Scripture Readings:

• First Reading: Jeremiah 20:7–9 (The prophet’s struggle with the painful burden of God’s word)

• Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 63:2, 3–4, 5–6, 8–9 (“My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.”)

• Second Reading: Romans 12:1–2 (An appeal to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice and avoid conforming to this age)

• Gospel: Matthew 16:21–27 (Jesus predicts his suffering and death; Peter rebukes him and is corrected, teaching that followers must take up their cross)

What happens when our civic GPS starts giving us bad directions?

In “The Liberal Democracy Compass,” I reflect on the habits that keep a democracy on course: truth, humility, pluralism, restraint, courage, and the willingness to admit when we’ve taken a wrong turn.

The danger is not only authoritarianism. It is certainty, tribalism, disinformation, and the temptation to accept shortcuts that weaken the very freedoms we claim to defend.

Democracy depends on our capacity to hear one essential word:

Recalculating.

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Common Sense Sundays is an expanded reflection based on homilies I preach at St. Agatha Catholic Church in Los Angeles where I am Resident Priest. This Sunday, August 30th, you can experience the worship and my homily at St. Agatha Parish at the 7:30am Spanish Mass on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Stagathas

The Liberal Democracy Compass

How do we stay on course when our civic GPS is being corrupted?

I have become so dependent on GPS that I sometimes wonder whether I could still find my way across Los Angeles without it.

I enter a destination. The map appears on my dashboard. The voice tells me when to turn. Traffic conditions are calculated before I can see the congestion ahead. If I make a mistake, the system does not scold me. It simply announces that familiar word: “Recalculating.”

There is something wonderfully humbling about that moment. I thought I knew where I was going. Apparently, I did not.

That is the image I use in my homily this weekend because it captures the encounter between Jesus and Peter in Matthew’s Gospel. Peter has correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, but when Jesus tells the disciples that his journey will lead through Jerusalem, suffering and the cross, Peter objects. Surely there must be another route. Jesus responds sharply: Peter is thinking according to human expectations rather than God’s purposes.¹

Peter has the right destination but the wrong map.

That may describe more of our political life than we would like to admit.

Americans use the word democracy constantly. Republicans claim to be defending it. Democrats claim to be defending it. Protesters invoke democracy. Presidents invoke democracy. Courts, legislators, activists and commentators all appeal to the will of the people.

But do we still agree about the route?

And perhaps an even more troubling question: What happens when the GPS itself becomes corrupted?

As someone who believes deeply in liberal democracy—not “liberal” as a synonym for the Democratic Party, but liberal in the older political tradition of constitutional government, human rights, freedom of conscience, pluralism, limits on state power and equality before the law—I increasingly think we need something like a Liberal Democracy Compass.

We need to know not only where we want to go but how to recognize when we are drifting away from the destination.

First, Enter the Destination

A navigation system is useless until we tell it where we want to go.

So what is the destination of liberal democracy?

It is more than holding elections.

A country can conduct elections and still intimidate opponents, manipulate the media, weaken courts, punish dissenters or deny minorities equal citizenship. Liberal democracy combines popular government with protections that restrain whoever temporarily holds political power.

Its basic coordinates are familiar: competitive elections, political pluralism, freedom of speech and religion, freedom of association, an independent judiciary, due process, government transparency, equal citizenship and meaningful limits on executive authority.²

But behind those institutional coordinates lies a moral destination: the dignity and freedom of the human person living among other human persons who possess the same dignity and freedom.

That final phrase is what makes democracy difficult.

I want freedom. So do you.

I want my values respected. So do you.

I want my voice heard, my community protected, my interests represented and my children given opportunities. So do the people who disagree with me.

Liberal democracy is the extraordinarily ambitious attempt to build a society in which none of us must disappear for the rest of us to belong.

That is why it requires more than voting. It requires character.

The Dashboard Is Flashing

There is good reason to examine our bearings.

Freedom House reported this year that global freedom declined in 2025 for the 20th consecutive year. Fifty-four countries experienced deterioration in political rights and civil liberties while only thirty-five improved. Two decades ago, 46 percent of the world’s population lived in countries Freedom House classified as Free. Today the figure is about 21 percent.³

The V-Dem Institute reaches the problem through a different methodology but sounds a similar alarm. Its 2026 Democracy Report concludes that democratic countries are now a minority and identifies declining freedom of expression, growing polarization and widespread disinformation among the forces associated with democratic backsliding.⁴

Democracy rarely disappears because one morning citizens collectively decide they prefer dictatorship.

The route changes gradually. A norm is dismissed as outdated. An inconvenient court is described as illegitimate. Journalists become “enemies.” Political opponents stop being mistaken fellow citizens and become traitors. Emergency powers become normal powers. An election matters only if our candidate wins. Violence becomes understandable when “our side” feels sufficiently threatened.

Each turn may appear survivable. Then one day we look at the map and discover we are somewhere we never intended to go.

The Viruses in the Civic GPS

What corrupts the Liberal Democracy Compass?

The first virus is certainty.

Peter’s problem in the Gospel is not that he lacks conviction. He has plenty of it. His problem is that he becomes so certain about the route that he attempts to correct Jesus.

Political certainty works much the same way. When I become convinced that my cause is so righteous that normal rules should no longer constrain me, democracy is already in danger.

The temptation exists on the right and the left. The causes differ; the logic is identical. The stakes are too high. The opposition is too dangerous. This election is too important. Our objectives are too morally urgent to permit ordinary restraints.

That reasoning can justify almost anything.

Liberal democracy begins from a humbler proposition: I may be wrong.

That does not mean abandoning conviction. It means recognizing that no party, ideology, religious community, political leader or social movement possesses the entire truth.

That is why we need opposition parties, independent judges, free universities, investigative journalists, religious communities, unions, civic organizations and citizens who refuse to applaud everything their own side does.

They are not obstructions in the road. They are part of the navigation system.

A second virus is tribalism.

Human beings naturally form groups. We need them. Family, religion, neighborhood, ethnicity, profession and political community give us identity and belonging. The problem begins when political identity swallows every other identity.

Then the question is no longer, “Is this true?” It becomes, “Who said it?”

We begin evaluating facts according to their partisan source. We excuse conduct by our allies that would outrage us if committed by opponents. We stop arguing about policies and begin making judgments about entire categories of people.

Research on polarization shows how easily political disagreement becomes partisan animosity—the experience of the opposing political group not simply as mistaken but as threatening.⁵

Democracy cannot survive indefinitely when half the country experiences the other half as an enemy population.

Opponents must remain opponents. They cannot become contaminants.

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The Disinformation Detour

A third virus is the corruption of truth.

Every GPS depends upon accurate signals. If the satellite information is deliberately falsified, the driver can follow directions perfectly and still end up in the wrong place.

Something similar is happening in our information environment.

Disinformation does not need to persuade everyone of one great lie. Often its more destructive purpose is to convince people that reliable truth cannot be known at all.

Every photograph might be fabricated. Every news organization might be lying. Every statistic might be manipulated. Every election result might be fraudulent. Every institution might be corrupt. Every expert might have an agenda.

Once citizens conclude that there is no trustworthy way to distinguish evidence from propaganda, power gains an enormous advantage. The strongest voice can simply declare reality. This is why freedom of expression is inseparable from the responsibility to seek truth.

A liberal democracy does not require one government-approved version of reality. Quite the opposite. It depends upon competing sources of information, skeptical citizens, professional standards, open debate and the willingness to correct errors.

Paul’s words to the Romans become surprisingly relevant here:

“Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”⁶

A renewed mind does not ask, “Does this information confirm what I already believe?”

It asks, “Is it true?”

That may be one of the most important spiritual disciplines of democratic citizenship.

The Shortcut of the Strongman

Another dangerous signal appears whenever democracy feels frustratingly slow.

A strong leader promises efficiency.

Why all these hearings? Why these judges? Why compromise with people who are obviously wrong? Why permit demonstrations? Why allow legislators to obstruct the program voters supposedly demanded?

Wouldn’t it be easier if someone could simply fix things? Of course it would. Democracy is inefficient by design.

Checks and balances slow things down because concentrated power can do terrible things very quickly. Courts interrupt majorities because majorities can violate rights. Opposition parties obstruct governments because governments need opposition. Due process protects people we may dislike because someday we may need due process ourselves.

The guardrails become most annoying precisely when we are tempted to drive off the road.

A liberal democrat therefore needs to develop an instinct that is becoming increasingly rare: the willingness to accept a political outcome we dislike because the process was legitimate.

I can lose an election without concluding democracy failed. I can disagree with a court decision without declaring the judiciary illegitimate. I can believe a law is deeply mistaken and still work through constitutional means to change it. And when my side wins, I must defend the same rights of opposition I demanded when my side lost.

That is not political weakness. It is democratic maturity.

“What Does It Profit a Person?”

Jesus then asks one of the great questions of the Gospel: “What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”¹

There is a political version of that question.

What does it profit a political movement to win power and lose democracy?

What does it profit Christians to achieve favored policies if Christianity becomes associated with coercion and domination?

What does it profit progressives to achieve justice if dissenting voices must first be silenced?

What does it profit conservatives to preserve traditions if constitutional restraints must be discarded to preserve them?

What does it profit any political party to win an election by convincing its supporters that fellow citizens are enemies who no longer deserve equal participation?

You can win the argument and lose the relationship. You can win the election and damage the institution. You can gain power and lose legitimacy. You can defeat your opponent and weaken the country you hoped to govern.

My homily this weekend reflects on Jesus’ command to “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” Renouncing ourselves does not mean denying our dignity. It means refusing to make ourselves the center of everything.

Liberal democracy requires a civic form of precisely that self-restraint.

Sometimes my side does not get everything it wants. Sometimes I must compromise. Sometimes another person’s freedom protects conduct I dislike. Sometimes justice requires defending the rights of someone whose worldview offends me. Sometimes democracy asks us to carry the cross of living with people we cannot persuade.

Pluralism is not the promise that differences disappear. It is the discipline of learning how to remain a society despite them.

Jeremiah and the Courage to Stay on Course

The prophet Jeremiah provides another part of the compass.

He wanted to quit.

Speaking truth had brought him ridicule and rejection. He decided he would stop speaking in God’s name. But the word became like a fire burning within him, and he discovered that silence would require betraying something essential about who he was.⁷

Democracy also depends upon people willing to remain faithful when doing so becomes inconvenient.

The election worker who accurately counts ballots even when neighbors accuse her of treason. The judge who applies the law despite political pressure. The journalist who publishes an uncomfortable fact about the political movement he personally prefers. The civil servant who refuses an illegal order. The pastor who tells his congregation something they do not want to hear. The citizen who says to friends, “No, that story isn’t true,” even though the falsehood benefits their side.

Institutions do not defend themselves. People defend them.

Constitutions cannot develop courage. Citizens must.

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Recalculating

The most hopeful word in GPS navigation may be “recalculating.”

It means a wrong turn is not the end of the journey. That is also the genius of liberal democracy. Democracy contains mechanisms for self-correction.

We hold another election. A court reverses precedent. A legislature revises a bad law. Journalists uncover corruption. Citizens organize. Churches examine their failures. Movements broaden their vision. Generations reconsider assumptions inherited from their parents. A country apologizes. A constitution is amended. A former enemy becomes a fellow citizen.

Democracy does not depend upon never making mistakes. It depends upon preserving the capacity to correct them.

That requires something Peter initially lacked: the humility to hear that the route we chose may not be the route that leads to life.

And perhaps that is one of the most important distinctions between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. Authoritarian systems cannot comfortably say, “We were wrong.” Their legitimacy depends upon strength, certainty and infallibility.

Democracy can say, “Recalculating.”

Checking the Compass

So perhaps we need a simple civic examination of conscience.

When we encounter a political proposal, movement or leader, we might ask: Does this increase human dignity or require someone’s humiliation? Does it widen participation or make citizenship conditional upon belonging to the correct tribe? Does it strengthen institutions or merely strengthen the people currently controlling them? Does it respect truth even when truth is inconvenient? Does it permit opposition? Does it preserve freedom of conscience? Does it accept limits on power? Does it encourage citizens to take responsibility, or merely teach them whom to blame?

Most important, perhaps: Would I still support this power if my political opponents controlled it?

That may be the most useful test on the entire dashboard.

If I want enormous executive authority only when my candidate is president, my compass is malfunctioning. If I defend free speech only for people who agree with me, it is malfunctioning. If I respect elections only when my side wins, it is malfunctioning. If religious freedom means freedom for my religion but merely tolerance for yours, it is malfunctioning. If due process is essential for my allies but an obstacle when dealing with my enemies, it is malfunctioning.

The destination cannot change every time the driver changes.

Who Is Directing the Journey?

At the beginning of my homily I asked the congregation how many use GPS to find the best route and estimate when they will arrive. At the end I asked a deeper question: Whom are we allowing to direct our lives?

The same question belongs in our civic life.

Who programs our political GPS?

• Our party?

• Our social-media feed?

• Our anger?

• Our fears?

• Our economic interests?

• Our religious tribe?

• A charismatic leader?

Or do we carry something deeper—a moral compass capable of judging all of them?

For Christians, that compass begins with the dignity of every person as a child of God, the command to love our neighbor, the obligation to tell the truth, special concern for those pushed to the margins and Jesus’ repeated warning against the seductions of domination.

For citizens of a pluralistic liberal democracy, we translate those convictions into civic practices accessible to people of many faiths and no faith: equal dignity, constitutional limits, religious liberty, freedom of speech, independent institutions, pluralism, truthful public argument, peaceful transfer of power and the rule of law.

These are not perfect directions.

Democracy remains a human project undertaken by flawed human beings. But the alternative is not perfection. The alternative is power without sufficient restraint.

We will make wrong turns. We always have. Americans have traveled through slavery, segregation, exclusion of women from citizenship, religious intolerance, xenophobia, economic exploitation and many other betrayals of our stated ideals.

Yet the democratic promise remained capable of saying: Recalculating.

Expand the franchise. Protect civil rights. Correct the law. Broaden freedom. Include those we excluded.

Try again.

Our present moment asks whether we still possess that capacity.

Jesus told Peter that the road ahead would not be the easy road. Liberal democracy offers no easy road either. It asks us to tolerate frustration, share power, defend the rights of opponents, distinguish truth from propaganda, accept defeat without abandoning the system, criticize our own side and sometimes sacrifice immediate political advantage for the long-term health of institutions.

There will always be someone promising a shortcut.

The Liberal Democracy Compass asks us to remember the destination.

Human dignity. Freedom. Truth. Pluralism. Justice. The common good.

And when the voice tells us we have taken a wrong turn, may we still possess enough humility to listen.

Recalculating.

Then begin again.

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Endnotes

¹ Matthew 16:21–27. Peter rejects Jesus’ prediction of suffering and is rebuked for thinking according to human rather than divine priorities. Jesus then teaches that discipleship requires self-denial, carrying the cross and recognizing that gaining the whole world can come at the price of losing one’s life.

² Freedom House, “FAQ—Freedom in the World.” Its framework evaluates electoral process, political pluralism and participation, functioning of government, freedom of expression and belief, associational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy. Freedom House explicitly distinguishes a liberal democracy from a system that merely satisfies minimum electoral requirements. (freedomhouse.org)

³ Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026: The Growing Shadow of Autocracy, released March 19, 2026. The report found a 20th consecutive annual decline in global freedom, with 54 countries deteriorating and 35 improving during 2025; approximately 21 percent of the world’s population now lives in countries classified as Free. (freedomhouse.org)

⁴ V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Democracy Report 2026, 10th edition. V-Dem reports that democracies are now a minority globally and identifies restrictions on freedom of expression, disinformation and polarization among recurring characteristics of contemporary autocratization. (v-dem.net)

⁵ Seth B. Warner, “Partisan Animosity and Protest Participation in the United States,” Social Forces 104, no. 2 (December 2025): 476–494. Warner’s analysis distinguishes partisan identity from partisan animosity and finds hostile feelings toward the opposing party strongly associated with perceptions of political threat and subsequent political behavior. (academic.oup.com)

⁶ Romans 12:1–2. Paul calls Christians not to conform themselves to the age but to be transformed through renewal of the mind so that they may discern what is good.

⁷ Jeremiah 20:7–9. Despite ridicule and rejection, Jeremiah describes God’s word as a fire burning within him that he cannot suppress.

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AI systems can already schedule workers, evaluate performance, recommend discipline—and even help decide who gets fired. The promise is greater efficiency. The danger is that human beings become little more than data points in someone else’s optimization model.

In “ROBOBOSSES,” I ask what happens when algorithms manage people, productivity outruns accountability, and the gains from AI flow upward while the risks fall hardest on workers with the least power.

Who wins? Who loses? And who gets to decide?

ROBOBOSSES

When algorithms manage human beings, who wins—and who loses?

For most of my lifetime, the idea of a robot boss belonged comfortably to science fiction. We could imagine the machine issuing orders, calculating performance, perhaps eventually deciding that troublesome human beings were no longer necessary. It made for good movies because the boundary was reassuringly clear: humans were people; machines were tools.

That boundary is becoming harder to locate.

This summer, an employee at a small store in San Francisco was fired after repeatedly arriving late for work. There is nothing particularly futuristic about that. Employees have been dismissed for attendance problems for as long as there have been workplaces.

What was different was the boss.

The store, Andon Market in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood, is an experiment operated by Andon Labs. Its manager is an artificial-intelligence agent named Luna. Luna helped establish the store, selected merchandise, set prices, interviewed job applicants, hired workers, scheduled them, approved time off, negotiated salaries and managed everyday operations. And eventually Luna concluded that one employee should be fired.¹

We should be precise about what happened. This was a controlled experiment, and Andon Labs says human beings reviewed Luna’s recommendation and delivered the termination. The employee had reportedly been late for 17 of 23 shifts. There was a reasonable employment problem to address.

But there was another revealing detail. Luna had created an attendance policy and then effectively lost track of it. Researchers had to prompt the AI to search its memory and reconsider the employee’s record. Once it did, Luna concluded that termination was appropriate.¹

The story is fascinating not because a wicked computer cruelly dismissed an innocent employee. That would be easier to think about.

The disturbing question is more ordinary: How much human authority are we prepared to surrender to systems that can calculate extraordinarily well but cannot themselves assume moral responsibility for what they decide?

Welcome to the age of the roboboss.

The Boss Is Already in the Building

“Roboboss” is a catchy term for something researchers usually call algorithmic management: software systems that organize, assign, monitor, supervise and evaluate human work. Some use sophisticated artificial intelligence; others rely on relatively simple rules, rankings or statistical models.²

Many workers have already met the roboboss without calling it that. The delivery driver whose app determines the next route, the warehouse employee whose handheld device counts the seconds allotted to retrieve an item, the call-center worker whose conversations are scored, the hotel employee whose schedule is generated by demand forecasts, the applicant rejected by a résumé-screening program and the gig worker suddenly “deactivated” from a platform are all experiencing versions of algorithmic management.

For years we have been introducing these systems gradually enough that we could pretend the human manager was still in charge. The computer gathered the information. The software produced the spreadsheet. The algorithm ranked the employees. The manager supposedly made the decision.

Now the sequence can be reversed. The algorithm can make the recommendation while the human manager becomes the person who clicks “approve.”

That is more than technological change. It is a transfer of authority.

The systems themselves are mathematically impressive. They can process quantities of data no human manager could possibly absorb, discover correlations, predict demand, allocate tasks, compare performance across thousands of workers and continuously adjust schedules or workflows toward a desired outcome.

But that last phrase is where the moral problem begins: a desired outcome.

An algorithm does not decide what a good workplace is. Human beings tell it what to optimize.

If we tell a system to maximize packages delivered per hour, it can do that. If we tell it to minimize labor costs, it can do that. If we tell it to reduce customer waiting time, maximize sales, identify absenteeism or rank employees by productivity, it can probably help.

But productivity is not the same thing as human flourishing.

The equation contains only what someone decides to put into it.

There Is a Powerful Case for AI at Work

It would be too easy—and intellectually dishonest—to portray this technology as entirely destructive.

AI can relieve managers and workers of enormous amounts of repetitive administrative work. It can identify patterns humans miss. It can help schedule complicated operations, anticipate equipment failures, translate languages, assist people with disabilities and place useful information in the hands of workers at precisely the moment they need it.

The productivity evidence can be impressive. One widely cited study of more than 5,000 customer-service agents found that access to a generative-AI assistant increased productivity by about 14 percent overall and by substantially more among novice and lower-skilled workers. The system appeared to spread some of the knowledge of the most effective workers throughout the organization.³

That is a genuine social good. Technology that helps an inexperienced worker become competent more quickly could expand opportunity rather than diminish it.

Another large field experiment found that workers using an AI assistant spent less time on email and, among those who actually used the system, reduced time spent working outside normal hours.⁴ AI does not inevitably create a digital sweatshop. Properly designed, it can give people time back.

The OECD has also found that employers using algorithmic-management systems frequently believe the tools improve the quality of managerial decisions and sometimes improve managers’ own job satisfaction. At the same time, those managers report concerns about unclear accountability, difficulty understanding how systems reach conclusions and inadequate protection of worker health.⁵

That mixture of promise and danger is exactly why we need a serious conversation.

The choice is not between embracing technology and smashing the machines.

The choice is what kind of workplace we intend to build with them.

What Happens to Human Judgment?

I began my own professional life in human resources and equal employment opportunity, long before anyone imagined that an artificial-intelligence system might conduct an interview or recommend termination. Personnel decisions could certainly be biased, inconsistent and unfair. Human managers are hardly paragons of objectivity.

That is precisely why organizations developed procedures: documentation, interviews, progressive discipline, appeals, equal-employment protections and review by other human beings. The goal was never to pretend managers were unbiased. It was to create accountability around the exercise of human judgment.

The roboboss introduces a different temptation. We may begin treating a mathematically produced decision as though mathematics itself makes the decision objective.

But an algorithm inherits choices at every level. What outcome was it instructed to optimize? What data was collected? Which data were excluded? What historical patterns trained the system? How much weight does punctuality receive? Customer satisfaction? Sales? Speed? Teamwork? Disability? Family emergencies? A broken bus line? The employee who spends ten extra minutes comforting a frightened customer?

The International Labour Organization recently warned that the rush to automate human-resource decisions is moving faster than our understanding of whether many of these systems actually make better decisions. The effectiveness of an AI system depends not simply on the sophistication of its mathematics but on the objective it has been given, the quality of the data it uses and how it has been programmed.⁶

The old human manager could make a bad decision.

The new danger is that we can make the bad decision systematic, instantaneous and scalable.

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When the Worker Becomes the Data

There is also a quieter danger: what constant measurement does to the person being measured.

Good work requires some degree of autonomy—the experience that I am not simply executing commands but exercising skill, judgment, initiative and responsibility. Work is one of the places where human beings discover competence and develop identity. We learn how to solve problems, cooperate, negotiate, improvise, mentor others and sometimes bend a procedure because the human situation in front of us demands it.

A roboboss can gradually turn that process upside down. Instead of technology serving human work, the human worker begins serving the measurement system.

The ILO has linked AI-driven surveillance and algorithmic management with work intensification, reduced autonomy, privacy concerns and psychosocial risks.⁷ That should not surprise us. Imagine spending an eight-hour shift knowing that every movement, keystroke, pause, conversation, route, sale or deviation can become another data point in a performance model whose reasoning you may never be permitted to see.

The worker begins asking not, What does good work require?

The worker asks, What does the system want?

That is human diminishment.

And it is particularly dangerous for people who have the least bargaining power to resist it.

The Inequality Question

Technological revolutions are often described as though “society” experiences their benefits and costs together.

Society does no such thing.

Owners, investors, managers, highly educated professionals, low-wage workers and unemployed people encounter technological change from dramatically different positions.

Consider the most optimistic scenario. Artificial intelligence makes a company 20 percent more productive. Wonderful.

Who receives the 20 percent?

Workers could receive higher wages, shorter workweeks, better benefits, safer conditions or more interesting jobs. Consumers could receive lower prices. Owners could receive higher profits. Executives could receive larger compensation packages. Or the company could reduce its workforce and expect the remaining employees to produce more.

Technology does not determine that distribution.

Power does.

A 2025 NBER study found that greater AI exposure could be associated with longer workdays and reduced leisure when technology increased productivity and strengthened monitoring. The researchers found that workers with less bargaining power were less able to capture the productivity gains for themselves; some of the benefits instead flowed to firms or consumers.⁸ Compare that with the study showing AI reducing after-hours email work, and an important lesson appears: the same broad technology can either return time to workers or extract more time from them depending on how organizations use it.

This is why I worry most about workers at the lower end of the economic ladder.

A highly educated professional who dislikes an intrusive AI-management system may have options. She can complain, negotiate, transfer departments, consult an attorney or take her skills elsewhere.

The warehouse worker, home-care aide, driver, hotel employee or contract worker living paycheck to paycheck may have no such freedom. If the algorithm changes the schedule, measures bathroom time, reduces available hours or issues a disciplinary score, “choice” becomes rather theoretical.

Efficiency imposed downward can become another name for power.

The Global Roboboss

The inequality problem becomes even more serious when we move beyond the United States.

The ILO estimates that about one in four jobs worldwide has some degree of exposure to generative AI, although most exposed jobs are more likely to be transformed than eliminated entirely. Exposure is much greater in high-income countries than in low-income economies because the occupational mix and technological infrastructure differ.⁹

That might initially sound like good news for poorer nations.

It is not necessarily.

A joint ILO–World Bank study released in 2026 warns of what might be called “disruption without dividend.” Developing countries may experience pressures from AI-driven restructuring while lacking the broadband access, digital infrastructure, investment, education and institutional capacity needed to capture comparable productivity gains.¹⁰

There is another uncomfortable part of the story. The apparently clean world of artificial intelligence rests upon an enormous human infrastructure: people who label data, moderate content, check outputs and perform the less glamorous work required to train and maintain AI systems. Much of that labor can be outsourced to lower-wage workers around the world.

So we should be careful when someone says AI has eliminated human labor.

Sometimes it has merely moved the human being out of sight.

The future of work cannot be judged only by whether American professionals become more productive. A morally serious evaluation must ask what happens to the worker in Nairobi, Manila, Mexico City, Mumbai or rural America whose labor becomes cheaper, more intensely monitored or easier to replace.

The ethical question is global: Who owns the technology? Who supplies the hidden labor? Who captures the productivity? Who is displaced? Who gets retrained? Who gets left behind?

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California Asks Whether a Human Must Remain in the Room

The San Francisco experiment arrived just as California legislators were considering precisely these questions.

State Senator Jerry McNerney’s No Robo Bosses Act of 2026, SB 947, would prohibit employers from relying exclusively on automated decision systems to discipline or terminate workers and would require meaningful human review when such systems substantially contribute to those decisions. Workers would also gain greater transparency about automated systems and access to information used in decisions against them.¹¹

California tried something broader in 2025. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 7, agreeing that automated workplace systems could harm workers but arguing that the legislation imposed overly broad requirements even on relatively innocuous technologies.¹² McNerney returned in 2026 with a narrower proposal.

As of August 25, SB 947 remains in the legislative process. After passing the Senate 29–9 in May and moving through several Assembly committees, it was amended again on August 21 and ordered to a third reading in the Assembly.¹³

The legislation will undoubtedly impose some costs on businesses. Human review takes time. Compliance takes money. Companies operating in multiple states will face different rules. Those concerns should not simply be dismissed.

But requiring a human being to assume responsibility before another human being loses a livelihood strikes me as a remarkably modest moral principle.

Someone should be accountable.

Not the model.

Not “the system.”

Not the data.

Someone.

The Future We Still Get to Choose

I am not afraid of artificial intelligence. I use it. Like many people, I am fascinated by what it can accomplish. I can imagine enormous benefits in medicine, education, transportation, scientific research, disability access, business and countless other areas.

What concerns me is our ancient human tendency to confuse what we can do with what we should do.

The roboboss forces us to confront that distinction.

We should use AI to expand human capacity, not quietly redefine human beings as inefficient components in machine-optimized systems. We should welcome tools that eliminate drudgery, spread expertise and make work safer. But productivity gains should become a basis for greater human flourishing—better work, better wages, more learning, perhaps even more leisure—not simply greater extraction from those with the least power.

Human beings also need the right to know when an algorithm is evaluating them, the right to correct bad data, the right to challenge consequential decisions and, above all, the right to encounter another responsible human being when their livelihood is at stake.

The International Labour Organization has documented examples in which employers, workers and their representatives jointly shape algorithmic-management systems. Consultation can preserve productivity gains while improving job quality.¹⁴ That may point toward a wiser path: not humans against machines, but human communities deciding democratically how machines will serve human purposes.

The ultimate danger of the roboboss is not that artificial intelligence will become too human.

It is that we will become willing to treat human beings as though they were machines—inputs to be scheduled, measured, optimized and discarded when the numbers say the arrangement is no longer efficient.

Economics matters. Productivity matters. Innovation matters.

But work is more than an economic transaction. It is one of the central ways people support families, participate in society, develop abilities, establish dignity and imagine a future.

A liberal society worthy of the name cannot allow efficiency to become its highest good.

The question before us is therefore much larger than whether Luna should have fired a worker who repeatedly arrived late.

We are deciding what authority we are prepared to give machines over human lives.

And before the roboboss becomes so ordinary that we stop noticing it, we ought to ask the oldest sociological question about any new institution of power:

Who wins? Who loses? And who gets to decide?

Endnotes

¹ Andon Labs, “AI Bosses Are Slow to Fire and Quick to Hire,” August 14, 2026. Andon Labs reports that Luna recommended termination after repeated attendance and other workplace problems, but emphasizes that the experiment maintained human oversight and that humans reviewed and delivered the termination. See also Kathryn Palmer’s reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 2026.

² International Labour Organization, “Algorithmic Management in the Workplace.” The ILO defines algorithmic management as systems using tracked data and other information to organize, assign, monitor, supervise and evaluate work, noting its spread through customer service, transportation, logistics, banking, health care and digital labor platforms.

³ Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey R. Raymond, “Generative AI at Work,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 140, no. 2 (2025), originally NBER Working Paper 31161. The study of 5,179 customer-support agents found an average productivity gain of approximately 14 percent, with substantially larger gains among novice and lower-skilled workers.

⁴ Eleanor W. Dillon et al., “Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI,” NBER Working Paper 33795, revised November 2025. The six-month field experiment involved 7,137 knowledge workers across 66 firms.

⁵ Anna Milanez, Annikka Lemmens and Carla Ruggiu, “Algorithmic Management in the Workplace: New Evidence from an OECD Employer Survey,” OECD Artificial Intelligence Papers No. 31, February 2025; see also OECD, “How Widespread Is Algorithmic Management in Workplaces?” December 2025.

⁶ Janine Berg, “The Messy Business of Managing People at Work: Is AI the Solution?” International Labour Organization, May 15, 2026. Berg emphasizes the importance of examining a system’s objective, data and programming when evaluating AI-based human-resource decisions.

⁷ International Labour Organization, “AI Systems @ Work: A Changing Psychosocial Work Environment,” Working Paper 170, April 30, 2026. The research identifies risks associated with surveillance, work intensification, loss of autonomy, privacy and data use.

⁸ Wei Jiang et al., “AI and the Extended Workday: Productivity, Contracting Efficiency, and Distribution of Rents,” NBER Working Paper 33536, February 2025. The study links higher AI exposure in some settings with longer hours and reduced leisure and examines how bargaining power affects distribution of productivity gains.

⁹ International Labour Organization and NASK, “Generative AI and Jobs: A 2025 Update,” May 20, 2025. The ILO estimates roughly one-quarter of global employment has some exposure to GenAI, while emphasizing that job transformation rather than wholesale replacement remains the more likely outcome.

¹⁰ International Labour Organization and World Bank, “Disruption Without Dividend? How the Digital Divide and Task Differences Split GenAI’s Global Impact,” March 2026. The study covers 135 countries and warns that developing economies may experience disruption faster than they capture productivity benefits because of infrastructure and digital-access gaps.

¹¹ Office of California State Senator Jerry McNerney, “CA Senate Approves No Robo Bosses Act of 2026 to Ensure Human Oversight of AI in the Workplace,” May 20, 2026.

¹² Governor Gavin Newsom, veto message for California SB 7, October 13, 2025. Newsom agreed that unregulated automated decision systems could harm workers but objected that the legislation’s notification requirements and restrictions were overly broad.

¹³ California State Assembly records and current bill tracking for SB 947. As of August 25, 2026, the measure had been amended on August 21 and ordered to third reading after having cleared Assembly Appropriations earlier in August.

¹⁴ Virginia Doellgast et al., “Global Case Studies of Social Dialogue on AI and Algorithmic Management,” ILO Working Paper 144, July 2025; Anna Milanez, “Exploring Win-Win Outcomes of Algorithmic Management,” OECD Artificial Intelligence Papers No. 43, July 2025. Both point toward worker consultation and social dialogue as mechanisms for combining technological productivity with better job quality and accountability.

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• First Reading: Isaiah 22:19–23

• Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 138:1–2, 2–3, 6, 8

• Second Reading: Romans 11:33–36

• Gospel Acclamation: Matthew 16:18 Gospel: Matthew 16:13–20

What do we do with the keys we’ve been given?

This Sunday’s Gospel is not only about Peter’s authority—it is about Christian responsibility. Education, citizenship, money, influence, faith, and opportunity are all keys that can either open doors or keep them closed.

In “The Keys We Carry,” I reflect on evangelization, religious freedom, and the Christian calling to help build a liberal democracy where more people can enter into dignity, belonging, opportunity, and hope.

The Keys We Carry

Christian authority, evangelization, and the doors we are called to open in a liberal democracy

Keys are remarkably ordinary things. We carry them in our pockets, leave them on kitchen counters, attach them to rings, lose them, replace them, and increasingly imitate them with codes on our phones. Yet behind every key is an important human reality: someone has been given access.

A house key means you belong there. An office key means someone trusts you. A car key gives you the ability to go somewhere. The key to a classroom, church, business, organization, or safe gives you both permission and responsibility. And whenever someone hands us a key, there is usually an unspoken message: I am trusting you with something.

That makes the image at the center of this Sunday’s Gospel far richer than it first appears.

Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus responds by giving Peter an extraordinary commission: “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” ¹

Catholics naturally hear these words in relation to Peter, the papacy, and the authority of the Church. That interpretation is deeply rooted in our tradition. But if we stop there, we can miss something spiritually important about the image Jesus chose.

Jesus did not give Peter a throne.

He gave him keys.

And keys exist primarily because something needs to be opened.

The Key Does Not Belong to the Steward

The first reading from Isaiah helps us understand what Jesus’ listeners would have heard in this image. The prophet describes the transfer of authority from Shebna, an official in the royal household, to Eliakim. God declares: “I will place the key of the House of David on Eliakim’s shoulder; when he opens, no one shall shut, when he shuts, no one shall open.” ²

The key is a symbol of authority, but it is not the authority of an owner. It is the authority of a steward.

Eliakim does not own the House of David. He has been entrusted with responsibility for it. Peter does not own the kingdom of God. He has been entrusted with serving it. The Church does not own Christ, grace, truth, salvation, or God. We have received them as gifts and have been commissioned to share them.

That distinction matters enormously.

One of the persistent temptations of religious institutions is to confuse stewardship with ownership. Once we believe we possess God, truth, salvation, or moral authority as private property, the key that was given to open doors can quickly become an instrument for locking people out.

Church history offers more than enough examples.

We have sometimes used doctrine to open minds and sometimes to close them. We have used religious authority to defend human dignity and, at other times, to defend institutional privilege. Christians have established hospitals, schools, universities, orphanages, shelters, missions, relief organizations, and movements for human rights. Christians have also participated in religious wars, colonialism, antisemitism, racial segregation, political repression, and the silencing of people whose questions made authorities uncomfortable.

The problem was rarely the key itself.

The question was what we believed the key was for.

The Keys Already in Our Hands

This image became especially vivid to me while preparing this weekend’s homily around a missionary appeal. We were being asked to support ministries that provide education, health care, economic and community development, and spiritual care.

I began thinking of every contribution as a kind of key.

A scholarship can be a key that opens a classroom.

A clinic can be a key that opens the possibility of health.

A well can open access to clean water.

Job training can open economic opportunity.

A parish can open a place of belonging.

A missionary can open a relationship between communities separated by thousands of miles.

And a contribution placed in an envelope in Los Angeles can become a key in the hands of someone we will probably never meet.

But why restrict the metaphor to missionary work?

Most of us possess far more keys than we realize.

Education is a key. Citizenship is a key. Professional credentials are keys. Money is a key. Language is a key. Technology is a key. A passport is a key. Social connections are keys. A home is a key. Political participation is a key. A position of leadership is a key. Knowledge of how institutions work is a key.

Some of us entered life with access to many of these keys. Others have spent their lives knocking on doors.

That is where this Gospel moves from church authority into Christian discipleship.

The question is no longer simply, What keys did Jesus give Peter?

It becomes: What keys have been entrusted to me, and what am I opening with them?

Liberal Democracy Is a System of Keys

This question becomes especially important for Christians living in a liberal democracy.

We often take for granted what an extraordinary privilege this is.

We can worship publicly. We can preach the Gospel. We can build churches. We can establish schools and charities. We can organize ministries. We can publish religious ideas. We can criticize political leaders. We can disagree with one another about theology. We can convert to another religion, leave religion entirely, or return after decades away.

These freedoms did not simply fall from heaven fully formed.

They emerged through centuries of painful struggles over political power, religious conflict, conscience, minority rights, and the proper limits of government. Catholics themselves had to learn important lessons in this development.

The Second Vatican Council’s declaration Dignitatis Humanae made a remarkably important contribution to Catholic understanding by grounding religious freedom in the dignity of the human person. Faith, the Council taught, must be free. No one should be forced to act against conscience in religious matters, and religious freedom belongs not merely to Catholics or Christians but to the human person. The Council even acknowledged honestly that Christians themselves had not always acted consistently with the spirit of the Gospel in this regard. ³

This is enormously important for understanding Christian responsibility in a pluralistic democracy.

Religious freedom is not a key Christians should use to secure privilege for ourselves while closing doors to others.

It is a key we are obligated to defend for everyone.

The Muslim building a mosque, the Jewish family celebrating its tradition, the evangelical Christian preaching on a street corner, the Catholic celebrating Mass, the Buddhist practicing meditation, the agnostic questioning religion, and the atheist rejecting belief all inhabit the same civic space.

A liberal democracy does not require us to pretend that all beliefs are identical or equally convincing. It requires something more demanding: that we respect the dignity and freedom of persons with whom we profoundly disagree.

That is not weakness.

It is a moral discipline.

Christians Should Be Door Openers

This is where the image of the keys becomes political without becoming partisan.

Every society contains doors.

There is the door into a good education. The door into decent health care. The door into meaningful employment. The door into safe housing. The door into citizenship and civic participation. The door into justice. The door into institutions where decisions are made. The door into economic security. The door into cultural belonging.

Some people find these doors opening almost automatically.

Others spend their lives discovering how many are locked.

A Christian social imagination should notice the difference.

The Gospel cannot be reduced to a public policy platform, and Christianity should never simply baptize one political party’s agenda. But neither can Christians proclaim God’s abundant mercy on Sunday while remaining indifferent to how opportunity is distributed Monday through Saturday.

If we possess keys, the Christian question must always be: Whose life can I help open?

This is one way Christian faith contributes to liberal democracy without dominating it. Christians strengthen democracy when we create institutions that enable people to flourish: schools, hospitals, food programs, refugee services, neighborhood organizations, universities, clinics, ministries to prisoners, support for families, care for the elderly, programs for young people, and communities of belonging.

These institutions do not have to make everyone Christian.

They can make Christianity credible.

Evangelization Is Not Capturing People

This brings us to a word that makes many contemporary Christians—and probably even more non-Christians—uneasy: evangelization.

For some Catholics, evangelization immediately means missionary preaching, converting people, teaching doctrine, bringing people into the Church, or increasing Mass attendance.

Those things can be part of evangelization.

But the Christian mission is much larger.

Pope Francis repeatedly emphasized that evangelization is not proselytism. In Evangelii Gaudium, he describes Christians not as people imposing new burdens, but as people sharing joy, pointing toward beauty, and inviting others to a banquet. The Church grows, he wrote, not by coercion but through attraction. ⁴ He repeatedly distinguished authentic proclamation of the Gospel from political, cultural, psychological, or religious forms of proselytism. ⁵

That strikes me as exactly right.

Jesus rarely seems interested in capturing people.

He encounters them.

He eats with them. He listens to them. He heals them. He asks questions. He tells stories. He forgives. He challenges. He invites.

“Come and see.”

“Follow me.”

“Your faith has saved you.”

“Neither do I condemn you.”

“Go and do likewise.”

There is invitation, but not manipulation.

There is conviction, but not coercion.

There is a door.

And the person remains free to walk through it.

Evangelization therefore cannot mean forcing our religious language onto people who do not share it. It means living so that the life of Christ becomes visible enough to awaken curiosity.

What would happen if Christians became known primarily as people who open doors?

What if encountering a Christian increased someone’s chances of experiencing mercy rather than judgment, dignity rather than humiliation, hospitality rather than suspicion?

What if Christian schools were known for opening intellectual possibilities, Christian hospitals for protecting human dignity, Christian parishes for building community, Christian employers for treating workers justly, Christian voters for defending democratic freedom, Christian families for hospitality, and Christian citizens for refusing to dehumanize people with whom they disagree?

Perhaps people might begin asking what makes these Christians behave this way.

That question itself is an opening for evangelization.

Authority Can Open or Close

There is, however, another side to Jesus’ image.

Keys can lock.

The Gospel explicitly speaks of binding and loosing, opening and shutting. Authority involves judgment. Communities need boundaries. Institutions require leadership. Not every action is acceptable, every argument sound, every behavior harmless.

Liberalism itself depends upon boundaries. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism. Religious liberty does not permit religious coercion. Political disagreement does not justify violence. Majority rule does not eliminate minority rights. Personal freedom exists alongside responsibility to others.

The Christian problem is not that doors are sometimes closed.

The moral question is why, for whom, and by whose authority.

Too often we become remarkably skilled at locking doors against people we fear while leaving wide open the doors through which power, money, resentment, and self-interest enter our institutions.

This is why Sunday’s second reading from Romans belongs in the conversation. Paul marvels at the mystery of God: “How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” ⁶

That is a necessary word of humility immediately before Christians start talking about authority.

We have keys.

We do not have God figured out.

We have convictions.

We do not possess infinite understanding.

We have a tradition.

We do not control grace.

The person holding the keys still stands before a mystery greater than himself.

Peter himself will demonstrate this almost immediately. The man praised for recognizing Jesus as Messiah will misunderstand what that Messiahship means. In the verses following this Sunday’s Gospel, Peter resists Jesus’ prediction of suffering and is sharply corrected. The rock can become a stumbling block. ¹

That should sober every religious leader.

And every Christian.

The Church Does Not Own the Kingdom

Perhaps this is the most important distinction of all.

Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. The Church serves that kingdom, witnesses to it, anticipates it, and proclaims it.

But the Church is not identical with the kingdom of God. Catholic biblical commentary on this passage points to an intimate relationship between Church and kingdom without simply identifying the two. ¹

God is working beyond boundaries we can see.

That means Christians should be able to recognize grace wherever human dignity expands, reconciliation occurs, hungry people are fed, frightened people are protected, children are educated, prisoners are treated as human beings, enemies discover ways to speak to one another, and communities create opportunities for people who previously stood outside the door.

We do not have to put a Christian label on every good thing before participating in it.

Sometimes evangelization begins simply by opening the door.

What Are You Opening?

I keep returning to the image of my own key ring.

Most keys look insignificant. A little piece of metal. A plastic card. A password. A number typed onto a keypad.

But keys reveal relationships of trust.

Someone believes we should have access to something.

The same is true of our lives.

Whatever education we have received, whatever money we possess, whatever citizenship we enjoy, whatever professional standing we have earned, whatever relationships we have developed, whatever religious freedom protects us, whatever institutional authority has been entrusted to us—these are not merely possessions.

They are keys.

And eventually the Gospel asks what we did with them.

Did our faith open people’s lives or make them smaller?

Did our churches create belonging or manufacture outsiders?

Did our citizenship protect freedom only for ourselves or enlarge it for others?

Did our education become status or service?

Did our money become insulation or opportunity?

Did our political convictions help us recognize neighbors or merely identify enemies?

Did our Christianity make God’s mercy easier or harder for another person to imagine?

These questions take Peter’s keys out of stained-glass windows and place them back into our hands.

The mission of the Church is still evangelization. Christians are still called to proclaim Jesus Christ. But proclamation without lived witness quickly becomes noise. A Church that speaks constantly about salvation while closing doors to human dignity makes its own message difficult to believe.

The challenge of Christian mission in a liberal democracy is therefore not to capture the culture, conquer the government, or possess the public square.

It is to help create a society in which more doors can open.

Pope Francis described this wider responsibility as a form of social and political charity: seeking the common good by building communities in which persons flourish together. ⁷

That is not a retreat from evangelization.

It may be one of its most persuasive forms.

Jesus entrusted Peter with keys.

Christians have been carrying them ever since.

The question for us is not simply whether we possess them.

It is whether anyone’s life is more open because we do.

Endnotes

¹ Matthew 16:13–23, New American Bible, Revised Edition. The USCCB commentary connects Jesus’ image of the keys with Isaiah 22 and discusses the relationship between Peter, the Church, and the kingdom of heaven. It also provides the immediate context for Peter’s subsequent misunderstanding of Jesus’ mission.

² Isaiah 22:19–23. Eliakim receives “the key of the House of David,” a symbol of entrusted authority and stewardship.

³ Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae (1965), especially nos. 1–4, 10–13. The declaration grounds religious freedom in human dignity, rejects coercion in matters of faith, and recognizes religious liberty as a civil right that extends to all persons.

⁴ Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013), especially nos. 14–15. Francis presents evangelization as the sharing of the joy of the Gospel and emphasizes attraction and invitation rather than coercion.

⁵ Francis, Message to the Pontifical Mission Societies, May 21, 2020. Francis distinguishes authentic proclamation of the Gospel from political, cultural, psychological, and religious forms of proselytism.

⁶ Romans 11:33–36, New American Bible, Revised Edition. Paul’s doxology emphasizes the depth and mystery of God’s wisdom and judgments.

⁷ Francis, Fratelli Tutti (2020), especially nos. 180–186, on political love, social charity, and the pursuit of the common good.

A recent visit to The Broad Museum in Los Angeles for a Yoko Ono retrospective reminded me that art can awaken the spiritual imagination, challenge political certainty, and help us see one another differently. In an age of propaganda and religious fundamentalism, we need artists—and a faith—that teach us how to look, listen, interpret, and live with mystery.

My new essay: “Beauty Without Certainty: The Catholic Imagination in an Age of Propaganda and Fundamentalism.”

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Beauty Without Certainty

The Catholic imagination in an age of propaganda and fundamentalism

A few days ago, I visited Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at The Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles. I went knowing Yoko Ono primarily as most people of my generation first encountered her: as the avant-garde artist who entered the orbit of the Beatles, became John Lennon’s partner, and was blamed—fairly or unfairly, but usually unfairly—for disturbing the chemistry of the most influential popular music group of the twentieth century.

The exhibition asks us to encounter her differently.

It traces more than seventy years of Ono’s work as an artist, musician, feminist, and peace activist. Some of the pieces are physical objects. Others are instructions: climb a ladder, look through a magnifying glass, hammer a nail, write a memory about your mother, tie a wish to a tree, imagine something that does not yet exist. The viewer is not simply asked to observe the art but to complete it. The work happens somewhere between the object, the artist, and the imagination of the person encountering it.

That may be why the exhibition stayed with me. Ono’s art does not tell us exactly what to think. It creates a space in which we have to participate. It asks us to look again at familiar things—a word, a shadow, a broken cup, a human body, a wish for peace—and consider whether they might contain more meaning than we first assumed.

As a sociologist, I recognized an invitation to examine the social world differently. As a priest, I recognized something almost sacramental. And as a high school student who loved the Beatles, I found myself returning to one particular word.

Before John Lennon and Yoko Ono became John and Yoko, Ono was assisting the experimental composer John Cage with a project called Notations, a collection of original musical manuscripts. She approached Paul McCartney hoping to acquire a handwritten Beatles manuscript. McCartney declined but suggested that John Lennon might be willing to contribute something. Lennon eventually gave her the handwritten lyrics to the Beatles’ 1965 song “The Word.”¹

Accounts differ slightly about the precise chronology of their first contacts. Their consequential meeting occurred in November 1966, while Ono was preparing an exhibition at London’s Indica Gallery. Lennon climbed a white ladder, looked through a magnifying glass, and discovered one tiny word written on the ceiling: “YES.” He later said he was struck by its affirmation. Much contemporary conceptual art seemed to him to be defined by negation. Ono’s “YES” surprised him.

But I remain fascinated that somewhere near the beginning of their relationship stood another single word: love.

“The Word” was not one of the Beatles’ most sophisticated spiritual compositions—if it can be called spiritual at all. Yet as a Catholic high school student in the 1960s, I heard something spiritual in its insistence that love could become a new way of seeing and living. “Say the word and you’ll be free,” the Beatles sang. The song suggested that love was more than a private feeling. It could be proclaimed, embodied, and shared. It could change how people lived together.

That idea was in the 1960s air. Popular culture was interacting with the Civil Rights Movement, the so-called “hippie movement,” the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, and a new questioning of social and religious authority. Songs were not simply entertainment. They became a form of moral and spiritual formation. They gave young people language for experiences that their schools, churches, and families did not always know how to discuss.

My own spiritual imagination was being formed not only by the Bible, the Mass, Catholic education, and the lives of the saints. It was also being formed by the Beatles and Motown, by protest songs, films, television, newspapers, political speeches, and the images of civil rights demonstrators facing police dogs and fire hoses.

That did not make popular culture a substitute for faith. It meant that faith was learning to speak through modern culture. And it took the Second Vatican Council to open up the Catholic Church in the late 1960s to permit modern and popular cultural forms to enter the liturgy and architecture of the times.

When Patti Smith said “Hi”

I thought again about this relationship between faith and culture when Patti Smith recently visited Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican.

The meeting itself produced an almost perfect cultural image: the first American pope receiving the woman often called the godmother of punk. Both were born in Chicago. One had been formed by Catholic religious life, missionary ministry, canon law, and the institutional responsibilities of the papacy. The other had been formed by poetry, rock and roll, visual art, grief, rebellion, and the streets of New York.

When Smith approached Leo, she reportedly greeted him with a shy and slightly awestruck “Hi.” Their private conversation lasted about forty minutes and touched on music, words, memory, dreams, visions, and hope.²

It would be easy to dismiss such a meeting as Vatican celebrity culture— a pleasant photo opportunity designed to show that the Church remains culturally relevant. But Patti Smith is not simply a celebrity. She is a poet, musician, visual artist, memoirist, and spiritual seeker whose work has long drawn upon biblical imagery, Catholic symbols, human suffering, and the tension between belief and rebellion.

She is not Catholic. That is precisely what makes the encounter interesting.

Smith did not have to become Catholic before Pope Leo could listen to her. Leo did not have to become a punk rocker before Smith could speak with him. Their conversation did not begin with agreement. It began with recognition: two human beings acknowledging that words, music, memory, suffering, and hope matter.

Perhaps that is what the Vatican can offer at its best—not a certification process for approved religious culture, but a meeting place between the Church and the many ways human beings search for meaning.

Pope Francis had cultivated that same openness. He met Smith more than once, and she performed at a Vatican Christmas concert in 2014. In 2023, Francis invited more than two hundred artists to the Sistine Chapel and called them visionaries who perceive realities others overlook. In 2024, he welcomed comedians including Stephen Colbert, Jim Gaffigan, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Conan O’Brien, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He praised humor’s capacity to reveal abuses of power without depriving people of their dignity.³

These were not random celebrity audiences. They expressed a theological conviction: artists often see something before institutions do.

The Catholic Imagination

The sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley gave us a helpful way to understand this relationship in his book The Catholic Imagination. Drawing upon theologian David Tracy’s concept of the “analogical imagination,” Greeley argued that Catholicism possesses a distinctive sacramental instinct. It tends to imagine creation not as an obstacle separating humanity from God, but as a field of signs through which God may be encountered.

Water can become baptism. Bread and wine can become Eucharist. Oil can carry healing and consecration. A marriage can disclose covenant. A meal can suggest a kingdom. A human body can become a temple. A poem, painting, cathedral, film, or popular song can open a door toward transcendence.

This does not mean that every cultural product is holy or that every artistic impulse should be treated as revelation. Analogy depends upon both resemblance and difference. A work of art may disclose something of divine beauty without becoming divine. A love song can evoke Christian love without offering a complete theology of love. A protest anthem can awaken moral courage while still simplifying the political problem it addresses.

The analogical imagination does not collapse the world into God. It recognizes that something of God, something transcendent can shine through the world.

This is one reason Catholic Christianity has produced and sponsored so much art across the centuries. Its churches contain architecture, music, sculpture, stained glass, incense, color, procession, gesture, storytelling, and silence. The liturgy engages the senses because Catholicism has generally understood human beings as embodied creatures, not disembodied intellects receiving religious information.

Scripture itself requires an artistic imagination. The Bible is not a single instruction manual written in one literary form. It is a library containing poetry, mythic narrative, history, genealogy, law, lamentation, prophecy, wisdom, parable, letters, songs, and apocalyptic visions. To read all those genres literally in the same way is not fidelity to scripture. It is a failure to understand how language and imagination works.

A parable is not a police report. A psalm is not a scientific explanation. The Book of Revelation is not a coded cinematic schedule for the end of the world.

Mature faith requires interpretation.

So does democracy.

The democratic imagination

At first, liberal democracy may seem far removed from Catholic sacraments or avant-garde art. Democracy concerns elections, laws, rights, constitutions, and institutions. Art concerns beauty, expression, and imagination.

But democratic institutions cannot survive through procedures alone. They require citizens capable of living with people whose beliefs, backgrounds, experiences, and identities differ from their own. They require what philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls the “narrative imagination”: the capacity to imagine what another person’s life might be like.⁴

A novel lets us inhabit someone else’s consciousness. A film lets us see the world through unfamiliar eyes. Music allows grief, longing, anger, and hope to cross boundaries that ordinary speech cannot. A painting slows our vision. Theater places conflicting motives before us without immediately resolving them. Satire exposes the absurdities of power. Comedy prevents the powerful from becoming sacred and the rest of us from becoming unbearably self-righteous.

Art forms citizens because it trains attention. It asks us to look, listen, interpret, meditation, be silent, and sometimes change our minds.

It also teaches us to live with ambiguity. In democratic life, people are rarely divided neatly between the completely righteous and the completely wicked. People act from mixed motives. Institutions preserve both ideals and injustices. Political victories have unintended consequences. Our opponents sometimes perceive truths that our own side has ignored.

This does not mean abandoning moral judgment. It means developing judgment mature enough to confront complexity.

The democratic imagination recognizes that no party, movement, church, or nation possesses the whole truth. Another person’s story may reveal something we have not seen. A symbol may carry several meanings simultaneously. Unity does not require uniformity, and disagreement does not automatically turn a neighbor into an enemy.

Yoko Ono’s instruction pieces require the viewer to participate in creating meaning. Liberal democracy asks something similar of citizens. We inherit laws, institutions, symbols, and traditions, but their future meaning depends upon what we do with them.

Democracy, like art, is never completely finished.

When art becomes propaganda

Art can also be used to destroy the imagination.

Propaganda uses the techniques of art—image, rhythm, repetition, spectacle, narrative, and emotion— but directs them toward a predetermined political conclusion. It does not invite us to see. It tells us what we must see.

The propagandist divides the world into heroes and enemies. History becomes a morality play in which the nation, leader, party, or movement is always innocent. Complexity is treated as betrayal. Questions become signs of disloyalty. Suffering matters only when it can be used against the designated enemy.

Religious fundamentalism can operate in much the same way.

Fundamentalism begins with an absolute conclusion and uses scripture to prevent further interpretation. It flattens poetry, history, metaphor, and parable into propositions that must be obeyed. It promises relief from uncertainty by dividing humanity into the saved and the condemned, the pure and the corrupt, the faithful and the dangerous.

Propaganda tells us that an image has only one permissible meaning. Fundamentalism tells us that a text has only one permissible interpretation.

Both fear ambiguity because ambiguity limits control.

Yet not all political art is propaganda, just as strong religious conviction is not necessarily fundamentalism. Art can be passionately political and still leave room for discovery, self-criticism, and the freedom of the audience. Religious art can proclaim faith without becoming propaganda when it invites contemplation rather than demanding ideological submission.

The distinction might be expressed simply:

Propaganda tells us what we must see. Art teaches us how to look.

The Church itself is not innocent in this history. Ecclesiastical patronage has given the world works of extraordinary beauty. It has also sometimes used beauty to glorify institutional power, conceal suffering, and present the Church as more triumphant and morally unblemished than it really was.

A Catholic defense of art must therefore include a Catholic examination of conscience. Beauty severed from truth can become seduction. Religious symbolism can illuminate divine grace, but it can also be manipulated to make human authority appear unquestionable.

Popes and artists

Recent popes have repeatedly tried to restore a more honest conversation between the Church and artists.

John Paul II understood the arts from within. As a young man, he had been an actor, poet, and playwright. In his 1999 Letter to Artists, he described artists as creators of beauty and invited them to discover new “epiphanies” through their work.⁵ He met figures ranging from B.B. King and Bono to Bob Dylan, who performed before him at the 1997 Eucharistic Congress in Bologna.

Benedict XVI gathered more than 250 artists in the Sistine Chapel in 2009. Among them were composer Ennio Morricone, singer Andrea Bocelli, filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore, and theater director Robert Wilson. Benedict spoke of beauty as a path that can lift human beings beyond resignation and restore hope.⁶

Francis widened the circle further. He conversed with Bono, Martin Scorsese, Patti Smith, Whoopi Goldberg, visual artists, architects, filmmakers, writers, musicians, and comedians. In 2024, he became the first pope to visit the Venice Biennale, where the Vatican pavilion was located inside a women’s prison. Art, incarceration, human dignity, and papal presence occupied the same space.

Now Leo continues that dialogue. His meeting with Patti Smith suggests that the Church need not fear artists whose lives or work do not fit comfortably within ecclesiastical boundaries. Artists may disturb institutions, but disturbance is not always destruction. Sometimes the artist notices the crack through which new light is entering.

Say the word

Walking through The Broad, I began with Yoko Ono’s artistic and activist life but found myself returning to the Catholic imagination that has formed my own life.

I thought about my high school student life listening to the Beatles and discovering that a popular song could awaken a spiritual intuition. I thought about the Civil Rights Movement, in which biblical imagery, Black spirituals, gospel music, preaching, protest songs, and democratic ideals came together to form a moral language powerful enough to challenge the nation. I thought about the anti-war movement and the artists who forced Americans to see what official statements and casualty statistics could conceal. My spiritual life was nourished by this incredible integration of music, activism, and the spiritual imagination.

And I thought about one handwritten Beatles manuscript passing from John Lennon to Yoko Ono because an avant-garde composer wanted to create a book of musical notations.

“The Word” became an object in an artistic project. But the word itself—love—was already traveling far beyond the page. (See the Appendix for the lyrics.)

That is what art can do. It takes words that have become familiar and makes us hear them again. Faith says “love,” “grace,” “mercy,” “justice,” and “peace” so often that we can cease to recognize their radical demands. Artists can return those words to us unsettled, wounded, strange, and alive. They create a mantric litany carrying the soul.

Perhaps that is also why a punk poet and a pope could sit together in the Apostolic Palace. Neither had to become the other before the conversation could begin. They needed only enough imagination to recognize that the other might have something worth hearing.

Liberal democracy depends upon that same act of faith.

We do not need citizens who agree about everything. We need citizens capable of believing that another person cannot be reduced to an ideology, a party label, a racial category, a religion, or an enemy image. We need people who can listen without surrendering judgment, believe without refusing interpretation, and disagree without destroying the possibility of a shared future.

The Church has centuries of experience bringing scripture, theology, music, architecture, painting, poetry, and ritual into conversation. At its best, it knows that truth is not diminished when it takes artistic form. Truth becomes visible, audible, tangible, and human. That is the Catholic imagination that much of the Reformation tried to suppress and which the new fundamentalists and Christian nationalists continue to suppress.

At The Broad, Yoko Ono asks us to participate in the work of imagination. At the Vatican, Patti Smith and Pope Leo show us what can happen when different worlds meet without first demanding conformity.

And from my high school years, the Beatles’ invitation still echoes: say the word.

The word is love.

Our faith— and our democracy— may depend upon whether we can learn to mean it.

APPENDIX: The Word by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Say the word and you’ll be free,
Say the word and be like me.
Say the word I’m thinking of,
Have you heard? The word is “love.”

It’s so fine, it’s sunshine,
It’s the word “love.”

In the beginning I misunderstood,
But now I’ve got it, the word is good.
Say the word and you’ll be free,
Say the word and be like me.
Say the word I’m thinking of,
Have you heard? The word is “love.”

It’s so fine, it’s sunshine,
It’s the word “love.”

Ev’rywhere I go I hear it said,
In the good and the bad books that I have read.

Say the word and you’ll be free,
Say the word and be like me.
Say the word I’m thinking of,
have you heard? The word is “love.”

It’s so fine, it’s sunshine,
It’s the word “love.”

Now that I know what I feel must be right,
I’m here to show everybody the light.
Give the word a chance to say,
That the word is just the way.
It’s the word I’m thinking of,
And you only word is “love.”

It’s so fine, it’s sunshine,
It’s the word “love.”

Say the word, “love,”
Say the word, “love,”
Say the word, “love.”

Endnotes

1. The Broad, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind”; Northwestern University Libraries, John Cage Collection and Notations Project.

2. Vatican News, “Pope Leo XIV Meets Patti Smith”; Associated Press, “A Giddy Patti Smith Meets Fellow Chicago Legend, Pope Leo XIV”.

3. Pope Francis, Address to Artists in the Sistine Chapel, June 23, 2023; Pope Francis, Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation, July 17, 2024.

4. Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

5. John Paul II, Letter to Artists, April 4, 1999.

6. Benedict XVI, Address at the Meeting with Artists in the Sistine Chapel, November 21, 2009.

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• First Reading (Isaiah 56:1, 6-7)

• Responsorial Psalm (Psalm 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8)

• Second Reading (Romans 11:13-15, 29-32)

• Gospel (Matthew 15:21-28)

A foreign woman refuses to be sent away. Mary trusts that God’s abundance is greater than our scarcity. And Jesus keeps widening the table.

This Sunday’s readings ask Christians a timely question: Can we hold our faith deeply without using it to exclude others?

In a pluralistic democracy, religious freedom is not Christian privilege. It is the freedom that allows all of us—believer and nonbeliever alike—to live according to conscience.

Subscribe now

She Would Not Be Sent Away

Mary, the Canaanite woman, and the Christian vocation to widen God’s table

One of the most revealing sentences in this Sunday’s Gospel is not spoken by Jesus. It is spoken by the disciples.

“Send her away.”

A woman has followed them into the region of Tyre and Sidon. She is not Jewish. Matthew deliberately calls her a Canaanite, reaching back to one of the oldest divisions in Israel’s religious memory. She is a foreigner, a woman, the mother of a suffering child, and persistent enough to become annoying.

“Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon.”

Jesus at first says nothing. The disciples have heard enough.

“Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us.”

There may be few phrases in Scripture more useful for examining the religious instinct toward exclusion. Send her away. She does not belong here. She is disturbing us. She is asking for something that belongs to somebody else.

Yet she will not go.

Coming as these readings do immediately after the Catholic celebration of the Assumption, I find myself hearing this Gospel alongside another woman: Mary of Nazareth. The two women could hardly be more different. One is a Jewish woman whom Christians will eventually honor as the Mother of God. The other is an unnamed Gentile woman from outside Israel. Yet both stand before God with a remarkable confidence. Both cross boundaries others might have expected them to respect. Both insist, in their different ways, that the mercy of God is larger than the arrangements human beings have made for distributing it.

And both should make Christians uncomfortable whenever we become too certain about who belongs at God’s table.

A House for All Peoples

The Canaanite woman does not suddenly appear in the Sunday readings without preparation. Isaiah has already given us the theme.

“The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,” the prophet says, will be brought to God’s holy mountain. Their offerings will be accepted because “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

Not some peoples. Not the people who were there first. Not the people who possess the correct ancestry, language, ethnicity, or social standing.

All peoples.

Psalm 67 widens the vision still further:

“O God, let all the nations praise you.”

God’s blessing is not a treasure Israel is supposed to hoard. Israel is blessed so that God’s way may become known throughout the earth.

Then Paul wrestles in Romans with one of the earliest and most difficult questions confronting Christianity: what happens when the good news of Jesus begins attracting Gentiles? Does the inclusion of one people require the rejection of another?

Paul refuses that logic. “The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable,” he says of Israel. The Gentile Christian has no reason for arrogance. The entire argument culminates not in deciding which religious group has defeated the other but in one of Paul’s most sweeping descriptions of God: God has allowed all to experience disobedience “that he might have mercy upon all.”

The USCCB commentary on Romans warns explicitly against the kind of Gentile Christian arrogance that forgets Christianity’s dependence upon Israel and upon grace itself.

The pattern running through the readings is difficult to miss. Human beings create boundaries. God keeps widening the circle.

And then a woman walks across the boundary.

The Woman Who Refuses the Boundary

This Gospel is not an easy story, and we should resist the temptation to make it one.

Jesus initially tells the woman that his mission is “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” She kneels before him:

“Lord, help me.”

Then comes the line that has troubled generations of readers:

“It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”

We can explain the language historically. We can debate whether Jesus is testing her faith, voicing the conventional boundary between Israel and the Gentiles, or allowing his disciples to hear their own assumptions carried to their logical conclusion. Christians have interpreted the exchange in different ways.

But Matthew does not allow us to escape the woman’s response.

“Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”

She does not storm away. She does not surrender. She takes the metaphor she has been given and turns it toward mercy.

If there is abundance at God’s table, she seems to say, then surely there is enough for my daughter too.

And Jesus responds with one of the strongest affirmations of faith in Matthew’s Gospel:

“O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”

The official Catholic biblical commentary notes that Matthew makes the woman’s “great faith” especially explicit, just as he does with the Gentile centurion earlier in the Gospel.

There is also something fascinating about where Matthew places this encounter. Immediately before it, Jesus has been disputing inherited ideas about what makes a person clean or unclean. Immediately afterward come healings of large crowds and another multiplication of bread. The narrative movement is suggestive: boundaries of purity are questioned, a foreign woman’s faith is recognized, and then once again there is enough bread for a multitude, with baskets left over.

The disciples wanted to send the woman away.

Jesus ends by giving her what she came for.

That movement—from exclusion toward recognition, from scarcity toward abundance—is one of the great movements of the Gospel.

Mary and the Women Who Keep Moving the Story

This is where Mary belongs in the conversation.

Catholic devotion can sometimes make Mary so serene, beautiful, and elevated that we forget how disruptive her actual biblical life is.

She is a young woman from Nazareth, nowhere near the centers of political or religious power. When Gabriel announces that she will bear a child, Mary does not respond as a passive object. She asks a question: “How can this be?” She listens, discerns and finally gives her consent: “Let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:34–38).

Her consent changes history.

Then she goes to Elizabeth, another woman whose experience of God has occurred beyond normal expectations. Together these two women interpret what God is doing before almost any male religious authority understands it.

Mary sings the Magnificat, and it is hardly a lullaby. She praises a God who scatters the proud, casts down the mighty, raises the lowly, fills the hungry and sends the rich away empty (Luke 1:46–55). Her spirituality is not an escape from social reality. It is a vision of God overturning the normal arrangements of status and privilege.

At Cana, when the wine runs out, Mary notices the need before anyone asks her to intervene. “They have no wine” (John 2:3). Jesus responds that his hour has not yet come, but Mary simply turns to the servants and says, “Do whatever he tells you.”

And the abundance begins.

Water becomes wine—far more wine than the wedding guests could possibly need.

Once again, a woman notices the lack, refuses to accept scarcity as the final word, and draws attention toward divine abundance.

Mary is still there when abundance seems to have disappeared altogether. She stands near the cross when male disciples have scattered. And in Acts, after Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, she is among the community gathered in prayer as they await the Spirit (Acts 1:14).

Nor is Mary alone. Jesus allows a Samaritan woman to become a theological conversation partner and then a witness to her village (John 4). Women accompany Jesus and help support his ministry (Luke 8:1–3). Mary of Bethany sits at his feet as a disciple. Women remain near the cross. Mary Magdalene becomes the first witness entrusted with announcing the Resurrection to the other disciples (John 20:11–18).

The point is not that the Bible magically escapes the patriarchy of the ancient cultures from which it emerged. It does not. The remarkable thing is that within those cultures the biblical story repeatedly gives women spiritual agency, prophetic speech, courage, persistence and responsibility at decisive moments.

Women do not merely decorate the story of salvation.

They keep moving it forward.

From Scraps to a Place at the Table

The Canaanite woman asks only for scraps.

But Christianity cannot remain a religion that congratulates itself for allowing outsiders to collect crumbs.

The trajectory of the Gospel moves toward a table.

Jesus eats with people respectable religion considers suspect. He touches those others avoid. He speaks with women publicly. He praises the faith of Gentiles. He tells stories in which Samaritans become moral heroes. After the Resurrection, the disciples are sent beyond their familiar world.

The early Church struggles enormously with what all of this means. The Acts of the Apostles records conflicts over Gentiles, food, circumcision, language and the treatment of widows. Inclusion is not automatic simply because people call themselves Christian. Communities have to learn it.

We still do.

Churches can become very skilled at preaching the universality of God while practicing the sociology of a private club. We may proclaim “all are welcome” while sending subtle messages about which races, classes, languages, political opinions, family histories, gender roles or life experiences make someone a more authentic member.

Sometimes nobody has to say,

“Send her away.”

People understand.

They notice whose voice carries authority. They see who is invited into leadership. They hear which families are spoken about with respect and which are whispered about. They recognize when their language, culture, questions or experiences are treated as inconveniences.

The question for a Christian community is not merely whether the door is technically unlocked.

It is whether people can find a place at the table.

Religious Freedom Is Not Christian Privilege

This has particular importance for Christians living in a liberal democracy.

Americans can easily take religious freedom for granted because many of us have never lived without it. The First Amendment contains two protections that exist in creative tension: government may neither establish religion nor prohibit its free exercise.

That arrangement does not diminish religion. It creates the civic space in which different religions—and people with no religion—can live together without the state deciding whose conscience deserves protection.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses the principle even more broadly. Freedom of thought, conscience and religion includes the freedom to hold, change and manifest religious belief, privately or publicly and individually or with others.

Catholics have a particularly important reason to understand this. Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae did not ground religious liberty in the privilege of the Catholic Church. It grounded religious freedom in the dignity of the human person and insisted that this right should be protected within the constitutional order of society.

That is a remarkable theological principle.

My religious freedom cannot depend upon your religion being wrong.

My freedom is secure precisely when yours is secure too.

The Muslim needs the freedom to be Muslim. The Jew needs the freedom to be Jewish. The evangelical needs the freedom to be evangelical. The Catholic needs the freedom to be Catholic. The Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and members of other traditions need that same protection. And the atheist, agnostic and person who simply wants no religious affiliation must be free from religious coercion as well.

That is not relativism.

It is human dignity.

And it is increasingly important in a country that is genuinely religiously plural. Pew Research Center’s most recent Religious Landscape Study found that 62 percent of American adults identify as Christian, while 29 percent are religiously unaffiliated and about 7 percent belong to non-Christian religions.

Christians therefore face a choice. We can interpret declining cultural dominance as persecution and try to restore Christianity through political power. Or we can rediscover the older and harder vocation of Christian witness: persuasion rather than coercion, service rather than privilege, confidence without domination.

A liberal democracy does not ask Christians to stop being Christian.

It asks Christians to live beside people who are not.

That may actually be good for Christianity.

What Kind of Faith Needs Everyone Else to Lose?

The Canaanite woman raises an uncomfortable question for our religious politics.

Why are we so afraid that there will not be enough?

Religious nationalism is built upon a theology of scarcity. If somebody else gains recognition, we have lost something. If another religion gains freedom, Christianity has been diminished. If previously excluded people gain a place at the table, somebody already seated must have been displaced.

But that is not how grace works.

The mother in Tyre and Sidon sees something the disciples do not yet see: there is enough mercy.

Mary sees at Cana that there can be enough wine.

Isaiah sees a Temple large enough for foreigners.

The psalmist imagines all nations praising God.

Paul imagines mercy overtaking both Jew and Gentile without erasing either.

The Gospel keeps moving away from a frightened calculation of who deserves what and toward an astonishing confidence in the abundance of God.

That does not mean convictions disappear. Jesus does not become indifferent to truth. Paul does not stop preaching Christ. Mary does not cease being a faithful Jewish woman. Religious freedom does not require us to pretend all religious claims are identical.

Pluralism asks something more mature.

Can I hold my beliefs deeply without needing the government to make you live by them?

Can I proclaim what I believe without demeaning your conscience?

Can Christians be confident enough in Jesus Christ that we do not need political domination to make the Gospel persuasive?

Can the Church create communities in which people encounter faith as invitation rather than coercion?

Those are spiritual questions before they become political ones.

“O Woman, Great Is Your Faith”

At the end of the Gospel, Jesus does something his disciples were unable to do at the beginning.

He sees her. Not merely as a Canaanite. Not merely as a woman. Not merely as a nuisance following the group down the road.

He recognizes faith.

“O woman, great is your faith.”

That sentence becomes even more beautiful when heard beside the life of Mary. Two women, one inside Israel’s story and one standing outside its boundaries. Two mothers. Two women willing to speak. Two women refusing to accept scarcity as the last word. Two women whose confidence opens a path toward abundance.

Perhaps that is part of what the Church should learn from Mary.

Devotion to Mary cannot mean placing a crown upon a woman in heaven while ignoring the voices of women on earth.

And perhaps that is what the Canaanite woman teaches us about democracy.

Religious freedom cannot mean demanding protection for our own faith while treating somebody else’s conscience as a threat.

The disciples’ first instinct was understandable.

Send her away.

The Gospel gives us another way.

Listen to her.

Recognize her dignity.

Look for her faith.

Make room.

Trust that God has enough mercy.

For the house of God is a house for all peoples, and the table of grace was never ours to guard as though we owned the bread.

We received it.

And the One who gave it to us keeps asking us to pass it around.

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Endnotes

1. The USCCB commentary on Romans 11 emphasizes that Israel remains holy in God’s sight and warns Gentile Christians against anti-Jewish arrogance and forgetting their dependence upon divine grace.

2. The USCCB commentary on Matthew 15 notes Matthew’s explicit emphasis upon the Canaanite woman’s “great faith” and places the encounter within a chapter concerned with purity, Gentile inclusion, healing and the multiplication of bread.

3. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits both governmental establishment of religion and governmental prohibition of its free exercise.

4. United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, establishing freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to change and publicly or privately manifest belief.

5. Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 2. The Council grounds religious freedom in the dignity of the human person and states that this freedom should receive recognition as a civil right within constitutional law.

6. Pew Research Center, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study. The study reports that 62 percent of U.S. adults identify as Christian, 29 percent as religiously unaffiliated, and approximately 7 percent with religions other than Christianity.

Subscribe now

• First Reading (Isaiah 56:1, 6-7)

• Responsorial Psalm (Psalm 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8)

• Second Reading (Romans 11:13-15, 29-32)

• Gospel (Matthew 15:21-28)

A foreign woman refuses to be sent away. Mary trusts that God’s abundance is greater than our scarcity. And Jesus keeps widening the table.

This Sunday’s readings ask Christians a timely question: Can we hold our faith deeply without using it to exclude others?

In a pluralistic democracy, religious freedom is not Christian privilege. It is the freedom that allows all of us—believer and nonbeliever alike—to live according to conscience.

Subscribe now

She Would Not Be Sent Away

Mary, the Canaanite woman, and the Christian vocation to widen God’s table

One of the most revealing sentences in this Sunday’s Gospel is not spoken by Jesus. It is spoken by the disciples.

“Send her away.”

A woman has followed them into the region of Tyre and Sidon. She is not Jewish. Matthew deliberately calls her a Canaanite, reaching back to one of the oldest divisions in Israel’s religious memory. She is a foreigner, a woman, the mother of a suffering child, and persistent enough to become annoying.

“Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon.”

Jesus at first says nothing. The disciples have heard enough.

“Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us.”

There may be few phrases in Scripture more useful for examining the religious instinct toward exclusion. Send her away. She does not belong here. She is disturbing us. She is asking for something that belongs to somebody else.

Yet she will not go.

Coming as these readings do immediately after the Catholic celebration of the Assumption, I find myself hearing this Gospel alongside another woman: Mary of Nazareth. The two women could hardly be more different. One is a Jewish woman whom Christians will eventually honor as the Mother of God. The other is an unnamed Gentile woman from outside Israel. Yet both stand before God with a remarkable confidence. Both cross boundaries others might have expected them to respect. Both insist, in their different ways, that the mercy of God is larger than the arrangements human beings have made for distributing it.

And both should make Christians uncomfortable whenever we become too certain about who belongs at God’s table.

A House for All Peoples

The Canaanite woman does not suddenly appear in the Sunday readings without preparation. Isaiah has already given us the theme.

“The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,” the prophet says, will be brought to God’s holy mountain. Their offerings will be accepted because “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

Not some peoples. Not the people who were there first. Not the people who possess the correct ancestry, language, ethnicity, or social standing.

All peoples.

Psalm 67 widens the vision still further:

“O God, let all the nations praise you.”

God’s blessing is not a treasure Israel is supposed to hoard. Israel is blessed so that God’s way may become known throughout the earth.

Then Paul wrestles in Romans with one of the earliest and most difficult questions confronting Christianity: what happens when the good news of Jesus begins attracting Gentiles? Does the inclusion of one people require the rejection of another?

Paul refuses that logic. “The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable,” he says of Israel. The Gentile Christian has no reason for arrogance. The entire argument culminates not in deciding which religious group has defeated the other but in one of Paul’s most sweeping descriptions of God: God has allowed all to experience disobedience “that he might have mercy upon all.”

The USCCB commentary on Romans warns explicitly against the kind of Gentile Christian arrogance that forgets Christianity’s dependence upon Israel and upon grace itself.

The pattern running through the readings is difficult to miss. Human beings create boundaries. God keeps widening the circle.

And then a woman walks across the boundary.

The Woman Who Refuses the Boundary

This Gospel is not an easy story, and we should resist the temptation to make it one.

Jesus initially tells the woman that his mission is “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” She kneels before him:

“Lord, help me.”

Then comes the line that has troubled generations of readers:

“It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”

We can explain the language historically. We can debate whether Jesus is testing her faith, voicing the conventional boundary between Israel and the Gentiles, or allowing his disciples to hear their own assumptions carried to their logical conclusion. Christians have interpreted the exchange in different ways.

But Matthew does not allow us to escape the woman’s response.

“Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”

She does not storm away. She does not surrender. She takes the metaphor she has been given and turns it toward mercy.

If there is abundance at God’s table, she seems to say, then surely there is enough for my daughter too.

And Jesus responds with one of the strongest affirmations of faith in Matthew’s Gospel:

“O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”

The official Catholic biblical commentary notes that Matthew makes the woman’s “great faith” especially explicit, just as he does with the Gentile centurion earlier in the Gospel.

There is also something fascinating about where Matthew places this encounter. Immediately before it, Jesus has been disputing inherited ideas about what makes a person clean or unclean. Immediately afterward come healings of large crowds and another multiplication of bread. The narrative movement is suggestive: boundaries of purity are questioned, a foreign woman’s faith is recognized, and then once again there is enough bread for a multitude, with baskets left over.

The disciples wanted to send the woman away.

Jesus ends by giving her what she came for.

That movement—from exclusion toward recognition, from scarcity toward abundance—is one of the great movements of the Gospel.

Mary and the Women Who Keep Moving the Story

This is where Mary belongs in the conversation.

Catholic devotion can sometimes make Mary so serene, beautiful, and elevated that we forget how disruptive her actual biblical life is.

She is a young woman from Nazareth, nowhere near the centers of political or religious power. When Gabriel announces that she will bear a child, Mary does not respond as a passive object. She asks a question: “How can this be?” She listens, discerns and finally gives her consent: “Let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:34–38).

Her consent changes history.

Then she goes to Elizabeth, another woman whose experience of God has occurred beyond normal expectations. Together these two women interpret what God is doing before almost any male religious authority understands it.

Mary sings the Magnificat, and it is hardly a lullaby. She praises a God who scatters the proud, casts down the mighty, raises the lowly, fills the hungry and sends the rich away empty (Luke 1:46–55). Her spirituality is not an escape from social reality. It is a vision of God overturning the normal arrangements of status and privilege.

At Cana, when the wine runs out, Mary notices the need before anyone asks her to intervene. “They have no wine” (John 2:3). Jesus responds that his hour has not yet come, but Mary simply turns to the servants and says, “Do whatever he tells you.”

And the abundance begins.

Water becomes wine—far more wine than the wedding guests could possibly need.

Once again, a woman notices the lack, refuses to accept scarcity as the final word, and draws attention toward divine abundance.

Mary is still there when abundance seems to have disappeared altogether. She stands near the cross when male disciples have scattered. And in Acts, after Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, she is among the community gathered in prayer as they await the Spirit (Acts 1:14).

Nor is Mary alone. Jesus allows a Samaritan woman to become a theological conversation partner and then a witness to her village (John 4). Women accompany Jesus and help support his ministry (Luke 8:1–3). Mary of Bethany sits at his feet as a disciple. Women remain near the cross. Mary Magdalene becomes the first witness entrusted with announcing the Resurrection to the other disciples (John 20:11–18).

The point is not that the Bible magically escapes the patriarchy of the ancient cultures from which it emerged. It does not. The remarkable thing is that within those cultures the biblical story repeatedly gives women spiritual agency, prophetic speech, courage, persistence and responsibility at decisive moments.

Women do not merely decorate the story of salvation.

They keep moving it forward.

From Scraps to a Place at the Table

The Canaanite woman asks only for scraps.

But Christianity cannot remain a religion that congratulates itself for allowing outsiders to collect crumbs.

The trajectory of the Gospel moves toward a table.

Jesus eats with people respectable religion considers suspect. He touches those others avoid. He speaks with women publicly. He praises the faith of Gentiles. He tells stories in which Samaritans become moral heroes. After the Resurrection, the disciples are sent beyond their familiar world.

The early Church struggles enormously with what all of this means. The Acts of the Apostles records conflicts over Gentiles, food, circumcision, language and the treatment of widows. Inclusion is not automatic simply because people call themselves Christian. Communities have to learn it.

We still do.

Churches can become very skilled at preaching the universality of God while practicing the sociology of a private club. We may proclaim “all are welcome” while sending subtle messages about which races, classes, languages, political opinions, family histories, gender roles or life experiences make someone a more authentic member.

Sometimes nobody has to say,

“Send her away.”

People understand.

They notice whose voice carries authority. They see who is invited into leadership. They hear which families are spoken about with respect and which are whispered about. They recognize when their language, culture, questions or experiences are treated as inconveniences.

The question for a Christian community is not merely whether the door is technically unlocked.

It is whether people can find a place at the table.

Religious Freedom Is Not Christian Privilege

This has particular importance for Christians living in a liberal democracy.

Americans can easily take religious freedom for granted because many of us have never lived without it. The First Amendment contains two protections that exist in creative tension: government may neither establish religion nor prohibit its free exercise.

That arrangement does not diminish religion. It creates the civic space in which different religions—and people with no religion—can live together without the state deciding whose conscience deserves protection.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses the principle even more broadly. Freedom of thought, conscience and religion includes the freedom to hold, change and manifest religious belief, privately or publicly and individually or with others.

Catholics have a particularly important reason to understand this. Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae did not ground religious liberty in the privilege of the Catholic Church. It grounded religious freedom in the dignity of the human person and insisted that this right should be protected within the constitutional order of society.

That is a remarkable theological principle.

My religious freedom cannot depend upon your religion being wrong.

My freedom is secure precisely when yours is secure too.

The Muslim needs the freedom to be Muslim. The Jew needs the freedom to be Jewish. The evangelical needs the freedom to be evangelical. The Catholic needs the freedom to be Catholic. The Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and members of other traditions need that same protection. And the atheist, agnostic and person who simply wants no religious affiliation must be free from religious coercion as well.

That is not relativism.

It is human dignity.

And it is increasingly important in a country that is genuinely religiously plural. Pew Research Center’s most recent Religious Landscape Study found that 62 percent of American adults identify as Christian, while 29 percent are religiously unaffiliated and about 7 percent belong to non-Christian religions.

Christians therefore face a choice. We can interpret declining cultural dominance as persecution and try to restore Christianity through political power. Or we can rediscover the older and harder vocation of Christian witness: persuasion rather than coercion, service rather than privilege, confidence without domination.

A liberal democracy does not ask Christians to stop being Christian.

It asks Christians to live beside people who are not.

That may actually be good for Christianity.

What Kind of Faith Needs Everyone Else to Lose?

The Canaanite woman raises an uncomfortable question for our religious politics.

Why are we so afraid that there will not be enough?

Religious nationalism is built upon a theology of scarcity. If somebody else gains recognition, we have lost something. If another religion gains freedom, Christianity has been diminished. If previously excluded people gain a place at the table, somebody already seated must have been displaced.

But that is not how grace works.

The mother in Tyre and Sidon sees something the disciples do not yet see: there is enough mercy.

Mary sees at Cana that there can be enough wine.

Isaiah sees a Temple large enough for foreigners.

The psalmist imagines all nations praising God.

Paul imagines mercy overtaking both Jew and Gentile without erasing either.

The Gospel keeps moving away from a frightened calculation of who deserves what and toward an astonishing confidence in the abundance of God.

That does not mean convictions disappear. Jesus does not become indifferent to truth. Paul does not stop preaching Christ. Mary does not cease being a faithful Jewish woman. Religious freedom does not require us to pretend all religious claims are identical.

Pluralism asks something more mature.

Can I hold my beliefs deeply without needing the government to make you live by them?

Can I proclaim what I believe without demeaning your conscience?

Can Christians be confident enough in Jesus Christ that we do not need political domination to make the Gospel persuasive?

Can the Church create communities in which people encounter faith as invitation rather than coercion?

Those are spiritual questions before they become political ones.

“O Woman, Great Is Your Faith”

At the end of the Gospel, Jesus does something his disciples were unable to do at the beginning.

He sees her. Not merely as a Canaanite. Not merely as a woman. Not merely as a nuisance following the group down the road.

He recognizes faith.

“O woman, great is your faith.”

That sentence becomes even more beautiful when heard beside the life of Mary. Two women, one inside Israel’s story and one standing outside its boundaries. Two mothers. Two women willing to speak. Two women refusing to accept scarcity as the last word. Two women whose confidence opens a path toward abundance.

Perhaps that is part of what the Church should learn from Mary.

Devotion to Mary cannot mean placing a crown upon a woman in heaven while ignoring the voices of women on earth.

And perhaps that is what the Canaanite woman teaches us about democracy.

Religious freedom cannot mean demanding protection for our own faith while treating somebody else’s conscience as a threat.

The disciples’ first instinct was understandable.

Send her away.

The Gospel gives us another way.

Listen to her.

Recognize her dignity.

Look for her faith.

Make room.

Trust that God has enough mercy.

For the house of God is a house for all peoples, and the table of grace was never ours to guard as though we owned the bread.

We received it.

And the One who gave it to us keeps asking us to pass it around.

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Endnotes

1. The USCCB commentary on Romans 11 emphasizes that Israel remains holy in God’s sight and warns Gentile Christians against anti-Jewish arrogance and forgetting their dependence upon divine grace.

2. The USCCB commentary on Matthew 15 notes Matthew’s explicit emphasis upon the Canaanite woman’s “great faith” and places the encounter within a chapter concerned with purity, Gentile inclusion, healing and the multiplication of bread.

3. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits both governmental establishment of religion and governmental prohibition of its free exercise.

4. United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, establishing freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to change and publicly or privately manifest belief.

5. Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 2. The Council grounds religious freedom in the dignity of the human person and states that this freedom should receive recognition as a civil right within constitutional law.

6. Pew Research Center, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study. The study reports that 62 percent of U.S. adults identify as Christian, 29 percent as religiously unaffiliated, and approximately 7 percent with religions other than Christianity.

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The meeting has gone on long enough. Someone is still hanging from the bridge.

Spider-Man, political purity, and the dangers of moral certainty

Tangled in the Web of Righteousness

SPOILER ALERT: This essay discusses major plot developments in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

A few weeks after seeing The Odyssey and discovering how easily its mythological characters could wander into the MAGA world, I went to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The political atmosphere was still following me into the theater.

My Odyssey essay found a natural home on the American right. Donald Trump could imagine himself as Odysseus, the indispensable hero whose adventures become more magnificent with every retelling. Stephen Miller made a disturbingly convincing Cyclops. JD Vance appeared as the adaptable traveler who is always becoming whatever the next stage of the journey requires. MAGA politics already possesses the necessary ingredients of epic satire: kings, monsters, sycophants, false prophets, loyal crews, and men who believe history cannot proceed without them.

But what about the left?

The American activist left does not think of itself as an epic court organized around a king. It prefers the language of movements, communities, coalitions, collectives, networks, caucuses, assemblies, working groups, and mutually accountable spaces. Its great symbol would not be a golden throne. It would be a web.

That is what makes Spider-Man such a tempting guide.

A web is an ingenious structure. It joins separate points. It senses disturbances that others cannot feel. It can catch someone who is falling, restrain someone causing harm, or create a passage across an otherwise impossible distance.

But a web can also become a trap.

The left’s great intellectual achievement has been its insistence that seemingly separate forms of suffering are connected. Wages are connected to housing. Housing is connected to race. Race is connected to education, policing, health, geography, and inherited wealth. Gender is connected to employment, family life, bodily autonomy, culture, and power. Climate change is connected to consumption, inequality, migration, and the decisions of corporations and governments.

The left sees the threads.

Its recurring problem is that it can become so fascinated by the complexity of the web that it forgets the person dangling from it.

Whatever Happened to the Friendly Neighborhood Left?

The most important description of Spider-Man has never been “superhero,” “Avenger,” or “protector of the multiverse.” It is “your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.”

The phrase is modest and almost old-fashioned. A neighborhood is not an abstraction. It is a place where people encounter one another repeatedly. You recognize the woman walking her dog, the man opening his store, the teenager waiting for the bus, and the family worried about next month’s rent. You may not agree with their politics. You may not even like all of them. But they are no longer theoretical categories. They have names, histories, habits, virtues, and contradictions.

That was once a recognizable form of left-wing politics. It lived in union halls, settlement houses, neighborhood associations, churches, public schools, cooperative societies, tenant organizations, civil-rights groups, and the offices of local newspapers. Organizers knew that solidarity could not merely be declared. It had to be built among people who did not yet agree about everything.

The contemporary left continues much of this work. Democratic socialists and other progressives have raised essential questions about corporate power, health care, housing, organized labor, climate change, racial inequality, and the obscene concentration of wealth. The Democratic Socialists of America now describes itself as an organization of more than 100,000 members with chapters in all fifty states. Its current program calls for universal health care, social housing, stronger unions, public investment, expanded voting rights, and democratic control over the institutions affecting everyday life.¹ Whatever one thinks of every proposal, these are serious responses to real forms of human insecurity.

The satire begins when a movement devoted to working people develops a political language that many working people cannot understand.

A home health aide arrives at a meeting wanting to discuss her unpredictable schedule. A delivery driver wants safer working conditions. A teacher is worried about overcrowded classrooms. A renter has received another notice that the rent is increasing.

Before their concerns can be addressed, someone explains that the meeting must begin with a forty-five-minute discussion of process. Another person objects to the proposed agenda because it was prepared by an insufficiently representative subcommittee. A third requests that the objection be referred to the Process Review Working Group. A fourth warns that the concept of “working group” may itself reproduce hierarchical assumptions about labor.

Meanwhile, the home health aide has left because she needs to catch the last bus.

This is not a criticism of democracy. Participatory democracy requires procedures, safeguards, and patient deliberation. The DSA’s 2025 convention considered an impressive array of resolutions, constitutional amendments, platform proposals, electoral rules, leadership structures, and internal reforms.² Such seriousness about democratic governance is admirable in a political culture increasingly attracted to authoritarian personalities.

Yet democratic participation can become procedural self-absorption. A movement can spend so much time constructing the perfect decision-making process that it loses the ability to make decisions.

With great power comes a very long consent agenda.

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Peter Parker Has Been Forgotten

In Brand New Day, Peter Parker lives in a world that no longer remembers him. MJ and Ned have moved forward without any memory of the friend who once stood at the center of their lives. Peter watches them from a painful distance while devoting himself almost entirely to being Spider-Man. He has become publicly visible and personally invisible: New York knows the mask, but no one knows the man beneath it.³

There is something politically familiar in that predicament.

The left can remember every category while forgetting the person. It can explain how someone has been positioned by capitalism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, heteronormativity, ableism, geography, and the educational system—and still fail to become curious about the actual human being sitting across the table.

Categories are necessary. Sociology could not exist without them. We cannot understand inequality merely by collecting individual stories, because systems produce patterns that no single person can see. But categories are instruments of understanding, not substitutes for encounter.

A person may be economically progressive and religiously traditional. A union member may support stronger public benefits while holding views about family life that would make a graduate seminar uncomfortable. A Latino voter may oppose harsh immigration enforcement without adopting every position of the activist left. A Black churchgoer may support racial justice while remaining skeptical of the cultural language used by some progressive organizations. A working-class voter may distrust corporations and universities simultaneously.

Human beings stubbornly refuse to become ideologically consistent.

For a coalition-building movement, that should be good news. Democracy requires people who disagree about some matters to cooperate on others. For a politics organized around moral purification, however, inconsistency is evidence of contamination. The purpose of political engagement gradually changes. Instead of persuading people, activists examine them. Instead of asking what they might build together, they determine whether the other person has completed the necessary stages of ideological formation.

Peter Parker would understand the danger. The mask is recognized everywhere; the human being underneath it disappears.

The Mask and the Algorithm

Spider-Man wears a mask partly to protect the people he loves. Social media has given political culture millions of masks, not all of them worn for such noble reasons.

An anonymous account can investigate, accuse, prosecute, sentence, and punish another person before breakfast. It can search through ten years of posts, discover a poorly worded joke from 2017, remove it from its context, and present it to an audience already prepared to condemn. The accused may never encounter the accuser as a human being. There is no kitchen table, union hall, classroom, parish basement, or neighborhood meeting—only the mask and the algorithm.

This behavior is not unique to the left. The online right has constructed an enormous machinery of humiliation, conspiracy, intimidation, and personal destruction. MAGA influencers routinely send followers after teachers, election workers, immigrants, clergy, journalists, librarians, and public officials.

But the left has developed its own moralized version. It often calls the process “accountability,” although genuine accountability requires some relationship between responsibility, evidence, proportionality, repentance, and restoration. Online denunciation usually offers none of those. It rewards the accusation, amplifies the outrage, and then moves on before anyone asks what justice would actually require.

Research has long suggested that online politics can make people feel less connected rather than more. Pew found that many users experience political exchanges on social media as stressful, angry, and less respectful than conversation elsewhere. Its more recent research found that large numbers of people avoid posting about politics because they fear criticism or harassment.⁴

A movement cannot build solidarity by teaching everyone to fear one another.

The left’s traditional moral vocabulary included solidarity, fraternity, cooperation, liberation, and mutual aid. Its online vocabulary too often revolves around complicity, harm, violation, privilege, erasure, and disqualification. Those words sometimes identify real moral failures. But when suspicion becomes the dominant political emotion, people learn that their safest contribution is silence.

Everyone is watching everyone else for a deviation from the approved line. Everyone possesses a spider-sense, but it detects mostly semantic danger.

Jean Grey and the Politics of Possession

The mysterious force at the center of Brand New Day can enter other people’s minds and act through their bodies. It eventually leads to Jean Grey, a wounded young woman with immense powers who has been manipulated through her suffering. She is presented first as a threat but gradually revealed as a person whose anger has a history.⁵

Jean offers the essay’s most serious metaphor. Political anger is rarely imaginary. It usually begins with an injury: exploitation, exclusion, humiliation, violence, abandonment, or grief. The left is often correct that calls for “civility” can become techniques for silencing the injured. People benefiting from an unjust arrangement frequently discover a sudden devotion to polite conversation when the people beneath them begin to protest.

But anger is never merely an instrument we pick up and put down unchanged. It enters us. It travels through us. It can take possession of the wounded person until the struggle against injustice becomes indistinguishable from the desire to inflict pain.

That transformation can be seen across the political spectrum, but it presents a particular spiritual danger for a movement convinced of its superior moral consciousness. If my cause is righteous, I can begin to imagine that everything my anger produces must also be righteous. Cruelty becomes candor. Humiliation becomes accountability. Exclusion becomes safety. Refusal to listen becomes resistance.

Peter’s own powers begin changing him under the pressure of grief, isolation, and full-time combat. His growing strength does not automatically make him more capable of acting well. Power magnifies what is already happening within him.

That may be the film’s most useful warning to political movements: anger at injustice can awaken moral courage, but anger without human connection can mutate into another form of domination.

Damage Control Takes Over the Revolution

Then there is Damage Control, the government agency assigned to manage the wreckage created by superheroes and villains. The name belongs in political satire because it describes so much of institutional America.

Damage Control speaks the language of public safety while consolidating its own authority. It responds to social disorder through surveillance, technology, bureaucracy, and containment. It does not necessarily resolve the underlying conflict. It manages the aftermath.

On the contemporary left, its counterpart is the professional-managerial institution that has learned to absorb the language of dissent without surrendering power.

A protest becomes a listening session. A demand becomes a task force. The task force produces a strategic framework. The framework recommends an advisory council. The council receives a modest budget, a new logo, and permission to organize a catered luncheon during the appropriate heritage month.

Everyone receives a tote bag. No one receives a raise.

Capitalism has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to merchandise its opposition. Resistance becomes content. Radicalism becomes branding. Corporations issue statements about liberation while opposing unions, underpaying contractors, eliminating positions, and compensating executives at levels that would have embarrassed the robber barons.

This is where democratic socialism’s economic criticism deserves to be distinguished from corporate progressivism. A company can display the proper symbols, sponsor the proper celebrations, use the proper pronouns, and still treat its workers as disposable. Representation at the top is not economic democracy at the bottom. A diverse group of executives can exploit a diverse workforce quite efficiently.

The left is at its best when it exposes this contradiction. It is at its worst when it accepts symbolic recognition as a substitute for structural change.

The Punisher’s Temptation

Frank Castle—the Punisher—offers a different danger. He has little interest in deliberation, rehabilitation, or structural analysis. He identifies the guilty and administers punishment.

Every political movement contains a secret Punisher caucus. Its members may disagree completely about who deserves punishment, but they share the exhilarating conviction that the world would improve if the right people could simply be defeated, expelled, silenced, or destroyed.

The activist left rightly criticizes punitive institutions, mass incarceration, police violence, and a criminal-justice system shaped by race and class. Yet parts of its culture remain strikingly punitive toward internal dissent. A movement can advocate restorative justice for society while practicing permanent excommunication within its own community.

The first imperfect phrase becomes the second offense. The explanation becomes additional evidence. The apology proves consciousness of guilt. Silence proves indifference. Leaving proves fragility. Staying proves entitlement.

Even Spider-Man could not escape such a web.

Liberal democracy begins from a less exciting but more durable premise: no group can be trusted with unlimited power, including the group most certain of its virtue. That is why we need rights, procedures, pluralism, due process, persuasion, elections, and institutions capable of correcting themselves. These are not obstacles placed in the path of justice. Properly constructed, they protect justice from becoming vengeance.

Back to the Neighborhood

The deepest contrast between the contemporary right and left may be this: the authoritarian right wants a king, while the activist left sometimes wants an endless meeting about whether leadership itself is oppressive.

Neither can sustain a pluralistic democracy.

The right’s danger is submission. The left’s danger is fragmentation. The right demands loyalty to the leader. The left can demand loyalty to an ever-changing vocabulary of moral purity. One constructs a throne; the other constructs a web. Ordinary citizens may find themselves trapped beneath both.

Spider-Man suggests another politics. Peter Parker is heroic not because he has developed a complete theory of justice. He is heroic because he notices when someone is falling. His power creates responsibility, not infallibility. He makes mistakes, misjudges people, loses his temper, and sometimes becomes entangled in the consequences of his own actions. Yet he keeps returning to the neighborhood.

That is where the left must also return.

The friendly neighborhood left would still confront concentrated wealth, defend workers, challenge racism, protect immigrants, expand health care, address climate change, and demand that democratic institutions serve the common good. But it would speak a language ordinary people can enter. It would understand that persuasion is not capitulation, compromise is not always betrayal, and a coalition is composed precisely of people who do not agree about everything.

It would measure political seriousness not by the sophistication of an analysis but by the strength of the relationships it creates and the lives it improves.

The left does not care too much about justice. Its problem is that it can become so preoccupied with possessing the correct analysis of injustice that it forgets why justice matters.

Somewhere beneath the theories, resolutions, caucuses, posts, masks, and ideological examinations, an actual person is still hanging from a bridge.

The meeting has gone on long enough.

Someone needs to cast the web.

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Endnotes

1. Democratic Socialists of America, “Workers Deserve More: DSA Program”, 2026; Democratic Socialists of America, “Who We Are”.

2. Democratic Socialists of America, “Proposals Dashboard: 2025 DSA National Convention”; Democratic Socialists of America, “2025 DSA National Convention”.

3. Sony Pictures Entertainment, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, official synopsis; Marvel, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, 2026.

4. Maeve Duggan and Aaron Smith, “The Political Environment on Social Media”, Pew Research Center, October 25, 2016; Colleen McClain et al., “How Americans Navigate Politics on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram”, Pew Research Center, June 12, 2024.

5. Sadie Sink’s role as Jean Grey and the character’s relationship to Damage Control were confirmed following the film’s release. See Entertainment Weekly’s interview with Sink.

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Dear Friends,

Over the past several months, Common Sense Liberalism has grown into a community of readers interested in the moral, civic, and spiritual questions shaping American life. Each week, I try to bring together my experiences as a Catholic priest, sociologist, teacher, organizational leader, and coach to offer something increasingly rare in our public life: reflection without outrage, conviction without ideological certainty, and serious attention to the kind of people we are becoming together.

I want these essays to remain accessible to as many people as possible. At the same time, thoughtful and carefully researched writing requires considerable time and sustained effort. If these essays have helped you think more deeply, see an issue differently, or connect faith with the challenges of democracy and everyday life, I invite you to become a paid subscriber.

A contribution of $5 a month—or whatever level is comfortable for you—will help sustain this work and allow Common Sense Liberalism to continue growing. A paid subscription is not simply a purchase of additional content. It is an investment in independent writing committed to human dignity, moral responsibility, the common good, and the preservation of a pluralistic democracy.

If a paid subscription is not possible, please continue reading as a free subscriber. Your presence, comments, recommendations, and sharing of these essays are also important forms of support.

Thank you for reading—and for helping create a community where faith, culture, politics, and ordinary human experience can be explored with both seriousness and hope.

With gratitude,
Joseph

• First Reading (1 Kings 19:9a, 11–13a): Elijah stands on Mount Horeb and encounters God not in the mighty wind, earthquake, or fire, but in a tiny whispering sound.

• Responsorial Psalm (Psalm 85:9, 10, 11–12, 13–14): “Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.”

• Second Reading (Romans 9:1–5): Saint Paul expresses his deep sorrow and great anguish for his kindred, the people of Israel.

• Gospel (Matthew 14:22–33): Jesus walks on the sea toward the disciples’ boat, calms their fear, and pulls Peter up when his faith wavers as he tries to walk on the water.

Faith is easy to define when life is calm. But what does faith look like in the middle of the storm—when God seems silent, sorrow overwhelms us, and certainty disappears?

This week’s readings remind us that faith is not biblical literalism, airtight theology, or freedom from doubt. It is Elijah listening in the silence, Paul loving through anguish, and Peter crying out as he begins to sink.

Perhaps faith is not our strong grip on God, but God’s strong grip on us.

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Common Sense Sundays is an expanded reflection based on homilies I preach at St. Agatha Catholic Church in Los Angeles where I am Resident Priest. This Sunday, August 9th, you can experience the worship and my homily at St. Agatha Parish at the 10:00am English Mass on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Stagathas

Faith Is Not a Formula

Elijah’s silence, Peter’s fear, and the danger of turning trust in God into a system of certainty

Imagine being awake in the middle of the night because someone you love is in danger. Perhaps you are sitting beside a hospital bed, waiting for a doctor to return. Perhaps you are staring at your phone, hoping for a message from a child who has not come home. Perhaps you have lost a job, received a diagnosis, or learned that a relationship you trusted is falling apart.

The room is quiet, but inside you there is a storm. Your thoughts race. You pray, but the words feel weak. You believe in God, yet you do not know what God is doing. You want some sign strong enough to calm you, some answer clear enough to restore the world you knew yesterday.

In such moments, faith is not an idea. It is certainly not a theological argument. It may be nothing more than the fragile decision to keep listening and whisper, “Lord, save me.”

The readings for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time take us into precisely these intense human situations. Elijah is exhausted and afraid. The people singing Psalm 85 are living through a restoration that has not fulfilled its promise. Paul carries “great sorrow and constant anguish” for his own people. Peter steps out of a boat in faith, becomes terrified, and begins to sink. Their faith is wounded, emotional, questioning—and still alive.

That is important in a religious culture that often tries to make faith look much tidier than it is. Some forms of fundamentalism seek certainty through biblical literalism: the text says it, I believe it, and that settles it. Some forms of apologetics pursue the same certainty through theological logic: if every proposition can be defended, every objection answered, and every doctrine fitted into an airtight system, faith has been secured. One approach can reduce revelation to words lifted from their history; the other can reduce mystery to conclusions in an argument.

Both may begin with an honorable desire to defend what is true. But both can become ways of protecting ourselves from the vulnerability that faith actually requires. The Scriptures this Sunday do not give us a closed system. They give us human beings standing before God when the system no longer seems to work.

When Certainty Becomes an Idol

Fundamentalism is often discussed as a particular religious movement, but it is also a habit of mind. It appears wherever people become so frightened by complexity that they treat one interpretation as identical with God’s own view. It promises escape from ambiguity: every verse has one obvious meaning, every moral question has one immediate answer, every person is either safely inside or dangerously outside.

That promise is emotionally powerful. In a changing society, certainty creates a sense of order. It gives people firm boundaries and a community of the like-minded. Sociologically, it can strengthen identity by identifying threats. Psychologically, it can relieve the burden of discernment. Politically, it can be used to bless a leader, party, or social arrangement as if opposition to them were opposition to God.

But certainty is not the same as faith. Certainty seeks control; faith requires trust. Certainty tries to eliminate risk; faithfulness chooses how to live when risk cannot be eliminated. Certainty can become an idol when it substitutes our grasp of God for God.

The Catholic tradition does not ask us to choose between taking Scripture seriously and taking history, human authorship, reason, and literary form seriously. Vatican II taught that God speaks in Scripture “through human beings in human fashion”; interpreters must therefore attend to the intentions of the authors, their historical conditions, and the literary forms they employed. The Council did not weaken the Bible by acknowledging its humanity. It applied the logic of the Incarnation: God comes to us through the genuinely human.¹

Pope Benedict XVI was even more direct. He wrote that fundamentalist literalism can become a “betrayal” of both the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture because it ignores the historical character of revelation and treats the text as though it had been dictated word for word, unaffected by culture or time. Such reading, he warned, opens the door to manipulation.² Pope Leo XIV recently returned to the same principle: the Bible was not written in a “heavenly or superhuman language.” God’s willingness to speak through human languages, authors, cultures, and limitations is itself an act of love.³

Biblical literalism is therefore not more reverent than careful interpretation. It can be less reverent because it refuses to receive the Bible as God chose to give it.

The God Who Was Not in the Fire

Elijah has every reason to expect a dramatic God. Just before this Sunday’s reading, he defeated the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Fire fell from heaven. Elijah might reasonably have expected this spectacular victory to bring Israel back to the covenant. Instead, Queen Jezebel threatened to kill him. He fled into the wilderness, collapsed beneath a tree, and asked God to let him die.

Elijah then journeyed to Horeb, another name for Sinai, the mountain where Moses encountered God and Israel received the covenant. He went back to the place of beginnings, perhaps hoping the God of Moses would act again with unmistakable force.

A violent wind tore at the mountain. An earthquake followed. Then came fire—all traditional manifestations of divine power. Yet the Lord was not in them. Finally, Elijah heard what our lectionary calls a “tiny whispering sound,” but which can also be translated as “a sound of sheer silence.”

The prophet who had seen fire fall from heaven now had to learn that God would not always repeat the performance. His earlier experience was real, but it did not give him a formula for controlling the next encounter. His faith had to grow beyond his expectations.

Fundamentalism is often an attempt to keep God in the fire—to insist that God must always speak in the manner, vocabulary, or interpretation through which we first learned to believe. Yet the living God is not our religious possession. Sometimes God sustains us through a quiet word, a patient friend, a needed rest, the wisdom of a therapist, or enough strength to take the next step. A faith that recognizes God only in the spectacular may miss the whisper that saves a life.

Psalm 85 comes from another wounded setting. It is commonly associated with Israel’s life after exile, when the people had returned home but discovered that restoration was slow and incomplete. They prayed, “Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.” Their faith did not deny disappointment. It imagined a healed society in which kindness and truth would meet and justice and peace would kiss.

That vision also challenges a privatized apologetics preoccupied with proving that Christianity is correct while neglecting what Christian faith should produce. The psalm does not picture salvation as winning an argument or securing private comfort. Salvation becomes visible in truthful relationships, social justice, peace, and a fruitful land. The credibility of belief is inseparable from the kind of world believers help create.

When Theology Becomes a Fortress

Apologetics has an honorable and necessary place in Christian history. The First Letter of Peter urges believers to be ready to give a reason for their hope—but immediately adds that it must be done “with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15–16). Christians should be able to explain what they believe, learn from questions, correct distortions, and engage reason honestly.

The trouble begins when apologetics ceases to be a conversation and becomes combat: when the goal is not understanding but victory; when questions are treated as attacks; when mystery is regarded as a defect; when another person’s suffering becomes an opportunity to deliver a prepackaged answer. A perfectly arranged syllogism about why a good God permits suffering may be logically defensible and pastorally cruel beside the bed of a dying child.

Theological reasoning is indispensable, but theology is a map of the encounter, not the encounter itself. The creed gives faith a grammar and protects the Church from saying incoherent or destructive things about God. Yet no grammar can compose every sentence a human life will require. Doctrine can tell us that God is faithful; it cannot tell the frightened parent when the doctor will return or explain why the treatment failed. Theology can clarify what Christians mean by providence; it cannot remove Gethsemane from discipleship.

John Paul II warned against “fideism,” the notion that faith has no need of reason, and specifically criticized a “biblicism” that makes Scripture alone—detached from Tradition, interpretation, and rational inquiry—the sole criterion of truth.⁴ But the opposite error is also possible: treating reason as if it could domesticate revelation. Faith and reason need one another precisely because neither fundamentalist assertion nor theological mechanics can contain the mystery of the living God.

Paul shows us what faithful theology looks like when it remains human. In Romans he is working through one of the most difficult theological questions facing the early Church: How do God’s promises to Israel relate to the growing mission among the Gentiles? He does not begin with a triumphant argument. He begins with grief: “I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart.”

Paul remains deeply connected to the Jewish people, their worship, covenants, Scriptures, and history. He says he would accept being cut off from Christ if that could save his kin. Whatever complexities follow in Romans 9–11, Paul’s reasoning begins in love and ends in humility before a mystery he cannot master.

This matters whenever religion divides the world into the saved and the disposable. Paul’s loyalty to Christ does not make him indifferent to people who do not share his convictions; it makes him more accountable to them. Faith is not a weapon for deciding whom God has abandoned. It is a burden of love that refuses to surrender another person to our categories.

Any apologetics that makes us more contemptuous, less curious, or more pleased by another person’s exclusion has failed the test Paul gives us. We may have defended a proposition and betrayed the person.

Peter’s Unfinished Faith

The Gospel takes us onto the Sea of Galilee at night. In the biblical imagination, the sea often represented chaos and danger. Several disciples were experienced fishermen, but experience does not protect them from every storm. The boat is far from shore, the wind is against them, and Jesus is not visibly present.

Matthew says Jesus comes during the fourth watch, between three and six in the morning—the most exhausted part of the night. The disciples see him and become terrified. Fear distorts their vision: the one coming to save them looks like another threat.

Jesus says, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.” The Greek words translated “it is I” also echo the divine “I am.” Jesus does not offer advice from a safe distance. God’s presence enters the chaos.

Peter believes and doubts at the same time. He asks for proof, yet he also takes a risk. He steps out of the boat and begins walking toward Jesus. Then he notices the wind, becomes frightened, and sinks.

We often treat Peter as a cautionary failure, as if genuine faith would have carried him serenely across the water. But Peter does something essential: he cries, “Lord, save me!” It may be one of the purest prayers in Scripture. There is no eloquence, argument, or pretense. Immediately, Jesus reaches out his hand.

Fundamentalism would prefer Peter to be either a believer or a doubter. The Gospel permits him to be both. A triumphalist apologetics might explain why Peter should not be afraid. Jesus saves the frightened man before delivering any lesson. The story does not say real faith eliminates fear. It tells us where to turn when fear overwhelms us.

Faith as a Way of Living

So what is faith? We should be careful about forcing one definition onto every life and circumstance. For Elijah, faith was learning to hear God in silence after the fire no longer came. For the exiles, it was imagining justice and peace before they could see them. For Paul, it was loving through anguish and trusting God’s fidelity beyond his own theological resolution. For Peter, it was stepping out, becoming afraid, and crying for help.

Christian faith certainly has content. It makes claims about God, creation, Christ, resurrection, grace, judgment, and hope. Not every interpretation is equally faithful, and contradiction does not become truth merely because it is sincere. But faith is more than assent to correct statements. It is a relationship of trust lived inside history, community, conscience, and the unfinished circumstances of a human life. As Pope Francis repeatedly emphasized, God takes the initiative; God “has loved us first.”⁵ We do not save ourselves through the strength of our arguments or the perfection of our religious grip.

Many people are carrying storms others cannot see. Some are awaiting immigration decisions, medical results, employment, reconciliation, or relief from loneliness. Some are grieving what has been lost. Some are trying to believe after disappointment with the Church, their family, their country, or themselves. They do not need a Christianity that shames them for uncertainty or hands them a verse as if it were a receipt proving that every mystery has been settled.

They need a community capable of reverent accompaniment: one that can listen before explaining, remain present when no answer comes, and distinguish the revealed hope of the Gospel from our desire to feel certain. They need believers whose confidence in God makes them gentler rather than harsher, more honest about complexity rather than afraid of it, and more committed to justice rather than satisfied with being doctrinally correct.

Jesus does not shame Peter for being human. He comes toward him in the storm. When Peter’s courage fails, Jesus does not stand at a distance and demand a better argument. He extends his hand.

Perhaps faith begins there—not with our strong grip on God, but with God’s strong grip on us. The wind may not stop immediately. Answers may not come quickly. Yet the whisper can still be heard, justice and peace can still be hoped for, love can endure anguish, and the hand of Christ is still extended.

When the storm rises, listen. When sorrow comes, love. When the way is uncertain, take the next step. And when you begin to sink, pray the prayer for which no apologetic system can offer a substitute: “Lord, save me.”

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Endnotes

1. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), November 18, 1965, nos. 11–12, Vatican.

2. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini (Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation), September 30, 2010, nos. 29–44, especially no. 44, Vatican.

3. Leo XIV, “The Sacred Scripture: The Word of God in Human Words,” General Audience, February 4, 2026, Vatican.

4. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (Encyclical Letter), September 14, 1998, no. 55, Vatican.

5. Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (Apostolic Exhortation), November 24, 2013, no. 12, Vatican.

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I first encountered that world in an all-boys prep school, where one classmate became known simply as “Menelaus.” I have forgotten his real name—but not the character.

My new essay asks what happens when Homer’s unforgettable cast meets today’s political theater: Odysseus, Menelaus, the sirens, the lotus-eaters—and Stephen Miller as the Cyclops. The names change. The characters endure. Hopefully today’s youth might actually read the epic in Latin like I did!

Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and the strange Homeric voyage of American politics

In my all-boys Catholic preparatory high school, I studied Latin for three years. Homer, of course, wrote in Greek, but the classical world did not respect the tidy departmental boundaries of a modern curriculum. Somewhere amid our declensions, conjugations, translations, and adolescent attempts to survive them, we encountered portions of The Odyssey.

One of my classmates acquired the nickname “Menelaus.”

I no longer remember exactly why. Nicknames in an all-boys school were rarely the product of careful literary criticism. Perhaps he possessed the wounded dignity of the king of Sparta. Perhaps he had a tendency toward martial swagger, romantic misfortune, or turning an ordinary disagreement into a matter of Homeric honor. Whatever the reason, the name stuck.

I thought of that classmate while watching Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey. Menelaus, I realized, has not disappeared. He has merely exchanged his bronze breastplate for a tailored television suit and found employment in Washington.

Indeed, much of the Trump administration can be understood as a Homeric epic produced by Fox News: large men announcing large destinies, courtiers competing for the king’s attention, prophets offering dubious predictions, monsters guarding the borders, and a restless chorus insisting that every shipwreck proves the brilliance of the captain.

The comparison is satire. But satire works only when it exposes something serious.

Homer’s Odyssey is not merely an adventure story about a clever warrior encountering monsters on his way home. It is a moral inquiry into leadership, appetite, loyalty, hospitality, deception, and the damage that war brings home. It asks whether cunning can survive without wisdom, whether power can restrain itself, and whether a man capable of conquering a city is still capable of governing a household.

Those questions seem unexpectedly contemporary.

The counterfeit Odysseus

Donald Trump naturally expects to play Odysseus.

He is, after all, always the central character in his own epic. No victory can occur without his genius, no defeat can be attributed to his decisions, and no supporting character may remain too long in the spotlight. If history is written by the victors, Trump would prefer to dictate it personally—and sell a commemorative edition afterward.

There are superficial similarities. Odysseus is a master of improvisation, disguise, storytelling, and strategic ambiguity. He survives by reading the weaknesses of others. He understands that force is not always enough; sometimes victory requires creating a spectacle that causes the opponent to participate in his own defeat.

Trump understands spectacle. He knows how to dominate attention, rename reality, transform grievance into loyalty, and persuade millions of people that his personal survival is identical with the nation’s salvation. His Trojan Horse is not made of wood. It is made of television, social media, branding, resentment, and the promise that only one man can restore Ithaca.

But Homer’s Odysseus possesses something Trump rarely displays: the capacity to learn through suffering.

Odysseus is repeatedly humbled. He loses ships, companions, certainty, status, and control. He must listen to women, servants, strangers, prophets, and gods. He returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, forced to observe before he commands. His homecoming requires him to become small enough to see what happened while he was away.

Trump’s preferred disguise is never a beggar. It is always a king.

He has little interest in anonymity, self-examination, or listening unnoticed. He does not enter a room to discover what others think; he enters to determine what they will say about him. He does not interpret suffering as a possible source of moral growth. He presents every investigation, criticism, electoral defeat, judicial restraint, or institutional objection as another injustice inflicted upon an innocent hero.

He is therefore not Odysseus but a counterfeit Odysseus: cunning without self-knowledge, appetite without restraint, grievance without homecoming.

Homer’s hero spends ten years trying to return to his kingdom. Trump has spent much of his political career persuading the kingdom that it cannot exist without him.

Pete Hegseth, our Menelaus of the Pentagon

If Trump is the counterfeit Odysseus, Pete Hegseth is the administration’s most convincing Menelaus.

Menelaus is not Odysseus’s subordinate. He is a fellow king, military ally, and somewhat lesser light among the Greek heroes. The Trojan War is fought to recover his wife, Helen, and thereby restore his violated honor. His identity is bound to masculine reputation, martial valor, humiliation, and revenge.

In The Odyssey, Menelaus has finally returned to Sparta, surrounded by wealth and trophies, recounting the war and praising the absent Odysseus whose cunning helped recover his honor.

Hegseth has made the restoration of the “warrior ethos” central to his public identity. In a 2025 address to senior military leaders, he declared that America trains “warriors, not defenders” and must be prepared to unleash “overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.”¹ The vocabulary could have been translated from an especially aggressive passage of Bronze Age literature.

Hegseth appears to view cultural change as a national humiliation demanding martial correction. Diversity initiatives, evolving gender roles, and institutional concern for inclusion become evidence that the warriors have been weakened by bureaucrats. The Pentagon must therefore recover not merely readiness but manhood itself.

This makes him our Menelaus of the Pentagon: aggrieved honor in search of a military campaign.

Yet the comparison reveals an uncomfortable difference. Homer’s Menelaus practices xenia, the sacred obligation of hospitality, when Telemachus visits Sparta. He welcomes the stranger, offers food and shelter, and postpones interrogation until the guest has been treated with dignity.

The modern warriors admire the armor but neglect the obligations that made Homeric civilization possible. They want the spear without hospitality, strength without restraint, and honor without responsibility for the vulnerable stranger.

Ancient Menelaus, for all his faults, understood that how a society welcomes an outsider reveals whether it is civilized. Our modern Menelaus might consider that too much diversity training.

JD Vance, the Telemachus who reversed the voyage

JD Vance does not quite fit Menelaus because he is not Trump’s peer. He is the ambitious younger man waiting to inherit the movement.

That makes him a darkly inverted Telemachus.

Homer’s Telemachus begins as the uncertain son of an absent father. He must leave home, consult elders, learn his history, test his courage, and decide what kind of man he will become. His journey is toward maturity and independent judgment.

Vance appears to have undertaken the reverse journey.

He once described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” warned that Trump might become “America’s Hitler,” and compared Trumpism to “cultural heroin.” By 2024, he had become one of Trump’s fiercest defenders and ultimately his vice president.² People can certainly change their minds. Intellectual honesty sometimes requires it. But Vance’s transformation seems less like conversion through evidence than self-reconstruction through ambition.

Vance’s life has been an odyssey of reinvention. Born James Donald Bowman, he became James David Hamel and finally James David Vance—three surnames for a man still in search of a settled identity. He traveled from troubled working-class Middletown to the Marines, Ohio State, Yale Law School, Silicon Valley venture capital, the United States Senate, and ultimately the vice presidency. Along the way, he moved across classes, regions, religious identities—eventually converting to Catholicism in 2019—and political convictions. The man who once presented himself as a thoughtful interpreter of the working class and an outspoken “Never Trump” conservative transformed himself into Trump’s most articulate defender and possible heir. Every reinvention brought him closer to the next opportunity. Perhaps that is Vance’s real odyssey: not the search for home, but the search for the identity most useful at the next port. Who, beneath all those names, convictions, and costumes, is the real J. D. Vance?

Telemachus travels to discover whether his absent father deserves his loyalty. Vance traveled toward Trump until loyalty required forgetting what he had once discovered.

The Homeric Telemachus gradually acquires a voice. The Washington Telemachus learned which voice would secure the inheritance.

There is nevertheless a real human question beneath the satire. What happens to a younger leader who binds his future to an aging patriarch’s need for constant affirmation? Can he mature without contradiction? Can he ever say, “Father, you are wrong”? Or must every doubt be sacrificed to the expectation that Ithaca may someday become his?

Telemachus becomes worthy of inheritance by developing moral courage. Vance risks inheriting only the performance.

Stephen Miller, the One-Eyed Cyclops of the Cruelty Regime

Stephen Miller could be assigned several roles.

He possesses something of Poseidon’s relentless hostility toward Odysseus’s voyage, especially when the travelers are migrants seeking another shore. He has something of Polyphemus, the Cyclops who rejects the sacred law of hospitality and recognizes no obligation toward the stranger. He occasionally resembles a reverse Athena—not the goddess of wisdom guiding leaders toward home, but the calculating intelligence advising them how to make home inaccessible to others.

Miller has been one of the chief architects of Trump’s immigration agenda and now serves as White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. His influence over deportation and border policy has made him one of the administration’s most consequential power brokers.³

Polyphemus provides the sharper moral comparison. The Cyclops has strength but no civic life. He recognizes no laws, councils, customs, or obligations beyond his own household. When strangers arrive, he does not see guests protected by Zeus. He sees intruders who can be consumed.

This is the political temptation behind every policy that reduces migrants to an invading mass. Once people become categories—“illegals,” criminals, threats, contaminants—it becomes easier to ignore individual stories, legal claims, family bonds, and human dignity.

The Cyclops has one eye because he sees only one thing.

Miller’s immigration vision is similarly monocular. It sees borders but not refugees, enforcement but not mercy, sovereignty but not hospitality, danger but not desperation. It does not necessarily invent every fear it uses. Nations need borders, laws, and orderly immigration systems. But a society becomes Cyclopean when one legitimate concern consumes its entire moral field of vision.

RFK Jr. on Circe’s island

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. belongs somewhere near Circe’s pharmacy.

Circe is knowledgeable about potions, transformations, appetites, and the uncertain border between healing and enchantment. Men arrive at her house believing they are being nourished and soon discover that they have become something else entirely.

Kennedy entered public life with a genuine record of environmental advocacy. As secretary of Health and Human Services, however, he brought with him a long history of vaccine skepticism and claims rejected by mainstream medical science. Federal health policy under his leadership has repeatedly placed established scientific institutions under pressure.⁴ Amid the serious measles outbreak of 2026, Kennedy finally urged parents to vaccinate their children, although he continued promoting other disputed medical claims.⁵

He is not Circe because he is intentionally transforming Americans into pigs. Satire must maintain standards.

He belongs on Circe’s island because his public persona combines distrust of institutions, fascination with hidden causes, claims of forbidden knowledge, and the promise that conventional experts have concealed the truth. His political potion contains one part legitimate criticism of corporate influence, one part romantic naturalism, one part conspiracy, and a final ingredient that was apparently omitted from the label.

The danger is not questioning medical authority. Science advances through questioning. The danger comes when suspicion itself becomes a substitute for evidence.

Circe at least knew what was in her medicine.

The Fox News Sirens

Then come the Sirens.

The Sirens do not physically force sailors toward destruction. They sing what the sailors most want to hear. Their power lies in their knowledge of the audience’s desires.

Fox News personalities have perfected a similar song: You were right all along. Your grievances are proof of your wisdom. The institutions questioning you are corrupt. The leader defending you is persecuted because he threatens the powerful. Every setback is sabotage. Every contradiction is strategy. Every indictment is vindication. Every shipwreck is evidence that the navigator terrifies the sea.

Trump’s second administration was notably assembled from people with television experience; Reuters observed during the transition that personal loyalty and “TV chops” were prominent qualifications, with Hegseth moving directly from Fox News toward leadership of the Pentagon.⁶

The relationship is more complicated than simple propaganda. Fox can criticize Trump, and Trump can rage at Fox when it fails to praise him sufficiently. The Sirens occasionally sing off-key. But the broader ecosystem creates an emotionally self-sealing world in which contrary evidence becomes proof that enemies are everywhere.

Odysseus survives the Sirens by ordering his crew to bind him to the mast. He knows that intelligence alone will not protect him from hearing what he desperately wants to hear.

Modern politicians prefer a different arrangement: bind the audience to the mast and give the captain the microphone.

Mike Lindell, prophet of the pillow

Every epic needs a prophet. The Trumpian court has Mike Lindell.

Lindell is the Tiresias of discount bedding, emerging periodically from the underworld of election conspiracy to announce that vindication is just around the next news cycle.

His devotion is almost touching. Evidence may disappoint him, courts may reject claims, and promised revelations may fail to transform reality, but the prophecy survives. In 2025, a jury found that Lindell had defamed a former Dominion Voting Systems employee through false election claims, although Lindell later won a separate appeal involving the rules of a $5 million contest he had created to challenge people to disprove his election assertions.⁷

Homer’s Tiresias tells Odysseus truths he does not want to hear. Lindell’s function is nearly the opposite: he reassures the king that the truth he wants is still coming.

And he sells pillows, which is appropriate. His political mission is to keep the faithful dreaming.

The crew, the suitors, and the feast

What role should MAGA supporters play?

It would be unfair to cast millions of Americans as monsters or fools. Many have legitimate grievances: cultural condescension, economic displacement, government failures, disappearing community institutions, unequal application of rules, and political establishments that remembered working people mainly during election years.

The deeper tragedy is that these citizens have been invited onto a voyage organized around one man’s appetites.

Some resemble Odysseus’s crew, repeatedly warned of danger but persuaded that this time the captain’s instincts will prevail. They open the forbidden bag of winds, ignore inconvenient instructions, and slaughter the cattle of Helios because immediate hunger overwhelms long-term consequence.

Others wait in Ithaca, believing the king’s return will restore a lost order. They do not merely support policies; they invest Trump with mythic significance. He becomes the persecuted hero, the protector, the avenger, the only man strong enough to cleanse the household.

But the suitors in The Odyssey offer the most unsettling image of political power. They occupy Odysseus’s house, consume its resources, harass its servants, pressure Penelope, mock Telemachus, and behave as though public property exists for their pleasure.

They are appetite without stewardship.

Our modern suitors include grifters, influencers, courtiers, consultants, branded-product merchants, ideological opportunists, and wealthy patrons crowding around the presidency. They feast on access, attention, contracts, pardons, deregulation, and proximity to the king. They praise sacrifice while ensuring someone else makes it.

In Homer, the suitors consume the absent king’s household. In Washington, the king sometimes joins them at the table.

The moral law of hospitality

Christopher Nolan’s film places renewed attention on xenia: the sacred relationship between guest and host. In the Homeric world, hospitality is not sentimental generosity. It is part of the structure separating civilization from barbarism. A traveler may be vulnerable today and a host tomorrow. Mutual obligation protects everyone in a dangerous world.

Recent commentary on Nolan’s adaptation has emphasized how violations excused during war return to poison domestic life. Once deception, cruelty, and lawlessness are rewarded abroad, they do not remain politely overseas. They become habits of leadership.⁸

That may be the most important connection between The Odyssey and the Trump era.

A government cannot celebrate cruelty toward strangers without eventually becoming cruel toward citizens. It cannot teach that laws are merely weapons against enemies and expect laws to remain safeguards for friends. It cannot make humiliation the central language of politics without humiliating its own institutions. It cannot reward loyalty above truth and then wonder why no one warns the king about the rocks ahead.

This is why Homer’s ancient code of hospitality matters to a modern liberal democracy. We do not need to erase borders or pretend that every stranger arrives without risk. We need to remember that power toward the vulnerable is always a test of character.

The essential question is not whether America can defend its house. It must.

The question is what kind of house America will become while defending it.

Who will bring us home?

The Odyssey endures because homecoming is never merely geographical.

Odysseus must recover the moral capacity to inhabit his own home. Telemachus must become an adult. Penelope must preserve the household without surrendering herself. Ithaca must distinguish legitimate authority from appetite dressed as entitlement.

America faces a similar test.

We have plenty of men eager to play the warrior, the king, the prophet, or the heroic son. We have television choruses ready to supply the music. We have courtiers prepared to declare every storm unprecedented and every escape the work of one man’s genius.

What we lack is the humility of homecoming: the willingness to admit where we have been, what we have done, whom we have sacrificed, and what the voyage has made of us.

Donald Trump can imitate the cunning of Odysseus. Pete Hegseth can polish the armor of Menelaus. JD Vance can rehearse for the inheritance. Stephen Miller can guard the shore. Robert Kennedy can mix the potions. Fox News can sing across the water. Mike Lindell can keep prophesying from his pillow.

But none of them can answer the central question for us:

Are we trying to bring America home—or merely cheering for the man who insists that he alone is America?

My old classmate may have carried the nickname Menelaus for reasons long forgotten. But perhaps our adolescent joke contained a modest classical wisdom. The characters of Homer never disappeared. Their pride, courage, appetites, loyalties, deceptions, and longings remain within every generation.

The costumes change. The ships become television studios. The gods become algorithms. The Trojan Horse becomes a political brand.

And Ithaca is still waiting to discover who will be left when the performance is over.

Endnotes

1. Pete Hegseth, “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Addresses General and Flag Officers at Quantico, Virginia,” September 30, 2025, U.S. Department of War.

2. Gram Slattery and Helen Coster, “JD Vance Once Compared Trump to Hitler. Now They Are Running Mates,” November 6, 2024, Reuters.

3. Laura Barrón-López, “Stephen Miller’s Rise to Prominence and Influence on the Trump Administration,” February 4, 2026, PBS NewsHour.

4. “In a Tumultuous Year, U.S. Health Policy Transforms under RFK Jr.,” January 2, 2026, PBS NewsHour.

5. “RFK Jr. Tells U.S. Families to Vaccinate Children against Measles amid Outbreak,” August 2, 2026, The Guardian.

6. Gram Slattery, Alexandra Ulmer, and Nathan Layne, “Trump Opts for Personal Ties and TV Chops in Choosing His Team,” November 15, 2024, Reuters.

7. Mike Scarcella, “MyPillow Founder Defamed Employee of Voting Machine Company, Jury Finds,” June 17, 2025, Reuters; Mike Scarcella, “Trump Ally Lindell Wins Appeal in Lawsuit over $5 Million 2020 Election Contest,” July 23, 2025, Reuters.

8. Jamil Smith, “Nolan’s Odyssey Shows What Happens When a Leader’s Violations Are Rewarded,” August 3, 2026, The Guardian.

• First Reading (Isaiah 55:1-3): An invitation from the prophet to come, drink, and eat freely of the Lord’s provisions without cost.

• Responsorial Psalm (Psalm 145:8-9, 15-16, 17-18): A joyful song proclaiming that the Lord is gracious and feeds all living things with an open hand.

• Second Reading (Romans 8:35, 37-39): Saint Paul’s powerful declaration that nothing in all creation—neither hardship, distress, nor death—can separate us from the love of God in Christ.

• Gospel (Matthew 14:13-21): The miracle of the multiplication of the five loaves and two fish, where Jesus feeds the massive crowd out of compassion.

We live in a country overflowing with food—yet millions of families still worry about their next meal.

This Sunday, Isaiah invites those without money to “come and eat,” while Jesus tells his disciples not to send the hungry crowd away: “Give them some food yourselves.”

As food-assistance programs face cutbacks at home and humanitarian needs grow around the world, these readings confront us with a moral question: Will we close our hands in fear, or share the abundance we have received?

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Common Sense Sundays is an expanded reflection based on homilies I preach at St. Agatha Catholic Church in Los Angeles where I am Resident Priest. This Sunday, August 2nd, you can experience the worship and my homily at St. Agatha Parish at the 7:30am PDT Spanish Mass on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Stagathas

Give Them Some Food Yourselves

Isaiah, the feeding of the five thousand, and the moral test of hunger in a nation of abundance

Imagine almost any evening in any major American city. Restaurants are crowded. Delivery drivers carry meals ordered with the touch of a screen. Supermarkets display fruit from several continents, bread in dozens of varieties, and entire aisles devoted to beverages that promise energy, health, relaxation, or happiness. At some coffee shops, a single drink can cost what a struggling family might spend preparing dinner.

Then drive a few blocks.

There are families deciding whether to buy groceries, pay the rent, or refill a prescription. There are older people stretching a fixed income by eating less near the end of the month. There are parents who tell their children they are not hungry so there will be enough food for everyone else. There are workers preparing and serving meals they cannot afford to purchase themselves.

We live surrounded by food, yet hunger remains among us.

The latest national report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 13.7 percent of American households—more than 18 million households—experienced food insecurity during 2024. More than 7 million lived with what the government calls “very low food security,” meaning that eating patterns were disrupted and food intake was reduced because money or other resources ran out.¹ For example, in Los Angeles County, the contrast is even more startling: approximately one in four households reported experiencing food insecurity during 2025.²

These numbers describe something more serious than occasional inconvenience. Food insecurity means uncertainty about whether there will be enough to eat and whether the food available will be nutritious enough to sustain health. It can mean missing meals, buying cheaper and less nourishing food, or relying on food pantries to make it through the month.

This Sunday’s readings ask us to examine that contradiction. How can a country capable of producing extraordinary abundance permit so many of its people to wonder whether they will eat? What responsibility does the United States have toward hungry people beyond our borders? And what does Christian discipleship require when political leaders are reducing or reconsidering programs that provide food assistance?

The readings do not give us a detailed federal budget. They give us something more fundamental: a moral framework through which every budget should be judged.

Come Without Paying

The Prophet Isaiah speaks to a people who have been exhausted and impoverished by exile. They have lost land, security, political independence, and much of the world they once considered permanent. Into that experience of deprivation comes an astonishing invitation:

“All you who are thirsty,
come to the water!
You who have no money,
come, receive grain and eat.”

God does not first ask whether the hungry have earned the grain. He does not demand proof that the thirsty have made responsible choices. He does not establish separate lines for the worthy and unworthy poor. The invitation begins with need: Are you thirsty? Then come. Do you have no money? Then eat.

Isaiah is speaking about more than physical food. He is inviting Israel to return to the covenant and to stop spending its life on what cannot satisfy. “Why spend your money for what is not bread,” God asks, “your wages for what fails to satisfy?”

That question reaches into our consumer culture. We spend enormous sums trying to satisfy hungers that consumption cannot resolve. We purchase convenience, status, entertainment, distraction, and experiences curated for display. We consume food, information, outrage, social media, and political grievance, yet often remain restless and spiritually malnourished.

But Isaiah’s spiritual meaning does not cancel the material one. Scripture does not tell hungry people that physical bread is unimportant because spiritual nourishment matters more. Throughout the biblical tradition, covenant with God is expressed in how land, harvest, debt, wages, and food are shared. The prophets reject religious devotion that leaves the poor hungry and the powerful unaccountable.

God’s abundance is not a private spiritual possession. It creates obligations.

The psalm makes that connection explicit: “You open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” The hand of God is open. Creation produces enough. Human intelligence, labor, agriculture, transportation, and technology multiply what the earth provides. The moral problem begins when human hands close—when abundance is hoarded, wasted, withheld, or distributed according to purchasing power alone.

The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that between 30 and 40 percent of the American food supply is lost or wasted. At the same time, millions of households struggle to afford adequate food.³ Hunger in this country is therefore not simply the result of an absolute shortage. It is a problem of access, affordability, distribution, income, housing costs, health expenses, public priorities, and the willingness to recognize food as more than another consumer commodity. (USDA)

Isaiah challenges an economy in which people without money are treated as people without claims. The prophet announces another kind of economy—the economy of covenant, in which life is received as gift and the goods necessary for life carry a social purpose.

The Reasonable Solution

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has just learned of the brutal death of John the Baptist. John was his relative, his prophetic companion, and the one who had prepared the way for his ministry. Jesus withdraws to a deserted place, apparently seeking time to grieve and pray.

But the crowds follow him.

When Jesus sees them, the Gospel tells us that “his heart was moved with pity.” His sorrow does not close him off from the suffering of others. Because he remains rooted in communion with the Father, grief enlarges rather than diminishes his compassion.

As evening approaches, the disciples identify a practical problem. Thousands of people are in an isolated place, and there is not enough food. Their proposal is reasonable: dismiss the crowds so they can go into the villages and buy something for themselves.

“Send them away.”

It is not a cruel response. The disciples did not create the hunger. They did not invite five thousand people to arrive without provisions. They have only five loaves and two fish. Surely they cannot be held responsible for solving a problem so much larger than their resources.

Their answer sounds remarkably modern: allow the market to handle it. Let each person go and purchase what he or she needs. Move the problem somewhere else. Make hunger an individual responsibility.

Jesus refuses.

“There is no need for them to go away,” he says.

“Give them some food yourselves.”

This is the sentence that turns compassion into responsibility. Jesus does not permit the disciples to remain sympathetic observers. He does not accept their assumption that what happens to the crowd is someone else’s problem.

The disciples see scarcity. Jesus asks what is available.

They see an impossible demand. Jesus asks for their participation.

They want to disperse the crowd. Jesus tells them to form a community.

Jesus takes the loaves, blesses them, breaks them, and gives them to the disciples, who distribute them to the people. These are Eucharistic gestures: taking, blessing, breaking, and giving. What begins as insufficient becomes abundant when it is received with gratitude and placed in service to the community.

The miracle is not merely that bread multiplies. A crowd accustomed to thinking in terms of individual survival becomes a community in which everyone is fed. The disciples discover that they are not owners protecting inadequate resources. They are stewards entrusted with distributing what has first been given to them.

A Political Debate with a Moral Boundary

Our debates about food assistance involve legitimate questions. Public programs should be responsibly administered. Fraud should be prevented. Benefits should reach the people for whom they are intended. Employment, when it is dignified and fairly compensated, is ordinarily good for individuals, families, and communities. Government agencies should be accountable for the money they spend.

Supporters of recent changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as SNAP, argue that expanded work requirements, reduced state waivers, and new cost-sharing provisions will promote employment, discourage long-term dependency, reduce errors, and protect taxpayers. Those arguments deserve to be stated fairly rather than dismissed as though concern for program integrity were inherently immoral.⁴

But every policy also has consequences, and moral seriousness requires us to examine them. Public Law 119-21, enacted in July 2025, expanded SNAP work requirements to additional adults, including some parents whose children are fourteen or older. It limited the circumstances under which states may waive those requirements, reduced certain deductions used to calculate benefits, narrowed eligibility for some lawful immigrants, and began shifting portions of program costs to state governments. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the work-requirement provisions alone will reduce SNAP participation by approximately 2.4 million people in an average month over the 2025–2034 period. CBO also projects benefit reductions for many remaining households and warns that some states may eventually reduce eligibility or benefits because of the new costs imposed upon them.⁵

These estimates do not prove that every person losing assistance will go hungry. Neither do they settle every dispute about how SNAP should operate. They do, however, tell us that the policy is not merely an exercise in administrative efficiency. Real people will receive less food assistance or lose it altogether.

A work requirement is not a job. A reporting form is not a wage. Removing food assistance does not create affordable child care, reliable transportation, predictable work schedules, disability accommodations, or employment in communities where jobs are scarce. Administrative sanctions may reduce a program’s enrollment without reducing the need that brought people to the program.

The Christian moral question is therefore not simply whether someone complied with every regulation. It is whether our policies leave human beings without enough to eat.

Jesus did not ask the disciples to determine which members of the crowd had planned poorly. He did not tell them to feed only those who could document that they had spent the day looking for work. He saw hunger and established a boundary: the people would not be sent away unfed.

That does not eliminate personal responsibility. It places personal responsibility inside social responsibility. Catholic teaching has never imagined society as a collection of isolated individuals who owe nothing to one another. The principles of human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good require responsibilities at several levels: individuals, families, churches, neighborhood organizations, employers, markets, local communities, states, and the federal government.

Food pantries and parish collections are important. They are also not substitutes for public policy. Charity can respond personally, creatively, and compassionately, but private generosity alone cannot provide stable nutrition for tens of millions of people. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops noted this year that nearly 42 million Americans relied upon SNAP in 2024 and that the program lifted approximately 3.6 million people out of poverty. The bishops urged Congress to provide adequate funding while also supporting employment and training that can help families move toward greater stability.⁶

That is not partisan ideology. It is a both-and moral vision: encourage work and feed people; improve accountability and protect the vulnerable; promote self-sufficiency without using hunger as an instrument of discipline.

The Crowd Beyond Our Borders

The crowd before Jesus also challenges the boundaries of national responsibility.

The United States cannot solve every humanitarian crisis. Foreign assistance should be monitored, evaluated, and reformed when programs are ineffective. Corruption, duplication, and dependency are real concerns. Governments have a duty to use public resources prudently.

Yet prudence is not indifference, and national boundaries do not erase human dignity.

The 2026 United Nations assessment of global food security estimates that approximately 645 million people experienced hunger during 2025, while about 2.1 billion endured moderate or severe food insecurity. Although the overall hunger rate declined modestly, progress remains fragile and deeply unequal. In many regions, especially those affected by war, displacement, climate disasters, and rising prices, the danger is becoming more acute.⁷

The World Food Programme says it needs approximately $13 billion to reach 110 million vulnerable people in 2026, but funding shortages have already forced reductions in several countries. The United States made an important $800 million contribution to the WFP in June, demonstrating that American humanitarian leadership has not disappeared. That contribution is expected to support food and nutrition assistance for more than 38 million people in at least 37 countries. At the same time, the scale of global need means that intermittent contributions cannot compensate fully for broad reductions in humanitarian capacity.⁸

Foreign food assistance is not merely a sentimental gesture. Hunger destabilizes communities, increases displacement, damages childhood development, weakens economies, and makes populations more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Feeding people in moments of crisis saves lives immediately and can help prevent larger political and humanitarian crises later.

More importantly for Christians, the person who is hungry in Haiti, Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, or Central Africa does not possess less human dignity because he or she lives outside the United States.

When Pope Leo XIV visited the World Food Programme in June, he emphasized both dimensions of the responsibility: immediate assistance to hungry people is vital, and the international community must also address the underlying causes of hunger.⁹ The five loaves must be distributed today, but discipleship must also ask why the crowd has no bread tomorrow.

What Do We Have Here?

The disciples’ first response to Jesus is understandable:

“Five loaves and two fish are all we have here.”

We often answer in the same way. The problem is too large. My contribution is too small. I cannot restructure the food system, fund an international relief agency, or repair federal policy. What difference will one bag of groceries, one donation, one volunteer shift, or one letter to a legislator make?

Jesus does not ask the disciples to possess what they do not have. He asks them to surrender what they do have.

Our five loaves and two fish may include financial contributions to a food pantry or humanitarian organization. They may include volunteering, reducing household food waste, supporting parish food programs, checking on an elderly neighbor, or helping an eligible family navigate the complicated process of applying for assistance.

They also include citizenship.

Voting, public advocacy, budget priorities, and the willingness to learn how policies affect vulnerable people are forms of moral action. Christians cannot receive the Eucharist on Sunday and then regard the feeding of hungry people as an unfortunate side issue in public life. We cannot praise Jesus for multiplying bread while applauding indifference toward those who need it.

Nor can we assign the entire responsibility to government. A society in which citizens pay taxes but never encounter the poor can become bureaucratically generous and personally indifferent. A society that relies only on private charity, however, makes access to food depend upon geography, philanthropy, and the unpredictable availability of donations.

We need both personal encounter and effective institutions. We need compassion close enough to recognize a human face and public structures large enough to respond to widespread need.

The Eucharistic Test

At Mass, Christ takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to us. We receive what we could never purchase or earn: the life of God offered without cost.

Isaiah’s invitation is fulfilled at the Eucharistic table:

“You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat.”

But the Eucharist is not simply sacred food for private spiritual satisfaction. Christ feeds us so that we may become his body in the world. We receive bread that has been broken so that our closed hearts may also be broken open. We receive a gift so that we may become gift.

A church that celebrates the Eucharist while remaining indifferent to hunger contradicts the sacrament it receives. A nation that thanks God for abundance while treating food for the poor as expendable fails to understand gratitude. Gratitude does not say, “I earned everything I possess.” Gratitude recognizes gift, and recognition of gift produces generosity.

The fragments remaining after the Gospel meal fill twelve baskets. The story does not end with barely enough. It ends in abundance.

Perhaps the final question is not whether there is enough food. In the United States, there plainly is. The deeper question is whether we have enough imagination, solidarity, and moral courage to share it.

The disciples looked at the crowd and said,

“Send them away.”

Jesus looked at the same crowd and said,

“Give them some food yourselves.”

In a country of extraordinary agricultural wealth, technological capacity, and material abundance, those words are not an impossible demand. They are a judgment upon our priorities and an invitation to recover our humanity.

The people do not have to go away.

The hand of God remains open.

Will ours?

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Endnotes

1. Matthew P. Rabbitt et al., Household Food Security in the United States in 2024, Economic Research Report no. 358 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, December 30, 2025). The report found that 13.7 percent of households experienced food insecurity and 5.4 percent experienced very low food security. (Economic Research Service)

2. USC Dornsife Public Exchange, Food & Nutrition Insecurity in Los Angeles County: October 2025 (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 2025). The survey found that approximately 24 percent of Los Angeles County households had experienced food insecurity during the preceding year. (Public Exchange Network)

3. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Food Loss and Waste,” accessed August 1, 2026; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Estimating the Cost of Food Waste to American Consumers (Washington, DC: EPA, 2025). EPA estimated that discarded food costs the average consumer approximately $728 annually. (USDA)

4. U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, “Chairman Thompson Releases Budget Reconciliation Text,” May 12, 2025; and “Thompson Opening Statement at Budget Reconciliation Markup,” May 13, 2025. Supporters described the provisions as efforts to encourage employment, protect taxpayers, improve state administration, and reduce payment errors. (House Committee on Agriculture)

5. Congressional Budget Office, Estimated Effects of Public Law 119-21 on Participation and Benefits Under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Washington, DC: CBO, August 11, 2025). CBO projected that expanded work requirements would reduce monthly SNAP participation by approximately 2.4 million people on average over the 2025–2034 period. (Congressional Budget Office)

6. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Charities USA, and National Catholic Rural Life, “Joint Letter to Congress on Agriculture Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2027,” April 28, 2026. The letter supports adequate SNAP funding, employment and training services, emergency food assistance, international food aid, and stronger nutrition programs. (USCCB)

7. Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, World Food Programme, and World Health Organization, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026: Understanding and Addressing the High Cost of a Healthy Diet (Rome: FAO, 2026). (FAOHome)

8. World Food Programme, “WFP Welcomes Announcement of Major U.S. Contribution as Global Hunger Reaches Record Levels,” June 17, 2026; and WFP Global Outlook: 2026 Mid-Year Update, July 7, 2026. (World Food Programme)

9. Leo XIV, “Address during the Visit to the Headquarters of the World Food Programme,” June 22, 2026. Pope Leo described immediate food assistance as vital while emphasizing the need to confront the root causes of hunger. (Vatican Press)

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Today, we may be sitting beside a pool—but the laptop is open, Slack is buzzing, and someone is checking email between family photos.

In “Whatever Happened to Vacation?”, I look back on summers from my 1950s childhood through my years in business, priesthood, teaching, and coaching—and ask how America turned vacation into just another place to work.

Maybe the real summer luxury is not the destination. Maybe it is finally becoming unavailable.

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Whatever Happened to Vacation?

A Meditation on Changing Patterns of Personal Renewal

Every summer, I find myself remembering what the season once meant.

In the Los Angeles of my childhood in the 1950s, summer was not primarily a product to purchase or an itinerary to optimize. It was a change in the texture of time. School stopped. The days became long. Children went to playgrounds and parks, invented games, wandered through neighborhoods, visited friends, played Hide and Seek into the night, and learned how to fill hours without an adult organizing every minute. For a couple of weeks, our family might travel to visit relatives and stayed in their homes. The point was not to accumulate experiences, photograph every meal, or prove that we had used our time well. The point was to be together and to be away.

I do not want to romanticize the 1950s. Childhood was not carefree for everyone. Segregation, poverty, discrimination, rigid gender roles, and family hardship shaped who could travel, who had safe parks, and who spent the summer working or caring for younger children. My memories belong to a particular working-class, postwar suburban Los Angeles world. Yet I remember a widely shared understanding that summer created a legitimate pause. Children could be children. Adults could be temporarily unavailable. Life did not have to justify every hour.

Today, summer often looks less like a pause than a relocation of activity. We take the laptop to the rental house, the smartphone to the beach, the Zoom call to the hotel balcony, and Slack to the airport lounge. We change the scenery without changing our state of mind. The calendar says “vacation,” but the nervous system remains at work.

When Summer Taught Us How to Grow

As I moved into adolescence, summer changed from play to work. In my working-class world, it seemed that nearly every teenager had some kind of job. We worked in stores, restaurants, offices, parks, warehouses, tourist attractions, or wherever someone would hire us. I mowed lawns and did tree work for my father’s side gardening business for clients in the entertainment industry. These were not usually résumé-building internships designed to impress a future admissions committee. They were ordinary jobs. We earned spending money, learned to take instructions from adults who were not our parents, and began to understand the relationship between time, effort, wages, and independence.

The national numbers remind me that “everyone” is too strong a word, but the experience was common. In July 1950, about 63 percent of Americans ages sixteen to nineteen were in the labor force; by the late 1970s, the summer rate had climbed above 70 percent. By 2016, it had fallen to about 43 percent, partly because of increased school enrollment, summer coursework, and the pressure to prepare for college.¹

There are benefits to the newer pattern. Young people now have courses, camps, travel, sports, service programs, and intellectual opportunities unavailable to many of us. But something is lost when every summer becomes another competitive season. A teenager may no longer simply work at a local store and learn how to deal with customers. The summer must demonstrate ambition. It must produce credentials, leadership, enrichment, or a compelling college essay.

Even childhood play has become more structured. Research has documented a shift toward organized activities and away from unstructured play, while pediatricians continue to emphasize that free play contributes to children’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development.² Childhood needs time that is not evaluated. So does adulthood.

My own college summers already mixed work, education, travel, and adventure. I worked at Universal Studios Tours doing everything from cleaning restrooms, serving at food stands, and working in the catering kitchen making hundreds of sandwiches from 11:00 pm to 7:00 am for the many food stands. I studied language in Mexico. I participated in a diplomatic trip to China. These experiences widened my world, and I remain grateful for them. Yet one experience ended before the next began. I was not checking email from one life while trying to inhabit another because email did not exist. Cellphones did not exist. Texting did not exist. I could be where I was. Present.

Perhaps we did not have more free time. We had clearer boundaries.

The Four-Week Lesson

In my mid-20s early business career, I worked for Castle & Cooke, a company with deep roots in Hawaii. One memorable feature of its culture was a four-week paid vacation schedule. That amount of time reflected more than a generous benefit. It reflected a different understanding of what a human being requires.

Four weeks allows something to happen that a long weekend cannot. During the first days, the body slows down. Then the mind begins to release unfinished conversations, lists, irritations, and imagined emergencies. Only after that does a person become available to family, place, beauty, prayer, curiosity, and surprise. A real vacation has an inner geography. We do not arrive at rest simply because an airplane lands.

That experience also taught me that time off is never only an individual matter. It depends upon culture and structure. An employee can have vacation days on paper and still feel unable to use them. A supervisor can say, “Enjoy your trip,” while sending messages that imply an immediate answer is expected. A workplace can promote wellness in public and reward constant availability in practice.

The United States still treats paid vacation largely as a private employment benefit rather than a social guarantee. Federal law does not require it. In 2025, 80 percent of private-industry workers had access to paid vacation, but access fell to 55 percent among workers in the lowest wage quartile and 40 percent among part-time workers. Among those with plans, the average was eleven days after one year of service and eighteen after ten years.³ Vacation in America is therefore not only a matter of personal discipline. It is also a matter of class, occupation, bargaining power, and institutional design.

Retreat and the Vocation to Stop

Priesthood and religious life in the Jesuits gave time off work another dimension. I learned the importance of retreat.

A retreat is not exactly a vacation. It is a deliberate withdrawal from ordinary demands in order to listen more carefully—to God, to conscience, and to truths that busyness helps us avoid. Yet retreat and vacation share an essential principle: human beings cannot remain fully awake to life while constantly producing, responding, and performing.

The biblical Sabbath is not a reward for finishing all the work. The work is never finished. Sabbath is a limit placed upon work because even good and necessary work can become an idol. It reminds us that the world continues without our management. It tells the worker, employer, parent, priest, and professional: you are more than what you produce.

My years as a priest and religious included retreats, vacations, journeys, and adventures. Some restored me through silence; others through friendship, great meals and conversation, beauty, humor, risk, and unfamiliar places. Renewal did not always mean doing nothing. It meant doing something not governed by the same demands as ordinary work.

Later, as a professor, travel often became a “work-vacation.” I led courses in Chile, New York, and Washington, DC, with students and combined intellectual exploration with the pleasures of another country or city. Those experiences were meaningful, but I was always responsible—teaching, planning, solving problems, watching over students, and representing an institution. The setting might have been beautiful, but I was still on duty.

That distinction matters. Meaningful work can be enjoyable without becoming rest. A priest may love celebrating Mass on a trip, a professor may love teaching abroad, and a leader may enjoy a conference in a beautiful city. Pleasure does not automatically turn work into vacation. I now yearn for those 30 day vacations without cellphones, the internet, and the other tech tools that too often impede real time for renewal and retreat.

The White Lotus and the Portable Office

Popular culture now reflects this confusion. HBO’s The White Lotus is a social satire about affluent guests who travel to extraordinary resorts but remain captive to the anxieties, status contests, family conflicts, and moral failures they brought from home. In the first season, executive Nicole Mossbacher conducts Zoom business from her Hawaiian suite. In the third, Timothy Ratliff arrives at a Thai wellness resort only to become consumed by calls and news about a business scandal. Paradise cannot protect people from the lives they are unable—or unwilling—to leave behind.⁴

The series exaggerates, but its insight is recognizable. We may change clothes, climates, and time zones while remaining psychologically tethered to work. The phone becomes a portable office and a portable tribunal. At any moment, we may be summoned to prove our usefulness.

Many of my American coaching clients describe this pressure. Before leaving, they tell colleagues they will be “available if needed.” But the phrase quickly expands. Everything becomes potentially necessary. They check email to prevent a backlog, answer Slack because silence might look disengaged, respond to texts because the sender can see that the message was delivered, and join a call because it seems easier than explaining why they cannot.

By contrast, many European clients I have coached treat August and the Christmas period as socially legitimate times of reduced availability. Europe is not a paradise, and work cultures vary. Still, the legal foundation is revealing: European Union rules establish at least four weeks of paid annual leave, and many member countries provide more.⁵ Public policy does not guarantee renewal, but it tells people what a society considers normal. America tells workers to negotiate rest individually. Europe more often treats rest as a condition of dignified work.

The Multi-Tasking Ego

Technology alone did not create our inability to stop. It found fertile ground in an American culture that equates busyness with importance.

There is an ego hidden in multitasking. We complain that everyone needs us, but part of us may enjoy the proof. The constant message reassures us that we matter. The overflowing inbox confirms that we are central. Being unavailable forces a more difficult spiritual question: Will the work continue without me? Usually, it does.

This does not mean the pressure is imaginary. Workplaces create explicit and unspoken expectations of responsiveness. Researchers use the term “workplace telepressure” for the urge to answer work messages quickly during nonwork time. Studies associate after-hours email and smartphone use with poorer psychological detachment, emotional exhaustion, and reduced well-being.⁶ The problem is not merely the minutes spent replying. It is the occupation of mental space that should belong to sleep, family, friendship, worship, play, and reflection.

The result is divided presence. We are physically at dinner and mentally in the inbox. We watch a child swim while drafting a response. We sit beside a spouse while monitoring notifications. We travel thousands of miles without leaving the office.

The loss is not only personal. Families lose the undistracted presence of one another. Children learn that adulthood means perpetual partial attention. Couples become logistical partners rather than companions. Communities lose people who have enough interior space to converse, volunteer, worship, create, or simply notice someone in need.

A society that cannot stop working will eventually forget what work is for.

Why We Do Not Take the Time We Have

Even workers who receive paid time off often do not use it. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 46 percent of U.S. workers with paid time off took less than they were offered. Among those leaving time unused, 49 percent worried about falling behind and 43 percent felt badly about burdening coworkers. Salaried workers and managers were especially likely not to take all their time.⁷

Those numbers reveal a moral problem disguised as personal choice. People say, “I decided not to take vacation,” but the decision occurs inside a culture of understaffing, insecurity, competition, and guilt. When an organization depends on one person never being absent, that is not proof of the person’s excellence. It is proof of poor organizational design.

We should also resist turning vacation into another privilege. It should be essential to work life. The reality is some people cannot afford travel. Others lack paid leave, work multiple jobs, care for relatives, or fear losing income or opportunity. Renewal cannot be reduced to resort travel. A vacation may be days at home, time in a public park, a visit with relatives, a retreat, or a camping trip. The essential question is not, “Where did you go?” It is, “Were you released from demand?”

Recovering the Meaning of Vacation

Recent research confirms what older spiritual traditions understood. A 2025 meta-analysis of thirty-two studies found that vacations improve employee well-being more substantially and for longer than earlier research had suggested. The strongest benefits were associated with psychological detachment from work and physical activity.⁸ Rest is not merely inactivity. It is the recovery of attention, energy, relationship, and freedom.

That recovery requires boundaries clear enough to survive inconvenience. Before leaving, a worker can name who will cover responsibilities, what constitutes a genuine emergency, and when messages will be read. An automatic reply should not say, “I will have limited access,” when the intention is to remain connected. It can say, “I am away and will respond after August 17. For an urgent matter, contact…” A manager can tell a team, “Do not copy her while she is away; bring the issue to me.” A family can agree that phones will be put away for meals, excursions, worship, and part of each day.

These practices challenge a large mythology. They say that success does not require permanent accessibility. They say that responsible people prepare for absence rather than cancel it. They say that colleagues should form a community, not a collection of indispensable individuals protecting their territory.

Most importantly, they make room for families to experience one another without competition from the workplace. Children deserve stretches of time in which a parent is not looking over their shoulder at a screen. Parents deserve to discover who their children are becoming. Spouses and friends deserve conversations that are not interrupted by the electronic announcement that someone elsewhere may be more important.

I cannot return to the summers of the 1950s, nor would I want to restore the inequalities and exclusions of that era. But I would like to recover something we once understood more clearly: renewal requires a change not only of place but of obligation.

Summer taught me different lessons at different ages. Childhood taught me play. Adolescence taught me work and independence. College taught me adventure and encounter. Castle & Cooke taught me that generous time off can express a humane culture. Priesthood taught me retreat and Sabbath. Teaching taught me that even beautiful work remains work. Coaching has shown me how frightened successful people can be of becoming unreachable.

Perhaps “Whatever happened to vacation?” leads to a more unsettling question: Whatever happened to our confidence that a good life includes times when we are not producing anything?

A real vacation is an act of humility. It admits that we are finite. It releases the fantasy that everything depends upon us. It creates room for the people we love to become more than background figures in our professional lives. It allows memory, gratitude, prayer, laughter, boredom, and wonder to return.

The purpose of vacation is not to escape life. It is to come back to life before we have forgotten how.

Endnotes

1. Teresa L. Morisi, “Teen Labor Force Participation before and after the Great Recession and Beyond,” Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 2017. The BLS reports a July labor-force participation rate of 63.2 percent for sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds in 1950, a peak of 71.8 percent in 1978, and 43.2 percent in 2016.

2. Sandra L. Hofferth and John F. Sandberg found that American children’s time shifted toward structured activities and away from unstructured play between 1981 and 1997. The American Academy of Pediatrics has repeatedly emphasized free play as important to children’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being.

3. U.S. Department of Labor, “Vacation Leave”; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Selected Paid Leave Benefits: Access,” March 2025; and “Paid Leave Benefits: Average Number of Sick and Vacation Days by Length of Service Requirement,” March 2025.

4. HBO describes The White Lotus as a social satire centered on guests and workers at exclusive resorts. Reviews and recaps note Nicole Mossbacher’s vacation Zoom calls in Season One and Timothy Ratliff’s business crisis intruding upon the family’s Thai retreat in Season Three.

5. European Commission, “Labour Law.” The European Working Time Directive entitles workers to at least four weeks of paid annual leave, while individual member states may provide more.

6. Ruben Cambier, Daantje Derks, and Peter Vlerick, “Detachment from Work: A Diary Study on Telepressure, Smartphone Use and Empathy,” Psychologica Belgica 59, no. 1 (2019): 227–245; Archana Manapragada Tedone, “Keeping Up With Work Email After Hours and Employee Wellbeing,” Occupational Health Science 6 (2022): 51–72.

7. Shradha Dinesh and Kim Parker, “More Than 4 in 10 U.S. Workers Don’t Take All Their Paid Time Off,” Pew Research Center, August 10, 2023.

8. Ryan S. Grant, Beth E. Buchanan, and Kristen M. Shockley, “I Need a Vacation: A Meta-Analysis of Vacation and Employee Well-Being,” Journal of Applied Psychology 110, no. 7 (2025): 887–905.

• First Reading (1 Kings 3:5, 7–12)

• Responsorial Psalm (Psalm 119:57, 72, 76–77, 127–128, 129–130)

• Second Reading (Romans 8:28–30)

• Gospel (Matthew 13:44–52)

What is worth keeping—and what is merely taking up space?

Jesus’ parables of the buried treasure, the pearl of great price, and the overflowing net invite us to examine the clutter of our lives: our possessions, memories, loyalties, grievances, ambitions, and inherited beliefs. With a listening heart, we may discover that grace has been hidden in places we had overlooked—and that some things we have carried for years can finally be released.

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Common Sense Sundays is an expanded reflection based on homilies I preach at St. Agatha Catholic Church in Los Angeles where I am Resident Priest. This Sunday, July 26th, you can experience the worship and my homily at St. Agatha Parish at the 10:00am PDT Mass on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Stagathas

What’s Worth Keeping?

Jesus’ parables, the clutter of our lives, and the spiritual work of discovering treasure

Most of us know the experience—or at least dread the possibility—of having to clear out a house, apartment, attic, or garage that has accumulated the possessions of a lifetime.

Perhaps an elderly parent or relative is moving into a smaller home. Perhaps someone has died, and the family must decide what to do with everything left behind. Perhaps the garage door has not been opened in years, and what was once intended as a place for a car has become a storage room for old furniture, broken appliances, clothing, newspapers, Christmas decorations, tools, photographs, and boxes whose contents no one remembers.

At first, the task appears simple: keep what matters and throw away the rest. Anyone who has actually done it, however, knows that the process is rarely simple.

One person sees an old chair with a broken leg; another remembers sitting in that chair beside a beloved grandparent. One person sees a stack of yellowing papers; another recognizes letters exchanged during a war, immigration documents, tax files, baptismal certificates, or photographs of relatives whose stories might otherwise disappear. A tarnished piece of jewelry may appear worthless until someone discovers that it belonged to a great-grandmother. A box of old coins may be worth more than anyone imagined—or may simply hold the memory of a father who collected them with his children.

Even ordinary objects raise difficult questions. Why was this kept? What did it mean? Does it still have value? Who should receive it? Are we preserving a memory or postponing a decision? Are we honoring the past, or allowing it to overwhelm the present?

Somewhere among the clutter, there may also be a treasure. It might not be financially valuable. It may be a family story, a handwritten recipe, an old Bible with names recorded inside, a letter of forgiveness that was never mailed, or a photograph that reveals something important about where we came from.

The challenge is not simply cleaning. The challenge is discernment.

Can we recognize the difference between what is valuable and what merely occupies space? Can we release what no longer serves life without carelessly discarding something precious? Can we distinguish treasure from clutter, memory from nostalgia, responsibility from guilt, and tradition from habit?

These questions bring us into the third week of Jesus’ school of parables.

From Soil, to Weeds, to Treasure

Two Sundays ago, Jesus gave us the parable of the sower. The central question was not simply whether God is planting seeds, but what kind of ground we are becoming. Is the word of God falling on the hardened path of a closed mind, entering shallow soil where enthusiasm appears quickly but has no roots, or being crowded by the thorns of anxiety, resentment, ambition, distraction, and fear? Or are we becoming rich soil in which grace can take root and produce fruit?

Last Sunday, Jesus moved from soil to growth. Wheat and weeds grow together. The spiritual life is rarely a clean, orderly progression in which everything harmful is immediately removed. Growth requires patience because our motives are mixed, our wounds remain tender, and our virtues develop alongside habits that still need healing.

We considered five movements of spiritual development: sleeping, awakening, discernment, integration, and bearing fruit for others. We often begin spiritually asleep, accepting without much reflection whatever our family, culture, church, political tribe, or social environment tells us is normal. Something then awakens us: suffering, beauty, love, failure, a relationship, a moral crisis, or an unexpected experience of grace.

Awakening, however, is only the beginning. Once we become conscious of what is growing within us, we must learn to discern. Which shoots are wheat, and which are weeds? Which parts of our lives need patience, and which must be confronted? Which wounds need healing rather than shame? Which convictions come from conscience, and which are merely inherited fears or prejudices?

This Sunday, Jesus takes the lesson one step further. The Kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, a merchant searching for a pearl of great price, a net that gathers fish of every kind, and a storeroom from which the mature disciple brings forth “both the new and the old.”

The seed has been planted, and wheat and weeds are growing together. Now we must decide what is truly valuable. What deserves our loyalty? What should organize our lives? What must be kept, and what can finally be released?

A Listening Heart

The first reading gives us Solomon at the beginning of his reign. God appears to him in a dream and says,

“Ask something of me and I will give it to you.”

It is the kind of invitation that exposes a person’s deepest desires. Solomon could have asked for wealth, long life, political dominance, military victory, or the defeat of his enemies. He could have asked for the ancient equivalent of popularity, security, and unquestioned power.

Instead, Solomon begins by admitting his limitations:

“I am a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act.”

He asks for “an understanding heart” so that he can govern the people and distinguish right from wrong. The biblical expression can also be translated as a “listening heart.”

That is a beautiful description of wisdom. Wisdom is not merely possessing more information, intellectual brilliance, professional expertise, quickness in argument, or the ability to dominate a conversation. Wisdom is the capacity to listen deeply enough to recognize what matters. A listening heart pays attention to God, to other people, to experience, to history, to consequences, and to the quiet movements of conscience.

We live in a society overflowing with information but often starving for wisdom. Our phones can retrieve millions of answers, but they cannot tell us what kind of people we should become. Social media can identify what is trending, but not necessarily what is true. Advertising can stimulate desire, but not tell us which desires are worthy. Political movements can tell us whom to blame, but not necessarily how to live together.

Artificial intelligence can organize knowledge, imitate styles, summarize arguments, and identify patterns, but it cannot assume moral responsibility for the human decisions we make with that information. We still need Solomon’s prayer: Lord, give us listening hearts. Help us recognize what is valuable before we discard it, release what is harmful even when we have become attached to it, and distinguish treasure from glitter.

The Treasure That Reorders Everything

In the first parable, a person unexpectedly discovers treasure buried in a field. In the second, a merchant has been deliberately searching for fine pearls. One person finds the treasure by surprise; the other finds it after a long and intentional search.

That distinction matters because grace enters human lives in different ways. Some people discover faith unexpectedly when a loss breaks open the heart, a child is born, someone offers forgiveness, a stranger shows compassion, a Scripture passage suddenly speaks with new force, or a moment of beauty and silence reveals a depth that had gone unnoticed. Others search for years. They study, question, doubt, pray, explore traditions, enter therapy, examine their lives, and gradually discover what deserves their trust.

One finds the treasure almost by accident. The other recognizes it after sustained searching. Their response, however, is the same: each joyfully reorganizes life around what has been found.

Jesus says that the person who discovers the treasure sells everything “out of joy.” That small phrase is essential. The Kingdom is not presented primarily as a burden imposed by an authoritarian God or as a collection of arbitrary restrictions designed to make life miserable. It is something so beautiful and valuable that sacrifice becomes possible.

Many people have learned to think of Christianity mainly in terms of what must be given up: do not do this, avoid that, deny yourself, carry your cross. These teachings have their place, but they make little sense unless we first understand what has been found.

What have we discovered that is worth reorganizing a life around? We have found the mercy of God, the friendship of Christ, the dignity of every human person, the peace that comes from forgiveness, the freedom of no longer needing to prove our worth, the possibility of reconciliation, and the hope that suffering and death do not have the final word.

When this treasure is discovered, faith stops being one object among many in the crowded storeroom of life. It becomes the measure by which everything else is evaluated. Work still matters, but it is no longer our god. Money still matters, but it does not determine human worth. Political participation matters, but no party or leader deserves religious devotion. Tradition matters, but it cannot excuse cruelty or protect injustice. Personal success may be welcomed, but it cannot substitute for meaning.

The treasure does not eliminate everything else. It gives everything else its proper place.

What Have We Been Saving?

Clearing out a house forces us to confront what has accumulated. So does the spiritual life.

We accumulate more than physical possessions. We also accumulate memories, identities, loyalties, fears, grievances, ambitions, explanations, and unfinished arguments. Some deserve to be kept: gratitude for those who loved us, memories of sacrifices that allowed us to flourish, the wisdom of elders, the disciplines that sustain us, the stories that give us identity, and commitments that have been tested by time.

Other things may have remained in our interior storerooms long after they ceased to give life. We may preserve a resentment rehearsed for twenty years, a family conflict whose original cause no one clearly remembers, a shame imposed upon us by someone else, an image of God formed by fear rather than love, a political loyalty that now excuses behavior we would once have condemned, a prejudice inherited from our social environment, or a story in which we are always the innocent victim and someone else is always the villain.

We may keep these things because they feel familiar, and familiarity can easily be confused with value. Sometimes we hold onto pain because releasing it seems to deny that the injury occurred. We hold onto anger because it gives us a sense of strength. We preserve an old identity because we do not know who we would be without it.

But not everything we have carried deserves permanent storage. Some things need to be honored and then released. Some need repair. Some can be recycled into wisdom. Some simply belong in the trash.

Under-Valuing and Over-Valuing Our Lives

The process of sorting also reveals how easily human beings misjudge value. We tend to overvalue what is expensive, fashionable, prestigious, or publicly admired while undervaluing what is quiet, ordinary, relational, and difficult to measure.

We may give greater value to professional recognition than to friendship, to productivity than to rest, to being right than to reconciliation, to public visibility than to private integrity, or to the appearance of strength than to the courage required to admit uncertainty. We may place inherited traditions above the human beings those traditions were intended to serve.

We also undervalue parts of ourselves. A person may dismiss years spent caring for children or elderly relatives because that labor produced no impressive title. An immigrant may undervalue the courage required to leave one country and build a life in another. Someone who has endured suffering may see only damage, while God sees compassion, endurance, and wisdom being formed.

We may undervalue our wounds because we see them only as evidence of weakness. Yet wounds honestly faced can become sources of empathy. Failure can become humility, grief can deepen love, and a mistake can become the beginning of conversion.

Saint Paul tells us that “all things work for good for those who love God.” He does not say that all things are good. Abuse, injustice, betrayal, illness, exploitation, and death are not secretly blessings that we should pretend to enjoy.

Paul’s claim is more demanding and more hopeful: God can work through all things, even what is painful, so that we may be conformed to the image of Christ. God can use rocky soil, thorns, weeds, failures, and unfinished struggles. Nothing must be wasted when it is placed in the hands of grace.

Grace, however, does not merely preserve everything exactly as it is. Grace transforms. It separates what should be remembered from what should continue ruling us.

Examining the Net

Jesus then compares the Kingdom to a net thrown into the sea that gathers fish of every kind. The image reminds us of the wide reach of God’s grace. The net does not gather only one approved variety. It brings together people of different cultures, histories, social classes, political convictions, personalities, and levels of spiritual maturity.

The Church has never been a community of people who all arrived at the same stage of development. Some are sleeping, some are awakening, some are struggling to discern, some are integrating faith into daily life, and some are bearing extraordinary fruit for others. Our first responsibility is not to stand on the shore deciding who deserves to be caught in God’s net. Final judgment belongs to God.

The parable still calls us, however, to examine what we gather into our own hearts. What do we collect each day through our screens, conversations, habits, and emotional reactions? We may spend hours gathering outrage, suspicion, gossip, comparison, and fear. We may fill our minds with voices that profit by making us anxious or angry. We may repeatedly expose ourselves to contempt until contempt begins to feel like strength.

A listening heart must ask what we allowed into ourselves today and what effect it had upon us. Did it make us more truthful or more suspicious, more compassionate or more contemptuous, more courageous or more fearful? Did it make us more capable of encountering another person, or more determined to reduce others to categories?

Discernment is not censorship of reality. We must not protect ourselves from every difficult truth. But neither should we confuse constant agitation with moral seriousness. Some information helps us act responsibly; some merely occupies emotional space. Some needs careful examination, while some needs to be released before it makes us bitter, dishonest, or cruel.

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Both the New and the Old

At the conclusion of these parables, Jesus asks his disciples,

“Do you understand all these things?”

They answer confidently,

“Yes.”

We might smile at their certainty. They understand something, but they still have much to learn. So do we.

Jesus then says that every scribe instructed in the Kingdom is like the head of a household who brings from the storeroom “both the new and the old.” Mature faith does not throw away the past merely because it is old, nor does it reject the present merely because it is new.

A wise household examines its inheritance. Some old things are treasures: Scripture, prayer, sacrament, community, mercy, the dignity of conscience, concern for the poor, and the accumulated wisdom of generations. Other old things are simply old habits, shaped by social conditions that no longer exist or by prejudices, exclusions, and assumptions that need purification.

The same is true of the new. New knowledge can expose injustice, improve health, broaden participation, and create forms of communication and solidarity that earlier generations could not imagine. Other innovations merely accelerate distraction, consumption, surveillance, isolation, or manipulation.

The spiritual task is not to worship either the old or the new. It is to bring forward what gives life.

That is true for the Church, for families, and for democratic society. We must preserve the moral inheritance of human dignity, religious freedom, constitutional government, equal citizenship, responsibility, and the common good. Preserving an inheritance, however, does not mean pretending that previous generations always lived according to their own ideals.

A storeroom can contain treasure and clutter at the same time. Love of tradition does not require denial of history, and honest reform does not require contempt for everything inherited. The listening heart receives the past with gratitude, truthfulness, and moral courage.

The Spiritual Work of Clearing Space

The popularity of decluttering reflects something deeper than a desire for tidy closets. Many people feel overwhelmed by excess: too many possessions, obligations, messages, choices, subscriptions, opinions, and demands for attention.

Clearing space, however, is not merely about creating a visually attractive home. It can become a spiritual practice because it requires us to ask what occupies the central spaces of our lives, what we have stored away because we are afraid to examine it, and what beauty we may have forgotten. It invites us to consider which relationships need repair, which obligations no longer belong to us, which gifts we have undervalued because they came without prestige, and which things we preserve out of love rather than fear.

The goal is not a perfectly organized life. Human lives remain complicated. Wheat and weeds continue to grow together, and the net gathers fish of every kind.

The goal is to recognize the treasure. Once we recognize it, we can begin ordering everything else around it.

A Practice for the Week

Jesus’ school of parables offers us three practices for the coming week.

Begin each morning with Solomon’s prayer: “Lord, give me a listening heart.” Before checking messages, headlines, or social media, ask for the wisdom to recognize what truly matters.

During the day, ask, “What treasure am I organizing my life around?” Our calendars, spending, attention, and emotional energy often reveal our answer more honestly than our words.

At the end of the day, examine the net: “What did I gather into my heart today? What should I keep? What needs to be released?” The treasure may be an unexpected kindness, a difficult truth, a moment of prayer, or the awareness that God was present within an experience we initially considered ordinary.

The seed has been planted. Wheat and weeds are growing together. The treasure has been uncovered, the pearl has been found, and the net is being drawn toward the shore.

The question is no longer simply whether we have heard the parables. The question is whether we will allow them to reorganize our lives.

Imagine once more that dusty garage filled with forgotten boxes, worn-out furniture, and things that appear to have no value. Hidden among them may be a treasure waiting to be recognized.

Our lives can feel the same way—crowded with memories, mistakes, responsibilities, disappointments, habits, and unfinished struggles. Yet God is always at work within the ordinary clutter. With a listening heart, we begin to see what is worth keeping, what must be repaired, what can be released, and where grace has been hidden all along.

The Kingdom of heaven may be closer than we think. It may be waiting to be discovered in the very life we already have.

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In my latest essay, “From Grift to Glory,” I examine the psychology, spirituality, and civic danger of borrowed glory—and what happens when loyalty to a leader begins to replace citizenship, humility, and the rule of law.

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From Grift to Glory

The World Cup, the Trump trademark, and the politics of borrowed glory

Donald Trump did not win the World Cup.

He did not coach the Spanish team, score its winning goal, endure the bruising matches that brought Spain to the final, or carry the physical and emotional exhaustion of the tournament in his body. But when Spain defeated Argentina and received the trophy at the New York–New Jersey stadium, the president of the host nation seemed reluctant to leave the picture.

Trump had every reason to participate in the ceremony. The United States had welcomed the world. The tournament had given Americans an opportunity to experience the beauty of international competition and to extend hospitality to millions of visitors. A president could appropriately represent the pride of the host country, congratulate the finalists, present the trophy, and then step aside.

But stepping aside has never been Donald Trump’s instinct.

After presenting the trophy, he remained on the platform as the Spanish players prepared for the moment they had earned. FIFA President Gianni Infantino eventually encouraged him to move away. Trump’s lingering presence drew ridicule around the world and became one more instance in which an event that should have belonged to others was absorbed into the gravitational field of his personality.¹

The episode was not a constitutional crisis. No law was broken. No public funds were obviously stolen. Yet it offered a revealing little parable about power.

The good host enlarges the celebration for others.

The self-absorbed host converts the celebration into another photograph of himself.

This was a moment for Americans to be proud of hosting the World Cup. It was a moment to honor Spain, Argentina, and the international community that had gathered on our soil. It required a particular presidential virtue that we do not discuss enough: the gracious humility to leave the stage.

Trump could not—or would not—do it.

From Grift to Glory

In a previous essay, I proposed that G.R.I.F.T. had become a useful description of the moral universe of Trumpism: Grievance. Retribution. Impunity. Favoritism. Transaction.

Grievance supplies the emotional fuel. Retribution identifies the enemies. Impunity exempts the leader and his allies from ordinary accountability. Favoritism distributes the rewards. Transaction replaces public service with personal advantage.

I argued that grift is no longer merely a financial maneuver. It has become “a political style, a public theology, and a moral pedagogy.” It trains people to interpret exploitation as cleverness, shamelessness as courage, self-enrichment as vindication, and proximity to the powerful as proof of worth.²

But the World Cup scene reveals the next stage of the grift.

Trump does not want only the money attached to his name. He wants the glory attached to everything else.

The name that began as a commercial trademark is being transformed into a political icon. The icon is attached to buildings, government programs, currency, public institutions, international agreements, merchandise, digital tokens, and civic celebrations. The ultimate product is no longer a hotel, golf course, watch, Bible, fragrance, telephone, or cryptocurrency.

The ultimate product is Donald Trump himself.

What we are witnessing is not simply branding. It is an effort to create symbolic immortality—to ensure that the Trump name remains embedded in American public life long after Trump himself is gone.

He is building the monument before history has rendered its judgment.

The Name as a Business Model

For decades, Trump’s most valuable commercial asset was not necessarily a building or company. It was his surname.

The business model was elegantly simple: attach the Trump name to a hotel, condominium tower, golf course, necktie, steak, university, television program, or other product; promote it as an emblem of wealth and exclusivity; invest as little personal capital as possible; and collect licensing fees or profits from the association.

Reuters described the same model operating in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency enterprises. The family invested little or nothing in some ventures while lending the name, publicity, and political aura that made the products valuable. Reuters estimated that the family had made approximately $2.3 billion from four crypto ventures by the end of April 2026, while outside investors had collectively sustained an estimated $2.3 billion in losses, including paper losses. The $TRUMP meme coin alone produced an estimated $616 million for the family under Reuters’ analysis.³

That financial model is already troubling when practiced by a sitting president whose policies can affect the value of the assets from which his family profits.

But the more profound change occurs when the trademark crosses the boundary between private commerce and public government.

A hotel bearing the Trump name is a commercial property.

A government program bearing the president’s name is something else.

When the Trademark Becomes the Government

The Trump name has now been attached to an extraordinary range of public institutions and projects.

The federal prescription-drug platform is called TrumpRx.gov. New tax-advantaged investment accounts for children are officially called Trump Accounts. The U.S. Institute of Peace building received Trump’s name. His allies added it to the Kennedy Center, although a federal court later forced its removal. A new proposed class of battleships carries the Trump name. An international transit corridor negotiated between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been called the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.⁴

In Florida, Palm Beach International Airport was renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport, with plans to change its identifying airport code from PBI to DJT. Treasury announced that Trump’s signature would begin appearing on American paper currency, an unprecedented placement of a sitting president’s signature on the nation’s banknotes.⁵

The U.S. Mint has also moved forward with a commemorative dollar coin featuring Trump’s portrait. One proposed reverse design depicts him with a raised fist and the words “Fight, Fight, Fight.”⁶

Consider the symbolic accumulation:

His name on the airport.

His signature on the money.

His face on the coin.

His name on the children’s accounts.

His name on the prescription program.

His name on the peace institute.

His name proposed for cultural institutions, military vessels, transportation systems, stadiums, holidays, and government buildings.

Presidents have always wanted to be remembered. Political allies have always tried to honor leaders they admire. But democratic societies ordinarily allow history some distance. Airports, monuments, libraries, and public memorials are generally created after a presidency— and frequently after death. The passage of time permits citizens to separate accomplishment from propaganda and service from self-promotion.

Here, the memorialization is happening while the president remains alive, in power, financially active, and able to reward the people offering the tribute.

That changes the meaning of the honor.

Naming something after the president may no longer be merely an expression of gratitude. It can become a bid for access, recognition, favorable treatment, or protection.

The tribute communicates: We know what pleases the ruler.

The Politics of Borrowed Glory

The World Cup podium, the commemorative coin, the renamed airport, and the government programs all participate in the same political psychology.

Trump surrounds himself with symbols of achievement and absorbs their prestige.

The athletes win the championship, but he remains in the trophy photograph.

The country celebrates its 250th anniversary, but his face appears on the commemorative coin.

Taxpayers fund the government program, but the program carries his name.

The American people own the currency, but his signature personalizes it.

Generations built the nation’s institutions, but they become surfaces upon which his identity can be projected.

This is the politics of borrowed glory.

The successful leader does not merely preside over national achievement. He becomes its presumed source. Economic growth becomes his personal triumph. Military power becomes his strength. A sporting spectacle becomes his production. A peace agreement becomes his route. A children’s savings policy becomes his account. The state becomes an extension of the brand.

Political supporters then participate in the same symbolic economy by purchasing hats, coins, watches, sneakers, Bibles, fragrances, digital tokens, and other products bearing his image or name. These objects do more than generate revenue. They make allegiance visible.

The purchase says:

I belong to the movement.

I reject those who despise him.

His enemies are my enemies.

His success is our success.

His vindication is my vindication.

In my earlier essay, I called this grift as sacrament: an outward sign of inward loyalty, mediated through money. The Trump coin, hat, Bible, watch, rally ticket, dinner invitation, photograph, and digital token mark who has paid, defended, invested, and drawn near to the leader.

The marketplace becomes a congregation.

The brand becomes a creed.

The customer becomes a disciple.

What Is the Grip on People?

It would be intellectually lazy and morally condescending to explain Trump’s support by simply declaring millions of Americans stupid, brainwashed, or psychologically defective.

Trump’s appeal arises from real experiences: economic dislocation, cultural upheaval, institutional failure, religious anxiety, demographic change, class resentment, distrust of elites, and the justified belief that many political and economic systems have failed ordinary people.

But Trump does something distinctive with those experiences. He personalizes them.

He tells supporters that his humiliation is their humiliation, his persecution is their persecution, his enemies are their enemies, and his restoration will be their restoration. His legal problems become proof of the system’s hostility toward them. His wealth becomes evidence that he has defeated the people who look down upon them. His disregard for convention becomes their vicarious rebellion.

Social psychologists call one version of this phenomenon identity fusion: the boundary between the individual and the leader or group becomes unusually thin. Research conducted around the 2020 election and January 6 found that stronger identity fusion with Trump predicted a greater tendency to view Democrats as an existential threat and to support authoritarian measures against political opponents. Significantly, identification with the United States as a whole had the opposite relationship: it reduced support for authoritarian action.⁷

That distinction is essential.

Loyalty to a nation is not the same as loyalty to a leader.

A citizen can love the United States while criticizing its president.

A devotee experiences criticism of the leader as betrayal of the nation—and therefore as a personal attack.

Trump has repeatedly encouraged this fusion with one of his most effective political claims: They are not really coming after me. They are coming after you. I am simply standing in the way.

Once that claim is accepted, accountability becomes persecution. An investigation becomes martyrdom. A court judgment becomes an assault on the movement. A lost election becomes an impossible contradiction requiring a conspiracy to explain it.

And the more time, money, reputation, and emotional energy a person has invested in the movement, the harder it becomes to reconsider. Continued loyalty protects not only the leader but the supporter’s own identity.

The Loyalty Economy

Personality-centered government eventually produces an economy of tribute and reward.

Loyalty flows upward:

Money. Praise. Investments. Endorsements. Public defenses. Attacks against critics. Silence about misconduct. Corporate donations. Personal flattery.

Favors flow downward:

Appointments. Pardons. Contracts. Regulatory relief. Access. Public praise. Protection. Invitations. Exemptions. Government recognition.

This is why the Trump trademark cannot be separated from the Trump presidency. A person or company seeking favorable treatment does not always need an explicit promise. The entire political culture teaches everyone what the leader values.

Praise his greatness. Use his name.

Purchase the product. Invest in the venture.

Donate to the project. Attend the dinner.

Defend the grievance. Attack the enemy.

Perhaps the ruler will remember you.

The ancient court received tribute in gold, land, jewels, and livestock. The contemporary court receives it through tokens, licensing agreements, subscriptions, digital assets, corporate donations, branded projects, and purchases that increase the value of family-controlled enterprises.

The technology is new.

The moral arrangement is ancient.

Not Stalin— but Not Normal

Comparisons with Stalin, Mao Zedong, the Kim dynasty of North Korea, or the supreme leaders of Iran require care.

The United States is not the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, or revolutionary Iran. American citizens are not compelled to display Trump’s portrait in their homes. Opposition parties, independent courts, journalists, civic organizations, universities, churches, and elections continue to exist. The terror, censorship, imprisonment, forced conformity, and violence associated with totalitarian regimes are categorically different.

But avoiding false equivalence does not require us to ignore recognizable patterns.

Personality cults typically portray the leader as father, protector, genius, savior, or embodiment of the nation. His judgments acquire an aura of infallibility. Failures are blamed on saboteurs from the “deep state.” Dissent becomes disloyalty. Official history is rewritten around his accomplishments. Portraits, quotations, monuments, ceremonies, and public rituals keep his presence constantly before the people.

Mao’s personality cult acquired explicitly religious characteristics during the Cultural Revolution, with his image and Little Red Book functioning as objects of mass political devotion. North Korea’s dynasty has been sustained through mandatory portraits, monuments, sacred family mythology, and hereditary succession from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un. Iran’s supreme leader occupies a different religious and constitutional structure, but the system similarly concentrates enormous political, military, judicial, and symbolic authority in an individual treated publicly with obligatory deference.[8]

Trump’s emerging version remains distinctly American: commercial, televisual, digital, participatory, and consumer-driven.

Mao had the Little Red Book.

The Kim dynasty has household portraits.

Trump has Truth Social, rallies, hats, watches, Bibles, meme coins, fragrances, government websites, currency, licensing agreements, and family businesses.

The Trump system does not merely demand loyalty.

It sells loyalty back to the follower as a product.

Idolatry Without a Golden Statue

As a priest, I hesitate to use the word idolatry casually. It is too serious to become another political insult.

But idolatry is not limited to bowing before a statue. Biblically, it occurs whenever something finite receives the obedience, trust, sacrifice, moral exemption, or ultimate loyalty that belongs only to God.

Political idolatry begins when the leader becomes the source of truth; when his appetites become the movement’s priorities; when his enemies become God’s enemies; when his success is treated as evidence of righteousness; and when commandments applied to ordinary people no longer apply to him.

This is what I mean by the functional self-deification of Donald Trump.

He does not need to declare himself divine. The deification occurs through a relationship between the leader and his followers.

He continually places himself at the center. They reinforce the placement.

He offers the image. They purchase it.

He claims persecution. They call him a martyr.

He claims unique greatness. They build the monuments.

He violates a moral norm. They create a theological exemption.

He seeks glory. They tell him the glory is deserved.

The Bible contains an old warning about this temptation. The people at Babel say, “Let us make a name for ourselves.” Their project is not merely architectural. It is an attempt to create permanence through concentrated power and monumental self-assertion.

Trump’s lifelong project has been precisely the making of a name.

The proposed Trump coin offers another biblical image. When Jesus is shown a Roman coin, he asks, “Whose image is this, and whose inscription?” The coin bears Caesar’s face. Jesus then draws a boundary between what belongs to political authority and what belongs to God.

That boundary protects both faith and freedom.

No president owns the nation. No political leader owns our conscience. No party possesses God. No ruler’s face, name, signature, wealth, charisma, or grievance should become the measure of truth.

The spiritual problem begins when Caesar no longer wants only the coin.

He wants the devotion.

A Republic Needs People Who Can Leave the Stage

The deepest danger is not that Donald Trump enjoys applause. Most politicians do.

The danger is the moral system formed around that appetite.

When loyalty replaces law, institutions become instruments of favoritism. When citizenship becomes fandom, supporters stop evaluating the leader and begin defending the star. When public spaces become branding opportunities, the commonwealth is treated as personal property. When the leader’s financial success becomes inseparable from his political authority, tribute and policy become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

And when a leader cannot leave the stage, no one else’s achievement is safe from appropriation.

A liberal democracy requires a very different understanding of greatness.

George Washington established his greatness not only by exercising power but by surrendering it. Abraham Lincoln’s greatness did not depend upon attaching his name to every institution of the Union. The most worthy public servants understand that they temporarily hold an office belonging to the people. They do not confuse stewardship with possession.

The World Cup ceremony should have been simple.

Welcome the world.

Honor the competitors.

Congratulate Spain.

Present the trophy.

Step aside.

That final gesture would not have diminished the president. It would have enlarged him.

But humility cannot be branded, monetized, inherited, or imposed. It arises from the knowledge that the world does not revolve around us—that another person’s achievement does not threaten our importance, that public service is not personal ownership, and that history will judge us without our permission.

Donald Trump remained on the World Cup stage because the stage has become his preferred image of America: everyone else may perform, compete, sacrifice, and win, but the final picture must still include him.

The question for the country is not simply why he refuses to leave.

The question is why so many Americans continue to build the stage, purchase the merchandise, repeat the claims, excuse the conduct, and applaud the man who insists that every celebration, institution, grievance, victory, and national symbol must eventually bear his name.

A republic cannot belong to one man.

And a free people must never forget how to tell the president:

The trophy is not yours.

The country is not your brand.

The stage belongs to all of us.

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Notes

1. Spain defeated Argentina 1–0 in the July 19, 2026, World Cup final. Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino were booed as they entered for the presentation ceremony, and Trump remained with the Spanish players as they prepared to lift the trophy. (Reuters)

2. Joseph Palacios, “GRIFT: Grievance. Retribution. Impunity. Favoritism. Transaction,” Common Sense Liberalism, May 19, 2026. (The Sensible Liberal)

3. Reuters estimated that Trump family crypto ventures generated approximately $2.3 billion for the family while outside investors incurred approximately $2.3 billion in realized and unrealized losses through April 2026. The Trump family and associated ventures disputed or declined to validate elements of Reuters’ methodology. (Reuters)

4. The naming efforts have included the Kennedy Center, Institute of Peace, Trump Accounts, TrumpRx, a proposed class of battleships, a “Gold Card” visa, and an international transportation corridor. (AP News)

5. Florida approved renaming Palm Beach International Airport for Trump. Reuters also reported Treasury’s plan to place Trump’s signature on paper currency, making him the first sitting president to sign American banknotes. (Reuters)

6. Treasury announced a commemorative dollar coin bearing Trump’s image, including a proposed design depicting his raised fist and the words “Fight, Fight, Fight.” (Reuters)

7. Francois Alexi Martel et al. found that identity fusion with Trump predicted perceptions of Democrats as an existential threat and support for authoritarian actions, while fusion with the United States predicted lower support for such actions. (UT Psychology Labs)

8. The Library of Congress describes Mao’s personality cult during the Cultural Revolution as taking on a religious character. The Associated Press describes leader portraits as central to North Korea’s state-sponsored personality cult and dynastic rule. The Iran Primer describes the supreme leader as exercising direct or indirect control across Iran’s government, military, judiciary, and media. (The Library of Congress)

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The Sunday Mass Readings (July 19, 2026)

• First Reading (Wisdom 12:13, 16-19)

• Responsorial Psalm (Psalm 86)

• Second Reading (Romans 8:26-27)

• Gospel (Matthew 13:24-43)

Last Sunday, the parable of the sower asked us: What kind of ground are we becoming?

This Sunday, Jesus takes us deeper into the field — where wheat and weeds grow together, mustard seeds begin small, yeast works invisibly, and God teaches us patience, discernment, and stewardship.

Even in the concrete and traffic of urban society, creation still has something to teach us about grace.

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Common Sense Sundays is an expanded reflection based on homilies I preach at St. Agatha Catholic Church in Los Angeles where I am Resident Priest. This Sunday, July 19th, you can experience the worship and my homily at St. Agatha Parish at the 8:30am PDT Spanish Mass on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Stagathas

Can We Still Learn from a Field?

Wheat, weeds, mustard seeds, yeast, and the patient work of becoming good stewards

One of the challenges of preaching Jesus’ parables to educated, urban people is that many of us no longer live close to the world Jesus used to teach.

We may understand data systems, schedules, budgets, meetings, emails, traffic patterns, school applications, immigration paperwork, parish bulletins, apps, passwords, and algorithms. We know how to survive a city. We know how to navigate freeways, bureaucracy, social media, and the emotional geography of modern life.

But many of us do not know wheat.

We do not know the patience of a field.

We do not know what it means to wait for rain, watch soil, protect seedlings, recognize weeds, prune carefully, harvest at the right time, or trust that hidden life is growing beneath the surface.

Some people in our communities do know this deeply. Many immigrants from Mexico and Central America grew up closer to land, fields, gardens, farms, animals, rain, drought, and harvest. They understand in their bodies what seed, soil, patience, and fruitfulness mean. But many of us living in Los Angeles inhabit an urban world where creation is mediated through supermarkets, delivery apps, landscaped medians, small yards, parks, and potted plants on apartment balconies.

This distance matters.

Jesus’ parables assume that spiritual wisdom can be learned from creation. A seed is not just a seed. Soil is not just soil. Yeast is not just yeast. A field is not just a field. These are not decorative images. They are windows into how God works.

Last Sunday, the Gospel of the sower asked us: What kind of ground are we becoming? We reflected on five stages of spiritual growth — seed not yet received, hard path, rocky ground, thorns, and rich soil. The central question was not simply whether God is generous. God is generous. The seed is always being sown. The question was whether we are placing ourselves where grace can take root.

This Sunday continues that lesson.

Now Jesus asks what happens after the seed begins to grow.

The Word has landed. Something is alive. Wheat is growing. But weeds are growing too.

And that is where Christian maturity begins.

The spiritual discipline of not rushing the harvest

In the Gospel for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Jesus tells the parable of a man who sows good seed in his field. While everyone is asleep, an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. When the crop begins to grow, the servants notice the weeds and ask the question any of us might ask: “Do you want us to go and pull them up?”

The owner says no.

“Let them grow together until harvest.”¹

That answer is frustrating.

Most of us want moral clarity sooner than that. We want the weeds removed. We want the problem fixed. We want the field cleaned up. We want the evil named, separated, punished, and gone. And there are situations where justice does require immediate protection: abuse must be stopped, exploitation confronted, corruption exposed, violence restrained, and the vulnerable defended.

But Jesus is teaching something more subtle than passivity.

He is teaching the difference between discernment and rash judgment.

The servants want to pull the weeds immediately. But the owner knows that premature zeal can damage the wheat. In trying to eliminate evil too quickly, they may uproot what is good.

That is a hard lesson for religious people.

It is also a hard lesson for political people.

It is easy to become so certain that we know who the weeds are that we start pulling up wheat. We misjudge people. We reduce them to one mistake, one political opinion, one past failure, one identity, one wound, one moment of immaturity, one label. We become gardeners of purity rather than servants of the harvest.

Jesus does not deny the existence of weeds. He is not naïve about evil. But he warns us against imagining that we always know how to separate wheat from weeds before the proper time.

There is a humility here that our culture desperately needs.

Modern urban parables

So how might urban people hear this parable today?

Think of a city sidewalk where weeds push through cracks in the concrete. The city tries to pave everything over, but life keeps emerging. Some growth is beautiful. Some is invasive. Some is hard to classify. The problem is not solved by pouring more concrete over everything. The deeper question is: What kind of environment are we creating?

Think of a public school classroom. A teacher sees distraction, anxiety, anger, gifts, trauma, intelligence, immaturity, resilience, and fear all growing together in the same students. If the teacher labels children too quickly — good kid, bad kid, gifted kid, problem kid — something gets uprooted. Education requires patience because children are not finished products.

Think of a family group text. A careless comment can grow like a weed. A word of encouragement can grow like wheat. Silence can be a seed. Resentment can be a seed. Forgiveness can be a seed. What grows depends partly on what we keep feeding.

Think of social media. Algorithms do not usually cultivate patience, mercy, truth, or discernment. They reward outrage, speed, contempt, tribal certainty, and emotional reaction. In that digital field, weeds spread quickly. But wheat can grow there too: truth-telling, solidarity, learning, prayer, humor, beauty, and support. The question is whether we are discerning what we are planting, sharing, and feeding.

Think of a neighborhood. A vacant lot can become a dumping ground or a community garden. A parish hall can become an empty building or a place where cultures meet. A street corner can become a site of fear or a place of organizing. Cities are fields. Institutions are fields. Families are fields. Digital spaces are fields. Our hearts are fields.

Think of our political culture. If people, especially political leaders, deliberately sow doubt about election processes and results, the doubt grows like weeds to strangle truth, decrease voting, and ultimately poison the soil of democracy.

Jesus’ agricultural parables are not outdated.

They are asking us to recover the kind of attention modern life often destroys.

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Power that is patient

The first reading from Wisdom gives us the theological foundation for this patience. God’s power is not domination. God’s might is expressed in justice, clemency, lenience, and mercy. Wisdom says that God teaches the just that they must be kind and gives God’s children “good ground for hope” because God permits repentance for sins.²

That phrase is beautiful: good ground for hope.

Hope needs ground too.

If God judged us as quickly as we judge one another, who could stand? If God uprooted everything in us that was not yet holy, what would remain? If God treated every weed in our hearts as the whole truth of who we are, we would have no future.

But God’s power is patient because God sees the whole field.

God sees the wheat that is still fragile.

God sees the weeds that are dangerous.

God sees what needs pruning, what needs time, what needs protection, what needs conversion, and what must finally be judged.

This is not permissiveness. It is divine wisdom.

The psalm gives the same vision: “Lord, you are good and forgiving.” God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and fidelity.”³

That is how God governs.

Not with panic.

Not with impulsive rage.

Not with contempt.

Not with the desire to destroy.

God governs with justice joined to mercy.

If that is how God treats us, then Christians must be very careful about how we treat others.

When we do not know how to pray

Saint Paul adds another important insight. In Romans, he says that the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness, because “we do not know how to pray as we ought.” The Spirit intercedes with inexpressible groanings.⁴

That line is deeply comforting.

We often do not know how to pray about the field in which we live.

We do not know how to pray about a divided country.

We do not know how to pray about climate change, immigration, political cruelty, war, poverty, artificial intelligence, loneliness, schools, families, young people, addiction, homelessness, and violence.

We do not know how to pray about the weeds in others.

We do not know how to pray about the weeds in ourselves.

Sometimes our prayers are too angry. Sometimes too timid. Sometimes too vague. Sometimes too ideological. Sometimes too self-protective. Sometimes we ask God to remove someone else’s weeds while protecting our own.

Paul says the Spirit helps us in that weakness.

The Spirit prays beneath our words. The Spirit groans within us. The Spirit teaches us to wait, discern, hope, repent, and act without pretending to be God.

That is crucial for public life.

Last week’s reflection on good soil asked where grace can take root. This week’s reflection on wheat and weeds asks whether we can become people who act without panic, judge without cruelty, wait without indifference, and trust without naiveté.

That is not easy.

It requires the Spirit.

Mustard seeds and urban impatience

Jesus does not stop with wheat and weeds. He gives two more parables.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed — tiny, almost invisible, easy to dismiss. Yet when it grows, it becomes large enough for birds to dwell in its branches.⁵

Urban life trains us to look for scale: big numbers, big platforms, big donors, big institutions, big followings, big headlines, big crises, big solutions. We are tempted to believe that only what is large can matter.

Jesus says the kingdom often begins small.

• A conversation.

• A habit.

• A child learning to pray.

• A young person discovering vocation.

• A parish ministry beginning with three volunteers.

• A family deciding to eat one meal without phones.

• A neighborhood cleanup.

• A citizenship class.

• A small garden behind a church.

• A teacher who refuses to give up on a student.

• A parish that learns to sing in more than one language.

• A voter who refuses cynicism.

• A citizen who asks better questions.

• A person who chooses not to forward the cruel post.

• A sinner who says, “I need to change.”

The mustard seed is not impressive at first. But it contains a future.

That is one of the great mistakes of our time: we underestimate small faithful things because they do not look powerful.

But the kingdom is not built only by spectacle. It grows by hidden fidelity.

Yeast and the hidden work of transformation

Then Jesus says the kingdom is like yeast that a woman mixes with flour until the whole batch is leavened.⁶

This may be the most urban-friendly parable because many of us understand bread better than wheat. Even in cities, people know bakeries. We know sourdough starters, pan dulce, tortillas, pizza dough, communion bread, dinner rolls, and the smell of bread rising.

Yeast works quietly.

It disappears into the dough. It does not dominate from outside. It transforms from within.

That is how grace often works.

• A person becomes gentler over time.

• A parish becomes more welcoming through repeated practice.

• A family becomes more honest after years of hard conversations.

• A community becomes more just because people keep showing up.

• A nation becomes more democratic when citizens learn habits of participation.

• A culture becomes more merciful when enough people refuse cruelty.

This is slow work.

But yeast teaches us that hidden work can change the whole.

That is a needed lesson in a culture addicted to visibility. If it is not posted, did it matter? If it did not trend, did it count? If no one applauded, did it change anything?

Jesus says yes.

The hidden work of grace matters.

Creation as teacher, not backdrop

All of these parables assume that creation teaches.

This is where Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ becomes so important. Francis opened the encyclical by reminding us, through Saint Francis of Assisi, that our common home is like a sister and mother who sustains us. But he also warned that the earth now cries out because of the harm we have inflicted by irresponsible use and abuse of the goods God has given us. He explicitly connected the earth’s suffering to Saint Paul’s language that creation “groans in travail.”⁷

This is not sentimental nature language.

It is a theological claim.

Creation is not raw material for our consumption. It is God’s gift. It is our common home. It is the field in which human life, social life, spiritual life, and moral life grow together.

If we forget how to read creation, we also forget how to read the parables.

If we no longer know what soil, seeds, weeds, birds, yeast, water, harvest, and groaning creation mean, we lose part of Jesus’ vocabulary.

And if we treat the earth as disposable, we eventually treat people as disposable too.

That is why Francis insisted that the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor belong together. In Laudate Deum, he returned to the climate crisis with urgency, saying that our responses had not been adequate and warning that the world in which we live “is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.” He also emphasized that climate change is a global social issue related to the dignity of human life, especially because its effects are borne by the most vulnerable.⁸

This is where creation stewardship becomes discipleship.

To care for creation is not to adopt a fashionable cause. It is to receive the world as God’s field and to ask what we are planting in it.

Pope Leo and stewardship in a technological age

Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas is not primarily an ecological encyclical. It addresses the safeguarding of the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. But its vision belongs within the same Catholic social tradition. Pope Leo writes that the Church’s social doctrine is a living reality, in dialogue with history, cultures, and the sciences, while holding to core truths. He calls believers to rediscover the principles of the common good, universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice in the concrete realities of daily life, work, family, and society.⁹

That matters for this Sunday’s parables.

Today the “field” is not only agricultural. It is also technological, economic, ecological, educational, political, and digital.

Artificial intelligence is a field.

Social media is a field.

Schools are fields.

Markets are fields.

Immigration systems are fields.

Neighborhoods are fields.

Parishes are fields.

The earth itself remains the field.

Pope Leo reminds us that the human person is created for relationship — with God, with others, and with creation.¹⁰ That means stewardship today cannot be reduced to recycling, though recycling may matter. It cannot be reduced to planting trees, though trees matter. It cannot be reduced to climate policy, though policy matters. Stewardship is a whole way of living in relationship with God’s world.

It asks: What kind of human beings are our systems cultivating?

Good stewardship in the city

For urban people, stewardship has to become concrete.

We may not own fields, but we still live in God’s world.

We can notice the heat in neighborhoods without trees. We can notice children with asthma near freeways. We can notice who has access to parks and who does not. We can notice food deserts, unsafe sidewalks, polluted air, unaffordable housing, and the exhaustion of workers who travel long distances because they cannot live near their jobs.

We can notice how many people in our cities are surrounded by beauty and still cut off from creation when the people remember that their cities are still part of creation— living organisms.

Wheat and weeds in ourselves

The parable also asks us to look inward.

It is tempting to assign roles too quickly.

The wheat is us.

The weeds are them.

But Jesus’ parable becomes spiritually dangerous if we use it only to classify other people.

The more honest reading is this: wheat and weeds are growing in me.

Faith and fear.

Compassion and resentment.

Generosity and control.

Patience and irritation.

Hope and cynicism.

Courage and cowardice.

Love of God and love of being right.

Care for creation and habits of waste.

Concern for justice and contempt for opponents.

A desire to serve and a desire to be praised.

That is why God’s patience is such good news.

God does not give up on us while the field is still growing. God gives good ground for hope. God sends the Spirit to help our weakness. God plants mustard seeds of conversion. God hides yeast in the dough of our ordinary life.

From soil to stewardship

The movement from last Sunday to this Sunday is important.

Last week: What kind of ground are we becoming?

This week: What kind of field are we cultivating?

The first question is personal and spiritual. The second becomes communal, ecological, and civic.

It is not enough to ask whether grace can take root in my heart. We also have to ask whether we are creating conditions where grace can take root in families, parishes, schools, neighborhoods, civic life, technology, and creation itself.

This is where Common Sense Sundays becomes more than devotional reflection. It becomes a moral way of seeing the world.

Trusting the time of God

The most difficult part of the parable may be the waiting.

“Let them grow together until harvest.”

We do not like that.

We want quick solutions. Quick judgments. Quick purifications. Quick victories. Quick reforms. Quick punishments. Quick growth. Quick healing.

But God often works through time.

This does not mean we ignore evil. It does not mean we leave injustice alone. It means we act with discernment rather than panic. It means we do not confuse our impatience with God’s justice. It means we protect the wheat while resisting the weeds. It means we trust that the harvest belongs to God.

This is hard in public life. It is hard in family life. It is hard in parish life. It is hard in our own spiritual lives.

But maybe that is why Jesus gives us three images at once: wheat and weeds, mustard seed, yeast.

The wheat and weeds teach patience.

The mustard seed teaches trust in small beginnings.

The yeast teaches confidence in hidden transformation.

Together they tell us how God works.

Becoming stewards of the field

So this week, perhaps we can ask a few simple questions.

Where am I too quick to uproot?

Where do I need more patience?

What small seed is God asking me to trust?

What hidden grace is already leavening my life?

What weeds are choking my capacity for love?

The parables of Jesus are not rural nostalgia. They are spiritual realism.

They teach us that life grows slowly, that judgment belongs to God, that small beginnings matter, that hidden grace changes everything, and that creation itself is one of God’s great teachers.

We may be urban people. We may live among concrete, traffic, apartments, screens, and schedules. But we are still creatures. We still depend on soil, water, air, bread, trees, seeds, farmers, laborers, and the mercy of God.

The field is still the world.

Christ is still sowing.

The Spirit is still groaning.

The kingdom is still growing.

And the harvest God desires is a creation renewed through mercy, patience, justice, stewardship, and love.

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Endnotes

1. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 19, 2026,” USCCB Daily Readings, accessed July 15, 2026, https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071926.cfm.

2. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 19, 2026.”

3. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 19, 2026.”

4. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 19, 2026.”

5. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 19, 2026.”

6. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 19, 2026.”

7. Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Vatican, May 24, 2015, nos. 1–2, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.

8. Francis, Laudate Deum: To All People of Good Will on the Climate Crisis, Vatican, October 4, 2023, nos. 1–4, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20231004-laudate-deum.html.

9. Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Vatican, May 15, 2026, nos. 46–47, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html.

10. Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 50.

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Maybe the problem is not just “the swamp.” Maybe our politics has become a sewer where both sides excuse dishonesty, corruption, cruelty, and misconduct whenever the candidate helps them win.

Liberal democracy does not need perfect politicians. But it does need standards: truth, accountability, respect for law, and the moral courage to say some victories cost too much.

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Why we keep getting horrible politicians — and what standards liberal democracy requires

Every so often, American politics forces us to ask a question we would rather avoid:

Are we getting the politicians we deserve?

That question sounds harsh. It can even sound anti-democratic. Voters are not stupid. Many vote under difficult conditions with imperfect information, limited choices, partisan pressure, cultural fear, economic anxiety, religious identity, and a political system that often gives them little more than a bad choice and a worse one.

Still, the question remains.

Why do so many deeply flawed candidates keep rising to power?

Why do parties keep nominating people whose private conduct, public dishonesty, abuse of power, corruption, cruelty, sexual misconduct, or contempt for law would disqualify them from many other professions?

Why do voters, clergy, activists, donors, commentators, and party leaders so often respond with the same exhausted line: “Well, everyone does it”?

That sentence may be the most dangerous moral anesthetic in American public life.

“Everyone does it” does not cleanse corruption. It normalizes it.

“Everyone does it” does not defend democracy. It poisons it.

“Everyone does it” does not produce better leaders. It tells ambitious people that the only real standard is whether they can survive the scandal and still help the tribe win.

We say Washington is a swamp. But sometimes the problem is not merely swamp water — murky, stagnant, self-serving, full of hidden creatures. Sometimes the problem is worse. Sometimes politics begins to feel like a sewer: a system that absorbs moral waste, routes it efficiently, and then asks us to call the smell realism.

The deeper question is whether liberal democracy can survive when both sides abandon standards whenever standards become inconvenient.

The beginning of moral accommodation

This essay is not an argument that divorced people cannot serve in public office. It is not an argument that people who have sinned, failed, repented, paid consequences, changed, or rebuilt their lives should be permanently excluded from civic leadership.

Such a view would be both unchristian and undemocratic.

Human beings are complicated. Marriages fail. People make mistakes. Lives unfold across decades. Moral judgment requires context, humility, evidence, proportion, and mercy.

But mercy is not the same thing as moral indifference.

Redemption is not the same thing as public entitlement.

Forgiveness is not the same thing as handing someone power over others.

The modern American story of moral accommodation in politics did not begin with Donald Trump. It developed gradually, across parties, religious communities, media systems, and cultural changes.

Ronald Reagan was the first divorced president of the United States. His divorce from Jane Wyman and later marriage to Nancy Reagan did not prevent conservative Christians from embracing him as a champion of family values, anti-communism, patriotism, and moral renewal.¹ That support did not necessarily mean hypocrisy. Many Christians believed Reagan represented broader cultural and political goods. They could distinguish personal marital history from governing philosophy.

But something shifted. The older assumption that a president’s personal life symbolized public moral order began to loosen — especially when the candidate served the movement’s larger goals.

That loosening deepened under Bill Clinton.

Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky was not simply a private sexual failure. It involved a president and a much younger White House intern; it unfolded inside a workplace marked by enormous power inequality; and it led to sworn testimony, alleged obstruction, impeachment, and a national debate over whether private sexual misconduct could become a public constitutional matter.²

Many liberals who would normally take sexual harassment, workplace power imbalance, and perjury seriously minimized the scandal because they believed Clinton was governing well, protecting liberal achievements, and being pursued by partisan enemies.

Some conservatives who had spent years defending moral character suddenly became constitutional purists. Some liberals who had spent years defending women’s rights became situational ethicists.

The lesson many politicians learned was clear: if you are useful enough to your side, people will find a way to explain you.

Then came Donald Trump.

Trump did not merely test the boundaries of public morality. He shattered them. Two divorces. Three marriages. Public infidelities. The Access Hollywood recording. Allegations of sexual misconduct. A jury finding him liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, later upheld on appeal.³ A separate $83 million defamation verdict.⁴ A criminal conviction in New York on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.⁵

And yet large portions of conservative Christianity not only tolerated him but transformed him into an instrument of providence.

The language shifted from “character matters” to “God uses imperfect vessels.” That statement is theologically true in one sense. God does use imperfect people. But when applied selectively, it becomes an alibi for power. It allows Christians to excuse in their champion what they would condemn in their opponent.

That is not biblical realism.

It is political idolatry.

Conservative Christian contradictions

The contradiction among many conservative Christians is not that they support imperfect candidates. Everyone supports imperfect candidates.

The contradiction is that they often claim to hold a literal, high-authority, morally demanding reading of Scripture — especially regarding sexuality, family, marriage, gender, and personal responsibility — while applying a highly flexible, situational morality when their own political power is at stake.

Faith and morality are preached.

Power and outcomes govern.

The Bible is read literally for opponents.

Mercy, context, and “larger purposes” are invoked for allies.

This is not only about Trump. The pattern repeats.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, was impeached by the Republican-controlled Texas House in 2023 on articles alleging corruption, bribery, and abuse of office. He was acquitted by the Texas Senate, but the allegations centered on misuse of office to benefit a donor and included an extramarital affair that became entangled with the broader abuse-of-power claims.⁶ In 2025, the Justice Department declined to prosecute him federally, reportedly because career officials had concerns about securing a conviction.⁷ But the political reality remains: serious allegations did not end his career. They became part of his brand as a fighter against enemies.

For conservative Christians who once treated marital fidelity, truthfulness, and public integrity as sacred public concerns, this is a moral crisis.

A movement cannot claim to defend biblical morality while repeatedly excusing adultery, cruelty, corruption, lying, sexual misconduct, and abuse of power whenever the offender votes correctly or fights the right enemies.

The problem is not that sinners enter politics.

The problem is that sin becomes politically useful.

Liberal contradictions

Liberals have their own contradictions.

Many liberals support laws and institutional standards around sexual harassment, discrimination, workplace abuse, civil rights, transparency, and equal treatment. They argue — rightly — that power differentials matter, that institutions must protect vulnerable people, that private conduct can reveal public risk, and that no one should be above accountability because of status.

But when an election feels existential, some liberals quietly shift standards.

Suddenly due process becomes delay.

Vetting becomes establishment sabotage.

Character concerns become distractions.

Sexual misconduct allegations become “complicated.”

Financial dishonesty becomes “opposition research.”

A questionable candidate becomes acceptable because the alternative is worse.

The Graham Platner situation in Maine is a warning. Platner, a military veteran and oyster farmer, became a progressive Democratic Senate candidate with significant enthusiasm behind him. is campaign had already weathered controversies involving a tattoo recognized as a Nazi symbol, years-old online posts dismissive of sexual assault and appearing to endorse political violence, and reports about sexually explicit messages while married and a physical confrontation with a former girlfriend. Then a sexual assault allegation emerged; Platner denied it as “categorically false,” but he announced plans to withdraw after major supporters pulled back.⁸

The point is not to declare Platner guilty of an allegation he denies. The point is to ask why red flags were rationalized for so long.

If liberals believe institutions must take patterns of misconduct seriously, then that principle cannot disappear when a candidate has the right economic message, the right populist appeal, the right anti-establishment posture, or the right chance to defeat a Republican.

The liberal contradiction is this: we demand impartial application of law and institutional standards, but under political stress we fall into our own version of situation ethics.

The right says, “He fights.”

The left says, “The stakes are too high.”

Both can become excuses for moral collapse.

The result: power becomes the only standard

When both sides excuse misconduct for power, several things happen.

First, candidates become beholden to those who protected them.

If party leaders, donors, media allies, clergy, activists, or influencers helped a candidate survive scandal, that candidate learns who really matters. Public accountability weakens. Loyalty networks strengthen.

Second, cynicism becomes common sense.

People stop asking whether a candidate is honest, disciplined, trustworthy, or fit for office. They ask only whether the candidate can win. They assume everyone is corrupt, so corruption becomes less disqualifying. Politics becomes not the pursuit of the common good but the management of mutual blackmail.

Third, institutions lose trust.

Gallup’s 2025 honesty and ethics ratings found that members of Congress remained near the bottom of professions measured, with only 7 percent of Americans rating them high or very high for honesty and ethical standards.⁹ That is not just a public relations problem. Liberal democracy depends on the possibility that citizens can trust some people, some procedures, some norms, and some offices some of the time.

Fourth, shame disappears.

Shame can be misused. It can be cruel, hypocritical, and socially destructive. But a healthy democracy needs some form of moral embarrassment. It needs the ability to say: this conduct is beneath the office; this pattern cannot be ignored; this behavior disqualifies a person from asking for public trust.

A shameless politics becomes a sewer because nothing is too foul to process.

Other professions have standards

This is where politics differs dramatically from many other professions.

Doctors can lose their licenses for unprofessional conduct, felony convictions, fraud, sexual misconduct, substance abuse, or incompetence. Medical boards can suspend, restrict, or revoke licenses.¹⁰ Teachers can be investigated for misconduct and face adverse action against their credentials.¹¹ Pilots must meet ongoing medical and safety standards. Clergy — painfully and belatedly, after grave institutional failure — are now subject to removal from ministry for established or admitted sexual abuse of a minor under Catholic norms.¹²

These standards are not perfect. Professional discipline can be inconsistent, biased, bureaucratic, or too slow. Institutions often protect themselves before victims. The Catholic Church knows this failure painfully.

But the principle is clear: some roles require trust before they require talent.

A brilliant doctor who abuses patients should not practice medicine.

A charismatic teacher who exploits students should not teach.

A skilled pilot who cannot meet safety standards should not fly.

A priest who abuses minors should not minister.

Why should politics — the profession that writes laws, commands armies, taxes citizens, regulates workplaces, confirms judges, controls budgets, and shapes the moral atmosphere of the country — have lower moral expectations than almost every other field?

The usual answer is: let the voters decide.

That answer is important, but insufficient.

Voters should decide among qualified candidates. They should not be forced to choose between scandals that parties failed to vet, donors decided to fund, media figures turned into entertainment, and activists excused because “the other side is worse.”

Democracy requires voter choice.

But democracy also requires gatekeeping.

Not authoritarian gatekeeping. Not ideological censorship. Not preventing outsiders from running. But serious institutional responsibility by parties, donors, endorsers, clergy, unions, advocacy groups, editorial boards, and civic organizations.

Before a candidate reaches the ballot as a major party nominee, many people have already made decisions. They recruited. Funded. Endorsed. Protected. Rationalized. Minimized. Attacked critics. Framed questions as conspiracies.

By the time voters face the choice, much moral damage has already been done.

The Constitution sets a floor, not a ceiling

The U.S. Constitution sets very few qualifications for federal office. A House member must be at least 25, a citizen for seven years, and an inhabitant of the state. The House historian notes that the Constitution placed “notably few hurdles” between ordinary citizens and membership in the House because the founders wanted it close to the people.¹³ The presidency likewise requires only that a person be a natural-born citizen, at least 35 years old, and a U.S. resident for 14 years.¹⁴

That openness is democratic. It rejects property tests, religious tests, aristocratic pedigree, and professional monopolies.

But constitutional eligibility is not moral suitability.

A person may be legally eligible and still ethically unfit.

A person may have the right age, citizenship, and residency while lacking honesty, self-control, respect for law, reverence for persons, or the capacity to hold power without abusing it.

That distinction is crucial.

The Constitution tells us who may run.

Democratic culture must decide whom we should trust.

State systems sometimes recognize this more clearly. The National Conference of State Legislatures notes that ethics and corruption laws vary widely, but some states provide forfeiture of office or disqualification from future office for certain felonies, bribery, malfeasance, or legislative-power offenses.¹⁵ California law similarly provides that conviction of designated crimes can disqualify a person from holding state office.¹⁶ Other democracies go further: Brazil’s “Clean Record” law was designed to bar candidates convicted of certain crimes from office for a period of years.¹⁷ The United Kingdom’s Electoral Commission warns candidates that they must ensure they are not legally disqualified before standing for election.¹⁸

These systems differ. Each has dangers. Disqualification rules can be abused by authoritarian governments to remove opponents. Criminal law can be weaponized. Voters should not be deprived of real choices because elites dislike a candidate.

But the absence of standards is also dangerous.

A liberal democracy must balance openness with integrity.

Problematic candidates are not new

America has always had problematic politicians.

George Santos was elected to Congress in 2022 after fabricating large parts of his biography; he was later expelled from the House and sentenced to 87 months in prison for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.¹⁹ James Traficant, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, was expelled from the House in 2002 after convictions involving bribery, racketeering, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, and related offenses.²⁰ Marion Barry, after a drug conviction and prison sentence, returned to public office and won a fourth term as mayor of Washington, D.C., because many voters saw not only his scandal but also his long history as a civil rights figure and advocate for the city’s marginalized communities.²¹ Roy Moore’s 2017 Senate campaign in Alabama raised agonizing questions for evangelicals after allegations that he pursued teenage girls when he was in his 30s.²² Herschel Walker’s 2022 Georgia Senate campaign raised questions of domestic violence allegations, abortion hypocrisy, and personal instability.²³

The point is not that every case is the same. They are not.

Some involve proven crimes. Some involve allegations. Some involve long-ago conduct. Some involve abuse of public office. Some involve private sin. Some involve recovery and public service. Some involve denial and defiance. Some involve voters making a complicated judgment about redemption, representation, and relative harm.

That complexity matters.

But complexity cannot become an excuse for having no standards.

What should be disqualifying?

We need bottom-line standards for public life. Not impossible standards. Not purity tests. Not rules that punish ordinary human failure forever. Not a demand that candidates be saints.

Politics is not the monastery. But liberal democracy does require certain minimum virtue. Here are six possible standards.

1. Fidelity to the rule of law

A candidate who openly rejects lawful elections, encourages political violence, threatens judges, defies court orders, solicits illegal interference, or treats law as merely a tool for friends and a weapon for enemies is attacking the foundation of constitutional democracy.

Policy disagreement is normal. Contempt for law is disqualifying.

2. Truthfulness about identity, money, and power

A candidate who fabricates education, military service, employment history, finances, residency, charitable work, or personal biography is not merely embellishing. He or she is asking voters to consent to a fiction.

Democracy depends on truthful representation.

3. No credible unresolved pattern of sexual abuse, harassment, or domestic violence

This does not mean every allegation automatically disqualifies. Due process matters. False accusations are possible. Evidence must be weighed.

But a credible pattern of sexual abuse, coercion, harassment, workplace exploitation, or domestic violence should not be waved away because a candidate is politically useful.

Power over bodies and power over citizens are morally connected.

4. No public corruption or abuse of office

Bribery, fraud, embezzlement, misuse of campaign funds, retaliation against whistleblowers, self-enrichment, and official favors for donors strike at the heart of public trust. Using one’s position , as well as family members, to market goods and services and insider trading should be outlawed.

A person who treats office as property cannot be trusted with the common good.

5. Capacity for accountability

Everyone fails. The question is what comes next.

Has the person told the truth? Accepted consequences? Made restitution? Sought repair? Demonstrated change over time? Or has the person attacked accusers, blamed conspiracies, lied repeatedly, demanded loyalty, and treated accountability as persecution?

Repentance matters. So does its absence.

6. Demonstrated respect for the dignity of opponents and vulnerable people

Politics is conflict. It requires argument, passion, and sometimes fierce opposition. But candidates who habitually dehumanize migrants, racial minorities, women, LGBT persons, the poor, political opponents, journalists, judges, or whole classes of people erode the moral culture democracy needs.

Liberal democracy requires opponents, not enemies to be destroyed.

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Mercy, redemption, and fitness for office

A society without mercy becomes cruel. A society without standards becomes corrupt. The challenge is to hold both truths together.

A past divorce should not automatically disqualify a candidate. A recovered addiction should not automatically disqualify a candidate. A youthful offense honestly confronted should not automatically disqualify a candidate. A person who has served a sentence, made restitution, lived responsibly, and demonstrated transformation may have something important to offer public life.

But not every story of wrongdoing is a redemption story.

Sometimes “redemption” is a campaign strategy.

Sometimes “I made mistakes” means “Stop asking questions.”

Sometimes “the voters will decide” means “Power matters more than truth.”

Sometimes “forgiveness” is demanded by people who have never practiced accountability.

Christians should understand this better than anyone. Forgiveness is real. But confession, penance, repair, and conversion are also real. Grace does not abolish consequences. Mercy does not require giving a person public power.

We can forgive someone and still say: you should not hold this office.

Why we get horrible politicians— the excuses

So why do we get horrible politicians?

Because parties want power more than character.

Because donors want access more than integrity.

Because voters want fighters more than servants.

Because media rewards spectacle more than seriousness.

Because religious leaders bless allies and condemn enemies.

Because activists excuse their side’s sins as necessary.

Because ambition attracts people who want attention, status, immunity, and control.

Because decent people often do not run.

Because politics has become so degrading that many morally serious people avoid it, leaving the field to narcissists, opportunists, zealots, and performers.

And because we — citizens, believers, professionals, parents, teachers, clergy, writers, organizers — too often lower the standard when our side benefits.

That is the hardest truth.

The sewer is not only “out there.”

It runs through our rationalizations.

A better common-sense standard

As a common sense liberal, I believe liberal democracy requires moral guardrails.

Not theocracy.

Not puritanism.

Not permanent exclusion for every failure.

Not partisan weaponization of ethics.

But a public ethic strong enough to say:

Some conduct is incompatible with public trust.

Some patterns are disqualifying.

Some offices require more than legal eligibility.

Some victories cost too much.

Some candidates should be rejected even if they might win.

And some causes are corrupted when defended by corrupt people.

That standard must apply across parties.

If sexual harassment law matters, it matters when the accused is liberal.

If marital fidelity and moral character matter, they matter when the candidate claims to be a conservative Christian.

If corruption matters, it matters when the corrupt politician votes your way.

If the rule of law matters, it matters when law constrains your own champion.

If democracy matters, it matters before the election, not only after your side loses.

From swamp to soil— nurturing a moral political culture

In my recent Common Sense Sundays reflections, I have been returning to images of civic culture, truthful patriotism, and the soil where grace can take root. That language applies here too.

A democracy does not grow decent leaders from poisoned soil.

If our civic soil rewards cruelty, cruelty will run.

If it rewards lying, liars will run.

If it rewards shamelessness, the shameless will run.

If it rewards fundraising above wisdom, fundraisers will run.

If it rewards ideological purity above moral maturity, zealots will run.

If it rewards celebrity above service, performers will run.

If it rewards domination above humility, bullies will run.

But if we cultivate a different soil, different people may step forward.

Parties can vet more seriously.

Donors can refuse to fund corrupt candidates.

Clergy— be they liberal or conservative— can stop baptizing partisan hypocrisy.

Journalists can investigate before primaries, not after disasters.

Citizens can ask better questions at town halls.

Civic organizations can train morally serious candidates.

Voters can refuse the logic of “our crook is better than their crook.”

Schools and congregations can teach young people that public service is not performance but responsibility.

And all of us can recover the older democratic virtue of shame — not cruelty, not humiliation, but the capacity to say: this is beneath us.

We do not need perfect politicians.

We need accountable ones.

We need candidates who understand that power is a trust, not a trophy.

We need leaders who know that liberal democracy depends on law, truth, dignity, restraint, public service, and the willingness to lose honorably.

We need citizens who stop asking only, “Can this person win?”

We need to ask, “What will this person do to the moral ecology of the republic?”

That is the question beneath the question.

Swamp or sewer?

The answer depends on what we are willing to tolerate.

And what we are willing, finally, to refuse.

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Endnotes

1. Ronald Reagan Library, “Biography of Nancy Davis Reagan,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/nancy-reagan/biography-nancy-davis-reagan; “Ronald Reagan Was the First U.S. President to Have Been Divorced,” History Facts, March 19, 2025, https://historyfacts.com/famous-figures/fact/ronald-reagan-first-president-divorced/.

2. Miller Center, University of Virginia, “The Clinton Impeachment and Its Fallout,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/impeachment/clinton-impeachment-and-its-fallout.

3. Carroll v. Trump, No. 23-793 (2d Cir. 2024), Justia, accessed July 13, 2026, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/23-793/23-793-2024-12-30.html.

4. Michael R. Sisak and Larry Neumeister, “Judge Orders E. Jean Carroll Be Paid $5.8M in Trump Sex Abuse and Defamation Case; Trump Appeals,” Associated Press, July 8, 2026, https://apnews.com/article/trump-e-jean-carroll-sexual-abuse-defamation-fe911fa64d58b03b4d96a628a5cdccb0.

5. Michael R. Sisak, Jennifer Peltz, Eric Tucker, and Jill Colvin, “Donald Trump Becomes First Former U.S. President Convicted of Felony Crimes,” Associated Press, May 30, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-hush-money-jury-verdict-b29f6b8f829dfc2f28a9a9cf4462c593.

6. Zach Despart, “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Acquitted on All 16 Articles of Impeachment,” Texas Tribune, September 16, 2023, https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/16/ken-paxton-acquitted-impeachment-texas-attorney-general/.

7. Eric Tucker, Jim Vertuno, and Jake Bleiberg, “Justice Department Declined to Prosecute Texas AG Paxton in Final Weeks of Biden’s Term: AP Sources,” Associated Press, April 4, 2025, https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/justice-department-declined-to-prosecute-texas-ag-paxton-in-final-weeks-of-bidens-term-ap-sources/.

8. Kimberlee Kruesi and Meg Kinnard, “Democrat Graham Platner Says He Plans to Withdraw from Maine Senate Race After Sexual Assault Claim,” Associated Press, July 9, 2026, https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2026/democrat-graham-platner-says-he-plans-to-withdraw-from-maine-senate-race-after-sexual-assault-claim/.

9. Megan Brenan, “Nurses Continue to Lead in Honesty and Ethics Ratings,” Gallup, January 12, 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/700736/nurses-continue-lead-honesty-ethics-ratings.aspx.

10. Federation of State Medical Boards, “About Physician Discipline,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://www.fsmb.org/u.s.-medical-regulatory-trends-and-actions/guide-to-medical-regulation-in-the-united-states/about-physician-discipline.

11. California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, “Licensure Enforcement,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://www.ctc.ca.gov/licensure-enforcement/.

12. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Child and Youth Protection: Did You Know?,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://www.usccb.org/offices/child-and-youth-protection/did-you-know.

13. History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives, “Constitutional Qualifications,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Constitutional-Qualifications/.

14. Library of Congress, Constitution Annotated, “ArtII.S1.C5.1 Qualifications for the Presidency,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C5-1/ALDE_00013692/.

15. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Ethics and Public Corruption Laws: Penalties,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://www.ncsl.org/ethics/ethics-and-public-corruption-laws-penalties.

16. Justia, “California Government Code: Disqualifications for Office or Employment,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2010/gov/1020-1042.html.

17. Rachel Glickhouse and Luisa Leme, “Explainer: Brazil’s Clean Record Law,” Americas Society/Council of the Americas, August 26, 2014, https://www.as-coa.org/articles/explainer-brazils-clean-record-law.

18. Electoral Commission, “Disqualifications,” November 7, 2024, https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/guidance-candidates-and-agents-uk-parliamentary-elections-great-britain/what-you-need-know-you-stand-a-candidate/qualifications-and-disqualifications-standing-election/disqualifications.

19. United States Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York, “Ex-Congressman George Santos Sentenced to 87 Months in Prison for Wire Fraud and Aggravated Identity Theft,” U.S. Department of Justice, April 25, 2025, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/ex-congressman-george-santos-sentenced-87-months-prison-wire-fraud-and-aggravated.

20. History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives, “TRAFICANT, James A., Jr.,” accessed July 13, 2026, https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/T/TRAFICANT,-James-A-,-Jr--(T000350)/.

21. Martin Kaste, “Former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry Dies,” NPR/KCUR, November 23, 2014, https://www.kcur.org/2014-11-23/former-d-c-mayor-marion-barry-dies.

22. Rachel Zoll, “Allegations Against Roy Moore Roil U.S. Evangelical Ranks,” PBS NewsHour, November 12, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/allegations-against-roy-moore-roil-u-s-evangelical-ranks.

23. “Herschel Walker Denies a Report That He Paid for Girlfriend’s 2009 Abortion,” NPR/TPR, October 4, 2022, https://www.tpr.org/2022-10-04/herschel-walker-denies-a-report-that-he-paid-for-girlfriends-2009-abortion.

• First Reading (Isaiah 55:10-11)

• Responsorial Psalm (Psalm 65:10, 11, 12-13, 14)

• Second Reading (Romans 8:18-23)

Gospel (Matthew 13:1-23)

Last week, I reflected on truthful patriotism and the Christian task of carrying the lamp in a wounded country.

This Sunday, Jesus’ parable of the sower asks the next question: what kind of ground are we becoming?

God’s Word is still being sown — in our hearts, families, parishes, communities, and civic life. But grace needs soil. It needs attention, roots, room to breathe, and habits that bear fruit.

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Common Sense Sundays is an expanded reflection based on homilies I preach at St. Agatha Catholic Church in Los Angeles where I am Resident Priest. This Sunday, June 28th, you can experience the worship and my homily at St. Agatha Parish at the 10:00am PDT Mass on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Stagathas

Grace Needs Good Soil

The parable of the sower, civic culture, and the soil where grace can take root

Last Sunday, as we reflected on America at 250, the Gospel gave us one of Jesus’ most tender invitations: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” We reflected on truthful patriotism, the promise and contradictions of America, and the Christian task of lifting the lamp not only beside a golden door but in every human encounter.

This Sunday, the Gospel asks a deeper follow-up question.

If Christ gives rest to the burdened, what kind of ground are we preparing where that rest can become new life?

If we want to carry the lamp, where are we placing ourselves so that the light of Christ can actually take root in us?

If we want to renew our families, our parish, our civic life, and our country, what kind of soil are we becoming?

That is one of the most important spiritual questions we can ask: On what ground am I putting myself?

Not simply: Do I hear the Word of God?

Not simply: Do I come to Mass?

Not simply: Do I believe in God?

But more deeply:

What kind of ground is my heart becoming?

What kind of soil is my mind, my family, my daily life, my parish, my neighborhood, my country?

Am I placing myself where the grace of God can take root and bear fruit?

The readings for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time are full of creation imagery: rain and snow, seed and bread, watered earth, softened furrows, valleys blanketed with grain, creation groaning in labor pains, and finally Jesus’ parable of the sower. The whole liturgy speaks of growth. But it also reminds us that growth is not automatic. God is generous. God’s Word is powerful. God’s grace is always being sown. But the question is: What happens when that grace lands in us?¹

The Word That Does Not Return Empty

The prophet Isaiah gives us the first word of hope.

God says that just as rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return until they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, so shall God’s Word be. “My word shall not return to me void,” says the Lord. It will do God’s will. It will achieve the end for which God sent it.

That means God is never speaking empty words.

God’s Word is not decoration. It is not background music. It is not religious poetry that we admire and then forget. God’s Word is alive. It is sent with a purpose. When God speaks, God wants to create something: faith where there was fear, mercy where there was resentment, courage where there was silence, hope where there was despair, justice where there was indifference, love where there was selfishness.

That is why Scripture is never merely private.

The Word of God does not fall only on individual hearts. It falls on families, parishes, institutions, cultures, and nations. It falls on the soil of our public life. It asks whether our habits, practices, policies, and relationships are prepared to receive grace — or whether they have become hard, rocky, thorny, exhausted, and resistant.

This matters because we live in a time when many people are spiritually tired and civically disoriented. In recent weeks, I have reflected on America at 250, truthful patriotism, and the need for common civic culture. I have also reflected on the simple pastoral observation that some communities in my parish could sing “America the Beautiful” with ease, while others had never been invited into that shared civic song.

That experience was not about music alone. It was about soil.

What kind of civic soil are we cultivating?

What kind of spiritual soil are our parishes becoming?

What kind of cultural soil are we preparing for young people, immigrants, families, and citizens who are trying to belong?

God’s Word will not return empty. But we still have to ask what kind of ground receives it.

Dry Ground and the Mercy of God

The psalm continues Isaiah’s image. God waters the land, drenches the furrows, breaks up the clods, softens the earth with showers, and blesses its yield.

That is a beautiful spiritual image because sometimes our hearts are like dry ground.

Sometimes we are hard from disappointment. Sometimes from anger. Sometimes from fear. Sometimes from grief, pride, exhaustion, or resentment. Sometimes our lives become so compacted by noise, obligation, anxiety, and reaction that grace cannot easily enter.

But God does not give up on dry ground.

God waters.

God softens.

God prepares.

God keeps working the soil of our lives so that something new can grow.

That is important because the parable of the sower is sometimes misunderstood as if Jesus were simply sorting people into permanent categories: hard path people, rocky people, thorny people, good soil people. But life is more complicated than that. Most of us are all of those soils at different times.

There are parts of us where grace is received and bears fruit.

There are parts of us where the Word touches only the surface.

There are parts of us where faith begins with enthusiasm but lacks roots.

There are parts of us where worries, ambitions, resentments, money, and distraction choke the life of grace.

And there are parts of us where God has patiently cultivated rich soil through suffering, love, discipline, prayer, service, and humility.

So the central question is not: Am I good soil or bad soil?

The better question is: Where is God trying to cultivate me now?

Creation Is Groaning

Saint Paul gives us a wider vision in Romans. He says that all creation is groaning in labor pains.

This is one of the most powerful images in the New Testament. Creation is suffering, but Paul does not describe that suffering as meaningless. He describes it as labor. Something is trying to be born. Creation is waiting for “the revelation of the children of God.”²

In other words, the world is waiting for us to become who we are meant to be.

That line should stop us.

The earth is groaning.

Our communities are groaning.

Families are groaning.

The poor are groaning.

Immigrants are groaning.

Young people are groaning.

Democracy is groaning.

Creation itself is groaning.

And Paul says that in the middle of that groaning, we already have “the first fruits of the Spirit.”

That means the fruits of God’s grace are not only private virtues for our personal peace. They are signs of a new creation. When patience grows in us, creation breathes a little easier. When forgiveness grows in us, a family can begin again. When generosity grows in us, someone else has bread. When courage grows in us, truth has a voice. When compassion grows in us, the Kingdom of God becomes visible.

Pope Francis made a similar connection in Laudato Si’, writing that “sister earth, along with all the abandoned of our world,” cries out for us to take another course. He insisted that ecological crisis and human suffering cannot be separated.³

Saint Paul would understand that. Creation groans when human beings fail to live as children of God. Creation groans when power is used for domination rather than stewardship. Creation groans when the poor are ignored, when neighborhoods are abandoned, when public life becomes cruel, when young people are formed by cynicism, when families are crushed by anxiety, and when the earth itself is treated as raw material for endless consumption.

But Paul does not leave us in despair.

He speaks of first fruits.

The whole harvest is not here yet. But something has begun.

That is Christian hope. Not naïve optimism. Not denial. Not political fantasy. Hope is the confidence that God is already sowing new life, even in groaning soil.

The Sower Is Generous

Then Jesus gives us the parable.

A sower goes out to sow. The seed is scattered generously. Some falls on the path, and birds eat it. Some falls on rocky ground, springs up quickly, but withers because it has no roots. Some falls among thorns and is choked. Some falls on rich soil and produces fruit — a hundredfold, sixtyfold, thirtyfold.⁴

The first thing to notice is the generosity of the sower.

This is not efficient farming. The sower scatters seed everywhere. On the path. On rocky ground. Among thorns. On rich soil. God is not stingy with grace. God does not sow only where the harvest is guaranteed. God speaks even to hard hearts. God sends grace even where the soil looks hopeless. God keeps scattering mercy into places we might have already written off.

That is good news.

It means God has not given up on us.

God has not given up on the distracted, the cynical, the shallow, the anxious, the ambitious, the wounded, the resentful, the exhausted, or the afraid.

God has not given up on the Church.

God has not given up on America.

God has not given up on democracy.

God has not given up on families, parishes, schools, neighborhoods, or young people.

The seed is still being sown.

The question is whether we will become ground where it can live.

Five Stages of Spiritual Growth

This parable can be read as a map of spiritual development.

The first stage is seed not yet received.

The Word is available. Grace is near. God is speaking. But we are not paying attention. This happens when we live distracted lives — scrolling, reacting, working, consuming, worrying, rushing from one thing to another but not really listening.

The first step in becoming good soil is attention.

We have to stop long enough to hear God.

The second stage is seed on the path.

The path is hard. The seed lands, but it cannot enter. The birds come and take it away. This is the heart that has become closed. Maybe because of hurt. Maybe because of cynicism. Maybe because we have heard the Gospel so often that we no longer let it surprise us. The Word touches the surface but not the soul.

To move beyond this stage, we need humility.

We need to say, “Lord, break open the hard places in me.”

The third stage is rocky ground.

Here there is an initial response. Something begins to grow. There is enthusiasm, emotion, perhaps a new commitment. But the roots are not deep enough. When the sun rises, the plant is scorched.

This is a very common spiritual experience. We begin with good intentions, but when life becomes difficult, the commitment fades. We want faith but not discipline. We want peace but not prayer. We want change but not conversion. We want justice but not sacrifice. We want community but not patience.

Rocky ground teaches us that grace needs roots.

And roots grow through daily practices: prayer, Mass, confession, Scripture, service, silence, forgiveness, showing up even when we do not feel like it.

The fourth stage is seed among thorns and weeds.

Here the plant grows, but it is choked. The problem is not lack of life; the problem is competition. Too many other things are growing around it.

Worry can become a thorn. Money can become a thorn. Ambition can become a thorn. Resentment can become a thorn. Control can become a thorn. Entertainment can become a thorn. Even good things can become weeds if they crowd out God.

So we have to ask: What is choking the Word of God in me? What is taking up so much space that grace cannot breathe?

The fifth stage is rich soil.

This is the heart that receives, protects, nourishes, and lives the Word. But rich soil is not perfect soil. It is prepared soil. It has been broken open, watered, softened, cleared, and cultivated.

That is why the spiritual life is not magic.

It is cultivation.

Civic Soil and Spiritual Soil

This is where the parable also speaks to our public life.

In recent essays, I have argued that liberal democracy needs more than laws and elections. It needs common practices: songs, stories, rituals, civic education, service, participation, and shared moral language. A democracy is not sustained by institutions alone. It also depends on the kind of people those institutions form.

That too is a soil question.

What kind of ground are we creating for civic virtue?

Are we placing young people in soil where they can learn history, responsibility, critical thinking, shared belonging, and democratic participation? Or are we leaving them in the shallow soil of social media outrage, consumer identity, conspiracy, and cynicism?

The signs are concerning. The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 22 percent of eighth-grade students performed at or above the Proficient level in civics.⁵ That does not mean young people do not care. Many care deeply. But caring without formation is like seed without roots. It may spring up quickly, but it withers under heat.

This is why the Educating for American Democracy initiative describes civic education as an inquiry-based framework for history and civics that should be integrated across K–12 education.⁶ We need civic formation that does more than teach slogans. We need young people to understand institutions, rights, responsibilities, history, conflict, compromise, protest, service, and the dignity of those with whom they disagree.

That is not separate from faith.

Catholic social teaching insists that human dignity, the common good, solidarity, and participation are central to moral life. The U.S. bishops’ Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship teaches that Catholics have a responsibility to participate in public life and to bring moral principles to political responsibility.⁷

Participation is not only political. It is spiritual.

A parish can become rich soil for democracy when it teaches people how to listen, serve, forgive, organize, pray, speak truthfully, welcome the stranger, protect the vulnerable, and work across difference.

A family can become rich soil for democracy when children learn gratitude, responsibility, honesty, patience, and respect.

A school can become rich soil when it forms students not only for success but for citizenship.

A nation becomes rich soil when its institutions protect dignity, cultivate belonging, and make room for the fruits of justice.

The Soil of the Parish

This is especially important in a multicultural parish.

A parish is one of the few places where people from different languages, nations, generations, classes, and political assumptions are asked to become one body. Not a crowd. Not a customer base. Not a coalition of separate interests. A body.

That is not easy.

It requires cultivation.

Some parishioners know the songs. Others do not.

Some know the customs. Others are learning.

Some carry wounds from exclusion. Others carry memories of stability.

Some came through immigration. Others came through slavery, migration, military service, or generations of neighborhood belonging.

Some are confident in American civic culture. Others stand at its edges.

A parish that wants to become rich soil cannot pretend these differences do not exist. But it also cannot allow them to harden into separate paths where the seed never enters.

The question is not whether every community must become the same.

The question is whether every community can be cultivated for communion.

That requires welcome, translation, patience, shared celebrations, honest history, mutual teaching, and practical formation. It requires giving people the tools to belong — liturgically, spiritually, culturally, and civically.

This is where last week’s image of “carrying the lamp” of the Statue of Liberty continues. A lamp is beautiful, but light still needs a place to shine. The Gospel lamp must be placed in homes, schools, neighborhoods, ministries, and civic practices where people can actually see.

Grace needs soil.

Where Are We Placing Ourselves?

The parable of the sower does not ask us to control everything.

We cannot control every circumstance of life. We cannot control every suffering, disappointment, political crisis, family wound, economic pressure, cultural change, or institutional failure.

But we can choose some of the ground on which we place ourselves.

We can place ourselves in prayer instead of constant noise.

We can place ourselves in community instead of isolation.

We can place ourselves near people who call forth our better selves instead of people who feed our bitterness.

We can place ourselves in service instead of self-absorption.

We can place ourselves before the Word of God and say, “Lord, let this Word take root in me.”

And we can help create good soil for others.

Parents do this when they make a home where faith is natural, forgiveness is practiced, and love is spoken.

A parish does this when it becomes a place of welcome, healing, and mission.

Friends do this when they encourage what is best in one another.

Teachers do this when they help young people develop roots.

Citizens do this when they protect public institutions from cynicism and corruption.

Communities do this when they defend the dignity of the poor, the stranger, the grieving, and the forgotten.

This is not sentimental. It is practical.

If we want mercy, we need to cultivate merciful habits.

If we want justice, we need to cultivate just institutions.

If we want faith, we need to cultivate prayer.

If we want democracy, we need to cultivate citizens.

If we want unity, we need to cultivate shared practices.

If we want grace to bear fruit, we need to ask what kind of ground we are becoming.

Clearing the Thorns and Weeds

Perhaps the most urgent part of the parable today is the seed among thorns and weeds.

We live in a thorny culture.

Anxiety chokes us.

Resentment chokes us.

Partisanship chokes us.

Consumerism chokes us.

Digital noise chokes us.

Fear of the future chokes us.

The need to be right chokes us.

The desire to belong to a tribe chokes us.

Even good causes can become thorns or weeds when they crowd out humility, prayer, mercy, and truth.

This is a serious danger for Christians in public life. We can become so consumed by the battles of the day that the Word of God has no room to breathe in us. We can become so passionate about justice that we forget charity. We can become so devoted to truth that we become cruel. We can become so concerned about belonging that we avoid necessary conversion. We can become so anxious about the future of the country that we forget the Kingdom of God.

The answer is not withdrawal.

The answer is cultivation.

We have to pull weeds.

We have to name what is choking us.

We have to ask whether our daily habits are forming us for love or for anger.

We have to ask whether our media diets are cultivating wisdom or agitation.

We have to ask whether our conversations are deepening communion or hardening contempt.

We have to ask whether our public witness sounds like Jesus — meek and humble of heart — or like the empire, the insult, the weapon, and the closed door.

The Harvest God Desires

The promise of today’s readings is that God’s Word is powerful.

God’s rain still falls.

God still waters the earth.

God still sows generously.

Creation is still groaning, but the first fruits of the Spirit are already among us.

That is why the parable is not a warning without hope. It is an invitation. Jesus is telling us that fruit is possible. Thirtyfold. Sixtyfold. A hundredfold. More than we expect. More than we deserve. More than our tired hearts can imagine.

The harvest God desires is not only private spirituality. It is lives fruitful in mercy, justice, courage, peace, patience, forgiveness, hospitality, and love.

The harvest is a family that begins again.

A parish that welcomes across difference.

A young person who discovers purpose.

An immigrant who learns how to participate.

A citizen who refuses cynicism.

A community that protects the vulnerable.

A country that allows its best ideals to take root in actual practice.

A Church that becomes not only a place where the Word is heard, but a people where the Word bears fruit.

So this week, ask yourself:

• What kind of ground am I standing on?

• What hard places need to be broken open?

• What roots need to grow deeper?

• What thorns and weeds need to be cleared away?

• Where is God inviting me to place myself so that grace can bear fruit?

The seed is the Word of God.

Christ is the sower.

And the harvest God desires is our lives — fruitful in mercy, justice, courage, peace, and love.

Endnotes

1. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 12, 2026,” USCCB Daily Readings, accessed July 10, 2026, https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071226.cfm.

2. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 12, 2026.”

3. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Vatican, May 24, 2015, no. 53, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.

4. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 12, 2026.”

5. National Center for Education Statistics, “NAEP Civics: Achievement-Level Results,” The Nation’s Report Card, accessed July 10, 2026, https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/civics/results/achievement/.

6. Educating for American Democracy, “The Roadmap,” accessed July 10, 2026, https://www.educatingforamericandemocracy.org/the-roadmap/.

7. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” accessed July 10, 2026, https://www.usccb.org/sjp/forming-consciences-faithful-citizenship.

That is not a reason for blame. It is an invitation.

If liberal democracy depends on ‘e pluribus unum’ — out of many, one — then we need shared civic songs, stories, symbols, and practices that help immigrants, young people, and longtime citizens belong together without erasing where anyone came from.

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One Song, Many Voices

A Civic Culture Toolkit for E Pluribus Unum

This Fourth of July weekend, I noticed something I had not expected to notice.

I minister in a multicultural parish in Los Angeles. Like many Catholic parishes in this city, our community is not one community but many: English-speaking and Spanish-speaking, immigrant and U.S.-born, older and younger, African American, Mexican, Central American, Filipino, Anglo, mixed families, longtime parishioners, recent arrivals, and people whose identities do not fit neatly into any single category.

One of the most important pastoral responsibilities in such a parish is learning how to do two things at once: honor the particular culture, language, customs, music, memory, and spiritual style of each community while also helping those communities become one parish.

That is not easy.

It is also not optional.

The Church is catholic — universal — not because everyone becomes the same, but because difference is drawn into communion. The same is true, in a civic key, of liberal democracy. The United States is not supposed to erase difference. But neither can it survive as a collection of separate communities with no shared language, symbols, practices, memory, or civic affection.

That was the lesson I carried away from five Masses across the Independence Day weekend.

At each Mass, I used the official Mass prayers and propers for the Fourth of July — beautiful prayers that ask God to guide the nation in justice, peace, and freedom. The Sunday Scriptures for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time were also surprisingly easy to connect with the holiday. Zechariah gives us the image of a humble king who comes not with chariots and warhorses but proclaiming peace. Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” That Gospel invitation connects naturally with Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

But the most revealing moment came at the end.

At the Thursday evening English Mass, almost everyone sang “America the Beautiful” as the closing hymn. At the Friday Spanish Mass, on the vigil of the Fourth of July, no one could sing it except me. At the Saturday bilingual English-Spanish Mass, perhaps ten percent of the congregation knew it. At the Sunday morning Spanish Mass, I made no attempt to have it sung. At the Sunday morning English Mass, about ninety percent sang it loudly and with enthusiasm.

I was not offended. I was not angry. I was not disappointed in the people.

I was struck.

Many of the immigrants in our parish from Mexico and Central America had no living experience of “America the Beautiful.” It was not part of their emotional vocabulary of living in the United States. Even more striking, many young people who have attended U.S. schools did not seem to know the song either.

That observation stayed with me because it revealed something larger than a hymn choice.

It revealed a gap in our common civic culture.

Civic culture is not coercion

Let me be clear from the beginning: this is not an argument for forced patriotism.

Coerced patriotism is not patriotism. It is performance.

A child mumbling words to a song they do not understand is not civic formation. A student compelled to recite a pledge without reflection is not democratic education. A newcomer pressured to abandon their native language, customs, food, music, and family memory in order to be “American” is not being welcomed into a liberal democracy. They are being asked to disappear.

That is not my concern.

My concern is almost the opposite.

When we fail to teach immigrants and young people the common civic songs, stories, customs, rituals, and symbols of the United States, we do not liberate them from nationalism. We deprive them of access to a shared public language.

We leave them outside the emotional life of the nation.

A liberal democracy needs more than laws, courts, elections, and rights. It needs common practices by which people learn how to belong to one another. It needs a civic culture strong enough to hold difference without turning difference into separation.

That civic culture does not have to be sentimental. It should not be dishonest. It must tell the truth about slavery, Indigenous dispossession, racial exclusion, gender inequality, anti-Catholicism, anti-immigrant movements, internment camps, segregation, unjust wars, and economic exploitation.

But a democracy cannot live by critique alone.

It also needs songs, rituals, stories, gestures, ceremonies, heroes, holidays, public virtues, and common language that help people feel: this is my country too.

What immigrants know — and what they are not taught

I have lived for extended periods of time in Mexico and Chile. I did not learn their national civic songs. I did not learn their patriotic rituals in any deep way. But I also did not intend to reside permanently in those countries.

Had I intended to make Mexico or Chile my permanent home, I would hope someone would have invited me into their civic culture. I would hope someone would have taught me the songs, stories, customs, symbols, and civic expectations that help people feel part of a national community.

That is what many immigrants in the United States are not receiving.

They may learn how to work here, drive here, shop here, pay rent here, send their children to school here, and navigate a bureaucracy here. They may learn enough English to survive, though not always enough to participate fully. They may learn the dangers of immigration enforcement and the opportunities of the labor market. But they are not always invited into the deeper civic life of the country.

They are often treated as workers before they are treated as future citizens.

That is a mistake.

The United States already knows that citizenship requires civic learning. The USCIS naturalization test includes questions on the Constitution, branches of government, rights and responsibilities, U.S. history, geography, national holidays, and civic participation.¹ That is useful. But a test is not enough. Citizenship is not only information. It is formation.

The question is not simply: Can you name the three branches of government?

The question is: Do you know how to belong, participate, dissent, serve, organize, and speak within a democratic community?

That is a deeper skill.

Tocqueville, civil society, and the American habit of organizing

Alexis de Tocqueville saw this more clearly than almost anyone. When he visited the United States in the 1830s, he was struck by the American habit of association. Americans gathered to solve problems. They formed churches, charities, committees, reform societies, schools, newspapers, neighborhood groups, and civic organizations. The Library of Congress summarizes one of Tocqueville’s central observations: Americans showed a remarkable tendency to organize themselves in pursuit of shared goals.²

That habit of association is one of the most important parts of American political culture.

It is also one of the hardest things for immigrants to learn if they come from societies where civic life has been more top-down.

In my own research and pastoral experience in Mexico in the 1990s, I came to see how different civic cultures can be. The United States has historically had a strong pattern of bottom-up civil society: PTAs, neighborhood associations, parish councils, unions, nonprofits, charities, school boards, volunteer groups, local journalism, civic clubs, and advocacy organizations.

Mexico, by contrast, had for generations a more top-down public culture shaped by political parties, the state, the Catholic Church, schools, and business elites. Independent nongovernmental organizations existed, of course, and civil society has grown significantly. But many people did not grow up with the same “civil society toolkit” that Americans often take for granted.

That difference matters.

An immigrant family may have enormous faith, courage, sacrifice, work ethic, and love for children. But they may not know how to organize a neighborhood meeting, speak at a school board, join a PTA, write to a city council member, form a nonprofit, meet with a public official, raise funds, build a coalition, or advocate without fear.

Those are learned civic skills.

If we want immigrants to become full participants in American life, we have to do more than demand assimilation. We have to teach participation.

The young are not learning it either

The problem is not limited to immigrants.

Many young people born and educated in the United States are not being formed in a common civic culture either. The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that eighth-grade civics scores declined for the first time since the assessment began, and only 22 percent of eighth graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level in civics.³

That should alarm all of us.

A democracy cannot renew itself if the young do not know how it works, why it matters, what it asks of them, or how to participate in it. Civic ignorance leaves a vacuum. And in that vacuum, politics becomes identity performance, algorithmic outrage, conspiracy, cynicism, or tribal loyalty.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor saw this danger clearly. After retiring from the Supreme Court, she founded iCivics in 2009 because she worried that young Americans did not understand their system of government or the responsibilities of citizenship. iCivics now describes itself as a nonpartisan organization devoted to helping students gain the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to engage in civic life.⁴

That is exactly what we need — but we need it not only in classrooms.

We need it in parishes, schools, immigrant centers, neighborhood councils, libraries, unions, community colleges, youth groups, and family conversations.

The emotional heart of a nation

Why does learning civic songs and traditions matter?

Because belonging is not only intellectual.

It is emotional.

A common civic culture gives people a shared language of public feeling. A song like “America the Beautiful” is not simply a melody. It is a prayer, a memory, a landscape, a hope, and a moral challenge. Katharine Lee Bates did not write only “God shed his grace on thee.” She also wrote, “God mend thine every flaw” and “Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”⁵

That is not blind nationalism.

That is mature patriotism.

A song can carry a moral vision. A pledge can remind us that allegiance is not to a leader, a party, or a tribe, but to “the Republic” and to “liberty and justice for all.” A national holiday can become an occasion not only for fireworks but for civic examen: What have we done with freedom? Who has been included? Who has been excluded? What must be renewed?

Common civic practices matter because they allow us to experience the heart of the nation together.

Not always comfortably.

Not always innocently.

But together.

A pluralistic democracy needs shared civic experiences that allow people from different backgrounds to say: We do not have the same story, but we share a country. We do not have the same ancestors, but we share a future. We do not have to erase our origins, but we must learn how to participate in a common life.

That is e pluribus unum — out of many, one.

The counterargument is serious

There are strong objections to what I am saying.

Some will ask: Why should immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, or anywhere else learn American civic songs and traditions when many feel unwelcome, targeted, exploited, or despised?

Others will say: Many patriotic songs were written in eras of racial exclusion, Indigenous dispossession, anti-immigrant sentiment, and gender inequality. Why should the descendants of those excluded sing songs of a country that did not fully recognize them?

Those are not trivial questions.

They are morally serious.

A Black American whose ancestors were enslaved has a different relationship to patriotic ritual than a descendant of Ellis Island immigrants. An Indigenous person has a different relationship to American expansion than a family that benefited from homesteading. A Mexican American family in the Southwest may hear the language of borders differently because the border crossed many families before many families crossed the border. An undocumented parishioner living under fear of deportation may understandably struggle to sing a patriotic hymn while worrying that the government may tear their family apart.

So the answer cannot be: ignore history and sing.

The answer must be: tell the truth and sing differently.

Sing “America the Beautiful” as a prayer, not propaganda.

Say the Pledge as a promise still being fulfilled, not a claim already completed.

Teach the Statue of Liberty alongside Chinese exclusion, Ellis Island alongside Angel Island, the Declaration alongside slavery, the Constitution alongside the Fourteenth Amendment, patriotic service alongside civil disobedience, the flag alongside the freedom to protest, and “liberty and justice for all” alongside the long history of those who had to demand that “all” actually mean all.

That is not anti-American.

That is American civic maturity.

The foreign flag question

This also helps us think about a difficult public issue: the use of foreign flags in immigration protests.

During demonstrations against aggressive ICE actions in Los Angeles and elsewhere, some protesters carried Mexican and other Latin American flags. The Associated Press noted that the symbolism sparked debate: many conservatives called it anti-American, while others argued it expressed pride in one’s homeland and solidarity with targeted communities.⁶ Politico similarly reported that many demonstrators see the Mexican flag as a symbol of heritage, resistance, and support for families under threat.⁷

I understand that.

People carry the symbols they know. A flag can be memory. It can be family. It can be grief. It can be resistance. It can say: we will not be ashamed of who we are.

But I also think immigrants and advocates need to ask a strategic and civic question: What signal are we sending?

If the purpose of a demonstration is to protect immigrants so they can remain, belong, contribute, and participate in American life, then a protest visually dominated by foreign flags can unintentionally undermine its own message. It allows opponents to say, unfairly but predictably: “They do not want to become part of America. Their loyalty is elsewhere.”

That may not be true. But symbols speak before explanations do.

This does not mean people should deny their origins. It means movements should think carefully about civic communication. A Mexican flag beside an American flag says one thing. A procession of families carrying American flags, parish banners, images of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Salvadoran and Guatemalan symbols, and signs saying “We Belong,” “Families Are America,” and “Liberty and Justice for All” says something very different.

The goal is not erasure.

The goal is integration.

Bring your whole story. Bring your language. Bring your songs. Bring your saints, foods, flags, memories, and wounds. But also learn the shared civic language of the country you are helping to build.

That is how belonging becomes mutual.

Robert Putnam and the work of “we”

The sociologist Robert Putnam has written honestly about the challenge of diversity. In his widely discussed essay “E Pluribus Unum,” he argued that immigration and diversity bring long-term cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. But in the short term, diversity can reduce social solidarity and social capital; people may “hunker down” rather than reach across difference.⁸

That finding should not be used to attack immigration. Putnam himself warned against that conclusion. The real lesson is that diversity does not automatically produce solidarity.

Solidarity must be built.

That is the missing middle in much of our public debate. The right often talks about assimilation but turns it into suspicion, resentment, or exclusion. The left often talks about diversity but assumes belonging will emerge by itself. Neither is enough.

A common civic culture is the work that makes diversity sustainable.

It is the bridge between many origins and one shared future.

Danielle Allen’s work on the Declaration of Independence helps here. She argues that the Declaration is not only about individual liberty but also about political equality and the work of becoming co-creators of a shared world.⁹ That is exactly the point. Liberal democracy is not only a system that protects individuals from domination. It is a system that asks free and equal people to build a common life together.

That requires practices.

It requires formation.

It requires a toolkit.

A Civic Culture Toolkit

So what would a Civic Culture Toolkit look like?

Not a propaganda program. Not a forced assimilation curriculum. Not a nationalist catechism.

A Civic Culture Toolkit would be a practical, local, multilingual, intergenerational set of practices that helps immigrants, young people, and longtime citizens learn the civic language, symbols, skills, and habits of American democratic life.

Here are ten elements.

1. Civic songs as shared prayer and memory

Teach “America the Beautiful,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and other songs not as perfect national myths but as windows into hope, protest, gratitude, and unfinished promise. Explain the lyrics. Translate key lines. Ask people what they hear.

2. The Pledge as a promise, not coercion

Teach the Pledge of Allegiance as a commitment to the republic, not to a person or party. Explain “liberty and justice for all” as a moral standard by which the nation must be judged. Make clear that in a free society, patriotism cannot be forced.

3. The Declaration as an unfinished invitation

Read the Declaration’s opening principles alongside the stories of those excluded from them. Ask: Who used these words to demand freedom? Frederick Douglass? Abraham Lincoln? Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Martin Luther King Jr.? César Chávez? Immigrant workers? Veterans? Students?

4. The Constitution and amendments as democratic repair

Teach the Constitution not as a frozen relic but as a framework that has been amended to repair injustice: abolition, birthright citizenship, equal protection, voting rights, women’s suffrage, and expanded participation.

5. Civil society skills

Offer workshops on how to attend a school board meeting, contact a city council office, join a PTA, start a neighborhood group, organize a parish ministry, register to vote, understand local government, and advocate without fear.

6. Civic storytelling nights

Invite parishioners and neighbors to answer: What is your American story? How did your family come here? What did America promise? What has been hard? What do you hope your children inherit? Let immigrants, Black Americans, veterans, young people, and elders speak together.

7. Shared holiday formation

Use Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Constitution Day as opportunities for honest civic formation. Each holiday should include gratitude, truth-telling, and responsibility.

8. Symbols in dialogue

Teach the meaning of the American flag, state flags, ancestral flags, parish banners, religious images, and cultural symbols. Help people learn when and how symbols build solidarity — and when they confuse the message.

9. Youth and recent immigrant civic apprenticeship

Pair young people and recent immigrants with parish leaders, neighborhood councils, nonprofit boards, school committees, and service organizations. Let them learn democracy by doing it.

10. Service as citizenship

Make civic culture practical through service: food distribution, voter registration, immigration clinics, tutoring, neighborhood cleanups, elder care, school supply drives, restorative justice work, and parish organizing. A shared country becomes real when people serve together.

Much of this already exists in pieces. The Educating for American Democracy Roadmap offers a national framework for inquiry-based history and civic learning.¹⁰ The National Archives’ “Civics for All of US” initiative provides civic education resources for all ages.¹¹ USCIS provides naturalization study materials. iCivics offers nonpartisan tools for students and educators.¹²

The task now is to bring these resources into living communities.

Especially parishes, congregations, synagogues, mosques, and other religious communities.

Why Catholic parishes matter

Catholic parishes are uniquely positioned to do this work.

They already gather people across generations, languages, income levels, immigration statuses, and cultural backgrounds. They already teach, sing, pray, organize, serve, and celebrate holidays. They already know how to hold memory and hope together. They already believe that unity does not erase difference.

A parish Civic Culture Toolkit could be offered in English, Spanish, and other languages of the local community. It could be built around national holidays, citizenship preparation, youth ministry, adult faith formation, school-parent engagement, and community organizing. It could help immigrants feel at home without asking them to forget where they came from. It could help U.S.-born Catholics recover a civic culture that many schools no longer teach. It could help young people understand that democracy is not something “out there.” It is something they practice.

This is not partisan work.

It is Catholic social teaching in civic form.

It honors human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, participation, rights and responsibilities, and the common good.

Learning to sing together

The image that remains with me from the Fourth of July weekend is simple.

Some people knew the song. Some did not.

Some sang loudly. Some were silent.

Some had known “America the Beautiful” since childhood. Others had never been invited into it.

That is not a reason for blame.

It is a reason for teaching.

It is a reason for hospitality.

It is a reason to recover the lost art of common civic formation.

A liberal democracy cannot be held together only by laws. It needs hearts trained for shared belonging. It needs citizens who know how to speak to one another across difference. It needs immigrants invited into participation. It needs young people taught that America is not merely a consumer marketplace or a political battlefield. It is a republic — if we can keep it.

And keeping it requires more than outrage.

It requires singing, learning, serving, voting, organizing, remembering, listening, and building.

So yes, I want immigrants to learn “America the Beautiful.” I want young people to learn it too. But I also want all of us to learn it more truthfully.

Not as a denial of America’s wounds.

As a prayer for America’s healing.

“God mend thine every flaw.”

That line is enough to build a civic culture around.

Not perfect America.

Not whitewashed America.

Not closed-door America.

Not tribal America.

America with flaws that need mending.

America with liberty that needs law.

America with freedom that needs responsibility.

America with many peoples who must become one without ceasing to be many.

That is the work of e pluribus unum.

And it will not happen by accident.

We need to teach it.

We need to practice it.

We need to sing it together.

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Endnotes

1. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Study for the Test,” accessed July 5, 2026, https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/find-study-materials-and-resources/study-for-the-test.

2. Library of Congress, “Tocqueville, A View from Outside,” Join In: Voluntary Associations in America, accessed July 5, 2026, https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/join-in-voluntary-associations-in-america/about-this-exhibition/tocqueville-a-view-from-outside/.

3. National Assessment of Educational Progress, “NAEP Civics: Civics Highlights 2022,” The Nation’s Report Card, accessed July 5, 2026, https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/civics/2022/. See also National Assessment Governing Board, “Eighth-Grade Scores Decline in Civics and U.S. History on Nation’s Report Card,” May 3, 2023, https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2023/eighth-grade-scores-decline-in-civics-and-us-history.html.

4. iCivics, “About: Our History,” accessed July 5, 2026, https://vision.icivics.org/about/history/.

5. Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward, “America the Beautiful,” Library of Congress, Patriotic Melodies, accessed July 5, 2026, https://www.loc.gov/collections/patriotic-melodies/articles-and-essays/america-the-beautiful/.

6. Associated Press, “Mexican Flags at LA Protests Spark Debate Over Symbolism,” June 11, 2025, https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/mexican-flag-flown-la-immigration-protests-e321c28691f0fa61427c981f99bfed13.

7. Melanie Mason, “Why Los Angeles Protesters Fly the Mexican Flag,” Politico, June 11, 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/la-protests-mexican-flag-00401663.

8. Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 137–174, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x.

9. Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center, “Our Declaration Reissued for America 250,” May 27, 2026, https://ash.harvard.edu/articles/our-declaration-reissued-for-america-250/.

10. Educating for American Democracy, “The Roadmap,” accessed July 5, 2026, https://www.educatingforamericandemocracy.org/the-roadmap/.

11. National Archives, “About: Civics for All of US,” accessed July 5, 2026, https://civics.archives.gov/about.

12. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Study for the Test”; iCivics, “About: Our History.”

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• First Reading: Zechariah 9:9-10

• Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 145:1-2, 8-9, 10-11, 13-14

• Second Reading: Romans 8:9, 11-13

• Gospel: Matthew 11:25-30

On America’s 250th birthday weekend, Pope Leo reminds us that liberty is not domination, freedom is not selfishness, and patriotism is not denial.

The Gospel invites the burdened to rest. “America the Beautiful” asks God to mend every flaw. Together, they offer a way to love this country truthfully: with gratitude, repentance, courage, and hope.

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Common Sense Sundays is an expanded reflection based on homilies I preach at St. Agatha Catholic Church in Los Angeles where I am Resident Priest. This Sunday, June 28th, you can experience the worship and my homily at St. Agatha Parish at the 10:00am PDT Mass on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Stagathas

God Mend Thine Every Flaw
America at 250 and the Christian work of truthful patriotism

On the weekend when the United States celebrates 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Gospel gives us one of the most tender invitations Jesus ever spoke:

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”

It is hard to imagine a more fitting Gospel for America at 250.

Not because the nation is Christ. It is not.

Not because patriotism is the same thing as discipleship. It is not.

Not because the American experiment has perfectly embodied the Gospel. It has not.

But because, on this anniversary weekend, Christians in the United States are being invited to bring the nation before God with gratitude, honesty, repentance, hope, and responsibility. We do not come to worship the country. We come to worship God. But we do bring our country with us — its beauty and its wounds, its promise and its contradictions, its achievements and its failures, its ideals and its temptations.

And into that complicated American reality, Jesus speaks:

Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened.

That word “all” matters.

It includes the citizen and the immigrant. The descendant of enslaved people and the family that came through Ellis Island, Angel Island, the southern border, or a refugee camp. The soldier and the conscientious objector. The worker and the business owner. The child in the womb and the elder near death. The poor, the disabled, the lonely, the addicted, the imprisoned, the grieving, the fearful, the exhausted, the politically alienated, and the spiritually burdened.

Jesus does not say, “Come to me when you have proven yourself useful.”

He does not say, “Come to me if your papers are in order.”

He does not say, “Come to me if your politics are correct.”

He says, “Come to me.”

That is the Christian beginning point for thinking about America at 250: not party, not ideology, not grievance, not nostalgia, not outrage, but the mercy of Christ offered to the burdened.

A meek king in a loud nation

The first reading from Zechariah gives us a striking image of power. The prophet speaks to a wounded people after exile, a people trying to rebuild their city, their faith, and their future. And he announces a king who does not arrive like other kings.

He comes meekly, riding on a donkey. He banishes the chariot and the warrior’s bow. He proclaims peace to the nations. His dominion reaches “from sea to sea,” but it is not the dominion of conquest. It is the reign of God’s peace.¹

In the ancient world, kings arrived with horses, chariots, weapons, banners, threats, tribute, and fear. God’s king arrives in humility.

That is not weakness.

Biblical meekness is not cowardice. It is disciplined strength. It is power under obedience to God. It is the refusal to dominate. It is courage freed from cruelty.

That is why the Gospel’s image of Jesus matters so much. Jesus says,

“Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.”²

He is not passive in the face of injustice. He is not indifferent to suffering. He is not afraid to confront hypocrisy, exploitation, or religious hardness of heart. But his power does not crush. His authority does not humiliate. His yoke does not enslave. His burden is light because his power gives life.

This is a difficult word for today’s United States.

We are a loud nation. A reactive nation. A nation tempted by domination, spectacle, insult, contempt, and performance. In our politics, cruelty often masquerades as strength. In our media culture, humiliation is treated as entertainment. In our social media habits, outrage is rewarded more than truth. Even religion can be bent into identity warfare, as if Christ came to baptize resentment.

But Zechariah and Matthew tell us that God’s kind of power looks different.

The Christian test of power is not whether it wins applause. It is whether it gives rest to the burdened.

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Pope Leo and the moral meaning of liberty

That is what made Pope Leo XIV’s acceptance of the Liberty Medal at the National Constitution Center so striking. On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, the first U.S.-born pope accepted an award honoring his work for religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and human dignity.³ Speaking from the Vatican to Philadelphia, Pope Leo did not offer empty praise or partisan criticism. He offered something better: a moral interpretation of America’s founding promise.

He praised the Declaration’s claim that all men and women are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. But he also made clear that this claim is not merely a political formula. It rests on a deeper truth about the human person: dignity precedes the state. The state does not create human dignity. It is entrusted with its custody.⁴

That is a crucial Christian correction to every ideology.

The government does not grant human worth.

The market does not measure human worth.

The party does not assign human worth.

Productivity does not determine human worth.

Race, class, citizenship, wealth, health, age, disability, usefulness, or public approval do not establish human worth.

Human dignity comes first because every person is created in the image of God.

This is why Pope Leo placed the right to life at the center of his reflection. Not as a narrow slogan, but as a whole moral vision. He spoke of human life “in every form and condition,” and called for reverence for life from conception to natural death.⁵ In Catholic social teaching, that reverence cannot stop at birth, and it cannot begin only when life is politically convenient. It includes the mother in crisis, the hungry child, the refugee, the elderly person, the prisoner, the sick, the disabled, the worker exposed to exploitation, the family without housing, the victim of violence, and the person whose worth is questioned.

A nation’s moral greatness, Leo said, is shown especially in its capacity to support, protect, and cherish the vulnerable.⁶

That is a demanding vision.

It does not fit neatly into American partisan categories. It asks more of everyone.

It asks pro-life Christians whether they are truly committed to life after birth.

It asks social justice Christians whether the unborn child belongs within their concern for the vulnerable.

It asks patriotic Christians whether love of country includes love for those the country is tempted to discard.

It asks all of us whether our political commitments are being converted by the Gospel, or whether the Gospel has been reduced to decoration for our politics. The Gospel should always make anyone uneasy, as Reinhold Neibuhr called having an “uneasy conscience.”

Religious freedom as responsibility

Pope Leo also lifted up one of America’s greatest contributions: religious freedom.

At its best, religious freedom is not merely the right to keep belief private. It is the protection of conscience, worship, public witness, interfaith dialogue, and moral contribution to the common good. Pope Leo described religious freedom as safeguarding the inner sphere where convictions are formed and conscience guides the decisions of the human heart.⁷

That understanding is urgently needed.

Religious freedom is sometimes treated today as a weapon in the culture war. Some want to use it as permission to dominate others. Others want to reduce it to a private hobby that must stay out of public life. Both approaches are wrong.

Authentic religious freedom protects conscience without turning conscience into coercion.

It allows faith communities to speak publicly, serve generously, educate morally, organize compassionately, and challenge injustice. But it also requires humility, moderation, respect for others, and a search for common ground. Pope Leo explicitly expressed hope for public discourse marked by moderation, respect, and efforts toward peace and reconciliation.⁸

That is a deeply Catholic way to live in a pluralistic democracy.

We do not enter public life because we want to impose a theocracy. We enter public life because faith forms responsibility. We believe every person bears the image of God. We believe the poor have a claim on our conscience. We believe liberty must be joined to truth and goodness. We believe peace is more than the absence of conflict. We believe reconciliation is possible. We believe the common good is real.

A Christian in today’s United States should not be silent.

But neither should a Christian be cruel.

The way we speak is part of our witness.

The golden door and the closed door

Pope Leo also reminded the country that America became a byword for freedom as it opened its doors to successive waves of immigrants.⁹ That is not the whole American story, but it is one of its noblest chapters.

It is also why Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue of Liberty resonates so deeply with this Sunday’s Gospel.

Lazarus rejected the old image of imperial power — the “brazen giant” of conquest — and imagined America’s symbol as a woman with a torch, a “Mother of Exiles,” lifting her lamp beside the golden door.¹⁰ Her famous invitation to the tired, poor, and huddled masses echoes Jesus’ own invitation to the weary and burdened.

Jesus says: Come to me.

Liberty says: Give me your tired, your poor.

The Gospel says: You will find rest.

The Statue says: I lift my lamp.

This is not accidental poetry. It is one of the moral bridges between Christian imagination and the American promise.

But on Independence Day weekend, especially from the perspective of a parish with a deep African American history and presence, we must say clearly: not everyone’s ancestors came through a golden door.

Many immigrants came seeking freedom, work, safety, and opportunity. That story is sacred. Many Catholic families know it in their bones.

But the ancestors of most Black Americans did not arrive invited by liberty. They were brought in chains. They did not come as huddled masses yearning to breathe free. They were forced into the holds of ships, sold on auction blocks, separated from families, and made to labor for a nation that proclaimed freedom while denying it to them.

And yet African Americans became among the greatest witnesses to the true meaning of American freedom.

Their history forced this country to ask whether its founding words were merely poetry or whether they could become justice. When the Declaration said all are created equal, enslaved Black people knew the contradiction. When the nation celebrated liberty, Black families knew the burden. When others spoke of freedom, they sang spirituals of deliverance.

Those songs were not escape from history. They were Gospel hope inside history.

The Black freedom struggle is one of the great gifts to the American conscience. It did not abandon the promise. It demanded that the promise become true.

The lamp and the Fourteenth Amendment

A Constitution frozen only in its founding moment could not fully carry the promise of liberty because that founding moment still tolerated slavery and exclusion. America had to be judged by its own stated ideals. It had to be amended, corrected, expanded, and morally confronted.

The Fourteenth Amendment is one of the clearest signs of America at its best: a nation recognizing injustice more clearly, expanding the meaning of citizenship, and writing due process and equal protection into constitutional law.¹¹ It did not solve every problem. It did not erase racism. It did not prevent Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, lynching, or discrimination. But it gave later generations a constitutional language by which to challenge those injustices.

That is how a liberal democracy grows: not by pretending its founding generation saw everything, but by allowing its deepest principles to confront its failures over time.

This is also how Christian conversion works.

We do not become holy by pretending we never sinned. We become holy by allowing grace to reveal what must be repented, healed, and transformed.

America, like every nation, needs conversion.

Not conversion into a confessional state. Not conversion into Christian nationalism. Not conversion into religious domination.

America needs conversion toward truth, dignity, justice, mercy, peace, and the common good.

Black Catholic witnesses and America’s unfinished freedom

Catholics have been part of America’s story in complicated ways. Sometimes painfully, because Catholics too participated in the sins and prejudices of the nation. But also beautifully, because Black Catholics and their allies helped the Church live the Gospel more faithfully.

Think of Venerable Augustus Tolton, born into slavery, who became the first widely recognized African American priest in the United States and served a Church that did not always welcome him.

Think of Venerable Henriette Delille in New Orleans, who founded the Sisters of the Holy Family to serve the poor, the elderly, and the enslaved.

Think of Daniel Rudd, the Black Catholic journalist who called the Church to live its own universal claims.

Think of Sister Thea Bowman, who taught the Church that Black culture, Black song, Black preaching, Black joy, and Black suffering belong fully in the Catholic story.

And think of Black Catholic parishes — including communities like mine, St. Agatha in Los Angeles — that became places of worship, dignity, education, organizing, beauty, and belonging when the wider society too often denied those gifts.

That is America at its best: not a nation without sin, but a people capable of repentance; not a people without contradiction, but a people capable of reform; not a people who always welcomed the burdened, but a people whose deepest ideals keep calling them back to welcome, justice, and dignity.

The Statue of Liberty lifts a lamp beside the golden door. But the Black freedom struggle reminds us that some people had to build the door, break down the door, march toward the door, pray at the door, and demand that the door be opened not as charity but as justice.

“A republic, if you can keep it”

At the Liberty Medal event, the setting itself mattered. Philadelphia. The National Constitution Center. Independence Mall. A ceremony on the eve of America’s 250th birthday. A pope speaking about liberty, conscience, dignity, and peace to a country both proud and divided.

The old Franklin warning still applies:

“A republic, if you can keep it.”¹²

That line is not just a civics-class quotation. It is a spiritual warning. A republic does not keep itself. A Constitution does not enforce itself. A democracy does not preserve itself through slogans. Liberty does not survive without virtue.

Pope Leo’s address made the same point in another key. America’s founding ideals must be taken up anew in each generation, in the face of new challenges.¹³

This is where his Liberty Medal address connects with his broader teaching in Magnifica Humanitas. There he wrote that humanity faces a choice: to build another Tower of Babel or to build a city where God and humanity dwell together, where dignity is safeguarded, justice is promoted, and fraternity becomes possible.¹⁴

That is the question before America at 250.

Will we build Babel — a civilization of pride, domination, technological power, tribal resentment, and self-enclosure?

Or will we help build a city where human dignity is safeguarded, justice is pursued, and fraternity becomes possible?

Christians cannot answer that question abstractly. We answer it by the lives we live.

How Christians live in today’s United States

So what does it mean to live as a Christian in today’s United States of America?

First, it means we love the country truthfully.

We do not have to choose between gratitude and honesty. We can thank God for the freedoms, opportunities, sacrifices, institutions, and ideals that have shaped this nation. And we can also ask God to heal what remains wounded, purify what remains unjust, and strengthen what remains noble.

Second, we practice a whole-life reverence for human dignity.

We refuse to measure human worth by usefulness, wealth, citizenship, productivity, race, ideology, age, health, or power. We defend the dignity of the unborn, the immigrant, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, the worker, the prisoner, the addict, the lonely, and the enemy. This does not mean every policy question is simple. It means every policy question must begin with the human person.

Third, we use religious freedom for service, not domination.

The First Amendment protects the public voice of faith. But Christian witness must be marked by humility, truth, charity, and respect. Religious freedom is not freedom to despise. It is freedom to worship God, form conscience, serve the vulnerable, speak for justice, and contribute to the common good.

Fourth, we reject dehumanizing language.

A Christian cannot speak of migrants, political opponents, the poor, racial minorities, women, LGBT persons, prisoners, soldiers, police officers, or any group of human beings as vermin, animals, invaders, enemies of the people, trash, or disposable bodies. Language forms conscience. Cruel speech prepares the way for cruel action.

Fifth, we carry the lamp.

Emma Lazarus imagined Liberty lifting a lamp beside the golden door. Jesus gives us something deeper: the light of the Gospel. That light belongs in family life, parish life, civic life, and public life. We carry it when we welcome the person who feels invisible, listen before judging, help children know they belong, support ministries that feed and teach and heal, accompany families under pressure, and stand with those whose dignity is denied.

Sixth, we become people of meek courage.

Jesus is meek and humble of heart. That does not mean Christians should be timid in the face of injustice. It means our courage must not become cruelty. Our conviction must not become contempt. Our truth-telling must not become self-righteousness. Our public engagement must remain rooted in mercy.

Seventh, we help keep the republic.

We vote. We learn. We organize. We participate in local institutions. We support schools, parishes, neighborhood groups, unions, charities, civic associations, and public-service organizations. We resist authoritarian temptations from the left or the right. We refuse political idolatry. We remember that Caesar is not Christ.

These are not small things. They are the ordinary practices by which faith becomes citizenship and citizenship becomes service.

“God mend thine every flaw”

The Liberty Medal ceremony concluded, fittingly, with “America the Beautiful.”

That song is often treated as patriotic decoration. But it is more than that. It is a prayer.

“God mend thine every flaw,” Katharine Lee Bates wrote. “Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”¹⁵

That is the line America needs at 250.

God mend thine every flaw.

That is not anti-American. It is mature patriotism.

It is love with open eyes.

It is the recognition that America’s beauty and America’s flaws are both real. Spacious skies and slavery. Purple mountain majesties and poverty. Heroic sacrifice and unjust war. Immigrant hope and closed doors. Religious freedom and religious hypocrisy. Constitutional brilliance and constitutional betrayal. Great generosity and terrible cruelty. Noble ideals and recurring fear.

A Christian can sing “America the Beautiful” not as national flattery, but as intercession.

God, mend what is broken.

Confirm our soul in self-control.

Join liberty to law.

Crown our good with brotherhood.

Make every gain divine.

That is a prayer worthy of America at 250.

The freedom that gives rest

At the end of the Gospel, Jesus says:

“My yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

That is real freedom.

Not freedom as selfishness. Not freedom as domination. Not freedom as endless appetite. Not freedom as contempt for law, neighbor, truth, or responsibility.

• Real freedom is the capacity to love what is good.

• Real freedom is the courage to serve.

• Real freedom is the humility to repent.

• Real freedom is the strength to protect the vulnerable.

• Real freedom is the discipline to seek truth.

• Real freedom is the mercy that gives rest to the burdened.

Pope Leo ended his Liberty Medal address by commending the nation to the One who is “the source of true freedom and lasting peace.”¹⁶ That is where Christians must begin and end.

America is not our savior.

But America is our responsibility.

As Catholics, we bring the nation before God not to worship it, but to pray for its conversion, healing, and renewal. We ask God to make us the kind of people our best ideals require and the kind of disciples Jesus sends into the world: meek but courageous, humble but hopeful, honest about injustice but committed to mercy.

May this country become more fully a place where the tired and poor are not despised, where the burdened find rest, where the stranger is treated with dignity, where the descendants of the enslaved are honored as prophets of freedom, where liberty is joined to responsibility, where religious freedom serves the common good, and where justice is guided by love.

And may Jesus Christ, meek and humble of heart, teach us again how to lift the lamp — not only beside a golden door, but in every human encounter — until all God’s children can breathe free.

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Endnotes

1. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 5, 2026,” USCCB Daily Readings, accessed July 3, 2026, https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070526.cfm.

2. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 5, 2026,” USCCB Daily Readings, accessed July 3, 2026, https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070526.cfm.

3. National Constitution Center, “Liberty Medal,” accessed July 3, 2026, https://constitutioncenter.org/about/liberty-medal.

4. Pope Leo XIV, “Address of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV: Acceptance of the Liberty Medal of the National Constitution Center,” Vatican, July 3, 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2026/july/documents/20260703-liberty-medal.html.

5. Leo XIV, “Acceptance of the Liberty Medal.”

6. Leo XIV, “Acceptance of the Liberty Medal.”

7. Leo XIV, “Acceptance of the Liberty Medal.”

8. Leo XIV, “Acceptance of the Liberty Medal.”

9. Leo XIV, “Acceptance of the Liberty Medal.” See also Joshua McElwee, “Pope Leo Praises US History of Welcoming Immigrants at 250th Anniversary,” Reuters, July 3, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/pope-leo-praises-us-history-welcoming-immigrants-250th-anniversary-2026-07-03/.

10. National Park Service, “The New Colossus,” Statue of Liberty National Monument, updated April 9, 2026, https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/colossus.htm.

11. Library of Congress, Constitution Annotated, “Fourteenth Amendment,” accessed July 3, 2026, https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/.

12. National Park Service, “September 17, 1787: A Republic, If You Can Keep It,” updated September 22, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-september17.htm.

13. Leo XIV, “Acceptance of the Liberty Medal.”

14. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, Vatican, May 15, 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html.

15. Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward, “America the Beautiful,” Library of Congress, Patriotic Melodies, accessed July 3, 2026, https://www.loc.gov/collections/patriotic-melodies/articles-and-essays/america-the-beautiful/.

16. Leo XIV, “Acceptance of the Liberty Medal.”

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For me, it begins in postwar Los Angeles, with my father’s WWII service, Catholic school flag ceremonies, working-class hope, Mexico, 9/11 in Washington, civic organizing in Los Angeles, and the complicated gratitude of calling myself an American.

America is not finished. Neither are our stories.

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What’s Your American Story?

A Fourth of July invitation to remember, reflect, and renew America at 250

A Personal Question for a National Birthday

Every Fourth of July asks us to remember a national story.

But this year, as America prepares to celebrate 250 years of independence, I find myself asking a more personal question:

What is my American story?

Not the abstract story. Not the textbook version. Not the partisan version. Not the sentimental version wrapped in fireworks and nostalgia. My story. The story of how I became American, how I learned what America meant, how that meaning changed, and why, after all these years, I remain grateful to have been formed by this country’s promise.

That is also the question I want to invite every reader to ask:

What is your American story?

Where did you first learn the Pledge of Allegiance? The songs? The myths? The contradictions? The possibilities? Where did America become real to you — not as a slogan, but as a lived experience?

Postwar Los Angeles and the Working-Class Promise

For me, it began in post-World War II Los Angeles.

I grew up in a Mexican American family in the San Fernando Valley. My father was a World War II veteran where he was finally treated as a full American after being treated as second class in the Texas of the deep South. Like so many men of his generation, he carried his military service quietly but seriously. He belonged to the American Legion. The flag mattered. Civic ritual mattered. Respect for public office mattered, even when one disagreed politically. There was a dignity in service and a sense that the country had asked something of him — and he had answered.

At my Catholic school, the flag ceremony was part of everyday life. We learned the patriotic songs. We learned American history in the older civic style — sometimes too clean, sometimes incomplete, but sincere in its belief that the country mattered. We sang “America the Beautiful.” We said the Pledge of Allegiance. We learned about presidents, wars, immigrants, pioneers, inventors, saints, soldiers, and citizens. We absorbed the idea that America was both a country and a responsibility.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood of homeowners. Families bought new homes for under $15,000. They did not feel rich. They worked hard. But they believed that work, family, faith, education, and thrift could build a stable life. My father’s wages were modest. My mother also worked. Two incomes, even at or near minimum wage, could help support a household, pay a mortgage, own a car and a truck, raise children, and participate in community life. In 1957, the federal minimum wage was $1.00 an hour; in 1963, it rose to $1.25.¹

That world was not perfect. It was not equally available to everyone. Housing discrimination, racial exclusion, gender expectations, and unequal schools shaped opportunities in ways many people did not see or did not want to see. But in my childhood, I saw something real: the American working-class promise still had some concrete form. Ordinary people could imagine a future. They could buy a home. They could send children to free public schools or very low cost Catholic schools like mine where tuition was $5.00 per month. People joined parish groups, veterans’ organizations, unions, neighborhood associations, sports leagues, and civic clubs. They could belong. This created a sense of real community.

Up until 1973 all public higher education in California was free of tuition. Ronald Reagan changed that. I was in the last graduating class of the University of California to receive that benefit. The state became an economic powerhouse because of this educational opportunity for all.

That early American experience gave me a baseline. Work should lead somewhere. Education should open doors. Citizenship should mean participation. Religion should form conscience. The flag should not be a weapon. Public life should have some sense of dignity.

Of course, every child eventually discovers that the country is more complicated than the symbols. For me that was experiencing the Civil Rights Movement through the TV news, most especially the March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.. Then came the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy. While at university I watched Walter Cronkite every night report the Vietnam War through actual war images. I organized, marched, and was arrested for engaging in peaceful civil disobedience.

Leaving Home to Discover I Was American

For me, one of the great discoveries about being American came when I studied in Mexico in the early 1970s to learn Spanish and research changing religion in Latin America. I also thought I was going to recover my roots. I imagined that Mexico would help me understand myself more deeply as a Mexican American. And it did — but not in the way I expected.

I discovered how American I was.

I was not Mexican in the way Mexicans were Mexican. I was Mexican American from suburban Los Angeles. More than that, I was a U.S. American Catholic, shaped by American Catholic schools and parishes, American individualism, American opportunity, American expectations of mobility, American civic assumptions, American informality, American ambition, and American freedom of religion.

Sometimes you have to leave your country to discover what your country has made of you.

When I was in Mexico, people saw me as American. My accent, my questions, my assumptions, my habits, my confidence, my sense of possibility — all of it marked me. I could claim Mexican ancestry. I could love Mexican culture. I could feel deep connection to family, language, food, music, faith, and memory. But I was not simply Mexican. I was American.

That realization did not diminish my heritage. It clarified it.

To be American is often to live with layered identities. It is to be formed by memory and migration, by family stories and national institutions, by inherited culture and chosen belonging. It is to discover that identity is not a sealed box. It is dynamic, relational, and sometimes contested.

Civil Society: America’s Hidden Democratic School

Years later in the 1990s, as a sociologist and priest doing research and pastoral work near Guadalajara, Mexico, I came to appreciate America from another angle.

I saw more clearly why people come to the United States through two years of ethnographic research in a squatters’ community near the Guadalajara airport— a community without running water, telephone lines, trash collection, or even a secondary school thereby limiting children’s education to 6th grade. I learned parents taught their children to realistically see their limited futures in manual labor. The minimum wage in Mexico in 1998 was equivalent to US $4.00 a day. No wonder people left for the United States where they could more than $4.00 per hour!

People do not leave home casually. They leave because they are seeking work, safety, education, medical care, family reunification, political stability, or a future for their children. Migration is often described in our politics as invasion, crisis, lawbreaking, or burden. But at the human level, migration is usually an act of hope.

In Mexico, I also saw how different civic culture can be. The United States has always had a strong tradition of bottom-up civil society: PTAs, neighborhood associations, churches, unions, school boards, nonprofits, charities, volunteer groups, professional associations, civic clubs, community foundations, local newspapers, and informal networks of mutual aid. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this nearly two centuries ago when he observed that Americans had a remarkable tendency to organize themselves in pursuit of shared goals.²

Not all Americans participate in these structures equally, and many of them have weakened. But historically they have been central to American political culture.

Mexico, by contrast, had a more top-down civic pattern shaped for generations by political party structures, the Catholic Church, schools, business elites, and state institutions. In the late 1990s few independent nongovernmental organizations existed. Fortunately after 2000 they have grown significantly over time. But the ordinary “civil society toolkit” that many Americans take for granted was not always as available or as trusted.

This helped me understand something important about immigrants to the United States. Many arrive with enormous faith, courage, family discipline, work ethic, and sacrifice. But they may not arrive with the civic tools and skills needed to participate in American non-political public life. They may not know how to organize a neighborhood meeting, advocate at a school board, join a PTA, start a nonprofit, meet with city officials, raise funds, write a grant, speak at a public hearing, or build a coalition.

Those are learned skills.

If we want immigrants to become participants in American democracy, we have to invite them into civic life and teach the practices of participation. Democracy is not only voting. Democracy is knowing how to speak, gather, organize, deliberate, petition, volunteer, advocate, and build institutions.

This is one of America’s great gifts when we are at our best: we teach people that their voice matters.

Family, Community, and the American Self

That lesson became clearer to me in a very different setting in 1999, when I observed AIDS prevention work across Mexico, the United States, and Canada. I saw how public health messages reflected different national cultural identities and how those national cultural factors are used to respond to common emergencies.

In Mexico, the most effective appeal was family: Do you care about your family and loved ones? Protect them.

In Canada, the appeal centered on social solidarity: Consider the health of your community.

In the United States, the appeal was individual protection: Protect yourself.

There is truth in all three. Family matters. Community matters. Individual responsibility matters. But the contrast was revealing. American culture often begins with the individual. That can be a strength. It teaches agency, initiative, responsibility, and self-protection. But it can also become a weakness when individualism forgets family, community, and common good.

America at our best holds those together: personal freedom, family responsibility, civic solidarity, and public obligation. But too often they do not.

When the World Became American

Then came September 11, 2001.

I was teaching social theory at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., less than four miles from the Pentagon. At 9:37:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.³ From a fourth-floor classroom, everyday for two months I could see the smoke from the crash. It is hard to describe what that felt like. The abstractions of war, empire, terrorism, vulnerability, national security, and global conflict suddenly became visible in the sky.

For weeks and months afterward, Washington felt transformed. There was fear, of course. There were police and barricades and security measures that made the city feel at times like an occupied capital. But there was also extraordinary solidarity.

At Georgetown, the courtyard near the chapel became an interfaith sacred space. People gathered for prayer, music, silence, mourning, and presence. For more than a month, that space held grief without requiring uniformity. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, people of other faiths, and people of no formal faith came together because the wound was larger than any one community.

There was a palpable sense of being American in a time of crisis.

For a moment, the world became American too. People across the globe grieved with us. Our vulnerability awakened sympathy. Our pain became visible. Our sense of invincibility was broken.

And then, slowly, that solidarity unraveled.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the expansion of national security power, the failures and costs of military intervention, and later the economic collapse of 2007 and 2008 changed the national mood. Fear hardened. Trust weakened. Partisanship deepened. The same country that had briefly gathered in grief began to fracture again over power, policy, memory, and meaning.

That is also part of my American story: solidarity can be real and still fragile.

Serving the Country from Inside a Troubled Institution

In early 2009, I received an invitation that surprised me. I was asked to serve as an Obama presidential appointee on the Board of Visitors for WHINSEC — the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas, based at Fort Benning, Georgia.⁴

This was a genuine dilemma.

Many of my students and faculty colleagues had participated in protests calling for the closure of WHINSEC because of the former School of the Americas’ history and the role some graduates had played in human rights abuses in Latin America. As a priest, a sociologist, and someone who taught Latin American Studies, I took those concerns seriously. I knew the history. I understood the moral weight.

But I also saw the invitation differently. Apart from voting, this was the first time I had been asked to serve my country.

I eventually decided to say yes.

I was asked to serve because I could bring together Latin American Studies, Catholic moral reflection, sociology, and concern for human rights. The Board’s work included reviewing curriculum, instruction, academic methods, and the ethical formation of military personnel from across the Western Hemisphere. WHINSEC’s statutory purpose includes professional education and training within the context of democratic principles, promoting democratic values and respect for human rights, and requiring instruction on human rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military, and the role of the military in a democratic society.⁵

I served on the Board of Visitors through the eight years of the Obama presidency.

I do not know how much impact my interventions had given how slowly the military changes. But I know the experience changed me. I learned more about military culture, security cooperation, hemispheric politics, institutional reform, and the complicated role the United States plays in Latin America. I saw both the positive and negative dimensions of American power. I saw how easy it is to criticize institutions from the outside and how necessary it is for some people of conscience to enter institutions and press for accountability from within.

That too is American: protest and participation, criticism and service, conscience and institution.

Naming a Neighborhood, Renewing a Community

My American story is also deeply rooted in Los Angeles.

In the late 1980s, during my first parish assignment after ordination, I served at Holy Name of Jesus Parish in South Los Angeles. It was a time of gang violence, drive by shootings, drugs, insecurity, and economic decline. Many people saw only the negative. But Holy Name was an oasis of worship, education, social services, and stable presence. It was a place where faith held people together when other institutions were failing them.

From my business and sociological background, I helped an interfaith clergy group reimagine the community not only through its deficits but through its assets: homeownership, education levels, family networks, central Los Angeles location, churches, schools, and neighborhood pride. We worked with local politicians and city bureaucrats to identify and name the neighborhood Jefferson Park — a name I found on old city maps.

That may sound like a small thing. But naming matters.

A neighborhood without a name struggles to organize its identity. A named neighborhood can have boundaries, signage, parades, neighborhood councils, preservation efforts, marketing, festivals, and a shared answer to the classic Los Angeles question: “What neighborhood are you from?” To help people say, “I’m from Jefferson Park” makes me very proud to have served that community.

I was at Holy Name for only two years, but that assignment shaped the rest of my priestly ministry. It taught me culturally adaptive and inclusive ministry. It taught me how theology and social science could serve a community. It taught me that faith-based organizing should not be separate from parish development but integrated into the life of worship, education, service, and public responsibility.

That is one of the reasons I believe in American civic life. Communities can be reimagined. People can organize. Public officials can be engaged. History can be recovered. Institutions can be redirected. A place can become more itself when people learn to see it with dignity.

The Complicated Name “American”

Of course, my American identity has not always been simple.

From 2005 to 2009, while directing a Georgetown summer program in Santiago, I worked closely with Chilean colleagues who sometimes challenged my use of the word “American.” They would say, with good reason, “We are all Americans.” They were right geographically and historically. The Americas include North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. The word “American” belongs to more than the United States.

And yet, in global usage, “American” also names the identity of people from the United States. I understand the ambiguity. I respect the challenge. Sometimes I say “U.S. American” for clarity. But I also know that when I move through the world, people see me as American. My passport, my formation, my civic habits, my assumptions, my freedoms, my contradictions — all mark me as a person formed by the United States.

Yes, I call myself an American. Not hyphenated like Mexican-American. Just American. That’s who I am. I can’t get around it.

But I do so with humility.

American identity has become more complicated in recent years. The pandemic revealed both our generosity and our fragmentation. We saw health care workers, teachers, parish volunteers, grocery workers, public servants, scientists, and neighbors act with courage and sacrifice. We also saw distrust, misinformation, resentment, isolation, and the breakdown of shared truth.

Our popular culture continues to shape the world — rock and roll, movies, television, jeans, hamburgers, pop stars, streaming platforms, social media, slang, celebrity, fashion, and technology. America absorbs the world and then exports new versions of it back to the world. That is part of our creativity. It is also part of our confusion. We are a culture of astonishing innovation and astonishing distraction.

Today’s partisanship and postmodern fragmentation make it harder to tell a common story. Many Americans no longer inhabit the same facts, trust the same institutions, or recognize the same civic vocabulary. The flag itself can feel contested. Patriotism can be narrowed into tribal loyalty. Criticism can be treated as betrayal. Faith can be weaponized. Freedom can be reduced to personal entitlement. Public life can become performance.

And still, I do not give up on America.

Because my American story is not one story. It is many.

• It is my father’s Army service where he was finally treated as a full American in World War II.

• It is a Catholic school flag ceremony in the San Fernando Valley.

• It is my parents working hard enough to build a home and raise a family moving into the middle class.

• It is learning patriotic songs and later learning the parts of history those songs left out.

• It is discovering in Mexico that I was more American than I knew.

• It is learning from immigrants why America still represents hope.

• It is seeing civil society as one of the great schools of democracy.

• It is watching smoke rise from the Pentagon and then watching strangers pray together.

• It is serving on the WHINSEC Board with both moral concern and civic responsibility.

• It is helping a Los Angeles neighborhood claim a name.

• It is voting seriously.

• It is singing “America the Beautiful” with affection.

• It is saying the Pledge of Allegiance solemnly, not as a denial of America’s failures but as a commitment to the republic for which the flag stands.

• It is knowing that America has been at its best and at its worst — sometimes in the same generation, sometimes in the same institution, sometimes in the same person.

Gratitude Without Illusion

So am I proud to be an American?

Pride is not quite the word I would choose.

Grateful is better.

I am grateful to have been born in the United States. Grateful for opportunities I might not have had if I had been born into a working-class family in Mexico or Spain. Grateful for education. Grateful for religious freedom. Grateful for civic life. Grateful for the possibility of reinvention. Grateful for the institutions that, however flawed, allowed me to become a priest, sociologist, teacher, organizer, coach, writer, and citizen.

But gratitude is not passive.

If I am grateful for the hope and promise I received, then I have a responsibility to keep that hope and promise alive for others — citizens and immigrants, the secure and the vulnerable, the long-established and the newly arrived, those who feel fully American and those still waiting to be welcomed into the story.

That is what America at 250 asks of us.

• Not nostalgia.

• Not cynicism.

• Not triumphalism.

• Not despair.

It asks us to tell the truth about our stories and then ask what they require of us.

• What did America give you? What did America deny others?

• Where did you first learn belonging? Where did you first see exclusion?

• Who taught you civic responsibility?

• Who opened a door for your family?

• Who served, sacrificed, organized, marched, taught, prayed, voted, worked, or hoped so that your life could become possible?

• And now, what will you do to keep the promise alive?

America Is Not Finished

America is not finished. That is not a failure. That is the nature of the experiment.

America is always unfolding through memory, conflict, reform, migration, faith, work, protest, service, creativity, and renewal. Each generation receives the country unfinished. Each generation decides whether to narrow the promise or widen it.

My American story has been complicated, contested, and changing. It depends on where I am, what the United States is doing in the world, what our politics have become, what our economy allows, what our culture rewards, and how honestly we face our history.

But after all these years, I can still say this:

I am a patriotic American.

Not because America is innocent.

Not because America is always right.

Not because America has fulfilled its promise.

But because I have lived enough of that promise to know it is worth renewing.

I honor my father’s service. I honor my parents’ labor. I honor the schools and parishes that formed me. I honor the communities that taught me. I honor the immigrants who still believe in the possibility of this country. I honor the civic institutions that need repair but still matter. I honor the responsibility of voting. I honor the unfinished work of democracy.

And yes, I still love singing “America the Beautiful.”

Especially the prayer hidden inside it:

“America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.”⁶

That is not blind patriotism.

That is mature patriotism.

It is love with open eyes.

What Is Your American Story?

So this Fourth of July, as we look toward America’s 250th birthday, I invite you to ask:

What is your American story?

And how will you help renew the America still becoming?

Happy 250th Birthday, America!

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Endnotes

1. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, “History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938–2009,” accessed June 30, 2026, https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart.

2. Library of Congress, “Tocqueville, A View from Outside,” Join In: Voluntary Associations in America, accessed June 30, 2026, https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/join-in-voluntary-associations-in-america/about-this-exhibition/tocqueville-a-view-from-outside/.

3. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “Chapter 1: ‘We Have Some Planes,’” The 9/11 Commission Report, accessed June 30, 2026, https://911commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch1.htm. See also 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, “9/11 at the Pentagon,” accessed June 30, 2026, https://www.pentagonmemorial.org/9-11-at-the-pentagon/.

4. Congress.gov, “H.R.1810 — To repeal the statutory authority for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (the successor institution to the United States Army School of the Americas) in the Department of Defense,” 107th Congress, introduced May 10, 2001, accessed June 30, 2026, https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/1810.

5. 10 U.S.C. § 343, “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed June 30, 2026, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/343.

6. Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward, “America the Beautiful,” Library of Congress, Patriotic Melodies, accessed June 30, 2026, https://www.loc.gov/collections/patriotic-melodies/articles-and-essays/america-the-beautiful/. For the 1917 text, see Katharine Lee Bates, “America the Beautiful,” Wikisource, accessed June 30, 2026, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/America_the_Beautiful_%281917%29.

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