man. Here was Augustine: a mischievous boy, a brilliant student, a rhetorician, a seeker, a lover, a father, a Manichaean, a philosopher, a Christian convert, a priest, a bishop, a theologian, and eventually one of the towering figures of Western Christianity.

He was hardly boring. He was also hardly uncomplicated.

Augustine lived with a woman for approximately fourteen years and fathered a son, Adeodatus. Before his conversion, he spent roughly nine years associated with Manichaeism, a dualistic religious movement that profoundly influenced the intellectual environment in which he developed.

His Confessions famously begins with his restless longing for God: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” That sentence has survived for seventeen centuries because it speaks beautifully to something deeply human.

Augustine also developed theological ideas that would profoundly shape Western Christianity’s understanding of sexuality, sin and the human body. His doctrine of original sin became increasingly connected to his understanding of the transmission of sin through human generation. He argued that sexual relations are an especially visible manifestation of humanity’s fallen condition.

And here is where I find myself looking at that cotton field again. Because Augustine teaches us something extraordinarily important: Good things can come from complicated histories.

And the reverse is also true: Complicated consequences can emerge from ideas articulated by extraordinarily gifted people.

When Theology Becomes Part of the Soil

Augustine’s theology of original sin helped shape Western Christianity’s understanding of baptism. He explicitly argued that infants should be baptized because they, too, were affected by original sin.

That theological trajectory eventually contributed to centuries of anxiety about the fate of unbaptized infants and to the development of the concept of limbo—a theological speculation that was never actually defined as dogma and that today has largely disappeared from Catholic theological consciousness. The historical evidence also reminds us that some Greek Christian thinkers approached the question very differently, emphasizing the innocence of infants and imagining an intermediate state without punishment.

That difference between East and West fascinates me—because perhaps the Church occasionally needs to remember that Christianity has never possessed only one theological imagination.

We have inherited multiple Christian traditions. Multiple ways of reading Scripture. Multiple understandings of sin. Multiple understandings of salvation. Multiple ways of understanding the human body. And yet Western Christianity has too often treated one particular historical trajectory as though it were the only possible expression of Christianity!

That is dangerous.

The cotton field offers a useful analogy: Cotton is not inherently evil, nor does its beauty erase the evil that surrounded its production. Likewise, Augustine does not become worthless because some of his theology troubles us. His sanctity does not require us to pretend that every theological conclusion he reached was perfect.

Saints are not infallible. That may be one of the most liberating things we can say about saints!

Even Saints Leave Complicated Footprints

I sometimes wonder what would happen if we stopped treating saints as plaster statues and started treating them as human beings. Augustine the deeply human person is way more interesting than Augustine the plaster saint!

His mother, Monica, whom we celebrated yesterday, prayed for years for the conversion of her son. She watched him pursue intellectual and sexual paths that distressed her. She eventually watched him become a Christian, priest, bishop and theologian. Imagine the conversations those two must have had! Imagine the tears. Imagine the arguments. Imagine the extraordinary love.

And imagine Monica living long enough to see that the son who once caused her anguish became one of Christianity’s most influential thinkers.

Yet even after his conversion, Augustine remained a product of his time. He inherited assumptions about women that modern Christians rightly find troubling. Contemporary scholarship notes that he accepted significant assumptions about women’s subordination and developed a theology of sexuality that was shaped in part by his struggles with desire and his intellectual battles with Manichaeism and Pelagianism.

This is where we have something important to learn. We should not be afraid of complexity. We should not need our saints to agree with us about everything. We need not be 21st-century progressives to appreciate Augustine.

And we should not need him to be perfect before we can critique him.

Perhaps holiness is not the absence of contradiction. Perhaps holiness is the willingness to keep seeking God in the midst of contradiction. Augustine himself might have appreciated that.

After all, the Confessions is not the autobiography of a man claiming that he always got everything right. It is the autobiography of a man trying to understand what God was doing with a life that was anything but simple.

From Augustine to Jansenism—and from Jansenism to Us

There is another part of Augustine’s legacy that particularly interests me as an Inclusive/Independent Catholic priest.

Augustine’s theology became enormously influential in later controversies over grace, free will, and human sinfulness. Centuries later, Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) and the Jansenist movement emphasized Augustine’s theology so strongly that conflict with the Roman Catholic establishment became inevitable. The Jesuits became some of Jansenism’s fiercest opponents.

And here we encounter another recurring problem in Christian history: We take a theological insight, absolutize it, build an institution around it, and then begin persecuting people who understand the insight differently.

Does that sound familiar? It should. We have been doing it for centuries! Catholics versus Protestants. Catholics versus Jansenists. Catholics versus Catholics. Conservatives versus progressives. Traditionalists versus reformers. Orthodox versus heretics. And eventually, in our own political culture, Democrat versus Republican, liberal versus conservative, red versus blue.

We keep taking human beings, infinitely more complicated than any label, and squeezing them into categories small enough to hate.

Jesus had a different strategy: “Love your enemies.” “Blessed are the peacemakers.” “Judge not, so that you may not be judged.” “Whatever you did for one of the least of these…you did for me.”

Paul went even further: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

That is an extraordinary vision—and it is a vision we repeatedly fail to live.

The Cotton Field and the Political Field

As I drove among the cotton fields yesterday, I kept thinking about how easily we inherit categories. We inherit racial, theological and political categories. We inherit assumptions about who is deserving and who is not. We inherit ideas about whose bodies are acceptable. We inherit ideas about whose relationships are acceptable. We inherit ideas about who belongs. And then we baptize those inherited assumptions in religious language. That should frighten us.

Christianity has repeatedly demonstrated how easily theology can become a tool of power. We saw it when Christians defended slavery, segregation, and the subordination of women. We saw it when Christians condemned LGBTQ people and justified colonialism. And we see it whenever Christians invoke God’s name to sanctify political violence.

The danger is not that we take theology seriously. The danger is that we take our theological interpretations so seriously that we stop listening for God.

That is precisely why Augustine can be so useful. He gives us permission to think deeply, to wrestle, and to admit that we might be wrong. And perhaps most importantly, he gives us permission to recognize that theology is never created in a vacuum. It emerges from particular people living in particular cultures at particular moments in history.

We Still Cultivate Inherited Fields

That lesson feels especially urgent in this very unordinary U.S. moment. We are watching political leaders resurrect old divisions, old fears, and old grievances. We are watching nationalism compete with solidarity. We are watching economic anxiety and racial anxiety. We are watching immigration become a proxy for questions about who belongs. We are watching religious language become political weaponry. And we are watching the Trump administration exert enormous economic and military power abroad.

The U.S. remains involved in an increasingly prolonged conflict with Iran. Tensions sharply escalated this week with Canada, our longtime neighbor and ally. Meanwhile, the administration continues to intensify economic pressure on Cuba.

Whatever our political loyalties, Christians should be asking an extraordinarily simple question: What happens to human beings when power becomes more important than people?

That is the question Augustine’s theology should ultimately lead us toward. Not merely, Who is right? But: Who is suffering? Not merely, Which side won? But: Who has been forgotten? Not merely, Whose doctrine is orthodox? But: Does our doctrine produce love?

Jesus gave us a rather practical test: “By their fruits you will know them” (Mt. 7:16).

Perhaps that is our test for theology, too. If a theology produces extraordinary compassion, perhaps we should listen. If it produces extraordinary courage on behalf of the marginalized, perhaps we should listen. If it produces humility, reconciliation and justice, perhaps we should listen.

But when theology produces hatred, humiliation, exclusion and violence, perhaps we should pause—even when the theology comes with centuries of tradition behind it.

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Ways to Cultivate a Different Field

We do not need to abandon tradition. We need to learn how to lovingly interrogate tradition. Here are five places to begin:

• Critically read Augustine. Pick up the Confessions, but read it alongside contemporary scholarship. Allow yourself to admire his spiritual insight while questioning his anthropology and sexual theology.

• Learn the history beneath the landscape. The next time you drive past or imagine a cotton field, pause. Ask whose labor created the wealth associated with that landscape. Remember the people whose names history too often forgets.

• Examine one inherited belief. Choose a belief about sexuality, gender, race, immigration, poverty or salvation that you inherited from your religious tradition. Ask: Where did this belief come from? What Scripture supports it? What Scripture challenges it? Who benefits from it? Who suffers because of it?

• Practice theological humility. Replace “The Church has always taught…” with the more honest question, “What has the Church taught, when, why, and with what consequences?”

• Turn theology into love. As James reminds us, faith without works is dead. Find one person who has been pushed to the margins by religious teaching and make sure that person experiences Christianity not as condemnation, but as extraordinary welcome.

When I See Cotton Again

As I head back to Austin this afternoon, I suspect that I may never again drive past a Texas cotton field quite the same way.

I will see the extraordinary beauty of those white blossoms, but I will also see Father Roy’s hands. I will see the hands of enslaved people who picked cotton because they were forced to do so. I will see generations of laborers whose names rarely appeared in the history books. I will see a state that once defended slavery in its constitution and then waited 2.5 years to allow enslaved people to go free.

And perhaps I will see Augustine there, too. Not standing triumphantly above the field as though he had figured everything out, but standing somewhere within it. A brilliant, restless, complicated human being whose ideas helped shape the field in which Christianity would grow for centuries.

That, perhaps, is the lesson I most need from St. Augustine today: We are all cultivating fields we did not plant. Some of what we inherited is beautiful. Some of it is painful. Some of it needs to be harvested and brought into the grain silo. Some of it needs to be uprooted and thrown into the furnace. And some of it still needs to be transformed.

Each of us inherits a field, and each of us must choose what we will grow in it!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• What beautiful things in my life contain histories that are more complicated than I have acknowledged?

• Which theological beliefs have I inherited without ever seriously examining their origins?

• Where might I be confusing my interpretation of Christianity with Christianity itself?

• What have I learned from Augustine that I want to preserve?

• What have I inherited from Augustine that I believe needs to be reconsidered?

• Where have I allowed political, religious or cultural categories to make it easier for me to judge another human being?

• Whose suffering has become so familiar to me that I no longer really see it?

• What would it mean for me to cultivate a field of extraordinary love, rather than a field of inherited division?

Let Us Pray

God of Augustine, Monica and all restless hearts,

You have never been afraid of complicated people.

You called Augustine through his questions, his desires, his mistakes, and his brilliance. You received Monica’s tears and transformed them into extraordinary love. You have worked through imperfect people, imperfect institutions, and imperfect theologies throughout the history of your Church.

Teach us to inherit wisdom without becoming prisoners of our inheritance.

Give us courage to question what needs to be questioned, humility to admit what we do not know, and grace to recognize your presence even where we least expect it.

When we encounter beautiful things with painful histories, help us neither to romanticize the beauty nor to ignore the pain.

When we encounter saints whose lives and teachings trouble us, help us neither to dismiss them nor to idolize them.

When we encounter political opponents, strangers, immigrants, prisoners, the poor, and those whose lives challenge our assumptions, help us remember the words of Jesus: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these…you did for me.”

And when we encounter the fields of our own lives—fields planted by those who came before us—give us the extraordinary courage to decide what should be cultivated, what should be uprooted, and what new seeds need to be planted.

May our theology produce love. May our faith produce justice. May our traditions produce freedom. And may the fields we leave behind be more beautiful—and more humane—than the fields we inherited.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

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Act today: Use promo code PERFECT to receive 25% off Father Ricky’s new book, Toward a More Perfect Communion, at paulistpress.com!

On a week like this, I am visiting more than 60 Texas public school districts: north toward Fort Worth earlier in the week and south of Houston today and tomorrow. That means I see a lot of billboards.

Most disappear into the visual blur. I do not linger over the endless advertisements for personal-injury attorneys or fast-food restaurants. I admit that Buc-ee’s billboards occasionally amuse me. I once counted 22 of them in an 80-mile stretch of highway!

As a priest, however, I am admittedly triggered by the 83 FOR TRUTH billboards, with their attacks on science, their promotion of creationism, and their claims that “real Christians obey Jesus’ teachings.” Let that last phrase sit for a moment in the United States of 2026.

But yesterday, a billboard in Georgetown stopped me cold.

“Texans, Democrats now support COMMUNISM. Republicans don’t.”

Oh. My. God. I struggle to recall another billboard that so efficiently reduces political discourse to a single emotionally-loaded word.

And perhaps that is precisely why the saints and spiritual teachers we remember today have something to teach us.

When a Word Becomes a Weapon

Let’s begin with the obvious: Communism is a powerful word in American political rhetoric.

For generations, the word has carried the weight of the Cold War, Joseph McCarthy, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the fear of losing both political freedom and economic liberty. It is a word that can still cause many Americans to stop thinking and start reacting. That makes it an extraordinarily useful political weapon.

As the 2026 midterm elections approach, we will increasingly hear political rhetoric that attempts to associate progressive policies, Democratic candidates, and Democratic socialism with radical ideologies. Whether the policy under discussion involves healthcare, housing, taxation, labor rights or social programs, the label can become a substitute for actually discussing the policy.

It reminds me of The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word…” Perhaps the problem is that we sometimes use words not to communicate but to end communication!

The billboard does not invite a conversation about what Democrats actually propose. It does not ask whether a particular healthcare policy is effective. It does not examine the merits of a particular tax proposal. It simply screams: Communism! Conversation over.

Except that Christians should know better.

• Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the people who win arguments.” He said, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Mt. 5:9).

• He told us to love our enemies (Mt. 5:44).

• He commanded us to remove the log from our own eye before attempting to remove the splinter from someone else’s (Mt. 7:3-5).

• And when asked what matters most, Jesus pointed to the love of God and the love of neighbor (Mt. 22:37-40).

None of that means Christians must abandon political convictions. Quite the opposite. Our faith should make us more engaged with questions of justice, poverty, healthcare, education, immigration, war and economic inequality.

But perhaps Christianity requires us to argue about policies without turning our political opponents into—wait for it—monsters.

Hélder Câmara: Ask the Question Behind the Question

That is where Hélder Pessoa Câmara (1909-1999) enters our reflection. The Brazilian archbishop, who died on this date, became an extraordinary advocate for the poor, human rights and democracy during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985).

His most famous observation provides a devastatingly simple lesson: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”

There is a profound distinction here. Charity asks, “How can I help this person?” Justice also asks, “Why does this person need help in the first place?” Catholic Social Teaching has long insisted that we need both.

Jesus certainly fed the hungry. But Jesus also challenged the systems and assumptions that left people hungry. He healed the sick. He welcomed outsiders. He confronted religious hypocrisy. He overturned tables in the Temple. He proclaimed liberty to captives and good news to the poor (Lk. 4:18). And Matthew 25 leaves us little room for theological gymnastics: “I was hungry and you gave me food… I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Câmara understood something that remains profoundly relevant in 2026: caring for the poor without asking why poverty exists can become a way of preserving the very structures that produce poverty. The Gospel demands more of us!

It challenges us to feed the hungry and to ask why they are hungry.

To welcome the unhoused and to ask why housing has become inaccessible.

To care for the uninsured and to ask why healthcare can bankrupt a family.

To welcome migrants and to ask why people are forced to leave home in the first place.

That is not communism. That is… Christian moral inquiry!

St. Monica: Prayer Is Not Passivity

Then there is St. Monica (c. 331-387). Her life offers a very different lesson: Sometimes transformation takes much longer than we want.

Monica prayed for years for her son Augustine. She prayed through his wandering. She prayed through his choices. She prayed through her own frustration. And eventually he “saw the light.” The woman who prayed for Augustine became the mother of one of Christianity’s greatest theologians!

I find something enormously comforting about Monica in our present moment. We live in an age when we want instant results. We expect elections to fix everything. We expect viral posts to change minds. We expect the perfect argument to defeat misinformation. We expect one clever Saturday Night Live sketch or one devastating The Daily Show monologue to make everyone suddenly understand. Monica reminds us that transformation is often painfully slow.

The prophet Isaiah tells us that God’s word accomplishes its purpose (Is. 55:11). Paul reminds us that we may plant and water, but “God gives the growth” (1Cor. 3:6).

Prayer, however, is not passivity. Monica prayed and persisted. She did not simply sit in her house waiting for Augustine to change. She followed him. She pleaded. She endured. She loved. She remained faithful.

Perhaps we need a little more “Monica spirituality.” Pray. Persist. Organize. Vote. Teach. Speak. Serve. And then pray again.

Don Miguel Ruiz: Be Careful With Your Words

Finally, there is Miguel Ángel Ruiz Macías (1952-), better known as Don Miguel Ruiz, whose birthday we celebrate today.

When I served as pastor of Cristo Rey Catholic Church, Ruiz’s writings seemed to be everywhere among the Mexican community. I attended one of his presentations and book signings here in Austin. Because I was serving a largely Mexican parish, I bought his books and leafed through them myself.

His Four Agreements became extraordinarily popular because they offer deceptively simple wisdom:

• Be impeccable with your word.

• Don’t take anything personally.

• Don’t make assumptions.

• Always do your best.

I cannot imagine a more useful spiritual prescription for our political moment!

Be impeccable with your word. That means we should be extraordinarily careful before calling our political opponents communists, fascists, Nazis, traitors, or enemies of America.

Don’t make assumptions. A person who supports universal healthcare is not necessarily a communist. A person who supports reproductive freedom is not necessarily anti-Catholic. A person who supports stronger immigration protections is not necessarily opposed to national sovereignty. A person who favors progressive taxation is not necessarily advocating the abolition of capitalism. And the reverse is equally important. A conservative Christian is not necessarily hateful. A Republican is not necessarily immoral or a pedophile protector. A person who disagrees with us is not necessarily our enemy.

Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” That command becomes particularly challenging when we begin to realize that our enemies may simply be our neighbors with whom we disagree.

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Ways to Practice Extraordinary Disagreement

We cannot control the billboards along the highway. We cannot control every political advertisement, social-media post or television talking head. But we can control how we respond.

• Refuse the lazy label. When someone uses a political caricature, ask what policy is actually being discussed.

• Ask the question behind the question. Follow Câmara’s example: Why are people poor? Why are people hungry? Why are people homeless? Why are people uninsured?

• Practice impeccable speech. Before reposting something, ask whether it is true, necessary and charitable.

• Refuse to dehumanize. Remember Genesis 1:27: the person on the other side of the political aisle is still created in God’s image.

• Pray like Monica. Pray for people with whom you disagree without turning prayer into a spiritual version of “Lord, please make them become more like me.”

• Act like Câmara. Do not allow prayer to become an excuse for inaction. Volunteer, organize, advocate and vote.

• Practice Ruiz’s fourth agreement. Do your best. None of us will save the nation alone, but each of us can contribute something extraordinary to its healing.

Perhaps We Need Fewer Billboards and More Bridges

That billboard message in Georgetown will eventually disappear. Another advertisement will replace it. As midterm elections approach, another political slogan will likely take its place. Another campaign will tell us: They are the problem, and we are the solution.

But Christianity offers us a radically different imagination. Monica reminds us that transformation may require extraordinary patience. Câmara reminds us that compassion must be joined to justice. Ruiz reminds us that our words have power. And Jesus reminds us that none of those virtues has meaning unless love remains at the center.

Perhaps that is the billboard I would rather see: LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR.

Not because everyone agrees with us. Not because everyone votes the way we do. Not because everyone deserves our affection. But because everyone bears the image of God.

The next time I drive past that Georgetown billboard, I know I will still cringe. But I hope I will also remember Monica, Câmara and Ruiz. And I hope I will remember that my Christian vocation is not to win every argument. It is to help build the kingdom of God.

And that kingdom will require something far more extraordinary than a clever political slogan. It will require us to love one another!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• When have I used a political label instead of engaging another person’s actual ideas?

• Where might I be making assumptions about people with whom I disagree?

• What social problem in my community needs me to ask Câmara’s question: “Why?”

• For whom do I need to pray with Monica’s extraordinary persistence?

• Which of Ruiz’s Four Agreements most challenges me right now?

• How might I practice extraordinary charity without abandoning my convictions?

• Where is God inviting me to move from prayer to action?

Let Us Pray

God of Monica, who patiently prayed;
God of Hélder Câmara, who demanded justice;
God of Miguel Ruiz, who reminds us of the power of our words;
and God of Jesus, who commands us to love even our enemies:

Teach us to speak truth without cruelty,
to pursue justice without hatred,
to pray without surrendering our responsibility,
and to disagree without forgetting the humanity of those who disagree with us.

When political language becomes a weapon,
make our words instruments of peace.

When poverty becomes invisible,
give us Câmara’s courage to ask why.

When transformation seems impossible,
give us Monica’s perseverance.

And when we are tempted to assume that we already possess the whole truth,
give us the humility to listen.

May our nation become less addicted to division
and more committed to the extraordinary work of reconciliation.

And may everything we say and do lead us closer to the kingdom Jesus proclaimed: a kingdom of justice, mercy, peace, and extraordinary love.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

Support Extraordinary Catholics!

Thank you for “liking,” restacking, or sharing these words with those who might need them!

Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768

Happy Women’s Equality Day!

I am willing to bet that Holy Family is the only Catholic community in Austin that marks this day and draws attention to the continued social sins committed against our sisters, daughters, and granddaughters.

Regretably, the Roman Catholic Church does not recognize how God calls our sisters to the ordained ministries of the Church: Apparently, for them, your chromosomes determine whether you “deserve” only six of the seven sacraments of the Church—or only five if you are a nun!

Meanwhile, U.S. women continue to encounter significant inequalities. Their median earnings are about 83% of men’s earnings. Although 2026 brings a record 55 women CEOs among Fortune 500 companies, that is still only…11%. And our string of 45 male U.S. presidents would rightly lead one to wonder just how deeply the sin of misogyny is woven into the fabric of this nation.

How intriguing, then, that today we remember two Marian images—Our Lady of Czestochowa and Our Lady of Balintawak—as well as William James, whose study of religious experience invites us to take seriously the experiences people claim to have of the divine. All on this day on which we celebrate Women’s Equality Day.

Perhaps the question is not merely Where is Mary appearing?

Perhaps the question is: Why are we so willing to listen to her while dismissing our sisters’ voices?

Two Marys—and Two Very Different Worlds

I cannot think of another day on which the Church and the wider Catholic tradition place two such striking Marian images before us.

Our Lady of Czestochowa, the famous Black Madonna of Poland, has become one of the world’s most recognizable Marian icons. Tradition attributes the image to St. Luke, although its actual history is way more complicated. The icon has nevertheless become profoundly associated with Polish identity, perseverance and faith.

I find the Black Madonna especially fascinating because Mary does not look like the sanitized, blue-eyed, European Mary that so often adorns U.S. Catholic churches. Instead, she is dark and scarred, looking as if she has endured something. And perhaps that is precisely why generations of people have found her compelling.

The Song of Songs gives us a woman who declares, “I am black and beautiful” (Song 1:5). Yet throughout Christian history, we have repeatedly tried to whitewash holiness. Mary keeps refusing to cooperate!

Then there is Our Lady of Balintawak, a Marian image particular to the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, the Philippine Independent Church. She appears in Filipino dress, while the pre-teen Christ Child appears in the uniform of a Katipunan revolutionary. The image emerged from the Philippine struggle for independence and became a symbol of liberation from foreign domination. That is quite a different Mary from the porcelain statue in the average U.S. church!

And therein lies a lesson: Mary is always encountered through culture.

Filipino Mary looks Filipino. Mexican Mary looks Mexican. Black Mary looks Black. European Mary looks European. Yet Catholics insist that these are somehow the same Mary. That paradox should humble us.

Mary Is Not a Photograph

Marian apparitions have fascinated me for decades.

I was raised in the shadow of Our Lady of Consolation, a Marian apparition connected to my Luxembourguish ancestors. As a teenager and young adult, I lived through the Catholic fascination with Medjugorje. As a young novice, I even met a Marian visionary, Barbara Matthias, who affectionately called me “cousin.”

What fascinates me is not simply whether an apparition happened exactly as someone describes it. It is what the apparition means.

Consider the extraordinary varieties of Mary: Guadalupe. Lourdes. Akita. Mount Carmel. Czestochowa. Fatima. Kibeho. Balintawak. Sorrows. Medjugorje. La Vang. Yankalilla. Perpetual Help. Donglu. Knock. Pilar. Help of Christians. Mercy. Grace. Consolation. Victory. Good Counsel. Prompt Succor. We could go on. And on.

The more irreverent might suggest that Barbie^® has nothing on Mary—and as one who grew up with Our Lady of Consolation, I can attest that her image in Carey, Ohio possesses a closet packed with stunning dresses that would make Barbie^® jealous!

These Marian images are not intended as photographic portraits of the same woman. Rather, each is a symbol, perhaps even a religious experience, filtered through human cultures, languages, histories, hopes and fears—which brings us to William James (1842-1910).

In his work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James was much less interested in religious institutions than in the actual experiences of individuals who believed themselves connected to the divine. He took those experiences seriously without pretending that every religious experience could automatically be proven true.

That distinction matters. We can respect someone’s experience without surrendering our critical faculties. We can also exercise critical faculties without demeaning the person who experienced something sacred.

Perhaps we could all learn something from that balance!

What If We Took Mary Seriously?

Here is where Women’s Equality Day becomes unexpectedly Marian.

Catholics have spent centuries saying extraordinary things about Mary. Queen of Heaven. Mother of God. Mother of the Church. Blessed among women.

The Magnificat places extraordinary words in her mouth: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly” (Lk. 1:52). Yet we have constructed churches in which women can be powerful everywhere except where power is formally conferred. That contradiction should trouble us.

The authors of our Christian scriptures repeatedly disrupted first-century gender expectations.

• Jesus spoke publicly with the Samaritan woman (Jn. 4) and welcomed women among his disciples (Lk. 8:1-3).

• Mary of Magdala became the first witness to the resurrection (Jn. 20:11-18).

• Priscilla taught Apollos (Acts 18:26).

• Paul named Phoebe a deacon and benefactor (Rom. 16:1-2).

And then Christianity spent over nineteen centuries explaining why the voices of women could be trusted to announce the Resurrection…but not to exercise sacramental leadership.

I know: Something does not quite add up. Frankly, it smells of misogyny.

Even Mary of Magdala’s proclamation—“I have seen the Lord!”—was initially met with disbelief (Jn. 20:18). Women’s Equality Day challenges us to ask whether we still disbelieve our sisters’ full equality in church and society.

When Texas Girls Have Less Freedom Than Their Mothers

Here in Texas, the question becomes painfully concrete. Like many places in the U.S., girls are growing up in a political environment in which their bodily autonomy is more restricted than that of their mothers and grandmothers. Women continue to encounter economic disparities, underrepresentation in positions of power, and institutional barriers that men simply do not experience in the same way. And our nation has still never elected a woman president.

Meanwhile, we have become remarkably comfortable with a strange theological contradiction: We can exalt Mary while diminishing women.

We can crown her. We can carry her statue through the streets. We can build shrines to her. We can call her Queen. All while ignoring the voices and vocations of the women standing beside us.

The Filipino image of Balintawak gives us a Mary who cries “Liberty!” The Magnificat gives us a Mary who speaks about overturning unjust structures. Czestochowa gives us a scarred Mary who embodies perseverance. And the women of our own communities continue to tell us where dignity is denied.

Maybe the problem is not that Mary has stopped appearing. Sadly, the problem is that we, as a church and society, have stopped listening.

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Ways to Practice Extraordinary Equality

• Listen to women whose experiences differ from your own. Do not immediately explain, correct, or theologize their experiences. Listen first.

• Support women exercising leadership. In your parish, workplace, school and community, make room for women’s voices where decisions actually happen.

• Learn the stories of women saints and prophets. Read Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Dorothy Day, and the women disciples of the Gospels.

• Challenge casual misogyny. Sexist jokes, dismissive comments, and assumptions about women’s competence are not harmless when they become cultural habits.

• Advocate for genuine equality. Salary equity, educational opportunity, bodily autonomy, protection from violence, and access to leadership are not merely political questions. They are questions of human dignity.

• Let women interpret Mary. Ask women in your community what Mary means to them. You may discover a Mary you have never encountered.

Perhaps Mary Has Been Speaking All Along

Yesterday I wrote about listening to the voices of people who challenge us. Today the Church gives us an extraordinary visual lesson in what happens when we actually do listen: Mary appears differently in Poland, differently in the Philippines, and differently in countless cultures around the world.

Perhaps that is not a problem. Perhaps it is the point.

God does not seem particularly interested in speaking through only one culture, one language, one gender, or one institution. The God whom Scripture calls the God of all creation keeps breaking through our carefully constructed boundaries.

And so I return to the women of Holy Family—and to women everywhere—who have heard themselves called by God.

If Mary can be a Black Polish mother, a Filipino revolutionary, a Mexican mestiza, a French visionary, or an Asian Madonna, perhaps our faith can also make room for women who hear God’s call in ways our institutions have not yet learned to recognize.

Mary does not need us merely to venerate her. She needs us to listen.

And perhaps, on this Women’s Equality Day, the most Marian thing we can do is stand in solidarity with all our sisters and actively work for their full equality in our churches, in our society, and in our world!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Whose voice have I dismissed because it challenged my assumptions?

• What might Mary look like if she appeared in my own cultural context today?

• Do I genuinely believe that women can exercise every spiritual gift God gives them?

• Where do I see women experiencing inequality in community, church or workplace?

• What might I learn from the women whose religious experiences differ from mine?

• Where might God be speaking through someone I have been reluctant to hear?

• What would genuine gender equality look like in my circles of influence?

Let Us Pray

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

God chose you, a woman, to bear God’s Son,
God chose you, a woman, to proclaim God’s greatness,
God chose you, a woman, to stand beneath the cross,
and God chose a woman, Mary of Magdala, to announce the Resurrection.

Teach us to listen.

When we exalt women in words but diminish them in practice, forgive us.

When we celebrate you while silencing your daughters, challenge us.

When we mistake our cultural image of holiness for holiness itself, broaden our vision.

Give us extraordinary courage to recognize God’s Spirit wherever it speaks, extraordinary humility to listen when we are challenged, and extraordinary love to build a Church and a nation in which every person can flourish.

Mary, Mother of God, Mother of the Church and woman of extraordinary courage, pray for us.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

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With other things on my mind, I don’t tend to engage rideshare drivers. So it was not unusual for me on Sunday evening to hop into my rideshare, open my laptop, and immediately start editing yesterday’s Substack. Then my ride-long conversation with my driver—we’ll call him Abel—began simply enough with my recitation of the exact location where I hoped to arrive. Abel glanced at me in the rearview mirror with a look of unknowing. I sensed a language barrier.

Not wanting to presume which languages he communicates in most easily, I hesitated. Then his GPS rescued us, suddenly telling him where to turn—in Spanish. I took my cue.

“¿De dónde vienes?” Where are you from?

“Cuba.”

And just like that, my Substack remained unedited while my geopolitical education continued.

Like Abel, three very different voices remembered by the Church today—St. Louis IX, St. Joseph Calasanz, and Hubert Augustus Rogers—might also shed light on world events today. Living in radically different circumstances, they confronted questions of power, poverty, education, race, and human dignity. And they remind us that Christianity cannot be reduced to what we believe. It is also about what we do with the power entrusted to us.

“Hoy en Cuba viven un poquito mejor…”

Abel told me that when he lived in Cuba, he earned approximately $90 a month. Yet, he said, prices are comparable to what we encounter here in the U.S.

Some time ago, he left Cuba, traveling first to Nicaragua, then through Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico before crossing into the U.S. He sought asylum and became a legal resident under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a longstanding federal law that provides a special path to permanent residence for eligible Cuban nationals.

Today, Abel drives for a rideshare service in Austin to support his wife and two daughters, ages 11 and 7, who remain in Cuba. That detail became central to his description of life there. “Hoy en Cuba, los que tienen familia aquí viven un poquito mejor.” Those who have family outside Cuba live a little better. The others? He described them as “las personas que no tienen apoyo económico.” People who have no economic support.

That is a sobering definition of poverty: not simply having little money but having no one who can help you when the system around you begins to collapse.

Abel shared that teachers have left classrooms because agricultural work can provide a more stable income than the Cuban government. He said some schools have closed because of food shortages. Doctors continue working, but the lack of medicines severely compromises their ability to treat patients.

I cannot independently verify every detail of Abel’s personal account, but his broader description comes amid a genuine and severe economic and humanitarian crisis in Cuba. The U.S. has maintained extensive sanctions against Cuba for decades, and the Trump administration expanded sanctions again in 2026, including measures affecting energy, metals and mining, financial services, and other sectors.

At the same time, Cuba’s own government has made profound economic and political choices that have contributed to the island’s problems.

Both realities can be true.

That is an important lesson for Christians living in a world that increasingly demands that we choose one explanation, one villain, and one talking point. Reality is usually more complicated!

St. Louis: What Does Power Owe the Powerless?

Today we remember St. Louis, King of France (1214-1270), who was crowned as a child and later became known for his commitment to justice, peace, and the welfare of the poor.

St. Louis—yes, the namesake of the Missouri city—attempted to curb private warfare. He promoted judicial reforms. He fed and housed people experiencing poverty. He negotiated peace.

In other words, Louis understood something that our political culture frequently forgets: Power is not ownership. Power is stewardship.

If I possess authority, the question is not simply, What can I make people do? The Christian question is, What am I responsible for because I possess this authority?

That applies to presidents and prime ministers. It applies to governors and legislators. It applies to bishops and pastors. It applies to school board members and CEOs. It applies to teachers and parents. And, inconveniently, it applies to us.

Jesus said, “The one who wants to be first must be servant of all” (Mk. 9:35). That is a radically different political philosophy from “might makes right”!

Abel bluntly described Cuba’s political system: “We don’t elect our presidents. They’re imposed or inherited.” He spoke of Fidel Castro, then his brother Raúl, and then the current government.

“Al final la política es mucho blah blah blah,” he concluded. “Hablan y no actúan.” Politics is a lot of “blah blah blah”: Politicians talk and don’t act. His words could have been uttered about U.S. politicians by anyone sitting in almost any American diner.

The temptation to talk about public service while actually pursuing power is not uniquely Cuban. Nor is it uniquely American.

St. Louis asks a more difficult question: Who benefits from the power we have been given—and who pays its price?

Calasanz: What Happens When We Educate the Poor

St. Joseph Calasanz (1556-1648) offers another perspective. In 17th-century Rome, Calasanz encountered children who were poor, neglected, and excluded from educational opportunities. In 1597, he opened a free school for poor children, an institution that became the foundation of the Piarist educational movement.

He understood something extraordinarily important: Education is not charity. Education is liberation.

A child who cannot read, calculate, or distinguish truth from propaganda is vulnerable. A child denied a quality education is more easily controlled by whoever possesses money, power or information.

Calasanz therefore didn’t merely teach children religious doctrine. He sought to provide them with the intellectual and human formation necessary to fully participate in society. The Piarist tradition continues to emphasize education, particularly for children and young people who are poor or marginalized.

As someone who has spent much of my ministry and professional life around education, I find Calasanz especially compelling. Abel spoke about Cuban teachers leaving the classroom because they cannot afford to live. What happens to a society when teachers cannot afford to teach? What happens when schools close? What happens when children inherit poverty, rather than opportunity? And what happens when we allow education—whether in Cuba, Texas, or anywhere else—to become primarily a commodity, rather than a public good?

Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn. 10:10). That sounds a lot like the purpose of education!

Hubert Augustus Rogers: Who Gets to Lead?

Then there is Hubert Augustus Rogers (1887-1976), whose story may be the least familiar to many of us. Rogers, a Black man born in the Dutch West Indies, became the third primate of the North American Old Roman Catholic Church in 1958. He led the church during the turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement, including a period when racial attacks were directed against him: His church had elected a Black man to lead a predominantly White Independent Catholic jurisdiction!

That matters. Because the question of who gets to lead is never merely about titles. It is about whose voice we consider credible. Whose experience we believe. Whose suffering we notice. Whose leadership we imagine as legitimate.

Abel’s voice matters. He was never elected to anything, does not teach at a university, and wasn’t pretending to be a geopolitical expert. He was simply the person driving my rideshare who spoke from his own lived experience. And perhaps that is precisely the point.

The Gospel repeatedly puts people whom society overlooks at the center of the story.

• The Samaritan becomes the model of neighborliness.

• The widow becomes an example of generosity and persistence.

• The child becomes an image of greatness and closeness to God.

• The immigrant, stranger and prisoner become places where we encounter Christ.

“Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Mt. 25:40).

Sometimes Christ teaches us from the pulpit—and sometimes Christ teaches us from the driver’s seat of a rideshare!

The Neighborhood Bully?

Abel told me that Cuba needs a “limpieza general del gobierno”—a general cleansing of its government. He also said the U.S. needs to invest in Cuba. He described beaches that are closed, hotels that are shuttered, tourism that has collapsed, and increasing theft and violence.

His conclusion was haunting: “En Cuba hay cambio, pero para atrás. El futuro nos está alejando. Muy lejos del futuro estamos.” There is change in Cuba, but it is backward. The future is moving farther away from us. We are very far from the future.

Those words deserve to sit with us.

The U.S. has legitimate interests in Cuba. Cuba’s government has a legitimate responsibility for the welfare of its own people. Human rights matter. Political freedom matters. Economic freedom matters. National security matters.

But so does the question Jesus asks us to ask whenever power is exercised: What is happening to the human beings caught in the middle?

Recent U.S. policy has intensified economic pressure on Cuba. The Treasury Department says the 2026 sanctions are intended to target people and entities associated with repression, corruption, and threats to U.S. national security. Critics argue that broader economic pressure also harms ordinary Cubans. Recent reporting has linked our nations’ pressure campaign to fuel shortages, blackouts, and severe disruptions to public services.

I do not pretend for a moment that a rideshare conversation can settle any of those questions, but it does something more important: It puts a human face on them.

That is what Christianity does. It takes an abstraction—immigration policy, sanctions, socialism, capitalism, national security, regime change—and reminds us that behind every abstraction are people. Mothers. Children. Teachers. Doctors. Farmers. Grandparents. Families separated by borders. People like Abel, his wife, and two daughters.

And Then There Were Solar Panels

There was one hopeful part of Abel’s story that particularly intrigued me: He has installed solar panels on their home in Cuba. Why? Despite the present U.S. oil embargo, they need electricity.

Yesterday, as I drove through Hill County (near Waco), Texas, and passed enormous wind turbines, I thought about how differently nations can respond to energy insecurity.

Cuba is seeking ways to reduce its dependence on oil. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we are witnessing political efforts to expand fossil-fuel dependence, while renewable energy projects are increasingly becoming ideological battlegrounds. (No, I didn’t see any “bird cemeteries” under any of those slow-moving turbines!)

I couldn’t help but think of another Don—Quixote, that is—tilting at windmills, except the windmills aren’t imaginary. They are producing clean energy!

And perhaps there is a broader lesson here: Wisdom sometimes means refusing to put all our eggs in one basket. That applies to energy. It applies to economics. It applies to diplomacy. It applies to politics. And it applies to faith.

“Test everything; retain what is good” (1Thes. 5:21).

What Extraordinary Love Requires of Us

I don’t know what ultimately should happen in Cuba. I don’t know whether greater sanctions, fewer sanctions, negotiations, investment, political reform, or some combination of approaches will best serve the Cuban people. Those are complicated policy questions that deserve serious analysis, rather than bumper-sticker answers.

But I do know what today’s saints ask of us.

St. Louis asks us to use power in service of justice.

St. Joseph Calasanz asks us to educate those whom society leaves behind.

Hubert Augustus Rogers asks us to listen to voices that others might dismiss.

And Abel reminds us that geopolitical questions always have human faces.

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Ways We Might Respond

• Listen before judging. Have a conversation with an immigrant, refugee or newcomer whose experience differs from your own. Ask questions before offering opinions.

• Support education as a public good. Volunteer, mentor, tutor or support organizations that provide educational opportunities to children whose families lack resources.

• Learn about Cuba beyond the headlines. Read sources that describe both the failures of the Cuban government and the effects of U.S. sanctions. Resist the temptation to turn an extraordinarily complicated situation into a simple political slogan.

• Practice solidarity, rather than abstraction. When you hear about sanctions, immigration, poverty, or international conflict, ask, Who is actually paying the price?

• Diversify your sources of hope. Don’t allow one political party, one news channel, one ideology, or one social-media feed to become your entire understanding of reality. As St. Paul reminds us, “Test everything.”

In the Backseat

I climbed into that rideshare Sunday evening intending to spend the trip editing a Substack. Instead, I met a teacher—not by profession, but by experience.

Abel taught me that a nation can be discussed in Washington, Havana or Austin as an abstraction. Yet nations are ultimately collections of human beings whose lives are profoundly shaped by decisions made by people they may never meet.

St. Louis reminds us that power carries responsibility.

Calasanz reminds us that poverty demands action.

Rogers reminds us that voices once marginalized can become voices of leadership.

And Abel reminds us that sometimes the Holy Spirit climbs into the rideshare with us and starts speaking.

Perhaps that is the extraordinary invitation before us in this very unordinary U.S. moment: to listen long enough to hear Christ speaking through the person whom we might otherwise overlook!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Whose story have I reduced to a political talking point?

• When have I exercised power without sufficiently considering who might bear its consequences?

• What can I do to strengthen educational opportunities for children who are poor or marginalized?

• Whose voice do I need to hear more carefully—even when that person’s experience challenges my assumptions?

• Where have I allowed ideology to replace compassion?

• What might Jesus say about the way our nation treats immigrants, refugees, and people living in countries with which we disagree?

• Where is God inviting me to replace abstraction with relationship?

Let Us Pray

God of every nation and every people,

you created no borders between your children.

Teach us to see beyond political labels and national boundaries to the human beings whom you have placed before us. Give us the justice of Louis IX, the educational vision of Joseph Calasanz, and the courage of Hubert Augustus Rogers.

When we speak about Cuba, help us remember Cuban families.

When we speak about immigration, help us remember immigrants.

When we speak about foreign policy, help us remember the people who live with its consequences.

When we speak about power, remind us that power is entrusted to us for service.

And when the Holy Spirit sends an unexpected teacher into our lives, give us the humility to listen.

May we become instruments of your extraordinary love, seeking justice, pursuing peace, and recognizing your image in every person we encounter.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

Support Extraordinary Catholics!

Thank you for “liking,” restacking, or sharing these words with those who might need them!

Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768

I spent a bit too much time gabbing with parishioners in the parish hall yesterday morning. When I finally looked at the time and realized that I had four minutes to get to church to preside at our 10:30 a.m. Mass, I headed for the door—only, fortunately, to be stopped by a parishioner.

“Father,” he called, “have you heard this song?”

I paused as he reached for his phone. He quickly scrolled through his playlist, then turned the screen toward me.

“You have to listen to this song.”

The thumbnail immediately caught my attention: An AI-generated image of the risen Christ, still wearing the crown of thorns, showing his wounded hands to a kneeling figure in a black hoodie whose identity is concealed behind a helmet and mask. The title was “I Never Said That,” by JoshM. Neither the artist nor the song rang a bell, but the invitation was clear: Listen.

“This song made me cry the first few times I heard it,” he added.

I assured him I would listen, then joked, “If it made you cry, there’s no doubt it’ll make me cry, too!”

As I swung the parish hall door closed behind me, I pulled out my phone and asked Siri to play the song. A haunting piano melody began, then a violin, then a male voice. I could only get four sentences in before inviting the congregation to stand and join in singing… a different hymn of gathering. But the words I heard during that hurried walk arrested my attention: the risen Christ admonishing us, “I bled for love, not for your war cries. I rose for mercy, not for your flags.”

The song was theologically juicy enough to pull me back after Mass and to keep me reflecting this morning as we remember various voices who translated faith into courage, nonviolence, compassion and truth. The song, “I Never Said That,” provides an important examination of conscience we could undertake—as individuals and as a nation—in this very unordinary U.S. moment.

Perhaps Jesus Really Never Said That

The genius of “I Never Said That” is not that it tells us anything particularly new about Jesus. Almost everything it sings comes directly from the Gospels.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Let your light shine. Whatever you did for the least of these, you did to me. Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone. The last will be first, and the first will be last. No one can serve two masters.

These are not obscure passages that require advanced theological studies to understand. And yet the song places them beside the things Christians sometimes wish Jesus had said.

Hate them. Fight. Use my name to acquire power. Build a political empire in my honor. Turn my cross into a weapon.

The last image especially haunts me—on this continent conquered by “sword and cross.” JoshM writes, “You wave your cross like a sword in your hand, but I carried mine through the blood and the sand.” A striking contrast, indeed!

When We Make Jesus Sound Like Us

Perhaps one of Christianity’s oldest temptations is to make Jesus look and sound remarkably like ourselves. We’ve turned a Semitic man white, and now we imagine Christian nationalist chants falling from his lips.

We find a few words from Scripture that support our position. We ignore the verses that challenge it. We surround ourselves with people who interpret Scripture as we do. Eventually, we convince ourselves that our words are God’s words, too!

Jesus becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy: He says whatever we need him to say!

That temptation isn’t limited to one political party, one denomination, or one theological camp. All of us find ourselves selecting the teachings of Jesus that affirm us, while quietly avoiding those that demand something uncomfortable from us.

The difference between discipleship and idolatry may sometimes be this simple question: Am I following Jesus—or have I created a Jesus who follows me?

In his Sermon on the Mount, the Matthean Jesus warned that not everyone who cries “Lord, Lord” truly belongs to him (Mt. 7:21-23). He also gave us an extraordinarily practical test of discipleship: How did we treat the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned? (Mt. 25:31-46).

The test of discipleship is not: How loudly did we proclaim our Christianity, how many Christian symbols did we display on our bodies or in our home or office, or how effectively did we use Christianity to win elections?

The test of discipleship is: How did we treat… people?

The Cross Is Not a Weapon

That is where “I Never Said That” intersects painfully with this extraordinarily unordinary U.S. moment.

We have watched political leaders invoke God’s name, surround themselves with pastors during photo ops, and even hold Bibles (upside-down at times!)—all while pursuing power.

We have heard Christian language invoked to justify hostility toward immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, people of other faiths, and people who simply disagree with us.

We have seen social media turn disagreement into demonization.

I sometimes think of the famous line from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Perhaps Jesus would say something similar: You keep using my name. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The irony is almost unbearable.

• The one who said, “Love your enemies” becomes a mascot for people who hate their enemies.

• The one who welcomed strangers becomes an icon for those who reject migrants.

• The one who blessed peacemakers has been recruited into the rhetoric of war.

• The one who told Peter to put away his sword has been placed on flags wielded like weapons.

• The one who said, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did to me” has somehow become the patron of those who insist that the least of these should fend for themselves and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

All while Jesus shakes his head and sighs, “I never said that!”

Today’s Extraordinary Voices

Perhaps that is why today’s other commemorations matter.

On August 24, we remember St. Bartholomew (died c. 69-71), the apostle who, according to tradition, was brutally martyred for proclaiming the Gospel. His feast invites us to ask whether our faith actually has enough “skin in the game” to cost us something. (Sorry for the pun, poor St. Bart was flayed alive!)

In our Inclusive/Independent Catholic tradition, we remember Gerard Shelley (1891-1980), the linguist, translator, and Old Roman Catholic archbishop who spent part of his ministry translating Russian works into English. His life reminds us that the Gospel always requires translation. We must translate ancient words into contemporary lives without changing their meaning!

We remember Bayard Rustin (1912-1987), the brilliant civil-rights organizer, openly gay Quaker and principal architect of the 1963 March on Washington. He helped Martin Luther King, Jr. develop and embody nonviolent resistance. Rustin called for “angelic troublemakers”—people willing to disturb injustice without becoming consumed by hatred.

And we remember Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), whose work with people who were dying transformed how many of us understand grief. She reminds us that beneath our arguments about politics, religion and ideology are fragile human beings confronting suffering, loss and mortality.

Four very different lives, one extraordinary question: What does our faith look like when it becomes flesh?

The Gospel We Actually Live

Jesus does not need us merely to defend his reputation. Jesus needs us to embody his teaching.

• That means that when we say “love your neighbor,” we actually love our neighbor.

• When we say “welcome the stranger,” we actually welcome the stranger.

• When we say “blessed are the peacemakers,” we actually make peace.

• When we say “love your enemies,” we resist the delicious temptation to turn our enemies into monsters.

• And when we say “Jesus,” we should be prepared for someone to ask: Which Jesus? The Jesus of the Gospels? Or the Jesuses we construct to baptize our politics, our prejudices, and our power?

Those questions should frighten all of us a little.

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Ways to Stop Putting Words in Jesus’ Mouth

For those of us who seek to follow the Jesus of the Gospels, perhaps today’s song offers some extraordinarily practical work:

• Read the Gospels before reading the headlines. Before allowing cable news, social media, or political messaging to tell us what Christianity requires, return to Jesus himself.

• Practice the uncomfortable Gospel. Don’t merely collect Jesus’ teachings that confirm your worldview. Identify one teaching that challenges you—and live it.

• Welcome someone labeled an outsider. Jesus repeatedly crossed the boundaries that respectable religious people had constructed. Find one boundary and cross it.

• Refuse dehumanizing language. We can oppose policies, ideologies, and even deeply destructive behavior without reducing human beings to monsters.

• Become an “angelic troublemaker.” Follow Rustin’s example. Challenge injustice with extraordinary courage while refusing to surrender our souls to hatred.

• Before sharing Christian political rhetoric, ask Did Jesus actually say this? If the answer is no, perhaps we should stop attributing it to him.

A Song Worth Hearing Again

With four minutes till Mass, I say “fortunately” I was stopped by that parishioner who wanted to share a song—because sometimes an unexpected interruption becomes an unexpected invitation.

A song sends us back to Scripture. Scripture sends us back to Jesus. Jesus sends us back to the world. And perhaps that is precisely what we need right now.

Not more people speaking for Jesus, but more people listening to Jesus.

Not more crosses wielded like swords, but more people willing to take up their cross.

Not more white/Christian nationalism wrapped in religious language, but more peacemakers.

Not more people shouting and insisting that Jesus belongs to their side, but more people asking whether they belong to Jesus’ side.

JoshM’s song began with the risen Christ showing his wounded hands. Perhaps that is the image we need to carry with us today: not Jesus waving a flag, sitting on a throne of political power, or wielding a weapon—but Jesus showing us the wounds of love and reminding us of things he never said.

May we have the humility to listen.

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• What words have I attributed to Jesus (or others) that he (or they) never actually said?

• Which teaching of Jesus do I find most difficult to live?

• When have I used my faith to win an argument, rather than to build a relationship?

• Who is the “stranger” whom Jesus might be asking me to welcome?

• Where might I need to become an “angelic troublemaker” for justice?

• Have I ever turned the cross or my religion into a weapon—against another person, group, or political position?

• What would change in my life if I took Matthew 25 as seriously as I take the rest of the Gospel?

Let Us Pray

Jesus,
You gave us no commandment to hate.
You gave us no permission to dehumanize.
You gave us no mandate to seek power for ourselves.

You gave us love, mercy, peace and a cross.

Forgive us when we put words in Your mouth.
Forgive us when we use Your name to justify our own ambitions.
Forgive us when we forget that the stranger, the prisoner, the hungry, the poor, and the wounded are Your siblings—and ours.

Give us the extraordinary courage of Bartholomew,
the translating spirit of Gerard Shelley,
the nonviolent courage of Bayard Rustin
and the compassionate presence of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

And when we are tempted to speak for You,
teach us first to listen.

May our words become Your words,
our hands become Your hands,
and our lives become instruments of Your peace.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

Support Extraordinary Catholics!

Thank you for “liking,” restacking, or sharing these words with those who might need them!

Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768

In addition to Extraordinary Catholics, I publish Latinx TxEd News, a semimonthly roundup of state, national and international news affecting the 2.9 million Latinx students in our Texas public schools and their families. The August 20 edition was admittedly a sobering one: Mexican citizens have reportedly been deported from the U.S. to countries where they have never lived, vulnerable immigrant children face an intensified deportation campaign, more than 175,000 visas have been revoked, and a Mexican immigrant in Virginia was hospitalized after an alleged beating by ICE agents.

From a faith perspective, such stories raise some very uncomfortable questions.

Do we recognize immigrants as our siblings? Are we treating them as we would treat Christ? And, as I wondered yesterday while writing about our $40 trillion national debt, are we actually being good stewards of this nation entrusted to our care?

Today’s Scriptures offer us a surprisingly direct answer.

The Keys Are Not Ours

Today’s first reading introduces us to Shebna, “master of the palace.” God removes him from his office and gives his authority to Eliakim. Most significantly, God says, “I will place the key of the House of David on Eliakim’s shoulder” (Is. 22:22).

Then, in today’s Gospel, Jesus gives Peter the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Keys. Authority. Stewardship. And therein lies the problem.

Shebna appears to have forgotten that authority is entrusted, rather than owned. Isaiah suggests that he had become more interested in his own status than in the people he was supposed to serve.

Does that sound familiar?

I confess that when I read about Shebna’s pride, self-exaltation, and abuse of office, as well as his golden chariots, elaborate high-elevation tomb, and his blindness in thinking that he would be in power forever, I think of others in public office today. I also think about The Simpsons, where Springfield’s leaders repeatedly demonstrate what happens when public office becomes a vehicle for personal ego. I think about Game of Thrones, where nearly everyone wants the Iron Throne, and far too few people seem interested in governing the people who live beneath it. And I think about Hamilton: “What is a legacy?” What will remain after our time of stewardship ends?

Jesus turns the question on its head: The keys are not trophies; they are responsibilities.

The Keys Are Ours, Too

I am not Peter. You are not Peter. But the Gospel nevertheless challenges all of us who participate in a democracy.

Jesus gives Peter keys. Our Constitution gives us keys.

We entrust elected officials with extraordinary power. We give them the authority to decide how our common resources will be used, how immigrants will be treated, how children will be educated, how the vulnerable will be protected, how our environment will be stewarded, and how our nation will relate to the rest of the world.

That makes citizenship a spiritual responsibility.

In today’s second reading, Paul reminds us that “from him and through him and for him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). Everything belongs ultimately to God.

In today’s psalm, the Psalmist adds another piece of wisdom: “the lowly God sees, and the proud God knows from afar” (Ps. 138:6).

And in today’s gospel, Jesus reminds us that the gates of the netherworld will not prevail against his Church (Mt. 16:18).

Those are extraordinary words for an “ordinary” Sunday.

Stewardship Is Bigger Than Money

We often reduce stewardship to putting something in the collection basket. But Christian stewardship is much larger. We are stewards of people. So when immigrant families are frightened, when children are separated from parents, when workers are abused, or when vulnerable people are treated as disposable, a stewardship question confronts us: What have we done with the people God has entrusted to our care?

We are stewards of creation. When forests are destroyed, water is polluted, energy consumption accelerates, and enormous data centers reshape communities, we must ask: Are we treating Earth as a gift or a commodity?

We are stewards of public resources. Yesterday I wrote about our $40 trillion national debt and the enormous obligations we are leaving to future generations. Our children and grandchildren will inherit the consequences of today’s decisions—whether they voted for them or not.

And we are stewards of democracy itself. In roughly ten weeks, on November 3, we will once again decide to whom we entrust the keys of government. Seventy-two days. The question is not simply, “Who do I like?” It is: Whom do we trust with the keys?

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What Can We Do?

For those of us trying to live Catholic or Christian discipleship in this very unordinary U.S. moment:

• Examine stewardship, rather than slogans. Ask what specific candidates and policies actually do for people, creation, and future generations.

• Defend the vulnerable. Especially immigrants, children, the poor, the elderly, and those whose voices carry little political power.

• Practice creation care. Reduce consumption and support policies that protect our common home.

• Pay attention. Democracy requires citizens who actually know what their elected officials are doing.

• Vote as an act of discipleship. Do not surrender the keys and then complain about what happens behind locked doors.

• Pray before acting. As James reminds us, faith without works is dead (Jas. 2:17).

We Hold the Keys

There is something almost comical about imagining ourselves as characters in Game of Thrones, fighting over the Iron Throne. Yet the Christian vision is actually more demanding: We are not fighting to possess the throne. We are challenged to steward the kingdom!

That changes everything. The immigrant at our border is not an inconvenience. The child in our school is not a statistic. The river flowing through our community is not merely a resource. The national treasury is not somebody else’s money. Democracy is not somebody else’s responsibility. They are all part of what has been entrusted to us.

So as we approach November 3, let us remember Shebna. Let us remember Peter. Let us remember the keys. And let us ask the question that matters most: When God looks at the way we have used the keys entrusted to us, will God find faithful stewards—or people who mistook stewardship for ownership?

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• What “keys” has God entrusted to me?

• Where have I confused stewardship with ownership?

• Whose well-being has been entrusted to my care?

• How am I stewarding the earth for generations yet unborn?

• What responsibility do I have for the way my government uses its authority?

• Before November 3, what do I need to learn, pray about, or do?

Let Us Pray

God of all creation,
You entrust your gifts to our care
and call us to serve, rather than to possess.
Give us wisdom to use our keys faithfully,
courage to defend those who are vulnerable,
compassion for our immigrant sisters and brothers,
reverence for our common home
and humility before the responsibilities of citizenship.
May we never confuse power with privilege
or stewardship with ownership.
And when you ask what we have done
with all that you entrusted to us,
may we answer with extraordinary love.
Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

Support Extraordinary Catholics!

Thank you for “liking,” restacking, or sharing these words with those who might need them!

Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768

After leading our weekly three-hour theological institute at Holy Family from 2013 to 2017, I was more than a little relieved when Father Roy offered to lead a Bible study and rosary for parishioners going forward. From that effort came what we affectionately call Father Roy’s Rosary, a scriptural rosary, also available in Spanish, that illuminates all 20 decades of the Catholic rosary through our Judeo-Christian scriptures.

The first three Glorious Mysteries are relatively easy: Scripture gives us plenty to contemplate in the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost. The last two are more difficult: Scripture says nothing explicitly about Mary’s Assumption and says even less about her Queenship. We can certainly construct a theological case for both, but if you are trying to build a thoroughly scriptural rosary, you quickly discover that you are working with considerably less material!

So perhaps today, August 22, while traditional Catholics contemplate the Queenship of Mary, I contemplate something else.

Yesterday, while driving to a school district, I began thinking about this week’s news that the U.S. national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. Forty. Trillion. Dollars. That’s forty, followed by twelve zeroes. $40,000,000,000,000.

Coincidentally, or perhaps coordinated by the Spirit, I pulled into a lane on the highway behind a car with a bumper sticker that proclaimed: “Help America: Pray the Rosary.”

Well, yes.

But prayer has never been an excuse for inaction.

I’m reminded of the words often attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola: Pray as if everything depends on God, and act as if everything depends on you. Whether or not Ignatius actually said those words, the wisdom is unmistakably Jesuit: prayer and action belong together!

So today, as the Church commemorates Mary as Queen, I ask a rather unromantic question: What does a $40 trillion debt have to do with discipleship?

Quite a lot, I would suggest.

Forty Trillion Dollars: Almost Impossible to Imagine!

Let’s begin with the number itself.

On August 19, the U.S. national debt officially crossed the $40 trillion threshold for the first time. The U.S. Treasury reported total public debt outstanding at approximately $40.047 trillion, comprising about $32.266 trillion in debt held by the public and $7.782 trillion in intragovernmental holdings.

The distinction matters.

When we say that America owes $40 trillion, we are not saying that America has to write one enormous check to some mysterious foreign banker. The federal government has issued millions of Treasury bills, notes and bonds to finance deficits. Some are held by investors, banks, pension funds, mutual funds, the Federal Reserve, foreign governments, and individuals. Some are held in federal government accounts, including trust funds.

As of June, foreign investors held about $9.3 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities. Japan held about $1.12 trillion, the United Kingdom about $940 billion, and mainland China about $633 billion.

So, no, China does not own America. Neither does Japan. Neither does some sinister international cabal.

We owe a tremendous amount of money to ourselves, to Americans and institutions that invest in Treasury securities, and to investors throughout the world who have chosen to lend money to the U.S.

That is important because Treasury securities are not charity. They are promises. America says, in effect: Give us your money today, and we will give you your money back later, with interest.

That is what debt is. It is a promise made to the future—and that is where my theological antennae begin to twitch.

$40 Trillion In Human Terms

This month, the Census Bureau estimated the U.S. population at about 342.8 million people. If we divide $40.047 trillion equally among every person in the U.S. today, every man, woman and child would have to come up with approximately $116,800 each in order for us to pay this debt.

That includes newborn babies. It includes the elderly. It includes people living below the poverty line. It includes people who don’t know whether they will make rent next month, as well as those who own homes worth millions of dollars. It includes you. It includes me.

If we decided that the debt should be paid by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, we would need roughly 48 Elon Musks at his August 12 Forbes-estimated net worth of $826.2 billion. Of course, that comparison is absurd: Musk’s net worth isn’t $826 billion sitting in a checking account. Much of it consists of ownership stakes in companies whose values dramatically fluctuate. Selling everything would, in itself, change the value of those assets. And even if Musk somehow liquidated his entire fortune, it would not begin to solve our nation’s fiscal problem. And that is precisely why such comparisons are useful.

$40 trillion is not a number that the human brain naturally understands. It is like asking me to imagine the entire population of Westeros. I can understand one dragon, one castle, perhaps even a bit of one enormously complicated Targaryen family tree. But the Game of Thrones universe gives us more dragons, castles and armies than I can keep track of, and all sorts of people with seemingly the same name: Tywin, Tyrion, Tyland, Tywald, Tybold, Tywell, Tygett, Tyrek, Tytos…! At some point, my brain simply says, That’s enough.

Forty trillion dollars does something similar.

So let’s bring it down to something we can understand: It is a promise. And promises are moral things.

Can the U.S. Simply Declare Bankruptcy?

Individuals can declare bankruptcy. Businesses can declare bankruptcy. Largely as a result of the clergy sexual abuse scandal, 28 Roman Catholic dioceses have filed for bankruptcy protection, too. But the U.S. cannot simply walk into a bankruptcy court and say, “Judge, things have gotten a little out of hand.”

There is no ordinary bankruptcy mechanism for a sovereign nation comparable to Chapter 11 for a corporation. Municipalities have Chapter 9. Corporations have Chapter 11. Individuals have Chapters 7 and 13. The U.S. has no “Chapter 40 trillion.” Nor does America have to walk into a bank tomorrow and pay $40 trillion.

Treasury securities mature at different times. The government generally pays maturing obligations by using available revenues and, when necessary, by issuing new debt. The problem is not that someone will suddenly arrive at the White House with a giant $40 trillion invoice. The problem is that we keep borrowing more while we are already carrying an enormous debt.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal deficit will be about $1.9 trillion in fiscal year 2026 and that debt held by the public will rise from about 101% of GDP in 2026 to 120% by 2036 under its baseline.

Then there is the interest. According to Reuters, during the first ten months of fiscal year 2026, interest costs on the federal debt had already exceeded Medicare spending and had become the second-largest line item in the federal budget behind Social Security. Annual interest costs are now around $1.1 trillion. That’s more than $3 billion that we pay in interest every single day. Just to service our debt. Not to build bridges, educate children, feed hungry families, respond to emergencies, fund cancer research, maintain military bases, provide healthcare, or even wage chosen wars. That’s interest alone. We are paying for yesterday’s expenses—and tomorrow we’ll pay for today’s.

How Did We Get Here?

This is where our political arguments usually become rather convenient. Republicans blame Democrats. Democrats blame Republicans. Everyone blames somebody else. But the history is considerably more complicated.

The national debt has accumulated through wars, recessions, tax policy, entitlement programs, economic crises, infrastructure investments, defense spending, emergency responses, and ordinary annual deficits.

During World War II, the federal government borrowed enormously to finance the war. Debt held by the public reached 106% of GDP in 1946. Yet because the economy subsequently grew so dramatically, that ratio declined over decades, reaching only 23% of GDP by 1974.

And there have been moments when the U.S. actually reduced its debt burden. From 1998 through 2001, during the final years of the Clinton administration, the federal government ran four consecutive budget surpluses. Debt held by the public declined by more than $450 billion, falling to 32% of GDP.

We do well to remember: Debt is not an inevitable law of nature. It is a consequence of human choices. So are surpluses.

Donald Trump’s first presidency included the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), bipartisan budget agreements, and enormous pandemic relief legislation. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that policies approved during his first term resulted in $8.4 trillion in additional debt, with roughly half attributable to COVID relief.

Joe Biden’s presidency also produced substantial borrowing through pandemic recovery, infrastructure investment, clean-energy initiatives, other spending and executive actions. CRFB’s subsequent analysis estimated $4.7 trillion in new debt approved during Biden’s term.

And now we have Trump’s second administration.

The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act is estimated by CBO to increase deficits by approximately $4.7 trillion over 2026-2035.

The important point for those of us who inhabit the Catholic world is not to turn this into another partisan scoreboard.

The debt problem did not begin with Donald Trump. It did not begin with Joe Biden. It did not begin with Barack Obama. It is a decades-long story—which means we cannot solve it by singling out one villain.

Debt in the Bible

The Bible doesn’t tell us that every debt is sinful. Borrowing and investments can be wise. A family can borrow to purchase a home. A student can borrow to finance an education. A school district can borrow to build or modernize a school. A municipality can borrow to build a water-treatment plant. Governments can borrow to build things that will benefit generations.

The moral question is not simply: “Did you borrow money?”

The moral questions include: Why did you borrow it? Who benefits? Who pays? Can the debt reasonably be sustained? And are we shifting today’s obligations onto people who have no voice in today’s decisions?

Those are profoundly Catholic questions.

• Consider Proverbs 22:7: “The borrower is the slave of the lender.” That is not a financial policy prescription. It is a warning about power.

• Or Deuteronomy 15, which established a periodic remission—the seven-year release of debts (shemitah)—in ancient Israel.

• Or Leviticus 25, with its vision of a 50-year jubilee return (yovel) of ancestral lands sold due to poverty to reset economic relationships.

• Or the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, where Jesus tells the story of a servant whose enormous debt is forgiven, but who refuses to forgive another person’s much smaller debt.

• And then there is the prayer Jesus taught us: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Depending on the biblical translation and Christian tradition, we hear the Our Father translated as “debts,” “trespasses,” or “sins.” Today, I rather like the translation of debts. Because the word forces us to ask: What do we owe?

What do we owe God? Or one another? Or our children? Or the poor? Or the immigrant? Or the elderly? Or God’s creation? Or the people who will inhabit this country after we are gone?

The Moral Problem of Intergenerational Debt

This is where Catholic social teaching becomes extraordinarily useful.

The Church’s social tradition repeatedly speaks of the common good, solidarity, and responsibility toward future generations. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church makes an unusually direct statement about intergenerational responsibility: It warns against burdening future generations with costs created by the present generation. Pope Francis similarly warned that public debt can become a burden placed on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren and described excessive burdens on the young as a question of justice. And Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas likewise emphasizes responsibility toward future generations, warning against a form of development that increases consumption for some, while shifting its costs onto others.

That sounds remarkably like a conversation about national debt—but it also sounds like a conversation about climate change, social security, Medicare, infrastructure, education, housing, clean water, public health, and the condition in which we leave our communities.

What kind of nation are we handing our grandchildren? That may be the most important economic question we can ask.

Selling Ourselves Into Slavery

Ancient societies sometimes responded to unpayable debts by forcing people into debt slavery. The biblical world intimately knew this reality. That makes Proverbs 22:7 particularly uncomfortable: “The borrower is the slave of the lender.”

Thankfully, our nation does not ordinarily turn us into the property of a creditor because we cannot pay our mortgage. But we can still become enslaved by debt. And nations can become constrained by their obligations. When an ever-larger portion of the federal budget goes toward interest, there is less flexibility for everything else. CBO says rising interest costs are a major driver of the projected growth in deficits over the coming decade.

So imagine that we encounter another pandemic. Or another September 11. Or another Hurricane Katrina. Or another financial crisis. Or another once-in-a-century climate disaster. Or choose to enter another “forever war.”

A country carrying enormous debt can still respond—but its choices become harder. Its fiscal room becomes narrower. Its borrowing can become more expensive. Its ability to respond to the unexpected can diminish.

That is why debt is not merely an accounting issue. It is a question of freedom. And freedom is a theological issue.

What Does Mary Have to Do With Any of This?

Everything. Or perhaps nothing. That depends upon how we understand a queen.

The Queenship of Mary is not supposed to be a celebration of royal extravagance. Mary does not appear in Scripture wearing a crown and sitting upon a throne surrounded by courtiers. The Mary of Luke’s Gospel is a young woman from Nazareth who says: “I am the handmaid of the Lord.” The Mary of the Magnificat proclaims a God who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly (Lk. 1:46-55). The Mary whom Jesus praises points beyond herself. The Mary whom we call Queen is the mother who stood beneath a cross. And that matters.

Because if we want to speak about queenship, Christianity gives us a radically different model of power. It is not Succession, Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon or The Crown. It is not even Hamilton, with its endless calculations of political power, money and legacy.

Christian queenship is servant leadership. Mary’s greatness is not that she accumulated. It is that she received. She did not ask, “How much can I get?” She asked, “How can I participate in what God is doing?”

And perhaps that is exactly the question the U.S. needs now.

Our $40 Trillion Rosary

I return to that bumper sticker: Help America: Pray the Rosary. I am not opposed to the idea. Quite the contrary. But perhaps we should pray the rosary differently today.

Perhaps when we pray: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” we should remember that nations also have beginnings and endings. No empire lasts forever. Rome fell. The British Empire declined. The Soviet Union disappeared. The Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared. The Ottoman Empire disappeared. Every political order eventually discovers that permanence was an illusion.

The U.S. is not exempt from history.

I do not know whether American decline will be caused by debt or by political polarization, environmental degradation, demographic changes, war, technological disruption, institutional decay, or something none of us can yet imagine. And I certainly do not believe that $40 trillion automatically means that the U.S. is about to collapse.

But I do know this: We should not confuse U.S. exceptionalism with U.S. immortality.

Mary’s Queenship reminds us that even power must ultimately kneel before God.

The question is not whether the U.S. will last forever. The question is what we will do with the U.S. we have been given while we have the responsibility to be good stewards of it.

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What We Can Do

If the $40 trillion number leaves you feeling helpless, I understand. What can one person possibly do about $40 trillion? That’s a heck of a lot of bake sales! Perhaps the best thing we might do is practice faithful citizenship.

• Learn the difference between debt and deficit. A deficit occurs when the government spends more than it takes in during a particular year. Debt is the accumulated amount borrowed over time. That distinction matters because responsible citizenship begins with understanding what we are actually discussing. CBO and the U.S. Treasury both provide remarkably accessible explanations of these concepts.

• Ask candidates and elected officials for a long-term fiscal plan. Not a slogan. Not “cut waste.” Not “raise taxes.” Not “protect everything.” Not “make the rich pay.” Not “government is the problem.” Ask a more difficult question: What is your plan for making the U.S. financially sustainable over the next 10, 20 and 30 years for the sake of our grandchildren? Then listen carefully to the answer.

• Pay attention to who bears the burden. Any fiscal change will affect somebody. Ask who. Will it affect children? Seniors? Working families? People with disabilities? Veterans? Immigrants? People living in poverty? Wealthy investors? Corporations? Your grandchildren? Catholic social teaching tells us that the common good cannot be reduced to the interests of whoever happens to possess the greatest political or economic power.

• Practice jubilee in your own life. If debt is a moral issue, so is our treatment of people who owe us. Could you forgive a debt? Could you help someone escape predatory debt? Could you support a financial-literacy program? Could the organizations with which you affiliate help families navigate housing, student loans, or medical debt? Sometimes extraordinary change begins with something very small.

• Refuse to make economics an idol. Jesus said we cannot serve God and mammon. Money is a tool. It is not our God. Neither fiscal responsibility nor social compassion should become an idol that prevents us from seeing human beings.

• Think like a grandparent—even if you are not one. Ask yourself: Would I make this decision differently if the person paying for it were sitting beside me? Imagine your grandchild sitting at the table. Then explain to that child why you made the decision you made. That exercise might change a few things.

• Pray—and don’t stop praying. Pray for wisdom. Pray for legislators. Pray for economists. Pray for people who disagree with you. Pray for the poor. Pray for young people. Pray for future generations. And then, as Ignatius is often said to have taught: Act as though your action matters, too.

The America We Leave Behind

When I saw that bumper sticker yesterday, telling me to help America by praying the rosary, I smiled. Today I find myself taking it more seriously. Perhaps the rosary really can help America. But not because Mary is some celestial political operative waiting for us to recite enough Hail Marys to make the stock market rise.

The rosary helps us remember. We remember the life of Jesus. We remember those who suffer. We remember the poor. We remember that power is temporary. We remember that death is real. We remember that resurrection is possible. And today, on the Queenship of Mary, perhaps we should remember something else: We are stewards, not rulers or owners.

This nation does not belong to Donald Trump—nor did it belong to Joe Biden, Barack Obama or George Washington. It does not even belong to us—but it has been entrusted to us. And one day, we will hand it to somebody else.

That is true of our money. It is true of our churches. It is true of our schools. It is true of our planet. And it is true of our nation.

So perhaps the most Catholic question we can ask about a $40 trillion debt is not simply, “How do we pay it?”

It is: “What are we willing to sacrifice today so that people we will never meet can inherit something better tomorrow?”

That is a very different question. It is also a very Marian question.

Mary’s yes was never primarily about what she would receive. It was about what she was willing to give.

And perhaps that is how we begin to pay our national debt—not with one magical check, but with a renewed willingness to sacrifice, to share, to plan, to restrain ourselves, and to love people we will never meet.

Because someday, someone else will pray the rosary. Someone else will display that same bumper sticker. Someone else will sit in the churches we built. Someone else will inherit the schools we funded—or failed to fund. Someone else will drink the water we protected—or poisoned. Someone else will live with the debt we accumulated—or the fiscal responsibility we practiced.

And perhaps, when that generation looks backward at us, we should hope that they will say: They knew they were stewards—and they tried.

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• What debts—financial, moral, relational or spiritual—do I carry that I need to honestly acknowledge?

• What do I owe to the people who came before me, and what do I owe to those who will come after me?

• Where in my own life have I confused consumption with happiness?

• How might I practice greater solidarity with people who carry debts far heavier than my own?

• When I think about national debt, do I see numbers first or human beings first?

• What would change if I evaluated public policies by asking who benefits, who pays, and who is left behind?

• How might Mary’s example of humble service reshape my understanding of power and leadership?

• What sacrifices am I willing to make today for people whom I will never meet?

• Am I willing to pray for political leaders with whom I disagree—and then faithfully act as a citizen?

• What kind of nation do I hope my grandchildren and their grandchildren will inherit?

Let Us Pray

God of abundance and God of enough,

You have entrusted us with gifts we did not create, and with a world we did not make.

You have given us resources, talents, communities and one another.

Forgive us when we consume without considering consequence.

Forgive us when we borrow without considering who will repay.

Forgive us when we seek our own comfort while others bear the burdens of our choices.

Teach us the wisdom of jubilee.

Teach us the courage of prophets.

Teach us the generosity of Jesus.

Teach us the humility of Mary.

Give wisdom to those who govern us.

Give courage to those who challenge us.

Give compassion to those who struggle beneath burdens they did not choose.

Give us the extraordinary courage to think beyond the next election, the next paycheck, and the next quarterly report.

Give us the extraordinary generosity to sacrifice something today for people we will never meet tomorrow.

And when we pray, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” remind us that we are also praying for our communities, our nation and our world—now and at the hour when our own generation must finally hand them to another.

May we leave behind not merely a balance sheet, but a blessing.

Not merely wealth, but wisdom.

Not merely a powerful nation, but a more just one.

And may everything we receive from your hands become something we faithfully return to the generations yet to come.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

Support Extraordinary Catholics!

Thank you for “liking,” restacking, or sharing these words with those who might need them!

Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768

My husband and I are currently watching the third season of HBO’s House of the Dragon. My head always spins a bit as I try to keep up with the various story threads across Westeros: Queen Rhaenyra and Prince Aemond, Team Black and Team Green, the scheming of the Hightowers, the battles for the Riverlands, the shifting alliances and betrayals. It is a lot of names and stories to keep track of—even if the series feels more focused than the channel-surfing experience of Game of Thrones, which sometimes seemed to simultaneously juggle a dozen unrelated subplots!

Sometimes I get the same feeling when I look at the Church’s calendar.

Before the reforms of Vatican II, the liturgical calendar contained an extraordinary number of saints and commemorations. I remember, as a seminarian, opening Butler’s Lives of the Saints and encountering more than 2,500 saints scattered across the 365 days of the year. At first, they were mostly names. Then, as I learned their stories, those names began to become people.

Of the various voices we could lift up on August 21, my gaze is drawn to Alexander of Hales, Noël Alexandre and John Okoro: three very different men from three very different centuries, illuminating three very different expressions of Catholic life. They converge on August 21 with another commemoration that I find particularly meaningful: National Senior Citizen Day, first observed in 1988 after Congress authorized President Ronald Reagan to proclaim August 21 as a day to honor older Americans and recognize their contributions, dignity, and continued participation in society.

That seems to me like a providential combination—because perhaps one of the great gifts of growing older is learning that the world is rarely as simple as we once imagined. And perhaps that is precisely the good news we need right now.

Alexander of Hales: Wisdom that Keeps Asking Questions

Alexander of Hales (1185-1245) became one of the great theological teachers at the University of Paris and eventually entered the Franciscan Order. He became known as the Doctor Irrefragabilis—the “Irrefutable Doctor”—and his Summa universae theologiae became one of the foundational works of the Franciscan theological tradition. His thought influenced generations of Franciscans—including St. Bonaventure—and even St. Thomas Aquinas engaged his work.

As a young Franciscan friar, I was of course introduced to Alexander, who stood near the beginning of the intellectual tradition that would eventually blossom into the Franciscan School. My first master’s thesis examined St. Bonaventure’s theology of self-diffusive Goodness, providing me an opportunity to more deeply explore the Seraphic Doctor’s “master and father.”

But what fascinates me now is not simply what Alexander taught. It is how he thought. Alexander did something that should come naturally to people of faith, but sometimes seems revolutionary in religious institutions: He asked questions. Big questions. Difficult questions. Questions for which there were not always tidy answers.

Among the questions associated with Alexander was one that became enormously important in Christian theology: Would Christ have become incarnate if humanity had never sinned?

Think about that for a moment. It is a remarkable question because it refuses to reduce Jesus to God’s emergency response to Adam and Eve messing up everything. It refuses to reduce the incarnation to salvation.

That question opens a breathtaking theological possibility: that Christ is not merely God’s answer to sin, but is God’s eternal expression of love!

Alexander reminds us that faith does not become weaker when we ask courageous questions. Faith becomes richer. That is a lesson we all desperately need. We sometimes inherit religious systems that teach us that certainty is holiness. But Alexander suggests another possibility: intellectual curiosity can itself be an act of devotion!

Jesus did not say, “Blessed are those who have all the answers.” He said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Mt. 5:3). Perhaps that poverty includes being intellectually poor enough to admit: “I don’t know.” “I might be wrong.” “Let’s keep searching.” That is extraordinary humility!

Noël Alexandre: The Courage to Disagree With Power

If Alexander of Hales teaches us about the sanctification of intellectual curiosity, Noël Alexandre (1639-1724) teaches us about something more dangerous: the courage to disagree with authority.

Alexandre was a French Dominican theologian, preacher, and ecclesiastical historian who became sufficiently prominent to preach before King Louis XIV, who granted him an annual pension of 800 livres. With a livre being roughly equivalent to a day’s wages for a skilled laborer, this was a comfortable arrangement… until Alexandre decided that loyalty to his conscience was more important than loyalty to his king. Yikes!

Alexandre became associated with Jansenist positions and supported the cas de conscience (case of conscience). Eventually, his opposition to Pope Clement XI’s 1713 bull Unigenitus dearly cost him. He was banished to Châtellerault in west-central France and ultimately lost his royal pension.

Let that sink in: The king’s preacher, a respected theologian, a man receiving a royal pension who in effect said, “No. I cannot agree with you.” And he paid the price. There is something profoundly Catholic about that—since Catholicism has always contained a tension between obedience and conscience, authority and truth, institution and Gospel.

St. Peter himself illuminated the deciding factor: “We must obey God rather than human beings” (Acts 5:29). People on any side of an argument can use Peter’s words. The question is not simply whether we disagree with authority. The question is: What is worth disagreeing with authority about? Alexandre apparently believed that his convictions and integrity were more important than signing the pope’s Formulary of Submission.

History gives us another reminder: Institutional condemnation does not necessarily determine intellectual, spiritual or personal worth. Alexandre’s writings continued to be valued by students of Church history long after the controversy surrounding him had faded.

The Church sometimes discovers, decades or centuries later, that yesterday’s troublesome theologian was asking tomorrow’s important questions!

Sound familiar?

John Okoro: “With God All Things Are Possible”

Then we come to John Okoro (1949-), whose story, I confess, holds a dear place in my heart. Born in Kano, Nigeria, Okoro studied in Innsbruck, Austria, and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. He served as a military chaplain with Austrian UN forces, worked as a psychologist and psychotherapist, and became deeply involved in transcultural psychology, suicide prevention, and family care. In 1999, he joined the Old Catholic Church of Austria.

In 2007, the Austrian Old Catholic Synod elected him the first Africa-born bishop of the Union of Utrecht of Old Catholic Churches. Consider that a Nigerian-born man became the bishop of an Austrian Catholic church—not simply any Catholic church, but the Old Catholic Church, a tradition that emerged from opposition to papal overreach and that today ordains women, embraces married clergy, and operates with significant laity participation in governance.

Okoro’s episcopal motto was: “With God all things are possible.” I love the optimism, even as I confess that I have always had a philosophical problem with the scriptural verse (Mt. 19:26). Can God make a square circle or a four-sided triangle? Can God make 2 + 2 equal 5? Can God create a married bachelor? Or a rock so heavy that God can’t lift it? (If unable to create it, God’s power is limited, and if unable to lift it, God’s power is similarly limited!)

If by “all things” we mean literally every string of words that we can construct, then the statement becomes nonsense. The context for Jesus’ words—“For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible” (Mt. 19:26)—is not mathematical absurdity, but human impossibility. Jesus is talking about salvation, something we simply cannot accomplish through our own strength. And that is where Okoro’s motto becomes beautiful, because there are moments when we look around and say: This cannot be fixed. This institution is too broken. This political moment is too dark. This relationship is too damaged. This country is too divided. I am too old. I am too young. I have failed too many times. There is no way forward.

In response, faith answers: Not so fast. “With God all things are possible”—not necessarily because God will give us the outcome we want, but because God has never surrendered the future to darkness!

What Our Elders Know That We Sometimes Forget

That brings us to today’s other commemoration.

National Senior Citizen Day (known as World Senior Citizen Day outside the U.S.) was established by Congress in 1988 and proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan. The proclamation emphasized the contributions of older Americans, their continuing leadership and volunteerism, and the importance of communities that allow older people to live with “independence and dignity.”

I find that especially poignant because Reagan was 77 when he issued that proclamation and was the oldest person ever to serve as president at that time. Today, that seems almost young: Our current president is now 80.

And suddenly, we have an interesting juxtaposition: a nation celebrating older adults while simultaneously debating what it means to have aging presidents leading our country.

The deeper lesson is not about age. It is about wisdom.

When we mark this day at Holy Family, I invite Father Roy to speak about his more than 35 years of ministry to senior adults in Austin. Father Roy turned 80 in December. He was in his 40s when he became interested in bringing joy to older adults through the St. Francis of Assisi Joy Group, a vision of former Roman Catholic Bishop John McCarthy that was subsequently brought to fruition in 1991 by Conventual Franciscan Brother Kerry Guillory.

I love the name: the Joy Group. There is something profoundly Christian about that. The Christian vocation is not simply to survive aging. It is to discover meaning in every season of life.

Psalm 92 provides us a magnificent image: “In old age they still produce fruit; they are always green and full of sap”! The senior members of our community are not useless, dried up, or to be discarded. They are fruitful, faithful, still alive, still green, and still very capable of blessing the world!

Our culture, of course, has a rather different message. We worship youth. We peddle anti-aging creams and looks-maxing. AARP welcomes us at 50, and retirement communities advertise to us by 60. Hollywood replaces actresses who have “aged out.” Silicon Valley celebrates the 25-year-old wunderkind. TikTok has convinced everyone that being 19 is a personality. Then our Judeo-Christian Scriptures look at us and ask: Have you met Sarah? Abraham? Moses? Elizabeth? Anna? Zechariah? Simeon?

God repeatedly chooses people who have accumulated some mileage, and their experience teaches us something that youth sometimes cannot: The world is complicated.

Sometimes with a good bit of handholding, they teach us: You can survive heartbreak. And disappointment. And institutional betrayal. And political seasons that you once thought would destroy everything. You can lose a job. Or a marriage. Or a friend. Or a parent. Or a child. Or your health. Or your certainty. And somehow wake up the next morning. Still breathing. Still loving. Still hoping. Perhaps even still capable of joy!

That is wisdom.

When the Darkness Feels Like It Will Never End

And that inevitably brings us to our present U.S. moment of extraordinary national darkness. We have witnessed political institutions under extraordinary pressure. Public trust has deteriorated. Neighbors have turned against neighbors. Vulnerable communities have become political targets.

And older Americans have particular reason to pay attention: The Trump administration recently announced that a temporary Medicare Part D subsidy will end, potentially increasing prescription-drug costs for millions of older adults in 2027. Meanwhile, the CDC is struggling with the consequences of major staffing reductions ordered by the Trump administration, with some programs—including those addressing Alzheimer’s disease and other public health concerns—left funded but largely inactive due to personnel shortages.

These are not abstract policy debates for the people who depend upon Medicare, Social Security, public health infrastructure, and community services. They are questions of dinner, medicine, rent and transportation. They are questions of life and dignity.

And that is where today’s three figures speak again.

Alexander of Hales says: Keep asking questions.

Noël Alexandre says: Do not surrender your conscience simply because someone more powerful demands agreement.

John Okoro says: Do not assume that what looks impossible today will remain impossible tomorrow.

And our elders say: We have seen dark days before.

That last lesson may be the most important!

What Our Elders Can Teach Us About Hope

The Lord of the Rings comes to mind: The characters repeatedly find themselves in situations where the darkness seems overwhelming. Yet Gandalf tells Frodo something that I have always found deeply theological: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” That is essentially the Christian vocation!

We do not control the age into which we are born. Alexander did not. Alexandre did not. Okoro did not. Our elders did not. Neither did Jesus. We control how we use the time we have been given.

The prophet Micah tells us exactly what that looks like: “Do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:8). Justice, kindness and humility: That is an extraordinary spiritual agenda for a very unordinary moment!

And perhaps that is why I find senior adults so inspiring: They have lived long enough to know that political victories are temporary. Long enough to know that presidents come and go. Long enough to see movements rise and fall. Long enough to bury people they love. Long enough to discover that sometimes the person you thought was your enemy becomes your friend. Long enough to understand that the church building is not the Church, that government is not God, that political party is not the Gospel, and today’s crisis will eventually become tomorrow’s history lesson.

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Ways to Respond Today

If Alexander, Alexandre, Okoro, and our elders have anything to teach us, I think it is this:

• Keep learning. Read theology. Read history. Read Scripture. Read people with whom you disagree. Ask better questions. Alexander reminds us that an intellectually-curious faith can be an extraordinarily faithful faith.

• Protect your conscience. When an institution, political party, employer, or religious authority demands something that violates your deepest moral convictions, remember Alexandre. Respect authority without worshiping it.

• Listen to older people. Call a senior adult. Visit someone in a nursing home. Invite an older parishioner to lunch. Ask, “What have you learned that you wish you had known when you were my age?” Then actually listen.

• Refuse despair. Okoro’s motto is not naïve optimism. It is Christian hope. There is a difference. Optimism says things will probably get better. Hope says that even when they do not, God remains present and we remain responsible for love.

• Participate in democracy. The 2026 midterm elections are scheduled for November 3, and every House seat plus one-third of the Senate will be contested. If you are eligible to vote, make a plan. Learn the issues. Help others register where permitted. Drive someone to the polls. And remember that civic engagement is not a substitute for discipleship—but it can be one expression of it.

• Build intergenerational communities. Churches should not segregate people by age any more than they should segregate them by race, economic status, or social background. Let children know elders. Let elders know teenagers. Let young adults learn from people who have survived unimaginable hardships.

• Practice joy as resistance. Host a potluck. Dance. Sing a hymn. Tell a joke. Have a slice of cake. Invite a lonely person to dinner. Joy does not deny suffering. Sometimes joy is how we tell suffering that it does not get the final word.

We Need People Who Remember

When I think back to those pages of Butler’s Lives of the Saints, I realize that perhaps I misunderstood them. I thought the point was to learn the names—but perhaps the point is to learn the stories. Because names alone do not teach us much. Stories do.

Alexander’s story tells us that a faithful mind can keep asking questions.

Alexandre’s story tells us that a faithful conscience can resist power.

Okoro’s story shows that Catholicism can span continents, cultures, and institutional boundaries in extraordinary ways.

Father Roy’s story tells us that a life spent bringing joy to older adults is itself a form of ministry.

And the stories of our elders tell us that we have not arrived here alone.

We stand on the shoulders of people who endured wars, pandemics, recessions, discrimination, political turmoil, family crises, church scandals, and personal heartbreak.

They have seen Game of Thrones before we were born. They simply called it history. That is why, as the darkness gathers around us, I am going to listen a little more carefully to the people who have been here before.

There are 74 days until the November 3 midterm elections—enough time to despair, but also enough time to pray, ask a better question, teach, organize, call a friend, visit an elder, vote, or do something extraordinary.

And if John Okoro is right—if we truly believe that “with God all things are possible”—then perhaps we should stop asking whether the darkness is going to win.

Perhaps we should ask the question Alexander of Hales might have asked: What is God inviting us to become in the midst of this?

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Whose wisdom am I overlooking because of their age, background, politics, or life experience?

• Where might God be inviting me to ask a difficult question, rather than accept an easy answer?

• Is there an authority in my life that I have elevated above my conscience? What might faithful resistance look like?

• Who is an older adult whom I could call, visit, or simply listen to this week?

• When have I experienced something that once seemed impossible, but eventually became possible? What did that experience teach me about hope?

• Where have I confused optimism with Christian hope?

• What is one concrete act of justice, kindness or humility that God is asking of me in this extraordinarily unordinary U.S. moment?

• If I were to tell my own life story to someone younger, what lesson would I most want them to remember?

Let Us Pray

God of every generation,
God of Sarah and Abraham,
of Miriam, Aaron and Moses,
of Anna and Simeon,
of Peter and Paul,
of Alexander of Hales and Noël Alexandre,
of John Okoro and all Your faithful people.

Teach us to honor those who have walked before us.

Give us Alexander’s intellectual courage
to ask difficult questions.

Give us Alexandre’s moral courage
to resist injustice even when resistance carries a price.

Give us Okoro’s extravagant hope
to believe that what seems impossible
may yet become possible through Your grace.

And give us the wisdom of our elders—
the wisdom born not from having avoided suffering
but from having survived it.

When we are tempted to despair,
remind us that darkness has never had the final word.

When we are tempted to surrender,
remind us that courage can begin with one small act.

When we are tempted to become cynical,
give us joy.

When we are tempted to become arrogant,
give us humility.

When we are tempted to forget where we came from,
send us someone who remembers.

And when we cannot see the road ahead,
help us trust that You are already there.

May we become people of extraordinary courage,
extraordinary compassion and extraordinary hope.

For we do not know what tomorrow will bring.

But we know who walks with us.

Amen.

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Now that the fourth season of Ted Lasso is out, my husband and I are simultaneously rewatching the first season. We are reminding ourselves of the great writing and the solid Gospel values that permeated those early episodes—before, according to my husband, the writing weakened in later seasons.

In Season 1, Episode 8, Ted tries to thank Rebecca for comforting him during an anxiety attack and helping him let go of the past and sign the divorce papers prepared by his wife’s attorney. Ted tells her:

“I’ve got your back. Think of me as your own personal metaphorical Saint Bernard. You don’t need to be dealing with a metaphorical avalanche to avail yourself to the metaphorical bourbon hanging around my neck.”

That scene sent my mind, naturally enough, to a certain breed of dog. As a child, I knew the St. Bernard from Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, Tom and Jerry, Peter Pan and even Donald Duck’s 1936 short Alpine Climbers. I knew several saints, too, including St. Bernard of Clairvaux, whom the Church celebrates today. So, before I learned about St. Bernard of Menthon, the 11^th-century archdeacon whose Alpine hospice gave the breed its name, I naturally assumed that the giant dogs were named after the more popular saint we celebrate every August 20!

Today, however, I’m less interested in the dog and more interested in three men whom the Church remembers today who remind us that holiness is never quite as simple as stained-glass windows make it appear. Bernard of Clairvaux was a brilliant abbot, mystic, reformer, and Doctor of the Church who could also be astonishingly intense. Geert Groote was a preacher whose call to deeper Christian living inspired communities that transformed education, spirituality, and book production. Erwin Kreuzer was a bishop who, in one of the darkest chapters of European history, swore an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

Three men. Three very different lives. Three very human mixtures of grace and sin. And perhaps one question for us in this very unordinary U.S. moment: To whom—and to what—are we willing to give our allegiance?

Bernard: Extraordinary Friendship As a Spiritual Practice

St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) is one of those medieval figures who accomplished a lot in so little time. He entered the Cistercian monastery at Cîteaux as a young man, became abbot of Clairvaux, and helped establish an extraordinary number of Cistercian monasteries. He was a theologian, preacher, spiritual writer, adviser to popes and kings, defender of the Cistercian reform, and one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the 12^th century. In 1830, he was named a Doctor of the Church.

He also wrote about love with an intensity that makes even modern readers pause. And this is where my mind goes to St. Aelred of Rievaulx. When I was an 18-year-old freshman at St. Louis University, one of the first spiritual texts I encountered in a 101 theology course was Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship. I did not yet know how often my own life would return to its central insight: that genuine friendship can become a place where we encounter God.

Aelred was a Cistercian, as was Bernard. Bernard was Aelred’s mentor and spiritual father. Bernard also wrote the introductory letter that appears at the beginning of Aelred’s The Mirror of Charity. The surviving edition of the work actually preserves Bernard’s letter to Aelred before Aelred’s own preface.

For Aelred, friendship was not a distraction from spirituality. Friendship itself can be a school of holiness. That matters. Catholic spirituality sometimes gives us the impression that holiness requires emotional distance. We can become suspicious of the affection, intimacy and relationships that bring us so much joy.

Aelred offers another possibility: Perhaps God can be encountered in the extraordinary love between friends!

Bernard’s profound affection for Malachy of Armagh, an Irish archbishop, makes that possibility even more fascinating. After helping him reform the Irish Church, Bernard welcomed Malachy to Clairvaux and eventually wrote Malachy’s biography, which is filled with an emotional intensity that modern readers can find startling. Bernard kissed Malachy’s feet, mourned him profoundly, and preserved his memory with extraordinary tenderness.

Modern LGBTQ+ Christians have understandably found something beautiful in these medieval accounts of male friendship. Contemporary queer Christian writers have pointed especially to Bernard’s intense relationship with Malachy and to the homoerotic language Bernard sometimes employed in describing his love for Christ. We don’t need to settle the question of Bernard’s sexuality to appreciate something important: He was not afraid of love.

And that may be one of the lessons we most need today. We live in a culture that increasingly teaches us to categorize and label one another before we encounter one another. Red state. Blue state. Christian nationalist. Progressive. Immigrant. Citizen. Gay. Straight. Black. White. Conservative. Liberal. Friend. Enemy.

But Jesus kept doing something inconvenient: He kept turning strangers into neighbors! He commanded us to love our enemies (Mt. 5:44). He told us that the greatest commandments are love of God and love of neighbor (Mt. 22:37–40). He admonished that people will recognize his disciples by their love (Jn. 13:35).

Bernard’s extraordinary friendships remind us that affection is not weakness. Deep friendship can be a spiritual discipline.

So perhaps we should ask ourselves:

• Who are the people we allow ourselves to love deeply?

• Who do we permit to know us when we are vulnerable?

• Who are the people whose differences from us have not prevented us from discovering their humanity?

And perhaps most importantly: Who is waiting for us to become their St. Bernard—to have their back when they are caught beneath an avalanche?

Geert Groote: Building a Common Life

On August 20, we also remember Geert Groote (1340–1384), the Dutch deacon, preacher and mystic who became a central figure in the movement known as Devotio Moderna.

Groote experienced a profound religious conversion and began preaching a call to deeper Christian living. His preaching attracted followers who eventually formed the Brothers of the Common Life. His communities sought to practice Christian discipleship not primarily through grand institutional power, but through shared life, prayer, work, education and service.

The movement eventually gave rise to the Windesheim Congregation, which became a major center of reform and spirituality in the Low Countries and northwestern Europe. At its height, the Windesheim network included dozens of monasteries for men and women and exercised considerable influence across Europe.

The Brothers also became deeply involved in education and the copying and printing of books. Their communities helped spread texts at a time when books were precious, labor-intensive objects. Their spirituality emphasized practical Christian living, rather than mere theological speculation.

Note the extraordinary lesson: Renewal rarely begins with the people at the top. It more often begins with people who decide to live differently.

Jesus gathered a small group around a table. He sent seventy-two disciples into the villages. He created a community in which tax collectors ate with zealots, women traveled with disciples, fishermen debated with scholars, and people who had no reason to trust one another learned to call one another family. The early Christian witness might best be summarized in Tertullian’s famous words, “See how they love one another.”

The common life mattered. And perhaps that is one reason the Church sometimes becomes so anxious about decline. We measure vitality in buildings, budgets, membership, attendance figures, collections, seminaries and ordinations.

But the Gospel asks different questions. Do people know that they belong? Do they know one another? Do they share one another’s burdens? Do they feed the hungry? Do they educate children? Do they care for elders? Do they make room for the stranger? Do they create beauty? Do they tell the truth? Do they forgive? Do they rejoice? Do they make the world around them more human?

The Brothers of the Common Life remind us that a community need not be enormous to be transformative. Sometimes an extraordinary movement begins with a handful of people who simply decide: We are going to live the Gospel together!

That sounds remarkably like the earliest Church described in Acts 2:42-47: They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to breaking bread and to prayer. They shared what they had. They cared for one another. They ate together with glad and generous hearts.

That is not merely a description of an ancient Church. It is a blueprint for today. Perhaps we should stop waiting for someone else to build the Church we desire. Maybe we are the people we’ve been waiting for!

Erwin Kreuzer: Even Bishops Can Get Allegiance Wrong

Then we come to Erwin Kreuzer (1878-1953), the fifth bishop of the German Old Catholic Church, whose memory is extremely uncomfortable. Months after being consecrated in 1935, he swore an oath of allegiance to… Adolf Hitler.

The language is chilling. Kreuzer pledged loyalty to the state and its Führer. Claiming to be “intimately allied with the people,” he welcomed the Third Reich and pledged loyalty to its leader.

We should resist the temptation to make Kreuzer into a cartoon villain. That would make him too easy to understand. He was not some monster from a horror movie. He was a Catholic bishop. A pastor and theologian. A human being. And he made a catastrophic moral choice—which is precisely why remembering him matters.

The danger of political idolatry does not begin when people become obviously evil. It begins when good people convince themselves that an alliance with political power will somehow advance the Church’s mission.

The logic is seductive: We’ll accomplish more with this leader’s protection. If we are loyal, perhaps this administration will respect our institution. If we compromise on certain issues, perhaps that will win us favor in other arenas. If we remain close to power, perhaps we can influence it! Eventually, we discover the leashes and chains around our necks.

Jesus had already warned us: “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Mt. 6:24). And elsewhere, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mt. 22:21).

The question isn’t whether Christians may participate in political life. Of course we may. And we should. The question is whether political power and alliances become our source of identity, security, and salvation. Because whenever the Church begins to believe that the kingdom of God can be secured through an alliance with Caesar, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Three Men. Three Lessons. One Common Life.

And here is what fascinates me about putting these three men together: Bernard teaches us about love, Groote teaches us about community, and Kreuzer warns us about allegiance.

Love. Common life. Allegiance. Those three words might make a rather good examination of conscience for us in 2026.

Let’s be honest: We, too, are tempted. We can become so consumed by political outrage that we forget how to love the people with whom we disagree. We can become so focused on criticizing institutions that we forget to build communities. We can become so certain that our political commitments are morally superior that we fail to notice when politics has begun functioning as a substitute religion.

And this is where I think of our very unordinary U.S. moment.

Pastor John Pavlovitz recently wrote about the people who continue to support Donald Trump despite everything they know about him. His argument is uncomfortable precisely because it refuses to explain away their support as simple ignorance. Some people know exactly who their political leader is—and still choose him!

However, whether we are talking about Trump supporters or progressive activists, the deeper spiritual question remains the same: What are we willing to excuse in the people or movements to which we have given our allegiance?

That question belongs to all of us. We can point fingers at Kreuzer and say, How could a bishop possibly swear allegiance to Hitler? But then we should ask: What would we be willing to overlook if we believed the person or movement on our side could save us? What truths would we rationalize? What suffering would we minimize? What neighbor would we sacrifice? What Gospel commands would we reinterpret? Which prophetic voices would we silence?

The great temptation is always to imagine that our alliances are different. Rather than baptize our political loyalties, Jesus challenges us to something much more demanding: to love, build community, and remain faithful to God when every earthly power promises security in exchange for our allegiance.

And that brings us back to the St. Bernard dogs of Ted Lasso. Ted literally tells Rebecca, “I’ve got your back.” That is a beautiful image for Christian discipleship: being the kind of person who can be trusted when someone else is buried beneath an avalanche!

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Ways We Can Live the Lessons of August 20

• Practice extraordinary friendship. Choose one person whose politics, theology, race, class, sexuality, or life experience differs significantly from yours, and intentionally deepen your relationship with them. Don’t debate them into friendship. Love them into it.

• Build a common life. Instead of merely lamenting the decline of religious institutions, gather people for prayer, meals, service, study, art, music, mutual aid, or conversation. Start small. The Brothers of the Common Life did.

• Examine your own political allegiances. Ask where your political commitments have become so important that you excuse behavior you would condemn if someone on the other side did it.

• Refuse dehumanizing language. The person on the other side of the political divide is still made in the imago Dei. For Christians, “love your enemies” is not a suggestion.

• Have someone’s back. Identify someone who is vulnerable in the present political climate—an immigrant, a trans person, a poor neighbor, a prisoner, a person experiencing homelessness, a child being bullied, a family facing food insecurity—and do something concrete.

• Keep your allegiances properly ordered. We can be patriotic without being nationalist, politically engaged without being politically possessed, and passionate about justice without confusing any political movement with the Kingdom of God.

Extraordinary People in an Unordinary Time

The three men remembered today do not give us three immaculate saints to imitate. Thank God. They give us something more useful: three human beings whose lives reveal both possibility and danger.

Bernard of Clairvaux reminds us that extraordinary love can transform friendship into a school of holiness.

Geert Groote reminds us that extraordinary renewal begins when ordinary people decide to share a common life.

Erwin Kreuzer reminds us that extraordinary intelligence, sincere faith, and ecclesial office do not make us immune from moral failure.

We are all mixtures of grace and sin.

That may be one of the most liberating truths Christianity offers. The goal is not to become a person who never fails, but to become a person whose failures do not have the final word.

So let us become people who love extravagantly. Let us build communities generously. Let us honestly challenge our own loyalties. Let us refuse to confuse political power with the power of the Gospel.

And when someone we love is buried beneath an avalanche—whether that avalanche is grief, fear, loneliness, poverty, discrimination, addiction, political persecution, or simply a terrible Thursday—let us be willing to say: I’ve got your back.

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Whom do I love deeply enough to know them beyond their politics, labels, or public identity?

• Who in my life needs me to have their back right now?

• Where have I substituted political allegiance for Gospel allegiance?

• How might I create a genuine “common life” with others?

• What person or group have I unconsciously dehumanized because of our political or cultural differences?

• Where might God be asking me to practice extraordinary courage, extraordinary compassion, or extraordinary friendship?

• If Jesus examined my calendar, my finances, my social media feed, and my relationships, what would they reveal about whom I truly serve?

Let Us Pray

God of Bernard, Geert and Erwin,
You who call even imperfect people into extraordinary service,

Teach us to love with the tenderness of Bernard,
to build community with the generosity of Geert,
and to recognize the dangers of misplaced allegiance
that we see so painfully in the story of Erwin Kreuzer.

When we are tempted to love our tribe more than our neighbor,
call us back to the command of Jesus.

When we are tempted to retreat into cynicism,
remind us of the first Christians who shared their lives with one another.

When we are tempted to place our hope in political power,
turn our eyes again toward your Kingdom.

Give us the courage to tell the truth about our own side.
Give us the humility to recognize our own capacity for sin.
Give us the grace to love people we do not understand.
Give us the wisdom to know when an alliance has become an idol.

And when our neighbors are buried beneath the avalanches of this very unordinary moment, make us people who do not merely pray for their rescue.

Make us people who show up.

Make us people who stay.

Make us people who look at other human beings and say, with all the extravagant love of Christ: I’ve got your back.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

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I first studied modern philosophy as a 19-year-old at St. Louis University. I remember encountering names that have never left me: René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. Some of them were believers. Some were skeptics. Some were outright hostile to Christianity. All of them, in one way or another, forced me to ask the question that good philosophy should always force upon us: How do we know what we think we know?

Voltaire spent much of his intellectual life attacking the power of the French Catholic Church, which he regarded as an engine of intolerance, superstition and cruelty. His famous cry, Écrasez l’infâme!—“Crush the infamous thing!”—was hardly an expression of affection for ecclesiastical authority. David Hume subjected miracles and traditional Christian claims to devastating philosophical scrutiny. Thomas Hobbes portrayed the Church as a dangerous political power that competed with civil government, and he famously described the papacy as the “ghost” of the Roman Empire.

The Roman Church responded as institutions under intellectual threat often do: with condemnation, censorship, and attempts to control who could read what. Hobbes and Hume suffered an opera omnia ban: All their works past, present and future were forbidden to Roman Catholics. The most influential masterpieces of all other modern philosophers—except Adam Smith—were banned as well.

But today we remember a fascinating paradox. One French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, was not trying to destroy the Church. He was trying to save it! A mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher and theologian, Pascal was a deeply committed Christian who loved the Church and his faith. Yet when he believed powerful churchmen were using theology to excuse moral corruption, he went after them with extraordinary intellectual brilliance—and extraordinary wit.

Today we also remember Johann Friedrich, a German Catholic theologian who likewise found himself on the wrong side of ecclesiastical authority after he opposed the novel claims of purported papal infallibility at the sham Vatican Council of 1869-1870.

And suddenly I find myself thinking about something rather uncomfortable in our own moment: What happens when those who possess power decide that criticism itself is a form of disobedience?

Pascal: The Catholic Who Took on the Jesuits

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) lived an astonishingly brief life and died before his 40^th birthday. In those four decades, he managed to make major contributions to mathematics, probability theory, physics, philosophy, theology and literature. He invented an early mechanical calculator. He contributed to the mathematical theory of probability. He conducted experiments concerning atmospheric pressure. He helped establish what is now known as Pascal’s law.

And then there was his religious life. Pascal experienced what he called his “Night of Fire” on November 23, 1654, an intense religious experience that profoundly changed him. His sister Jacqueline had entered the religious community at Port-Royal-des-Champs, a center of Jansenist spirituality. Pascal increasingly associated himself with the Port-Royal movement, which emphasized human sinfulness, divine grace, and the absolute necessity of God’s initiative in salvation.

The controversy was not merely theological. It was political. And it was personal.

At the center stood the Jesuits. Pascal believed that certain Jesuit theologians had developed an approach to moral theology known as casuistry, in which complicated cases of conscience could be analyzed through elaborate distinctions. Pascal believed that this approach could make serious sins appear less serious when the person committing them happened to be wealthy, powerful, or socially connected. The Jesuits, for instance, argued that a nobleman could be forgiven for the sin of dueling (a mortal sin!) as long as he claimed he was just taking a walk and defending his honor—and not actively looking for a fight.

So Pascal did something extraordinary: He wrote. Between 1656 and 1657, he published eighteen letters under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte. They became known as The Provincial Letters. They were theological polemics. They were literary masterpieces. And they were savage. Pascal used humor, irony, logic and satire to expose what he regarded as the moral absurdities of his opponents. His target was not the Church itself, but Christianity distorted by institutional self-interest. That distinction matters. Pascal was not saying, “The Church is terrible, therefore abandon Christianity.” He was saying something much more dangerous: “I love the Church enough to tell the truth about what is happening inside it.”

The distinction reminds me of the prophet Nathan confronting King David (2Sam. 12:1-14). Nathan did not say, “You are no longer my king.” He said, in effect, You are wrong. Nathan told the king the story of a rich man with many sheep and cattle who stole the one ewe lamb of an exploited person. Then came those devastating words: “You are the man!” (2Sam. 12:7). Prophetic faithfulness sometimes requires us to speak truth to the institution precisely because we love the institution.

Jesus did the same thing: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” (Mt. 23:13). Jesus was not attacking Judaism from the outside. He was speaking as a Jewish teacher from within his own religious tradition. That is an important distinction for us today.

Criticism is not necessarily betrayal. Sometimes criticism is fidelity.

When the Institution Decides Who May Speak

Pascal’s Provincial Letters became enormously influential. They were also condemned. The Roman Church placed them on the Index of Forbidden Books. King Louis XIV ordered that they be burned.

Imagine that: A Christian writes a book criticizing leaders—and the response is not, “Let’s debate.” It is: Burn the book. That should sound familiar. Not because we live in 17^th-century France, but because the temptation to control information is remarkably durable.

Every authoritarian system eventually discovers that controlling the narrative is easier than answering the questions. And that is why I find the White House’s current catalog of “Media Offenders” and “Leftist Influencers” so fascinating. The administration itself describes the site as a record of media stories it considers false or misleading and presents a running list of alleged “offenders”—as if we were living in the 17th century!

Journalists make mistakes. News organizations get things wrong. Corrections are necessary. Accountability is necessary. But there is a profound difference between correcting misinformation and creating an official government catalog of media enemies.

One is journalism. The other begins to look remarkably like a modern-day Index of Forbidden Books. And suddenly Blaise Pascal feels less like an obscure 17^th-century French intellectual and more like a companion in this very unordinary U.S. moment.

Johann Friedrich: Excommunicated, Yet Still a Priest and Teacher

Today we also remember Johann Friedrich (1836–1917), the German priest and theologian who became an important figure in the Old Catholic movement.

Friedrich was a student, colleague, and close associate of Ignaz von Döllinger. When Pius IX convened the bishops of the Church in 1869, Friedrich served as theological adviser to Cardinal Gustav Adolf, Cardinal Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst, and supplied historical and theological material to bishops who opposed the proposed doctrine of purported papal infallibility.

Friedrich was not some radical outsider throwing rocks at the Church from a distance. He was an insider: a priest and theologian convinced that infallibility had no place in Church history and that the bishop of Rome was pushing his Church in the wrong direction.

When he refused to accept the new Vatican definitions, he was excommunicated in 1871—and yet he continued his priestly and academic work. The Bavarian government supported him, he retained his academic position, and he established the Old Catholic theological faculty at Bern.

There is something almost breathtaking about this. The institution said, “You are outside,” but Friedrich’s life effectively answered: “I am still serving God’s people.”

That is a profoundly important part of the history of Old and Independent Catholicism. Excommunication is a statement about ecclesiastical communion. It is not a statement about God’s love and grace, or about a person’s integrity, or about whether someone’s ministry bears fruit. And challenging those in power, as Nathan did to King David, certainly does not give the institution the power to erase someone’s vocation from God.

I know something about this: After ten years of ministry as a Roman Catholic priest, I publicly broke with a conservative hierarch unwilling to stand with immigrants and women against wealthy, conservative donors. As a result, we created Holy Family Catholic Church—Austin’s only inclusive Catholic community—in 2012. I know this much: Sometimes the Spirit calls us to minister in places where institutions suggest we no longer belong.

Jesus tells us that the Spirit “blows where it chooses” (Jn. 3:8): The Spirit has never been particularly good at respecting the institutional boundaries of man-made (sic) organizations!

A Chorus of Other Voices

In addition to Pascal and Friedrich, August 19 gives us an extraordinary collection of people to remember.

• Dick Gregory (1932–2017) used comedy as a weapon against racism and injustice. He understood something every prophet eventually learns: Sometimes laughter can puncture a lie more effectively than a lecture. In an age when political humor can feel like a survival mechanism, Gregory reminds us that joy itself can be a form of resistance.

• Robert Wood (1923–2018) was a Congregational minister and LGBTQ pioneer whose 1960 book Christ and the Homosexual argued for Christian acceptance of gay people. He later participated in the Annual Reminders, early public demonstrations for LGBTQ equality, while wearing his clerical collar. I cannot help but feel particular gratitude for people like Wood who stood in public when doing so could cost them dearly.

• Jack Canfield (1944-) reminds us that stories matter. The Chicken Soup for the Soul phenomenon has sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. As someone who has published more than fifty books myself, I love the reminder that stories can heal, teach and humanize people whom propaganda has reduced to stereotypes. Jesus knew this—and he taught with stories!

• Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite (1948-) has spent decades connecting theology with public life, justice, peace, women’s equality, and the experiences of people on society’s margins. She served as president of Chicago Theological Seminary from 1998 to 2008, where she remains president emerita and professor.

• And Emelyn Dacuycuy (1966-) became the first woman bishop of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente—our movement’s largest non-Vatican expression of Catholicism—in 2019. She has spoken about the need for the Church to move beyond unjust structures and build bridges for justice and equality.

A remarkable chorus: a mathematician, a priest and theologian, a comedian, a gay minister, a motivational storyteller, a feminist theologian, a woman bishop. Different traditions, gifts and battles, but one extraordinary lesson as we prepare to celebrate Austin Pride this weekend: The Spirit seems to love and delight in diversity!

The Return of the “Index”

The Roman Catholic Church eventually abandoned its Index of Forbidden Books in 1966. Yet the instinct behind the Index never disappeared—as evident in the White House’s “Media Offenders” page.

That human tendency appears whenever those in authority decide that the safest response to criticism is to discredit the critic.

• It appears when journalists become “enemies.”

• It appears when scholars become “ideologues.”

• It appears when teachers become “indoctrinators.”

• It appears when public servants become “disloyal.”

• It appears when clergy who ask uncomfortable questions become “divisive.”

• It appears whenever someone says, “Don’t answer the question. Silence the person asking it.”

Which is why we keep returning to Scripture.

• The prophet Amos did not receive a government press credential before saying, “Let justice roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24).

• John the Baptist did not wait for King Herod’s approval before challenging his behavior (Mt. 14:3-4).

• Mary did not consult the religious establishment before singing that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones” (Lk. 1:52).

• Jesus did not submit his Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7) to a communications director.

• And Paul? He repeatedly got himself into trouble by speaking.

Even Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their response? “We cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). That is the Christian vocation in miniature!

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Extraordinary Acts of Resistance

In this very unordinary U.S. moment, we cannot merely complain. We must act.

• Read something you were told not to read. Read the book the banned author, the uncomfortable theologian, the historian who challenges your assumptions, the journalist whose conclusions irritate you. Then think. That is how adults learn.

• Defend the freedom of people with whom you disagree. Freedom of speech is not a reward for people who agree with us. If we defend only speech that makes us comfortable, we have not defended free speech. We have defended ourselves.

• Refuse to participate in dehumanizing language. When immigrants become “invaders,” journalists become “enemies,” protesters become “thugs,” and political opponents become “vermin,” pause. Words prepare the soil in which violence grows. Our vocabulary should remember that God created human beings in the divine image (Gen. 1:27).

• Support institutions that preserve independent thought. Libraries. Public schools. Universities. Independent journalism. Religious communities. Museums. Courts. Professional associations. These institutions are imperfect; they need accountability, but democracy becomes extraordinarily fragile when every independent institution is pressured to become an extension of political power.

• Become a person whose love cannot be intimidated. This may be the hardest. Pascal was not merely clever. Friedrich was not merely learned. Wood was not merely courageous. Gregory was not merely funny. They placed their gifts at the service of something larger than themselves. That is Christian discipleship. This very unordinary U.S. moment requires extraordinary courage—and it also requires extraordinary love!

The Spirit Cannot Be Put on the Index!

When I was 19, sitting in a philosophy classroom at St. Louis University, I could not have imagined how often those names from our textbooks would return to me. Hobbes. Locke. Hume. Rousseau. Kant. Voltaire. And Pascal. I certainly could not have imagined that decades later I would find myself writing about another Catholic theologian who had been excommunicated for refusing to accept what he believed was an abuse of ecclesiastical authority.

Perhaps that is the full circle. Pascal teaches us that loving the Church does not mean surrendering our minds. Friedrich teaches us that losing institutional status does not necessarily mean losing one’s vocation. Gregory teaches us that laughter can challenge injustice. Wood teaches us that an LGBTQ Christian can stand proudly in a clerical collar. Thistlethwaite teaches us that theology belongs in the public square. Dacuycuy teaches us that women belong wherever God’s people need leadership. And together they remind us that truth is not the possession of those who hold office.

Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn. 8:32). The truth does not need our permission. It does not need an episcopal decree or a White House press release. It does not require lists of approved or banned works. Truth simply remains… truth.

Our task is to keep seeking it, speaking it, listening for it, and loving one another enough that even when we disagree, we remain free to search for it together!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Where in my life have I confused truth with institutional authority?

• Have I ever silenced someone because their questions made me uncomfortable?

• What book, author, theologian or perspective might I encounter if I were less afraid of being challenged?

• Where am I being called to speak truth with extraordinary courage?

• Where might I need to listen, rather than speak?

• How do I respond when someone criticizes an institution, tradition or leader I love?

• Am I willing to defend another person’s freedom, even when I profoundly disagree with what they say?

• Where do I see the Spirit working outside the boundaries I have constructed?

• What marginalized person or community needs me to use my voice more courageously?

• What would it look like for my faith to become not merely certain, but genuinely curious?

Let Us Pray

God of truth and freedom,

You have never been confined by our institutions.

You spoke through prophets who challenged rulers, through apostles who defied authorities, through women whose witness transformed the Church, and through saints and sinners whose voices we sometimes recognized only long after they had spoken.

Give us the extraordinary courage of Blaise Pascal.

Give us the steadfastness of Johann Friedrich.

Give us the joyful resistance of Dick Gregory.

Give us the prophetic love of Robert Wood.

Give us the wisdom of Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite.

Give us the bridge-building courage of Emelyn Dacuycuy.

When those in power demand silence, give us courage.

When we are wrong, give us humility.

When others are wrong, give us charity.

When we are afraid, give us hope.

And when we encounter someone whose voice challenges our certainty, remind us that your Spirit is not ours to control.

Keep us forever seeking truth.

Keep us forever defending freedom.

Keep us forever choosing love.

And never allow us to mistake the silencing of a voice for the triumph of truth.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

Support Extraordinary Catholics!

Thank you for “liking,” restacking, or sharing these words with those who might need them!

Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768

I typically wake up on Sunday mornings thinking about my homily and what I will say to the people of God. This Sunday was different. Partly because I was not scheduled to preach—only to preside at our 9:00 a.m. English Mass and our noon Spanish Mass—but also because I woke up to a message from a friend who suggested that it might be interesting to explore the Roman Catholic Church’s role in negotiating with cartels, criminals and drug lords in Mexico.

I replied that, after all these years of traveling through Mexico and serving so many Mexican immigrants here in Austin, I really hadn’t considered that reality. Then I watched those little bubbles appear on my phone as he typed: “Oh, they are, Padre, but it’s a secret. Shhh, don’t say anything!”

How dare my friend dare me like that?

And so, as I drove to church Sunday morning, instead of thinking about a homily, I found myself thinking about Mexico. I thought about the countless miles I have traveled there, the cartel violence I witnessed in newspapers and television, the parishioners who have told me stories of extortion and kidnapping, and the young people I encountered decades ago when gangs were already transforming lives in East Austin.

But most of all, I began thinking about larger questions:

• What do we do when evil is stronger than we are?

• What do we do when we cannot simply eliminate evil?

• What do we do when confronting evil head-on might get someone killed?

• What do we do when survival itself requires us to navigate a world in which good and evil are not neatly separated?

And suddenly, my friend’s question was not really about Mexico. It was about us.

“Shhh, Don’t Say Anything!”

He sent me an article from the National Catholic Reporter that reported something extraordinary: In February 2024, four Roman Catholic bishops in Mexico acknowledged that they had met with leaders of drug cartels in an effort to negotiate a possible peace agreement in Guerrero. The Bishop of Chilpancingo-Chilapa, José de Jesús González Hernández, said the talks ultimately failed because the cartels could not agree about territory.

And here is the first important correction to his teasing: Conversations between bishops and cartel leaders were not exactly a secret. The bishops themselves publicly talked about them.

Nor does the reporting establish that the bishops were taking cartel money or making deals to enrich the Church. The stated purpose was much more sobering: trying to reduce violence and protect people whose lives were caught between competing criminal organizations.

In fact, an anonymous Mexican priest explained the dilemma rather well. People sometimes approached priests to ask what had happened to missing relatives. Others needed someone who could communicate with cartel leaders because the government could not guarantee their safety.

The Church was not negotiating because it suddenly had a fondness for drug lords. It was negotiating because people were dying. That distinction matters.

The bishops were not saying, “Cartels are good.” They were saying, in effect, “How can we keep our people alive?” And that is where our moral theology becomes considerably more complicated than our bumper stickers.

From the Cornfields of Ohio to the Cartels of Mexico

I have loved Mexico for decades.

When I returned to Cristo Rey in 2000, I traveled to Mexico every eight weeks, bringing back merchandise from Casa Cristo Rey in Monterrey for our parish gift shop. When I decorated my first home in 2006, I furnished it through several trips to Mexico, collecting art, furniture, and all sorts of things that made my house feel like a celebration of Mexican art and culture.

In 2007, my friend Heidi and I drove from Austin to Mexico City. During that trip I met Trinidad Ruben in San Luis Potosí, and he and I drove all the way to Manzanillo and Puerto Vallarta that Christmas. In 2008, my friend Isidro and I drove to Cancún and back. (Well, almost: My SUV broke down in Campeche, we had it towed to a mechanic named Pollo, and, back in the U.S., I subsequently learned that Pollo stole my catalytic converter!)

Mexico taught me many things, some theological and some automotive—but then something changed.

By 2008, cartel violence had become sufficiently widespread that I stopped driving into Mexico. I remember crossing the border and seeing newspapers with photographs of people murdered in the streets, bodies hanging from bridges, police officers killed, and even military personnel executed.

The Mexico I loved was still there, but another Mexico had become impossible to ignore.

When our Adoración Nocturna at Cristo Rey desperately wanted to visit the magnificent monument of Christ the King atop Monte Cubilete, we organized a bus pilgrimage in 2010. I have never prayed so fervently for a bus trip to safely end—and I have rarely been so grateful to God when it did!

When Evil Becomes Your Neighbor

The stories I have heard from parishioners over the years have never been abstract. Family members in Mexico have been extorted. People have been kidnapped. Loved ones have disappeared.

One Holy Family parishioner, Inocencio, traveled to Mexico a few years ago in his new truck. Cartel members stopped him and gave him a choice: The truck or his life. He chose his life.

What would you have chosen?

That question bothers me because it refuses to remain theological. It very quickly becomes personal. We like moral questions when we can answer them from a comfortable distance.

Should I tell the truth? Yes. Should I steal? No. Should I help someone who is suffering? Yes. Should I cooperate with evil? Absolutely not.

But then imagine that your child has been kidnapped. Imagine that your spouse has been threatened. Imagine that a cartel controls your town. Imagine that you own the only pharmacy for fifty miles, and criminals tell you that you will pay them or they will burn your business. Imagine that your parish priest knows the cartel leader and might be able to negotiate your daughter’s release.

Suddenly, “What would Jesus do?” becomes a much harder question!

I Met Gangs Before I Met Cartels

This subject touches my heart and my own ministry: When I was assigned to Cristo Rey in East Austin in 1995, I was asked to work with parish youth—including those involved in local gangs. It was eye-opening. Gangs were pervasive in East Austin at the time. I still remember the gang names and gang members’ (or should I say, parish youths’) graffitied “tags.” Pizza companies would not even deliver to the neighborhood.

I remember one eighth-grader, Mago, showing me a rock of crack cocaine about the size of a marble. I have often wondered what became of him. Was he able to escape? Did he survive? Those gangs were serious—but they were child’s play compared with the cartels whose violence I saw splashed across the newspapers in Mexico.

I admit: I resist simplistic answers to violence.

I have sat with young people caught in systems larger than themselves. I have watched poverty, addiction, violence, hopelessness and opportunity—or the lack of it—intersect. And I have learned that evil rarely arrives wearing a sign that says: HELLO. I AM EVIL.

Sometimes evil looks like a cartel boss. Sometimes it looks like a frightened teenager. Sometimes it looks like a government policy. Sometimes it looks like a respectable institution. Sometimes it looks like us.

Can You Negotiate with the Devil?

There is an interesting tension here in Catholic spirituality.

Pope Francis once explicitly said that Jesus did not negotiate with the devil. In a 2024 Angelus reflection, Francis contrasted Jesus’ rejection of the devil with the need for dialogue in human conflicts. That distinction is enormously important. We do not negotiate with evil in the sense of declaring evil good—but we sometimes have to negotiate with people who are doing evil.

Jesus did that all the time. He spoke with Roman soldiers. He ate with tax collectors. He conversed with Samaritans. He allowed a woman of questionable reputation to wash his feet. He even engaged Judas until the very end.

The Gospel does not teach us to pretend that evil does not exist. It teaches us to refuse to surrender the humanity of the person who has become entangled in it.

The Catholic Catechism itself recognizes that evil can become social and structural. It speaks of the responsibility not to cooperate in evil or become accomplices in systems that perpetuate violence and injustice. At the same time, Catholic social teaching insists that the common good concerns the life of everyone, not merely the safety of those with power.

So perhaps the question is not simply: “Did Mexican bishops talk to criminals?” Perhaps the better question is: “What were they trying to accomplish by talking to them?” If the goal was to protect human life, rescue captives, and reduce violence, dialogue may be an instrument of the common good. If the goal were to secure money, privilege, or institutional power, the moral calculation would be very different. Intent matters. Circumstances matter. Consequences matter.

And as Catholic moral theology insists, we cannot simply do something evil in the hope that a good outcome will result, which is precisely why this is so difficult.

Mother Teresa, Charles Keating, and the Problem of “Tainted Money”

This brings me to a story concerning Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Charles Keating, a financier convicted for his role in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, had donated approximately a million dollars to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. After his conviction, Mother Teresa wrote to Judge Lance Ito asking for clemency. A prosecutor subsequently asked her to return money obtained through Keating’s fraud.

The point is not to bash Mother Teresa. The point is to recognize how complicated the moral life becomes when good works become entangled with compromised resources.

I imagine someone giving Holy Family $100,000 to feed and shelter the poor—only for us to later discover that the money came from fraud. We fed so many hungry people—but were we implicated in the theft? Do we return any remaining monies, or do we use it to feed the poor? What if the money came from a murderer? Or from the ransom demanded for someone’s kidnapped child? What if our accepting it saved a life? Or what if our accepting it empowered the criminal to continue harming others?

These are not questions for bumper stickers. They are questions for conscience—and ones that Christians have faced for centuries.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer faced them in Nazi Germany. Pius XII faced them in Nazi-occupied Europe. People living under dictatorships have faced them. People living under slavery have faced them. People living under Jim Crow faced them. People living under apartheid faced them. People living under cartels face them. And increasingly, people living under powerful governments face them.

Suddenly, the Question Is About Us

Here is where a Sunday morning conversation with a friend became profoundly uncomfortable. It would be easy for us to look at Mexico and say: “How terrible that those people have to negotiate with criminals!”

But then I look in the mirror.

Our own government is using lethal military force against people it identifies as drug traffickers. Since September 2025, U.S. forces have conducted dozens of strikes against boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Senator Tim Kaine recently shared that public reporting indicates more than 65 such operations and more than 220 people killed. Human rights organizations and legal advocates have challenged both the legality of the strikes and the administration’s refusal to publicly release the legal rationale.

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) has documented 221 deaths in the maritime campaign and has argued that the strikes amount to extrajudicial executions, particularly because the administration has not publicly established the identities of many of those killed or demonstrated that drugs were aboard the vessels.

And this is not simply a theoretical concern for Mexico. A Los Angeles Times investigation reported that at least 13 Mexican citizens may have been killed in U.S. strikes on fishing boats, raising questions about whether some of those targeted were fishermen, rather than cartel operatives.

Think about that. Mexico has cartels. The United States has a military. And ordinary people can find themselves caught between them.

The Mexican bishops say: We need to talk to dangerous people… because people are dying.

The U.S. government says: We need to kill dangerous people… because people are dying.

And the Christian must ask: Which response actually protects human life?

The School in Minab

Then there is Iran.

On February 28, U.S. and Israeli forces launched military operations against Iran. That same day, a girls’ elementary school in Minab was struck by U.S. missiles. Iranian authorities reported that more than 160 people were killed, including at least 123 children.

One fact is unbearable: Children died. Children who had gone to school. Children who had families. Children who had names. Children who had dreams. Children who probably had no idea what strategic objective was being pursued around them.

And we must ask ourselves what it means to be morally implicated in their deaths.

Such a question is not anti-American. It is Catholic moral reasoning at its best.

The Fifth Commandment does not say: You shall not kill… unless the person is on the wrong side of a geopolitical conflict. It simply says: You shall not kill.

And Then There Is the Money

Even when we do not personally pull a trigger, we can still ask whether our money supports systems that cause harm.

The Trump administration’s dismantling and defunding of major portions of USAID has already produced measurable human consequences. Some observers estimate that 700,000 people, two-thirds of whom are children, have already died as a result.

Again, the question is not: “Are we personally responsible for every death?” That is too simplistic. The better question is: “What systems do we help sustain, and what responsibility do we have to challenge them?”

Catholic theology has a word for this: solidarity. We belong to one another. The hungry child in Gaza is not someone else’s child. The kidnapped Mexican is not someone else’s problem. The Iranian schoolgirl is not someone else’s daughter. The Venezuelan fisherman is not someone else’s brother. The incarcerated American is not someone else’s son. And the eighth-grader holding a marble-sized rock of crack cocaine is not merely a “gang member.”

They are all human beings. They are the imago Dei. They all bear the image of God!

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What We Can Do

So what do we do with all of this? Not every evil can be confronted with a dramatic march. Not every criminal can be persuaded. Not every government can be immediately transformed. But we can cultivate extraordinary moral courage!

• Learn the difference between dialogue and endorsement. Talking with someone is not necessarily agreeing with someone. Sometimes dialogue is the only path toward protecting vulnerable people.

• Refuse the dehumanizing language of our age. When we call entire populations “illegals,” “rapists,” “animals,” “terrorists,” “invaders” or “criminals,” we make violence easier to justify. Speak of people before speaking of categories.

• Ask where your money goes. Our moral lives include budgets, taxes, investments, purchases, and institutional priorities. Ask difficult questions about what your money supports.

• Support people who build bridges in dangerous places. Support churches, nonprofits, journalists, lawyers, human-rights advocates, and community organizations that work to protect people caught between violence and power.

• Practice courageous dialogue without surrendering moral clarity. Jesus did not confuse compassion with approval. Neither should we.

• Resist the fantasy that violence is always the simplest solution. Sometimes force is necessary to protect people. But Christians should never celebrate killing. We should grieve it, scrutinize it, and demand accountability.

• Remember the vulnerable person in every policy debate. When we discuss cartels, imagine Inocencio. When we discuss gangs, imagine Mago. When we discuss Iran, imagine a little girl sitting in a classroom. When we discuss immigration, imagine the family who crossed a border because they were terrified of what would happen if they stayed.

That is how moral theology becomes incarnational!

From Narcos to the Gospel

Popular culture has spent decades teaching us to think about organized crime.

• The Godfather taught us about family, power and corruption.

• The Wire showed us how institutions themselves can become engines of dysfunction.

• Breaking Bad gave us a suburban chemistry teacher who gradually convinced himself that evil could be justified by the good he intended to accomplish.

• Traffic showed us that the war on drugs is never merely about drugs.

• Sicario confronted us with the seductive idea that perhaps defeating evil requires becoming more ruthless than evil itself.

• And Narcos turned cartel violence into binge-worthy television.

But the Gospel refuses to let us remain spectators. Jesus does not invite us to watch violence from the comfort of our couches. Our Scriptures send us into it!

• “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Mt. 5:9).

• “Love your enemies” (Mt. 5:44).

• “Whatever you did for one of the least of these” (Mt. 25:40).

• “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Mt. 5:6).

• “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21).

• “Let justice roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24).

And perhaps most hauntingly:

• “What have you done?” (Gen. 4:10).

God asks Cain about Abel because the blood of the murdered person cries out.

That question never stops.

From “What’s Going On?” to “What Are We Going to Do?”

Marvin Gaye asked the question in “What’s Going On?”

U2 sang Sunday Bloody Sunday in the shadow of political violence.

John Lennon imagined a world beyond the borders and divisions that humans construct.

Bruce Springsteen has repeatedly asked what happens to ordinary people when institutions become indifferent to them.

And the great protest music of every generation has essentially asked the same theological question: How long, O Lord? The psalmist asked it. The prophets asked it. The martyrs asked it. The poor ask it. The immigrant asks it. The prisoner asks it. The mother whose child has disappeared asks it. And sometimes we ask it ourselves.

But the Christian response cannot stop at lament. Eventually God asks us: What are you going to do?

When We Cannot Defeat Evil, We Can Still Refuse to Become It

This may be the lesson I needed from the Sunday-morning text. I began the day thinking about Mexican bishops who had apparently done something extraordinary: They sat down with people whose actions were causing extraordinary suffering.

Perhaps that was courageous. Perhaps it was dangerous. Perhaps it was imperfect. Perhaps it was necessary. Perhaps it was all four. And that is precisely why I think it matters.

We are living through a moment when people increasingly insist that there are only two choices: dominate or be dominated, destroy or be destroyed, win or lose, crush your enemies or become their victim.

The Gospel offers another way: Do not become what you oppose.

The cartel does not get to define your morality. The dictator does not get to define your humanity. The terrorist does not get to define your compassion. The government does not get to define the value of the person it labels an enemy. And fear does not get to define the limits of your love.

Perhaps that is why I keep thinking about Mago, that eighth-grader from East Austin. I have no idea what became of him. But I know this:

• If Mago became a criminal, that would not mean that God stopped seeing him.

• If Mago became a victim, that would not mean that God stopped seeing him.

• If Mago became a father, God would see him.

• If Mago became a prisoner, God would see him.

• If Mago died decades ago, God would see him.

Because the Gospel insists that no human being ever becomes invisible to God. And perhaps that is our vocation in this very unordinary moment: to see the people whom power has made invisible. Even when we cannot defeat the evil around them. Especially then!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Where in my own life am I tempted to believe that violence is the only realistic response to evil?

• Have I ever confused talking with someone with agreeing with someone? What might courageous dialogue look like in my life?

• Who are the people whom my society has taught me to see primarily as criminals, threats or enemies? Can I look at them again as people created in God’s image?

• What systems, institutions or policies do I participate in that may contribute to suffering elsewhere in the world?

• When have I faced a situation in which every available choice seemed morally compromised? How did I discern what to do?

• Am I more comfortable condemning evil from a distance than accompanying people who are actually caught within it?

• Where is God inviting me to practice extraordinary courage, rather than simply express extraordinary outrage?

Let Us Pray

God of justice and mercy,

You see what we cannot see.

You know the name of every person who disappears into a cartel’s violence, every child who dies in a war, every family threatened by extortion, every young person trapped by addiction, and every person whom governments and institutions reduce to a category.

Give us wisdom when the choices are difficult.

Give us courage when evil frightens us.

Give us prudence when dialogue becomes necessary.

Give us moral clarity when compromise becomes tempting.

Give us compassion when we encounter people who have become entangled in evil.

And give us extraordinary love when the world tells us that some people are beyond redemption.

Teach us to protect the vulnerable without becoming violent ourselves.

Teach us to resist evil without surrendering our humanity.

Teach us to seek peace without confusing peace with silence.

And when we cannot eliminate the darkness, help us at least to become light.

May we never forget that every person bears your image.

May we never forget that every life matters.

And may we never forget the question you asked Cain: “What have you done?”

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

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Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768

Of the hundreds of funerals I have attended, there is one I remember less for what happened during the funeral, than for what happened afterward.

In 2015, Juanita Lopez went to her heavenly reward at age 85. Saying that Juanita “went to her heavenly reward” almost feels like an understatement. If anyone ever merited eternal life and the beatific vision, it was Juanita! I often called her a saint. Whenever she enthusiastically embraced another project, I would tell her she was earning her wings.

I had known Juanita for nearly 20 years. She was a devout Catholic, a beloved catechist, and a motherly and grandmotherly presence at Cristo Rey. She loved co-leading the “recycled teenagers” who danced ballet folklórico at the Conley-Guerrero Senior Center. She took enormous pride in her work as master seamstress for a local professional ballet folklórico company.

I was her former pastor, and like her constable son, Carlos, I was an elected official at the time. So there was never any question in my mind about honoring Juanita’s life and legacy by attending her funeral. So I did.

Are you sitting down?

Later that afternoon, Deacon Ron Walker, Chancellor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Austin, called to threaten me with a restraining order if I ever set foot again at the parish I once led as pastor.

Why? Because I, now an Inclusive Catholic priest, attended a funeral at the Roman Catholic parish I once led.

Deacon Ron’s call struck me as supremely petty and anything but pastoral. Apparently, my presence at the funeral of a beloved parishioner somehow threatened the institution that once enjoyed my gifts. Truthfully, I felt more pity than anger—for Deacon Ron, for his bishop appointed by the “Rottweiler” Papa Ratzinger, and for my successor at Cristo Rey who obviously phoned the chancery immediately after the funeral.

But my mind also immediately traveled back to another priest who was punished for attending a funeral. His name was Henri Brémond, and we remember him every August 17.

Sometimes Love Refuses to Ask Permission

Henri Brémond (1865-1933) was born in Aix-en-Provence, France. At 17, he entered the Society of Jesus, spent his novitiate and much of his formation in England, and was ordained a priest in 1892. He eventually became an editor of the Jesuit journal Études, a monthly French Catholic review of contemporary culture.

Brémond was, in many ways, exactly the sort of person I find fascinating. He was deeply Catholic yet intellectually restless. He was a priest suspicious of easy ecclesiastical certainties. He was a scholar fascinated by the mystery of religious experience. He was a literary critic who believed that poetry and prayer could illuminate one another. And he was a prolific writer. His eleven-volume Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France (A Literary History of Religious Sentiment in France) became his monumental achievement. He also wrote about Thomas More, John Henry Newman, Fénelon, Anglican clergy, English public education, and religious spirituality. The French Académie française eventually elected him to its membership in 1923.

I confess that I feel great kinship with Brémond. Like him, I was Jesuit-trained. Like him, I have written dozens of books on Catholicism. Like him, I have maintained a fascination with education and public schools. And like him, I discovered that sometimes the most revealing moments in ecclesiastical life occur not in chancelleries or theological classrooms, but in ordinary human encounters.

Like Brémond, I also attended a funeral. And that is where his story gets even more interesting!

The Friend the Church Wanted to Forget

George Tyrrell (1861-1909) was an Irish-born convert to Catholicism who joined the Jesuits and eventually became one of the most provocative Catholic thinkers associated with the Modernist movement.

Modernism, broadly speaking, was an effort to wrestle honestly with the challenges posed by modern biblical scholarship, historical criticism, philosophy, and the natural sciences to traditional Catholic theology.

Tyrrell believed Christianity had to engage the modern world, rather than simply condemn it—an idea that did not go over particularly well with hierarchs at the time. He was dismissed from the Jesuits, and, after publicly criticizing Pope Pius X’s 1907 condemnation of modernism in Pascendi dominici gregis, he was excommunicated. Yet Tyrrell did not simply walk away from Christianity. He continued to wrestle with what it meant to believe in a modern world.

There is something painfully human about Tyrrell’s story. He was not an atheist mocking Christianity from the outside. He was a Christian wrestling with Christianity from the inside. He was not saying, “I don’t care about the Church.” In many respects, he was saying, “I care about the Church so deeply that I cannot stop asking difficult questions!” That distinction matters.

Jesus himself was not exactly allergic to asking challenging questions.

• “Who do you say that I am?” (Mt. 16:15).

• “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mk. 10:51).

• “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you?” (Lk. 6:46).

And perhaps most inconveniently for ecclesiastical bureaucracies:

• “Who is my neighbor?” (Lk. 10:29).

The questions of faith are rarely as tidy as institutional answers would have us believe!

Tyrrell died at Storrington on July 15, 1909. Because he had not publicly retracted his condemned theological positions, he was refused burial in a Catholic cemetery. He was buried instead in the Anglican churchyard at Storrington.

And Henri Brémond showed up. He prayed, shared a funeral address, and blessed his friend’s grave. For that act of human and priestly solidarity, Bishop Peter Amigo of Southwark suspended Brémond and prohibited him from exercising priestly functions.

Imagine it: A priest attended the funeral of his friend—and the institution punished him for it!

When Institutions Confuse Loyalty with Love

There is an important distinction here. Institutions need accountability. Churches need boundaries. Governments need laws. Organizations need policies. Leadership requires authority.

But authority without compassion becomes domination, and obedience without conscience becomes complicity.

That is one reason Brémond’s story speaks to me so powerfully. He could have stayed home. He could have said, “I cannot be seen with a condemned friend.” He could have calculated the institutional consequences. He could have protected his clerical status. Instead, he went to his friend’s funeral.

There are moments when the most important thing we can do is simply show up!

Jesus tells us that when we feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the imprisoned, we encounter Christ himself (Mt. 25:31-46). Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say: “First determine whether the person deserves your presence.” Or, “Check first whether the person is on the ‘approved’ list.” Or, “Make sure everyone else agrees with you before you show up.”

He says, in effect: “I was there, and you were there, and that is enough.”

There is something deeply sacramental about presence. A hand held at a funeral. A chair occupied beside someone who is grieving. A letter written to someone whom everyone else has abandoned. A visit to someone in prison. A meal shared with someone whom polite society would rather exclude. A public defense of someone publicly humiliated.

Sometimes love looks remarkably ordinary—and sometimes that ordinary act of love becomes extraordinarily courageous!

From Brémond to Juanita

That is why I keep thinking about Juanita. The institution, it seems, wanted to control where I could stand. But Juanita’s family and friends hoped that I would be there for her and for them. More importantly, Juanita deserved to be honored without institutional anxiety taking precedence over human love.

I have spent enough time around church institutions to know that they can become remarkably frightened creatures. Hierarchs sometimes behave as though the Holy Spirit needs their permission. They erect fences around God’s grace. They divide people into insiders and outsiders. They create categories of “orthodox” and “heterodox,” “worthy” and “unworthy,” “in communion” and “out of communion.” And then they become surprised when Jesus keeps walking across the boundaries they have drawn.

The Good Samaritan crossed a boundary. The prodigal son’s father crossed a boundary. The woman at the well crossed a boundary. The Canaanite woman crossed a boundary. The Ethiopian eunuch crossed a boundary. Paul crossed a boundary. The resurrected Christ crossed the boundary between death and life itself!

Perhaps the Gospel’s great recurring question is not, “Who is allowed inside?” Perhaps it is: “Whom have you relegated to the outside?”

Our Very Unordinary U.S. Moment

It would be comforting to imagine that Brémond’s experience belongs safely to the past and that there are no punishing Peter Amigos and Ron Walkers remaining in 2026.

Soberingly, though, our current U.S. administration has repeatedly been accused by critics, watchdog organizations, and former government officials of using governmental power in retaliatory ways against political opponents, critics, and people perceived as disloyal. Some of those allegations concern firings, investigations, prosecutions, and revocations of security clearances.

Consider just a few examples.

• Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted by the Justice Department in April for allegedly threatening Donald J. Trump.

• Former National Security Adviser John Bolton, indicted in 2025, has long been a target of Donald Trump’s ire.

• Former CISA Director Christopher Krebs, who declared the 2020 presidential election the most secure in American history, and former DHS official Miles Taylor, the anonymous author of a 2018 New York Times op-ed and the 2019 book, A Warning, critical of Donald Trump’s leadership, had their security clearances revoked in April 2025.

• Senator Mark Kelly and other members of Congress faced an attempted criminal referral related to a video encouraging military personnel not to obey unlawful orders.

• Justice Department prosecutors and FBI personnel who worked on investigations connected to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol have faced firings and other personnel actions.

• Reuters reported in 2025 that more than a dozen Justice Department lawyers who had worked on cases against Donald Trump were fired.

We should not be naïve about the danger of retaliation becoming normalized. When government employees begin wondering whether faithfully doing their jobs might make them targets, something important has already changed. When prosecutors wonder whether pursuing a case against a powerful person will cost them their careers, the rule of law is placed under stress. When journalists, academics, civil servants, or political opponents begin to calculate whether speaking honestly will invite government retaliation, democracy becomes less free—even before a single constitutional right is formally revoked.

And this is where Brémond becomes extraordinarily relevant: He reminds us that sometimes the question is not whether we can avoid punishment. It is whether avoiding punishment is worth the price of abandoning someone.

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What We Can Do

Brémond does not invite us to become reckless rebels who reject every institution. He invites us to become people whose allegiance to conscience, compassion, and human dignity is stronger than our fear of institutional disapproval.

So what might we do?

• Show up. Attend the funeral. Visit the prisoner. Stand beside the immigrant. Accompany the person whom everyone else has abandoned. Presence is itself a ministry.

• Defend people whose humanity is being questioned. You do not have to agree with everything someone believes to insist that they deserve dignity, due process, and basic human respect.

• Distinguish conscience from contrarianism. Brémond was not rebellious merely for the pleasure of rebellion. He was motivated by friendship, scholarship, faith, and a conviction that Christianity could not be reduced to institutional conformity.

• Refuse to participate in dehumanization. Don’t repost the cruel meme. Don’t laugh at the humiliation of the political opponent. Don’t call people monsters simply because you oppose their policies.

• Support independent journalism and courageous scholarship. Tyrrell and Brémond remind us that intellectual inquiry can become costly. A church or society that punishes people for asking difficult questions eventually becomes one incapable of discovering difficult truths.

• Protect the people who speak truth to power. When whistleblowers, civil servants, journalists, professors, clergy or activists face retaliation, don’t wait until they become famous. Ask how you can support them now.

• Remember that your institutional identity is not your whole identity. Job titles disappear. Clerical privileges disappear. Political power disappears. Even ecclesiastical offices disappear. What remains is the person you became through the choices you made.

As Jesus reminds us, “the truth will set you free” (Jn. 8:32). The truth may not make you comfortable or popular, but it will set you free.

The Funeral is Not the End of the Story

I sometimes wonder what Deacon Ron expected me to feel when he called me after Juanita’s funeral. Perhaps fear, shame, or a renewed determination to seek institutional approval.

Instead, I found myself thinking about Juanita. And then about Henri Brémond. And then about George Tyrrell. And then about Jesus.

That is the strange thing about institutions: They can sometimes try to make a person smaller, yet God can use the experience to make the person’s world larger!

Bishop Peter Amigo’s punishment did not erase Tyrrell or Brémond. It certainly did not erase the questions that Tyrrell had raised about Christianity’s relationship with the modern world. Many of the questions associated with Catholic modernism continued to surface in the decades that followed, including at the Second Vatican Council—at which Tyrrell was largely vindicated.

Perhaps that is one of the great lessons of history: Institutions can punish people, but they cannot always control what the courage of those people inspires.

Funerals end. Flowers wilt. Graves settle. Official reprimands are filed away. But someone will remember that you showed up—and that memory may just be its own kind of resurrection.

Extraordinary courage often looks remarkably ordinary. Henri Brémond did not overthrow a government or lead a revolution. He did not write a viral post. He simply went to a funeral and honored his friend. He prayed, he blessed a grave, and he accepted the consequences.

More than a century later, that tiny act still speaks. So does Juanita’s funeral. So does every person who has ever decided that love matters more than institutional approval.

In a culture increasingly tempted to ask, “Whose side are you on?”, perhaps Christians need to ask a different question: “Whose side is Christ on?”

Matthew 25 gives us the answer. Christ is with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned. And perhaps, on some days, Christ is simply with the person standing alone beside a grave.

Brémond reminds us that we may sometimes be called to stand there, too—yes, even when someone in authority tells us we should not.

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Whom have I avoided because I was afraid that being associated with them might cost me something?

• When have I confused institutional loyalty with Christian faithfulness?

• Do I possess the extraordinary courage to remain present with someone whom others have rejected?

• How do I respond when someone asks difficult questions about my faith? Do I welcome the questions or instinctively try to silence them?

• Where might I be participating, even unintentionally, in the dehumanization of people with whom I disagree?

• When have I experienced the healing power of someone simply showing up for me?

• Whose funeral, suffering or loneliness might God be asking me to enter, rather than observe from a safe distance?

• What would it mean for me to choose conscience over convenience this week?

Let Us Pray

God of extraordinary love,

You have never been confined by the boundaries we construct.

You called prophets who challenged rulers.
You welcomed strangers.
You touched lepers.
You ate with sinners.
You defended the condemned.
You crossed every boundary that human beings erected to determine who was worthy of Your love.

Give us the courage of Henri Brémond.

When institutions demand silence, give us wisdom to know when we must speak.

When fear tells us to stay away, give us courage to show up.

When someone is being rejected, give us compassion to stand beside them.

When power is used to punish dissent, give us the extraordinary courage to defend conscience, truth, and human dignity.

And when we find ourselves standing beside someone else’s grave, remind us that our simple presence may be the ministry that person most needs.

May we never become so concerned about remaining in someone’s good graces that we forget to remain in Yours.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

Support Extraordinary Catholics!

Thank you for “liking,” restacking, or sharing these words with those who might need them!

Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768

I was not alive in the 1960s, but that decade fascinates me.

It was the decade of civil rights and voting rights, of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream and Malcolm X’s critique of nonviolence, of Black Power and the beginnings of Chicano Power, of the women’s liberation movement and the birth of the modern gay-rights movement. It was Woodstock and Hair, Star Trek and The Beatles, Easy Rider and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was the Summer of Love and the summer of riots. It was Vietnam and the anti-war movement. It was the moon landing and the extraordinary belief that human beings could accomplish almost anything if we dared to imagine it.

For the Roman Catholic Church, it was a decade of aggiornamento—of opening the windows and allowing some fresh air into a Church that had spent generations defending itself against modernity. Suddenly Catholics were speaking about religious freedom, ecumenism, the dignity of the human person, the role of the laity, and the Church’s relationship with the modern world in ways that would have seemed almost unimaginable a generation earlier!

In some ways, I feel like a child of that decade even though I entirely missed it. For decades, I have signed my name in handwritten communications with a peace sign, a heart, and a smiley face. Peace, love and joy: What could be more 1960s?

Today we remember two people whose lives belong to that extraordinary period of Catholic history: John Courtney Murray, who helped Catholics rediscover religious freedom, and Felix Maria Davídek, who challenged the Church to recognize that its sacramental ministry cannot flourish when half of humanity is treated as though it were somehow less capable of exercising it.

One taught us to build bridges across religious differences. The other tried to tear down the wall between women and the priesthood. Both have something extraordinary to say to us in this very unordinary U.S. moment!

A Catholic Theologian Too Catholic for the Vatican

John Courtney Murray (1904-1967) was born in New York, entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), and eventually became one of the most important American Catholic theologians of the twentieth century.

His particular obsession was one of the great questions of Catholic life in the modern world: How can Catholics faithfully live in a religiously pluralistic society without trying to force everyone else to become Catholic?

That question sounds rather obvious to us. It wasn’t in the 1950s.

Murray argued that religious freedom was not merely a pragmatic arrangement that Catholics should tolerate because the U.S. happened to have Protestants, Jews, and so many other non-Catholics. Rather, he suggested, religious freedom belongs to the dignity of the human person! That argument placed him in considerable tension with the prevailing Catholic theological understanding of church-state relations. His writings on religious liberty eventually became so controversial that in 1954 the Vatican prohibited him from writing on the subject.

Let that sink in. A Jesuit priest and theologian was effectively told: Don’t write about religious freedom.

Yet Murray did not abandon the Church. He continued thinking, writing, and contributing to the theological ferment that eventually became the Second Vatican Council—and when the Council debated religious liberty, Murray was there. The result was Dignitatis humanae, the 1965 Declaration on Religious Freedom. The Council declared that the human person possesses a right to religious freedom and that no human power should coerce someone to act against conscience in religious matters.

That was no small theological adjustment. The Council’s language grounded religious freedom in human dignity, conscience, and the nature of faith itself. Faith, after all, cannot be coerced. A coerced “yes” to God is not really faith at all!

Murray’s contribution was significant enough that historians have described him as a principal influence on the document. The final text emerged only after years of drafts, interventions, and intense debate among the bishops—but there is something wonderfully Catholic about that story.

The Church changed, not because someone woke up one morning and decided that doctrine no longer mattered. The Church changed because Catholics—including a theologian whom the Vatican had once silenced—continued asking whether the Church’s understanding was sufficiently faithful to the Gospel.

As Murray himself understood, truth does not become less true because we encounter it through dialogue. Indeed, Dignitatis humanae explicitly says that truth “makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.” That sounds remarkably different from the politics of coercion!

A Bishop, an Underground Church, and a Woman Who Answered the Call

Felix Maria Davídek (1921-1988) lived a very different Catholic story. Born in Czechoslovakia after the War to End All Wars, Davídek was a brilliant, complicated and controversial priest, theologian and physician. Communist authorities arrested him in 1950 and sentenced him to 24 years in prison. He spent 14 years incarcerated before his release in 1964.

When the Communist regime attempted to suppress the Church, Davídek became a leader of the underground Catholic community. He was secretly consecrated a bishop in 1967 and developed clandestine structures for theological education and sacramental ministry.

This was not Catholicism as usual. Priests had to secretly serve the people of God. Seminary formation took place in homes. The Church lived in circumstances where a knock at the door could mean an ordinary visitor—or the secret police.

And Davídek confronted a very practical problem: How might we provide pastoral and sacramental care to the women whom male priests cannot reach?

The problem was particularly acute for women in prison. According to accounts of the underground Church, Communist authorities restricted male clergy from visiting imprisoned women, creating a pastoral crisis that Davídek took seriously.

So, in 1970, Davídek convened a synod to discuss the ordination of women. Then something extraordinary happened: Davídek, a Roman Catholic bishop, ordained Ludmila Javorová to the Roman Catholic priesthood in December 1970.

Javorová subsequently became his vicar general and has consistently testified to her vocation and ordination. Czech historical sources identify her as one of several women ordained in the underground Church, even if the circumstances and canonical status of those ordinations remain disputed. After the fall of communism, Roman Catholic authorities did not recognize her ordination and instructed her not to exercise priestly ministry.

We should be intellectually honest about this history. Not every Catholic authority agrees that Davídek solved the question of women’s ordination. His decisions were controversial, even within the underground Church. Some of his fellow Catholics opposed the ordinations and broke with him over them.

But I find Davídek’s reasoning fascinating. He reportedly wrote: “Today [humanity] needs and is literally awaiting the ordination of women. The Church should not oppose it.” He continued by arguing that women were needed as “a special instrument for the sanctification of the second half of [humankind].”

That phrase—“the sanctification of the second half of [humankind]”—is the part I find particularly compelling. Davídek was not simply asking, “Can women do what men do?” He was asking a deeper question: How can women be fully sanctified except through the efforts of… other women? We need not imagine women as having to depend on men for their sanctification!

The Canaanite Woman Who Blurred Boundaries

Today’s scriptures make both Murray and Davídek seem remarkably contemporary.

Isaiah announces that God’s house is not a clubhouse for one favored group. Foreigners who join themselves to the Lord will be welcomed to God’s holy mountain, because God’s house “shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

The responsorial psalm doubles down: “O God, let all the nations praise you!”

And Paul tells the Gentiles that God’s mercy ultimately embraces all—not just the Jews or Gentiles, but all people!

Then comes one of the strangest encounters in the Gospels. A Canaanite woman approaches Jesus because her daughter is suffering—and Jesus initially refuses her. She is not one of us. She is one of them. Jesus replies that his mission is directed toward “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” When she persists, he tells her that it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs. Let that sink in: Jesus is likening the Canaanites to… dogs!

Yet the woman refuses to accept such boxes. Even the dogs get the scraps, she says. And Jesus comes to admire her faith.

I love this Gospel because it forces us to confront one of humanity’s most persistent temptations: Too often, we divide the world into neat baskets. Us versus them. Jews versus Gentiles. Citizens versus foreigners. “Real Americans” versus immigrants. Men versus women. Catholics versus Protestants versus Muslims. Straight versus gay. Orthodox versus heterodox. Those who belong versus those who don’t. The Gospel keeps smashing such categories!

Even Jesus appeared to learn something from a person standing outside the boundaries he was taught. That ought to make us all a little nervous.

Murray, Davídek and the Politics of Walls

That is why these two men speak so powerfully to our present moment.

Murray reminds us that religious freedom means more than the freedom of my religion. It means the freedom of the Muslim, the Jew, the Sikh, the Hindu, the Baptist, the agnostic, the atheist, the transgender person whose understanding of God may differ profoundly from mine, the Catholic who disagrees with the bishop. Murray’s understanding of religious liberty was rooted in human dignity, not in the expectation that everyone would eventually agree with us.

That distinction matters enormously when politicians invoke Christianity while simultaneously demonizing religious minorities, immigrants, or people whose lives do not fit their preferred social categories.

And Davídek reminds us that the Church itself must continually ask whether its walls are protecting the faith—or preventing the Gospel from reaching people who desperately need it.

The contrast with our current political moment is hard to miss. This administration is literally building walls. Just Friday, a federal judge refused to halt construction of 62 miles of border wall across the Tohono O’odham Nation’s Arizona reservation, despite the tribe’s objections concerning sacred sites, environmental damage, and cultural ties.

And the walls are not only physical. There are walls around immigration, gender, and religious identity. Walls around who gets to belong. Walls around whose conscience counts.

The administration has also intensified federal efforts to restrict gender-affirming care, including a rule announced last week that would bar federal Medicaid and CHIP funding for such care for minors beginning in October.

Whatever one’s views about particular policies, the broader question for people of faith remains: What happens when government becomes more interested in defining who belongs than in protecting the dignity of everyone who lives within its borders?

That is precisely where Murray’s theology of religious freedom becomes relevant—and where Davídek’s willingness to reconsider inherited structures becomes provocative.

The 1960s Question Is Still Our Question

Perhaps that is why I remain fascinated by the 1960s. I understand the decade was messy, contradictory, sometimes frightening and sometimes naïve. It produced both extraordinary hope and extraordinary violence. But people dared to imagine that things could be different.

Rosa Parks sat down. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed. The Stonewall generation stood up. Women demanded equality. Farmworkers organized. Young people protested a war. Scientists reached the moon. And Catholic leaders gathered in Rome and asked whether the Church might become something more faithful to the Gospel.

That is what Murray and Davídek share. Neither simply accepted the boundaries handed to him. Murray asked whether Catholics could embrace religious freedom without surrendering Catholic identity. Davídek asked whether the Church could proclaim universal sanctification while excluding women from sacramental ministry.

Both questions begin with the same premise: Perhaps the boundaries we inherited are not the boundaries God intended.

That is a dangerous thought. It is also a profoundly Christian one.

Jesus repeatedly crossed boundaries. He touched lepers. He ate with tax collectors. He spoke with Samaritans. He praised the faith of a Roman centurion. He welcomed women as disciples. He welcomed children. He told stories in which outsiders became heroes. And then, in today’s gospel, a Canaanite woman apparently changed his mind.

If that is our Gospel, perhaps we should be rather cautious about building walls!

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Ways We Can Build Bridges

• Defend religious freedom—even for people whose beliefs you dislike. Read Dignitatis humanae. Ask whether your understanding of religious liberty protects your ideological opponents as vigorously as it protects you.

• Refuse the language of “us” and “them.” When you hear immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, Jews, atheists, or political opponents described as threats rather than human beings, resist the temptation to repeat the language.

• Learn the stories of women whose ministries have been marginalized. Read about Ludmila Javorová. Learn about women in the early Church. Ask what the Church loses when it restricts leadership according to gender.

• Practice sacramental hospitality. At Holy Family, we say that everyone has a place at the table. But hospitality is more than a slogan. Who is missing from your table? Who has been told—explicitly or implicitly—that they don’t belong?

• Become a bridge-builder in your own community. Have one conversation this week with someone whose religious, political or cultural worldview differs from yours. Begin by listening, not by trying to win.

• Speak up when walls are built in your name. Whether the wall is made of steel, legislation, rhetoric or prejudice, ask the Gospel question: Who is being kept outside—and why?

The Church Needs Fewer Walls and More Windows

Perhaps that is the gift John Courtney Murray and Felix Maria Davídek offer us today. Murray reminds us that faith does not need coercion. Davídek reminds us that tradition does not require stagnation.

Isaiah reminds us that God’s house is supposed to be “a house of prayer for all peoples.” The Canaanite woman reminds us that outsiders may sometimes see the Gospel more clearly than insiders.

We should not imagine that we have already arrived at the perfect Church or the perfect society. We haven’t. We, too, can create our own boxes, baskets and boundaries. We, too, can become the people who decide who is sufficiently enlightened, sufficiently progressive, sufficiently Catholic, sufficiently anything to belong. The Gospel will not let us rest there.

The extraordinary challenge is not merely to tear down someone else’s walls. It is to keep asking about the ones we have built.

And perhaps that is why the 1960s still speak to me. The peace sign, the heart, and the smiley face with which I have signed my name for decades are more than nostalgic symbols of another era. They express a little theology: peace, love and joy. Not bad building materials for the reign of God.

The question is whether we will have the extraordinary courage to live them in our lives!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Where have I unconsciously divided the world into “us” and “them”?

• Whose religious freedom am I willing to defend even when I strongly disagree with that person’s beliefs?

• Where might I be treating tradition as though it were synonymous with immutability?

• What gifts might the Church be missing because we have excluded certain people from leadership?

• Who is the Canaanite woman in my life—the person I initially regard as an outsider but from whom God may be asking me to learn?

• What wall—literal or figurative—am I being called to help dismantle?

• Where might God be inviting me to become a bridge, rather than a gatekeeper?

Let Us Pray

God of every nation and every people,
You refuse to be confined by the boundaries we construct.

You called Abram and Sara to leave what was familiar.
You spoke through prophets who challenged the powerful.
You welcomed foreigners to Your holy mountain.
You sent Jesus beyond the boundaries of his own people.
You allowed a Canaanite woman to challenge even his understanding of mission.
You called women and men alike to proclaim Your Gospel.

Give us the courage of John Courtney Murray
to defend conscience and religious freedom.

Give us the extraordinary imagination of Felix Maria Davídek
to recognize gifts wherever Your Spirit has planted them.

Give us the humility of the Canaanite woman
to listen even when we believe we already know the answer.

And when we are tempted to build another wall,
remind us that Your house is a house of prayer for all peoples.

Make us bridge-builders.
Make us peacemakers.
Make us courageous servants of human dignity.

And make Your Church, in this very unordinary U.S. moment,
a little more like the Church You dreamed it could become.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

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I’ll never forget preparing for a doctoral class some twenty years ago, reading Chava Frankfort-Nachmias and David Nachmias’ Research Methods in the Social Sciences. In their opening chapter, they illuminate how human beings come to know what they claim to know.

The authors described several approaches to knowledge, beginning with authoritarian knowledge: We “know” something because an authority tells us it is true. In the religious world, that can sound remarkably familiar. The pope, a bishop, or a priest says it; therefore, it must be true. The authors emphasize that for devout Roman Catholics, the pope occupies precisely that sort of authoritative role—similar to that of Mao Zedong in China or the mullahs in Iran.

Such “authoritarian knowledge” comes to mind today as the Roman Catholic Church marks the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the second of two Marian doctrines defined as dogma by a Roman bishop in the modern era. Pius IX split the Church in 1854 through his proclamation of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, thus necessitating a proclamation of purported “papal infallibility” by the sham Vatican Council of 1869-1870. Bearing the name and legacy of his predecessor, Pius XII then walked through the door again with his 1950 proclamation of Mary’s Assumption into heavenly glory.

Today we also remember Hermann of Wied (1477-1552), an archbishop who spent much of his career exercising authority over others before discovering that authority without consensus, followership, and institutional support can ultimately leave a leader standing alone.

Somehow, every August 15 seems like a rather extraordinary combination of saints and sinners for us to contemplate—especially in this very unordinary U.S. moment!

When the Pope Insists, “Believe This!”

To be clear, there is much about the doctrine of the Assumption that is quite beautiful. The ancient Christian imagination long contemplated Mary as having shared uniquely in her son’s destiny. The feast itself is ancient, with August 15 celebrated in the Christian East for centuries before Pius XII ever put pen to paper. The Eastern Christian tradition commonly speaks of the Dormition, the falling-asleep of the Mother of God. What changed in 1950 had less to do with Marian devotion, and more to do with the status of the teaching within Roman Catholicism.

On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII issued Munificentissimus Deus, solemnly defining as a divinely revealed dogma that Mary, “having completed the course of her earthly life,” was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.

The process itself was fascinating. Pius XII did not simply announce, “I believe this, therefore everyone must believe it.” He commissioned theological investigation. He gathered centuries of petitions. In 1946, he formally asked the bishops of the world whether they believed the Assumption could be defined as dogma and whether they desired such a definition. He reported an almost unanimous affirmative response.

Then came the extraordinary claim: Because the teaching was sufficiently manifested through Scripture, tradition, liturgical practice, theological reflection, and the consensus of the bishops and the faithful, it could be proposed infallibly as divinely revealed! That distinction matters: The Roman Catholic Church does not understand the Assumption as something Pius XII simply invented, but as authoritatively defining something that had already been received and developed within the Church.

From the perspective of the Old Catholic tradition and those of us who self-identify as part of the Inclusive/Independent Catholic movement, the question becomes: Who possesses the authority to make a doctrine universally binding upon the whole Church?

The Roman Catholic–Old Catholic dialogue has explicitly acknowledged this difference: Old Catholics reject the papally-defined Marian dogmas of 1854 and 1950 while affirming the ancient Church’s faith in Mary and recognizing the Assumption as a matter of personal devotion, rather than as a dogma that a pope can unilaterally impose.

That is why August 15 often feels different in Inclusive/Independent Catholic communities. We can love Mary without pretending that every later Roman definition must be accepted as though it had descended directly from heaven—as if in an email from God to the pope.

And that brings me back to a lesson from my doctoral studies.

The Problem Isn’t Authority; It’s Authoritarianism

Every human grouping needs some form of leadership or authority. Every family needs parental figures. Every school needs an administrator. Every parish needs a pastor. Every democracy needs elected officials. Every orchestra needs a conductor.

The problem arises when authority becomes the answer to every question. When the authority figure says, “…because I said so.” When questioning becomes disloyalty. When disagreement becomes rebellion. When institutional position becomes confused with divine revelation. When the leader’s certainty becomes more important than any individual’s conscience.

That is where authoritarian “knowledge” becomes dangerous.

Perhaps that is why the first scripture that I instinctively associate with today’s feast is not a dogmatic definition at all. It is Mary’s Magnificat: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly (Lk. 1:52). Mary’s great song is an anti-authoritarian manifesto! God does not appear in her song as the cosmic strongman who demands everyone’s obedience. God is the One who scatters the proud, brings down the mighty, and lifts up those whom the powerful overlook.

Mary does not sing, “Blessed are the powerful because they are powerful.” She sings that God is turning the world upside down!

Two Crowns, One Old Temptation

There is something else striking about today’s feast: The very pope who defined the Assumption, Pius XII, belonged to a papal tradition deeply invested in visible authority. Look at the papal tiara he wore: Three crowns. It was not merely an elaborate hat. The symbolism accumulated over centuries around the bishop of Rome’s spiritual, jurisdictional and teaching authority. The Vatican itself explains how the triple crown came to symbolize the pope’s threefold power.

Then, in 1963, Paul VI became the last pope crowned with the tiara. He subsequently gave his tiara away to benefit the poor and abandoned its use. I find that almost deliciously symbolic: The Church did not cease to be the Church when it stopped placing three crowns on the pope’s head. Authority did not disappear—but the visual vocabulary of authority changed. Perhaps we should ask why.

Jesus had some pretty strong things to say about this very temptation.

When the disciples start arguing about who is greatest, Jesus tells them that the rulers of the Gentiles “lord it over” their people. Then he says: “But it is not so among you” (Mk. 10:43). Not so among you. That may be one of the most important sentences in the New Testament for anyone who exercises religious, political, educational or organizational leadership.

Not so among you!

The Christian leader is not the Christian version of a ruler. Like mother, like son: Jesus turns leadership upside-down: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant” (Mk. 10:43). The crown is replaced by the towel. The throne is replaced by the table. The command becomes… service! And in that context, Mary’s Magnificat begins to make even more sense.

Hermann of Wied: The Sheepless Shepherd

Which brings me to the other person we remember today: Hermann of Wied.

Hermann became Archbishop and Elector of Cologne in 1515. When Martin Luther’s Reformation erupted, Hermann opposed it and ordered Luther’s writings to be publicly burned in Cologne. He later failed to intervene when two reform-minded preachers, Adolf Clarenbach and Peter Fliesteden, were condemned and executed.

And then Hermann changed. His quarrel with the papacy and his disappointment with the failure of internal Catholic reform helped push him toward a very different vision. Beginning in the 1530s, he pursued reform within the Church. Eventually, he invited Protestant reformer Martin Bucer to Cologne and worked toward a moderate reform of the archdiocese. And suddenly the man who had once opposed the Reformers was himself accused of becoming one!

The results were disastrous for him. His reform program encountered opposition from the cathedral chapter, university, and papacy. Although portions of the secular estates supported his efforts, his reforms did not gain sufficient institutional consensus. In 1546, Paul III excommunicated Hermann, who resigned his office in 1547. He died five years later, in 1552.

I find Hermann psychologically fascinating. He seems to have been a man of certainty… who kept changing what he was certain about. First Luther was the problem. Then the Church’s failure to reform was the problem. Reform became the answer. Then the people and institutions he needed did not follow him.

There is an extraordinary leadership lesson here: Leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin. Or, as John Maxwell famously says, “If you think you’re leading, but no one is following, you’re just taking a walk!”

A title can make you a bishop; it cannot make you a shepherd. A presidential seal can make you president; it cannot make people love or trust you. A miter can make you look authoritative; it cannot make people believe you. A papal tiara can communicate extraordinary institutional power; it cannot manufacture wisdom.

Hermann ultimately became something of a sheepless shepherd—a frightening place for any leader to find oneself!

From Cologne to Washington

Which brings us, inevitably, to the United States of America in 2026.

I am hardly the first person to notice the authoritarian themes emerging in our national political life. Constitutional scholars, political scientists, journalists, and former national security officials have increasingly described efforts during our president’s second administration to expand executive authority, weaken institutional constraints, and pressure institutions that traditionally served as checks on presidential power.

Beginning with executive actions in early 2025, Harvard Law School scholars have debated the unprecedented expansion of presidential control over federal personnel and independent agencies. Professor Scott L. Cummings bluntly described it as an “autocratic legal playbook”: using apparently lawful mechanisms to weaken the institutions that once constrained executive authority. The American Bar Association has similarly described efforts to expand executive power, disregard statutory limits, and challenge the traditional separation of powers.

These are not merely partisan talking points. They are questions worth taking seriously regardless of one’s political party:

• Who gets to say what is true?

• Who gets to challenge the person in charge?

• What factors shape personal and institutional loyalty?

• What happens when disagreement is interpreted as disloyalty?

• What happens when the leader increasingly surrounds himself with people whose principal qualification is that they agree with him?

And perhaps most importantly: What happens when a leader begins to believe that his authority itself proves his correctness?

I think of that infamous 2019 “Sharpiegate” episode, when President Trump displayed an altered map—showing in black marker that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian. The image remains almost comically memorable because it represented something larger than a weather forecast: the spectacle of someone attempting to make reality conform to an “authoritative” assertion!

It was the political version of The Wizard of Oz: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Except that, in this case, the curtain is the whole point.

Or think of Star Wars, where the Empire’s power depends upon convincing people that resistance is futile. Or The Hunger Games, where political domination depends upon controlling not only bodies, but narratives. Or George Orwell’s 1984, where controlling language becomes a way of controlling reality itself. Or The Handmaid’s Tale, where religious language becomes a tool for political domination. These stories endure because we recognize something profoundly human in them.

We know how power works. We also know how easily power can become addicted to itself. And Scripture knows it, too: Pharaoh. Nebuchadnezzar. Herod. Pilate. The rich man who built bigger barns. The disciples arguing about who was greatest. Again and again, the Scriptures challenge us to distinguish power over from power for.

When the Sheep Stop Following

There is another fascinating parallel between Hermann of Wied and our current moment. A leader can command, but a leader cannot command genuine allegiance forever.

As of early August, Reuters/Ipsos polls found our president’s approval at 35%, only a point above his lowest recorded level in the presidency. The same poll found Democrats leading Republicans by 37 to 42 points on a generic congressional ballot.

Other polls have produced somewhat different numbers, as polls always do, but the broader picture has been consistently challenging for the administration. The American Presidency Project’s aggregation shows Trump’s second-term approval generally hovering in the mid-to-high 30s during 2026.

And our November midterm elections are now only 80 days away.

Polls are not prophecy or ballots. They do not tell us what will happen in November—but they can tell us something important about followership. When the sheep no longer follow the shepherd, the prospect looms of the oxymoron that is the “sheepless shepherd.”

And that brings us back to Mary. Mary did not seize a throne or demand a crown. She did not gather a personality cult. She simply said yes. She sang. She served. She magnified God. Then, centuries later, she became, in the Christian imagination, a woman assumed, body and soul, into heavenly glory. That is a radically different vision of greatness!

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Extraordinary Practices to Resist Authoritarianism

Today’s commemorations offer us some concrete spiritual challenges—not partisan instructions or political checklists, but something deeper.

• Question authority without becoming cynical. Christianity does not require us to believe everything a leader says. Nor does it require us to distrust everything a leader says. Practice discernment.

• Distinguish confidence from certainty. The person who says “I could be wrong” may possess more wisdom than the person who never does.

• Protect institutions that protect people. Courts, schools, journalism, universities, legislatures, elections, and religious communities all need independence to serve the common good.

• Refuse to make enemies into monsters. Hermann of Wied’s life reminds us how quickly yesterday’s enemies can become tomorrow’s allies. Saul became Paul. Augustine changed. So did Dorothy Day and John Henry Newman. People are capable of extraordinary conversion.

• Practice Mary’s Magnificat. Look for and stand with the people whom power overlooks. Listen to them. Make room for them. The measure of our Christianity is not how loudly we defend our own power, but how faithfully we use whatever power we possess for others.

• Tell the truth—even when the truth is inconvenient. Jesus says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn. 8:32). The truth may not make you powerful or comfortable, but it will make you free.

• Remember that democracy requires citizens, not spectators. Read beyond headlines. Check sources. Talk with people who disagree with you. Participate in your community. Vote when elections come. And resist the temptation to believe that any political leader—left, right, or somewhere in between—is the nation’s savior.

The Assumption is Ultimately About God’s Power

So, where do I land on August 15?

The Assumption could be framed as a theological argument over whether Pius XII possessed the authority to define such a “dogma.” Or an historical argument about whether the ancient Church precisely believed what Roman Catholicism eventually defined. Or it could become an ecclesiological argument about papal infallibility. All of those conversations have their place.

But beneath them lies something much more beautiful: Mary was not glorified because she seized power, but because God lifts up the lowly. That is the radical message of her Magnificat.

And that may be precisely what we need in this very unordinary U.S. moment.

We do not need more leaders who think their authority makes them infallible. We need leaders who know they are fallible.

We do not need more people who demand unquestioning loyalty. We need people who can hear criticism without treating it as betrayal.

We do not need more crowns. We need more towels.

We do not need more people shouting, “Because I say so!” We need people courageous enough to say, “Help me see what I may be missing.”

And perhaps most of all, we need to remember that God is perfectly capable of bringing down the mighty without our becoming mighty ourselves.

That is Mary’s extraordinary lesson. The woman who begins her song as God’s lowly servant ends it by proclaiming that God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

The archbishop who once commanded a great ecclesiastical territory eventually discovered that a title without followership is meaningless.

And the political leader who believes that authority can redefine reality may eventually discover what every shepherd eventually learns: The sheep have minds of their own!

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Questions for Prayer and Reflection

• Where in my own life have I confused authority with truth?

• Do I sometimes demand loyalty from others when what I really need is their honesty?

• Where might I be tempted to treat political or religious leaders as though they were incapable of error?

• Who are the people whom my community, church or nation currently overlooks?

• How might Mary’s Magnificat challenge the way I understand power?

• What institutions or relationships in my life need my courageous defense because they protect truth, human dignity, or the vulnerable?

• Where might God be inviting me to exchange a crown for a towel?

Let Us Pray

Holy God,
You have scattered the proud
and lifted up the lowly.

Teach us to recognize the difference
between authority and authoritarianism,
between leadership and domination,
between confidence and arrogance,
between loyalty and idolatry.

Give us Mary’s humility
to say yes to You
without needing to control everything.

Give us Mary’s courage
to sing truth
when truth unsettles the powerful.

Give us Hermann of Wied’s story
as a reminder that leaders without listeners
can become shepherds without sheep.

Give us the wisdom to question authority
without surrendering to cynicism.

Give us the courage to defend truth
without becoming cruel.

Give us extraordinary love
for those whom power overlooks,
and extraordinary courage
when power demands our silence.

And when we are tempted to seek the crown,
remind us of the Christ
who chose the towel.

May we become,
in this very unordinary moment,
people who do not seek power over others,
but use whatever power we possess
for the flourishing of all Your children.

Amen.

We thank you for your prayerful consideration of a personally meaningful gift to support progressive Catholic voices. According to the Pew Research Center, 47% of Americans have a personal connection to Catholicism, and 13% of U.S. adults self-identify as former Catholics. Help us reach them with good news!

Support Extraordinary Catholics!

Thank you for “liking,” restacking, or sharing these words with those who might need them!

Reach out to us! editor@extraordinarycatholics.faith | P.O. Box 2386, Austin, Texas 78768