Michele Dunne is a professed Secular Franciscan and the executive director of the Franciscan Action Network, a collective Franciscan voice seeking to transform United States public policy related to peace making, care for creation, poverty, and human rights.

Before coming to her current position, Michele’s career focused on the Middle East and US foreign policy. From 2006 until 2021, she headed programs focused on peace, human rights, and democracy in the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Atlantic Council. Prior to that, she served for nearly 20 years in the US Department of State, including assignments in Jerusalem and Cairo. She holds a PhD from Georgetown University and currently lives in Washington, DC with her husband.

In this episode, Michele shares with us her spiritual journey and the gradual revelation of her Franciscan vocation—what she describes as “the greatest gift that God ever gave me, and also the most challenging and most humbling”—and explores those elements of the “life-giving and life-affirming” Franciscan Rule that have enriched and encouraged her along the way. We take a close look at the work of the Franciscan Action Network and its mission to “inform, inspire, and mobilize” its collective membership of religious communities, local affinity groups, and thousands of individual members across the country. Michele also touches on the relationship between Franciscan spirituality and activism and explains how the Network supports its members in discerning and carrying out their own unique calling.

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Paul Nyklicek on healing our collective national trauma: “We are traumatized by how we are imposed upon by others and by how we impose ourselves on others. We experience the shame of being dehumanized and the shame of dehumanizing others. Reaching a critical mass of internal shame—or, worse, public humiliation—we become highly susceptible to violent behavior as an escape from this unbearable pain.”

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Jim Hickey on the tension of religious responses to war: “Pope Leo XIV has been highly outspoken regarding prayer and conflict, notably during the Iran war conflict. In a Palm Sunday address in St. Peter’s Square, he stated that God ‘does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war’ and rejects prayers from leaders whose ‘hands are full of blood.’ Leo also declared that Jesus is the King of Peace and ‘no one can use [him] to justify war.’”

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Congratulations to our podcast guest Colette Lafia, whose book Leaving the Shore: Experiencing Poetry as Prayer (Monkfish Publishing) was named the Nautilus Book Award 2026 Gold Winner in the category of Lyric Prose or Hybrid Works. Our interview with Colette explored the relationship between reading and writing poetry and contemplative practice. She also shared poems from Leaving the Shore along with prompts for guided mediation.

Congratulations also to our guest Kurt Johnson and his colleagues at Light on Light Press. The Way of Unity: Essential Principles and Preconditions for Peace, written by Robert Atkinson and published by Light on Light, received a 2026 Nautilus Award in the category of Religion and Spirituality of Other Traditions. Kurt introduced us to the two-volume Interspirituality set compiled last year for Light on Light and gave us a rich synthesis of the history and current state of the interspiritual movement.

Look out next week for our interview with Mary Fontana, author of Strangers in the Province of Joy: Practicing Radical Hospitality on the US-Mexico Border (Orbis Books). We’ll also be featuring an article on the Kino Border Initiative, a ministry accompanying migrants in Nogales, Arizona, along with new poetry from El Salvador.

If we look closely at the timeline of American history, we find that, since 1776, over 90 percent of our nearly 250-year project has been marked by involvement in war. I’m not sure if any other nation today can make that claim.

America came into existence as a consequence of war. But what explains this extreme tendency to repeatedly engage in war? It would be comforting to believe that there is a rational explanation, that there is a good reason for engaging in warfare again and again and again. There is, but it’s not what we were taught in school.

As a nation, we are saturated in a collective trauma that we have never adequately addressed. The news of what our country is doing to its own people and to people in other parts of the world horrifies us. We are exposed to such news around the clock. Mere awareness of these events hammer at our souls, and they hammer at the collective American soul. At some level, the American people know that domination, cruelty, destruction, and corruption are wrong and unacceptable. I believe this is true even for those who support the wars America wages and the oppression of people living within and beyond its borders. No individual or nation is immune to moral injury.

When we speak of this trauma, we are speaking of a national moral injury, and when we speak of moral injury, we are dealing with shame. Shame is at the center of traumatic injury, whether we are processing it individually or collectively. It takes the form of an emotional story we create to attribute meaning to our experience. Shame becomes the compelling narrative of our inherent “badness” that is so painful that we go to great lengths to conceal it from others and, as much as possible, from ourselves.

Shame insists that a person or group is the problem. Attempting to claim the moral high ground, we decry poor behavior as “shameless” and we exclaim “Have you no shame?” to those behaving reprehensibly—as if having a sufficient quantity of shame would redirect their actions back within morally acceptable parameters.

Shame has been tragically misunderstood as a kind of virtuous, corrective energy. It isn’t. Often confused with appropriate guilt, shame is an emotional indictment of who we are. By contrast, appropriate guilt is the energy of moral course-correction that guides us back to living in accordance with our values. Think of it as our organic GPS system. Guilt informs us that we have made a mistake, while shame informs us that we are a mistake. If my very existence is labeled a mistake, where is there to go? Literally nowhere.

Shame is corrosive, not corrective. In fact, research indicates that shame is highly correlated with expressions of violence. The actual experience of shame is one of internal torture. This is precisely why people and nations will go to such incredible, even outrageous lengths to escape feelings of shame.

The Origins of Trauma

America’s collective trauma is partly a result of what was done to us. The European settlers who colonized what we now know as North America were themselves a traumatized group of people attempting to escape various forms of oppression in Europe. They risked much in undertaking perilous journeys across the Atlantic Ocean. Some didn’t survive. Many died soon after arriving in the “New World.” They brought their collective trauma with them.

We have also traumatized ourselves by our long history of perpetration. The early settlers who colonized this land traumatized themselves as they dehumanized and brutalized the indigenous people already living on this continent. Those colonists traumatized themselves further by doing the same thing to the people abducted from Africa, who were enslaved and used as beasts of burden to provide a more comfortable life for those who presumed to own them. After the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, we imprisoned thousands of Japanese Americans in internment camps simply because they were Japanese Americans. This kind of vicious inequality and oppression became the pattern for American life, emerging in the Jim Crow period of the 20th century and the bigotry towards Muslims in the 21st.

We are traumatized by how we are imposed upon by others and by how we impose ourselves on others. We experience the shame of being dehumanized and the shame of dehumanizing others. Reaching a critical mass of internal shame—or, worse, public humiliation—we become highly susceptible to violent behavior as an escape from this unbearable pain.

How have we tried to manage our collective trauma? We have manufactured sanitized stories that promote mythologies of greatness and virtue. We escape into highly materialistic lifestyles that we regard as the evidence of how good we are. We obscure or minimize those aspects of our nation’s history that are shameful. Instead, we tell ourselves that God favors us and is on our side. We proclaim American exceptionalism. It worked for us until it couldn’t, because it came at such a high moral cost. Portions of America’s soul were required for the Faustian bargain we didn’t know we were making.

States of Denial

What lengths have we Americans gone to in order to escape our collective trauma? Whether we consciously admit it or not, there is an inner awareness that we have acted in ways that are significant betrayals of our morality. Eventually, very painful truths break through and enter our collective awareness. We learn of war crimes like the fire bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo in World War II and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam that were perpetrated by the US military. Incidents of vicious racism like the Wilmington Coup of 1898 and the Tulsa massacre of 1921 seep into public awareness and illuminate the ugliness of white supremacy in America. The American government’s complicity in the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is a current example of this moral betrayal.

Becoming traumatized by harming others may seem like a strange concept to some. Many active military personnel and veterans will confirm how real and devastating it is. The extent to which we subscribe to the illusion of separateness between ourselves and others is the degree to which we are blind to how we injure ourselves by injuring others. The reality of our deep interconnectedness is a matter of scientific fact. Yet it is a highly problematic fact for those invested in maintaining the political and economic status quo which maintains the privileges of a select few.

Sadly, our politicians are collectively and perhaps willfully in denial of perpetration-induced trauma, as are the powerful corporations that dominate our government. Out of this state of denial, our political and economic systems continue to inflict serious injuries to our individual and collective integrity. They wound our humanity.

This denial makes war inevitable. State-sanctioned mass murder is established as a viable and all too often preferred method of getting what is desired by both political and economic power structures. It is very lucrative for the few and obscenely costly to the many. The normalization of war is the result of conditioned ignorance. The glorification of war is pathological. The conflation of war with anything holy is blasphemous.

Yet the reality of war persists. When nothing else works for us to control the torturous shame we have internalized, war is our “break glass in case of emergency” option. When all else fails, we go to war to distract ourselves from the agony of our shame.

The Work of Healing

The purpose of pointing out the low points of American history is not to promote a sense of national shame. Despite the current attempt to re-engineer public education to “protect” students from history that might make uncomfortable (to protect “white fragility,” some might contend), it is just the opposite. We are already immersed in an atmosphere of collective trauma that is so familiar to us that it feels normal. We are like fish swimming in water and not realizing that we are wet.

The point of reckoning with our collective injuries and the perpetration of serious injuries to others is that a deep and rigorous honesty is the only way out of this toxic cycle. Such honesty is the exit ramp for us to do the necessary work of healing so that we can emerge from the torture chamber of our collective trauma. We need to stop pretending that we can fight our way out of this torture chamber. We can’t. We keep trying the main the feelgood stories of our collective ego, perhaps fearing the pain of letting them go. We confuse honest humility with the shame we fear so much, and this confusion keeps us trapped in our own fiction.

Like a recovering alcoholic, America needs to make amends to all whom it has harmed, which must include tangible reparations to the fullest extent possible. We must humbly ask for forgiveness and accept whether it is given or not. A hollow “celebrity apology” will accomplish nothing.

America needs its own version of a Truth and Reconciliation process. We need to take long and serious look in the mirror and stop pretending that we’re always right and always superior. “My country right or wrong” needs to be retired and finally recognized as an obsolete stance. Our national ego needs deflation. No more fantasies about superiority. Then we will be able to heal from our trauma and start telling ourselves a new and honest story of who we are: a people who prioritize love over domination and a nation that genuinely respects all of its inhabitants and all those living throughout the world. ♦

Paul Nyklicek is a husband and a father. He works in Farmington, Connecticut, as a psychotherapist and is an associate member of Veterans for Peace.

Before coming to her current position, Michele’s career focused on the Middle East and US foreign policy. From 2006 until 2021, she headed programs focused on peace, human rights, and democracy in the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Atlantic Council. Prior to that, she served for nearly 20 years in the US Department of State, including assignments in Jerusalem and Cairo. She holds a PhD from Georgetown University and currently lives in Washington, DC with her husband.

In this episode, Michele shares with us her spiritual journey and the gradual revelation of her Franciscan vocation—what she describes as “the greatest gift that God ever gave me, and also the most challenging and most humbling”—and explores those elements of the “life-giving and life-affirming” Franciscan Rule that have enriched and encouraged her along the way. We take a close look at the work of the Franciscan Action Network and its mission to “inform, inspire, and mobilize” its collective membership of religious communities, local affinity groups, and thousands of individual members across the country. Michele also touches on the relationship between Franciscan spirituality and activism and explains how the Network supports its members in discerning and carrying out their own unique calling.

Invoking the divine is a long-standing tradition in American military history, but the rhetoric of the present administration has reached unprecedented levels. Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has positioned himself as a champion of the Christian cause. After surviving the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt, he attributed his survival to divine intervention, claiming he was “saved by God to make America great again” and stating that the event deepened his faith. Yet much of Trump’s subsequent rhetoric strikes a sacrilegious chord. Doesn’t Christianity teach the necessity of humility and the need to examine one’s own conscience?

This tone extends to his cabinet. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has framed military operations in the language of “divine purpose,” asking Americans to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus.” He even compared the rescue of a US airman on Easter Sunday to the resurrection of Christ.

Previous administrations invoked God with more restraint. During the D-Day invasion, Franklin D. Roosevelt led a national radio prayer asking for the blessing of “Almighty God” in a “struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization.” Following 9/11, George W. Bush stated that “the Lord of life holds all who die,” but he stopped short of claiming a divine anointing for specific military strikes. Similarly, Barack Obama frequently spoke of “Jesus Christ,” but within the context of personal faith rather than as a justification for combat. Two passages in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address perhaps capture this tension best:

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. . . .

With malice toward none, with charity for all.

Pope Leo XIV has been highly outspoken regarding prayer and conflict, notably during the Iran war conflict. In a Palm Sunday address in St. Peter’s Square, he stated that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war” and rejects prayers from leaders whose “hands are full of blood.” Leo also declared that Jesus is the King of Peace and “no one can use [him] to justify war.”

Aside from Pope Leo’s strong pushback to Trump’s bold statement, “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” a vast majority of conservative politicians, media outlets, and, most surprisingly, clergy have remained silent. This “sitting on the sidelines” approach only bolsters Trump’s sense of invincibility. Does he believe he can walk on water, give sight to the blind, or make the mute sing? Does he truly believe God takes sides in politics?

The truth is, God does not choose sides.

Tom Waits’s beautiful ballad, “The Day After Tomorrow,” takes the form of a letter from a soldier to his loved ones in Rockford, Illinois. Disillusioned by the blood spilled in battle, he asks the very question that today’s rhetoric ignores:

You can’t deny,
the other side
don’t want to die any more than we do,
what I’m trying to say
is don’t they pray
to the same God that we do?
And tell me how does God choose,
whose prayers does he refuse? ♦

Jim Hickey is a member of St. Brigid Parish in Westbury, New York, a Vincentian, and a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of local newspapers.

As a way of gathering initial impressions of Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the UK-based Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice convened a panel of scholars to offer assessments via Zoom on June 4.

Magnifica Humanitas was released on May 25 and takes as its theme the preservation of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Panel chair Anna Rowlands of Durham University (UK) noted in her opening remarks that the encyclical has been positively received both within the church and among nonbelievers.

Rowlands described human dignity “as a foundation and not merely a principle” of the encyclical. She observed that Catholic social teaching (CST)—the body of church doctrine concerned with human dignity, solidarity, and other elements of the common good—is presented as an “act of discernment” throughout Magnifica Humanitas.

Rowlands added that the encyclical integrates the Vatican’s two previous texts on AI—Antiqua et Nova and Quo Vadis, Humanitas?, both published earlier this year—into a social and theological point of view that “bring[s] into sharp relief questions of goods, temporal and spiritual.”

In addressing questions of “inequalities of power” and “the profound interconnections between the crises and the opportunities that lie before us,” the encyclical “returns the human to the center of the conversation,” she said.

Nicholas Hayes-Mota, assistant professor of social and theological ethics at Santa Clara University in California, praised Magnifica Humanitas for its “comprehensive reinterpretation of the history of Catholic social teaching as this extremely dynamic and evolving tradition.”

Hayes-Mota observed that two of the encyclical’s five chapters are about Catholic social teaching, providing “an essential synodal interpretation of Catholic social teaching” rooted in “a vision of the church as a synodal body” that discerns and decides together. This synodal interpretation is “not only embraced and incorporated” within the encyclical, he added, but “becomes applied to the world.”

He referenced paragraph 10 of the document, which invokes synodality as the church’s “offering” to the world, thereby providing a framework for “a deliberative democratic vision.” The church and the world become “mirror images of each other,” he said, in that both are called to become “synodal bodies.”

Hayes-Mota explained how chapter 2 of Magnifica Humanitas summarizes the core principles of Catholic social teaching. He singled out paragraph 22 for the way it presents Catholic social teaching as developing through the “many voices” of our time, which implies a church that learns as well as teaches.

Paragraphs 86 through 89 represent a “hugely significant move” in that they affirm that the principles of Catholic social teaching “apply within the church itself”—something that has been previously contested within the church’s magisterium, he said.

“There is more work to do to create a church that embodies its own social teaching,” he continued. Pope Leo XIV has moved the church in this direction by “mak[ing] subsidiarity the guiding principle of the church’s own governance and pastoral life,” he added.

Dr. Samuel Tranter, research fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, spoke from an Anglican perspective about how “Leo’s letter is very much the treatise we need for our time.”

Tranter framed his remarks around three key words: courage, creatureliness, and care. He quoted poet W. H. Auden’s definition of poetry as “the clear expression of mixed feelings” and linked this to the ambivalence of technological development, which can be marked by sin even as it is made in service to love and justice.

Since no contemporary pope would want to “prolong the conflict” between science and faith, Leo expresses gratitude for human ingenuity throughout the encyclical, Tranter said.

Central to Magnifica Humanitas is “the irreducible value of our humanity” that “must never be replaced or surpassed,” he added.

“The world construed by Magnifica Humanitas is strange and beautiful already” without the inundation of technology, he said. In attempting to inspire people to retain their humanity in the teeth of technological onslaught, Leo is effectively saying, “Don’t give up your birthright for a mess of pottage,” Tranter said.

Tranter observed that the future of work is another of the pope’s major concerns. While “tech optimists” say that the “disruption” caused by AI will eventually die down, this is “not much consolation,” he said. The church’s responsibility in the meantime is to be “pastoral and prophetic.”

Describing Magnifica Humanitas as “a toolkit that can be applied to this moment,” Tranter singled out Leo’s invitation to become “weavers of hope” in the document’s conclusion.

“With hope comes agency, or the freedom to act,” he elaborated.

Meghan J. Clark, a professor of moral theology at St. John’s University in New York, characterized Magnifica Humanitas as “dense” and “not something that lends itself to a quick read.”

Building on Hayes-Mota’s comments, she spoke of the encyclical’s “repositioning of what Catholic social teaching does” by framing it as a process of “shared discernment.” She cited paragraph 45, which speaks of “a harmonious, though not always linear, development” of social teaching within the history of the church.

A common critique of Catholic social teaching is that it’s “too optimistic,” Clark said. This has led some commentators to claim that Magnifica Humanitas “does not talk about sin enough.”

She pointed to paragraph 176, in which Leo asks for pardon for the church’s complicity in the practice of slavery—what he terms “a wound in Christian memory”—as recognition that “the church should have known better.”

“Nobody is let off the hook,” she said. “The moral criteria that matured [throughout history] has been there all along.”

Magnifica Humanitas “moves us into being able to analyze the world around us in a way that’s more integrated,” she continued.

Leo joins his predecessors Benedict XVI and Francis on “sounding the alarm on efficiency and economic development” with the document, Clark observed.

“We have seen a cult of efficiency emerge” in recent years that “eats away at that sense of self,” she said. She quoted from paragraph 112 of the encyclical: “When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.”

There is always a risk that people “will stop mattering” in periods of rapid economic and technological change, she said. She emphasized that privileging labor over capital and people over profits “has always been central for Catholic social thought.”

In a world where “we’ve armed everything” from the war on drugs to the characterization of cancer as “a battlefield,” Magnifica Humanitas represents Pope Leo’s “call to disarm,” she said. ♦

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic

Notes and Events

• In light of the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood on Sunday, it is worth revisiting paragraph 234 of Magnifica Humanitas, which begins: “The spirituality that we need is a Eucharistic spirituality, that is, a spirituality of ecclesial unity in love.” I (Michael) was kindly invited to offer a reflection on Sunday’s readings for U.S. Catholic; those interested can find the text as well as video reflection here. I’m also pleased to share a related essay on praying the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours for Emmanuel Magazine that is available here. Special thanks to Emmanuel editor (and TAC contributor) Michael E. DeSanctis for his openness to the piece and valuable editorial assistance!

• Join TAC podcast co-facilitator Patrick Carolan tomorrow, June 6, at 9:30 a.m. ET as he presents “Franciscan Renaissance—The World is Our Cloister: Reimagining Our Way Forward as Human Family” for the Franciscan Circle of the Companions of Francis and Clare. The link to join the presentation is here. The Franciscan Circle is a diverse interfaith gathering of clergy and laypeople who seek to journey in mind and heart with the witness and wisdom of the saints of Assisi, Francis, and Clare. To learn more, we invite you to listen to our podcast episode with Franciscan Circle founder Br. Mark D’Alessio from April, available here.

Seeking to establish a new pedagogy for learning spirituality melding the ancient Western wisdom tradition with contemporary scientists and modern mystics, Fox founded the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality in 1976. After pressure from the Vatican’s Congregation of Doctrine and Faith, the institute closed in the early 1990s. Fox went on to establish the University of Creation Spirituality, or UCS, in California in 1996. On the UCS faculty were persons from Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Sufi, Native American, and Hindu traditions, as well as scientists and ecological and social justice activists and artists. Fox has since taught at Stanford University, Vancouver School of Theology, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, among other places.

Fox is recipient of the Abbey Courage of Conscience Peace Award, the Gandhi King Ikeda Award, the Tikkun National Ethics Award, and other awards. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Academy of the Love of Learning in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and conducts numerous workshops each year.

Our wide-ranging conversation looked at Matthew’s early life and the influence of Dominican theologian M. D. Chenu on the formulation of Creation Spirituality; explored the fourfold path of the spiritual journey, with a particular focus on the via creativa that links art and meditation; and related the importance of interspirituality or “deep ecumenism” for the future of the planet. Matthew also shares why he feels “human beings need ritual to survive” and how ritual sustains community by “bringing people together to rejoice, to grieve, to commune, to be nourished, and to be strong to return to serve.”

See also:

The core tenets of Creation Spirituality

An overview of the Cosmic Mass

An overview of the “four mystical paths” of Creation Spirituality

Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox

“Continuous Creation”: Our report on Matthew Fox’s presentation for the Association of Pittsburgh Priests on August 6, 2025

Expanding our perception of the world’s sacredness is essential in meeting the current moment of climate crisis, said Lisa Dahill at the “Spiritualities of Resilience: Aligning with Earth” symposium sponsored by the Center for Transformative Spirituality at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace (HIU) on May 30.

Dahill is the Miriam Therese Winter Professor of Transformative Leadership and Spirituality at HIU and director of the Center for Transformative Spirituality. Her presentation, “Loving the Wild: Earth-Centering Spirituality,” was one of three keynote addresses featured throughout the day.

The symposium opened with a welcome from HIU president Sherry Turner, who emphasized that humans’ relationship to creation implies “a profound connection but also a profound responsibility.” Humans are “not to dominate nature, but to be in relationship with it,” she said.

Dahill followed Turner’s remarks by framing the intentions of the symposium. “Human insanity is threatening the health and future of life on the planet,” she said, stressing the need for “a deeper sanity” and “a resilience and spirituality in this liminal time.” She offered a centering prayer whose language opened from the particular “inter-elemental space” to the universal “great reciprocity” of life.

Living in Earth’s Capacity

Erik Assadourian, founder and director of the eco-spirituality organization the Gaian Way, gave the opening keynote, “What Are We to Do? Deny, Delay, or Embrace the Collapse.”

Assadourian began with quote from Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of the Five Rings: “For each thing there exists an instant in which it collapses. A house, a person, an adversary collapses over the course of time following discordances in cadence.” He then asked, “Can there be an instant where that civilizational house collapses?”

Assadourian spoke of complexity of the “polycrisis,” or numerous intersecting crises, that trigger a societal breakdown. He noted that it is hard to go back to a previous state after a civilizational shift.

Defining collapse as when “the ecological systems which human civilization depends on to survive and thrive are changing to a degree that they cannot sustain the current (or even a large) human population,” he stated that “a collapse period is not an instant but a long, long process.”

“Collapse is a real issue,” he said. “We’re absolutely in the process of collapse.”

“This collapse was not inevitable,” he continued. He pointed to the explosion in world population from 3.7 billion in 1970 to over 8 billion today and cited Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren’s equation to measure the impact of humans on the environment through population, affluence, and technology.

The root cause of ecological devastation and collapse is growth beyond the earth’s limits alongside patterns of overconsumption and consumerism that are “being replicated around the world like a plague,” he said.

“We’ve long transcended the world’s ecological footprint,” he added. The result is that the earth “can no longer handle” our overuse.

Assadourian introduced three possible responses to collapse: denial, delay, or embrace.

Denial “can be insidious,” he said, amounting to “a war on reality” where governments and corporations renege on ecological promises in favor of increasing profits.

Delay involves making some ecological changes but leaving the underlying systematic and structural problems of overconsumption in place. An example is “shifting to renewable energy” to maintain a hyper-consumeristic society, an adaptation he termed “a nonstarter.”

The alternative, Assadourian affirmed, is “getting back to living in earth’s capacity.” This means “we have to reduce pretty much everything that is standard” within our consumer culture and “really focus on economic degrowth.”

He compared and contrasted the consumption patterns of wealthy nations, where societies use the resources of three planets, with the “fair earth standard” of “one-planet living.” The current average daily intake of 3,383 calories per person in wealthy nations would have to be reduced to 2,424 calories to be proportional to one-planet living, for example.

Assadourian characterized the third response, embracing collapse, as “an opportunity to begin shifting how we live now” by developing mutual aid networks, altering our habits of food production and consumption, and making other lifestyle changes.

“It’s not that far away in our shared collective history [to have] a simpler way of living,” he said.

He stated that humans are not giving enough attention to what comes after the post-polycrisis period and asked how “we [can] prioritize initiatives that reduce suffering now” and in the post-polycrisis period.

Assadourian projected a slide showing a quadrant of responses to the post-polycrisis period arranged by order of effectiveness in 1) making the polycrisis less bad and 2) setting up a better post-polycrisis period. The most effective responses on both counts included economic degrowth, regenerative agriculture, and reducing nuclear arsenals.

Additionally, “cultivating a deeper respect for Gaia and an understanding of humanity’s dependence on a thriving Earth system” is an effective and necessary response to collapse, he said. He shared how practices of fasting and daily meditation in nature have helped him “reflect mindfully and with gratitude” on the food he consumes.

Overall, he said, the project of “extracting the human out of the center of the passage of time” and “planting foundational seeds for an earth-centric culture” will help humanity navigate the polycrisis and bring about a better reality in the post-polycrisis period.

Between Nature and Culture

Following a break for small-group sharing and reflection, Bill Baue of the global nonprofit platform r3.0 presented the second keynote, “Bioregional Relationality and Regeneration as Collapse Resilience.”

Baue looked at the phenomenon of collapse as a “dynamic over a broader swath of history” and shared the scholar Luke Kemp’s notion of the “morality of states.” The average lifespan of a state is 326 years, according to Kemp. Baue said that this shows that “the social systems we live within” and that produce collapse “are not necessarily new.”

Baue explained how civilizations concentrate power through “top-down obedience enforced through threat of violence,” thereby extending human control over nature. He defined civilizations as “a collection of hierarchies” and said that “hierarchical power is what dooms civilization to collapse.”

The concept of “civilization” has been weaponized over time against cultures deemed “uncivilized” but that are nonetheless more sustainable, he said. He gave the example of cultures in Oceania that have persisted for over 60,000 years.

“All large-scale complex societies experience periodic waves of political instability,” he noted. He credited this to cycles of production, in that “levels of political violence are high when well-being is low and elite overproduction is high.”

Baue defined resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance.” He explained how “collapse is actually part of natural systems,” but the collapse occurring now “is on a planetary scale” as the earth experiences “a cascading effect between systems.”

Baue laid out the various stages of what he termed the “collapse response continuum”: ignorance, awareness, denial, avoidance, acceptance, resilience, and transcendence.

The problem with the “avoidance” strategy of countering climate collapse is that corporate paradigms that privilege profit over all other concerns ultimately block the potential for sustainable changes, he explained.

Baue introduced a core theme of his keynote, the concept of “bioregionalism.” This “correlation between nature and culture” has been defined by Peter Berg of the Planet Drum Foundation as “a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness.”

As an example of “how cultural and biological diversity” are intertwined, Baue shared a scientific study showing how three distinct genetic groups of grizzly bears in British Columbia correlate closely to the geography of three Indigenous language groups in the region.

Baue articulated four “basic thresholds” for determining a bioregion: a land and water territory whose limits are defined by the natural realities of a place and the communities within them; a territory large enough to be self-reliant and maintain the integrity of its biological communities; a territory based on the location of a watershed or drainage basin; and a territory where inhabitants determine what stewardship frameworks make sense for the area.

Related to bioregionalism is the idea of “relationality,” or “the radical interdependence of everything that exists,” in anthropologist Arturo Escobar’s formulation. Baue drew a parallel between relationality and the African philosophy of Ubuntu, “I am because we are.”

As scientist Riane Eisler and others have pointed out, humanity has shifted over time from feminine “partnership” to masculine “dominance” systems. Partnership systems are more sustainable, Baue said, and clarified that the intention of bioregional relationality is not to replace patriarchy with matriarchy but to seek “a more balanced mindset between masculine and feminine ways of being.”

Baue drew on economist John Fullerton’s definition of regeneration as a “process that delivers sustainable living systems as the outcome of that process,” adding, “Regeneration is part of the systematic evolutionary process of how life creates conditions conducive to life.”

Citing regenerative educator Daniel Christian Wahl, Baue explained that we need to understand regeneration as “a coming home, as a listening, as a being more humble again, as a return to a kin-centric worldview.”

Baue concluded by summarizing bioregionalism as “an alternative modality to uncivilized behavior” that invites people into relationality, not dominance. He offered pathways to participate in the bioregional movement through organizations such as the Northeast Woodlands Bioregional Collective (NEWBC), the upcoming r3.0 conference, and the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress convening in Oregon in September.

To Live in the Living World

Dahill opened her afternoon keynote with a quote from Ian McEwan’s novel What Can We Know, which is set in the 22nd century. Relating that novel’s theme of living after ecological catastrophe, she asked, “How can we possibly speak of spirituality when our hearts are shutting down?”

Dahill shared an experience of seeing Interstate 70 in Pennsylvania “from below” while on a cycling trip. She described an environment “teeming with life” that is missed from the perspective of the highway overpass. She termed this feeling of disconnect or distance from contemporary human life “perpendicularity.”

Another example of such “perpendicularity” is the Los Angeles River, she said, which flows beneath the overpasses of that overbuilt environment. She invited participants to ponder what it might mean “to learn to live in the living world,” starting with a spirituality she defined as “one’s personal relationship with the more-than-human world, in all its fullness.”

“The world transcends us,” she continued. In the “perceptual and transcendent reality that we all share,” there are moments of “the world glimpsed in all its immaculate is-ness.”

Quoting Thomas Berry, the Passionist priest and pioneer of contemporary eco-spiritual thought, Dahill affirmed that “the universe is the primary sacred reality.” She specified that Berry spoke of incendence, not transcendence—a small linguistic shift that signals that humans are not on the planet to control life but to become integral with it.

An earth-centering spirituality is a central element of climate resilience, she said. She spoke of a “soul resilience” that navigates “crises, upheavals, and reimaginings” and has the capacity “to create and rebuild in whole new ways.”

The discovery of “radical new futures” requires asking “what kinds of humanity we need to cultivate” in the present moment, she said. Additionally, humans need to begin asking what kinds of religious and spiritual leadership and what new religious forms and practices might best foster a necessary “soul depth” for our current time.

Drawing on the thought of “new materialists” Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway, she elaborated on the “entanglement and inseparability of all that is” and contrasted the dualistic nature of much religious thinking with the idea of “interrelationship” that is intrinsic to Indigenous thought.

New forms of thought and prayer should be allowed to emerge from “our sensorial bonds” with the living world, she added. As a catalyst for such emergence, she introduced “four facets of spirituality to inhabit the more-than-human world,” beginning with “facing and feeling the huge range of emotions” accompanying the loss of biodiversity and planetary life.

“Emotion is at the heart of climate response,” she said. She compared these emotions to seeds whose energy, power, and creativity humans block through suppression.

Creating safe spaces through ritual and sacrament to “allow the seeds of grief to soften and break open” is the “task of religion,” she said. Additionally, religion can facilitate “what is most needed to come alive in people to come alive.”

She described the second facet, expanding the perception of the world’s sacredness, as uncovering “this deep wild love that has been there all along.”

“The splitting of the holy from the world is the foundation of the chaos we have unleashed on the planet,” she continued. She suggested participants ponder the question: “Where does God end and the world begin?” By “falling in love again with that wild divine,” she said, one comes to see each creature—even “a toad with its delicate skin”—as an “icon of God.”

The third facet, attending to “kinship networks” of the more-than-human world, involves moving beyond human pluralism to a kind of “interspecies pluralism” where one “listen[s] to those who are not human” and embraces “the humility of encountering the rest of the world.”

Recognizing that our places “are tangled up in trauma,” “we persevere in loving because there is no untraumatized place” and “every place deserves to be loved,” she said.

These practices culminate in the fourth facet, stepping into one’s own vocation of creating a “generative future.” Dahill shared a personal experience of a vision fast she undertook in Colorado in 2021, including a sacred moment in a deer-birthing ground, and the ways it prepared her to apply for her current position at HIU.

She concluded on a note of invitation: “What gestates in you when you lie down where deer give birth? To what larger love for the life of the world is the world summoning you?” ♦

Michael Centore is the editor of Tomorrow’s American Catholic.

Readers are invited to listen to our latest podcast episode with Sergio Lopez, National Director for Mission and Leadership Formation for Catholics in Communion, released in tandem with this article—Ed.

Earlier this year, Catholics began gathering outside detention centers, in parish halls, on sidewalks, after Masses, and in neighborhood streets across the country with a shared question: What does faithful witness look like in this moment?

For many communities, the question emerged from lived reality. Families were navigating fear and uncertainty. Immigrant communities were experiencing instability and separation. Parishioners were exhausted by polarization and division. Many Catholics felt caught between two unsatisfying options: reducing faith to private spirituality or reducing it to partisan conflict.

At the same time, there was also a growing sense that the church had something deeper to offer.

Out of that moment emerged the Season of Faithful Witness, a national initiative of Catholics in Communion inviting Catholics to gather in prayer, discernment, and peaceful public witness between Ash Wednesday and the Feast of Corpus Christi.

At its heart is a simple conviction: faithful witness is not meant to be carried alone.

“We kept hearing the same questions from people across the country,” said Sergio Lopez, National Director of Mission and Leadership Formation for Catholics in Communion. “People were asking how to respond as Catholics in a way that is rooted in prayer, rooted in the Gospel, rooted in human dignity, and rooted in communion with one another.”

What followed was not a centralized campaign or a single national event. Instead, local Catholic communities began responding in ways that were deeply pastoral, visible, and rooted in ordinary Catholic life.

Some communities organized prayer vigils outside detention centers. Others hosted ministry reflection nights or post-Mass hospitality gatherings. Some organized Eucharistic processions through neighborhoods. Others gathered parishioners for listening circles and conversations about fear, solidarity, and the church’s public witness.

Many of these actions were intentionally simple. And that simplicity became part of the movement’s strength.

“A Pastoral Emergency of Hope”

One phrase quickly emerged throughout the movement’s gatherings and parish materials: “a pastoral emergency of hope.”

The phrase resonated because it named something many Catholics instinctively recognized. Beyond political polarization or social fragmentation, many communities were also experiencing profound isolation.

People were carrying grief privately. Parishioners felt overwhelmed and disconnected. Many Catholics no longer knew where to bring their fears, hopes, or questions together as church.

“We wanted to create spaces where people could gather again not first around ideology or argument, but around prayer, listening, and discernment,” Lopez said.

That emphasis shaped the character of the Season of Faithful Witness.

Rather than encouraging communities to replicate a single model, Catholics in Communion invited local leaders to discern what faithful witness might look like within their own context. One parish might organize a public procession. Another might host a bilingual prayer vigil or a ministry conversation. Another might simply invite parishioners to stay after Mass to pray together and reflect on the signs of the times.

The movement’s organizing materials repeatedly encouraged communities to focus on actions that were “simple, prayerful, and doable.”

That tone mattered.

The goal was never spectacle. It was to help people rediscover practices of public faith that felt recognizably Catholic: prayerful, communal, sacramental, and rooted in human dignity.

Why Corpus Christi Became Central

As the movement grew, many communities began focusing especially on the Feast of Corpus Christi that falls this year on June 7.

For Catholics in Communion, Corpus Christi became more than a liturgical feast celebrating Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. It became an opportunity to reflect publicly on what it means to become the Body of Christ together in a wounded world.

In the movement’s parish toolkit, organizers wrote: “Corpus Christi is not only a celebration of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. It is also an invitation to remember who we become when we receive the Eucharist.”

That theological connection shaped many of the season’s public witnesses.

Across the country, Catholics organized processions through neighborhoods, public prayer gatherings, listening circles, and acts of solidarity rooted in the connection between Eucharistic faith and human dignity.

Some of the most powerful moments unfolded outside immigration detention facilities.

During Holy Week and throughout the spring, Catholics and ecumenical partners gathered outside detention centers in states including Florida, Illinois, Indiana, and California to pray publicly with and for detainees and immigrant families. In one particularly moving moment outside the Baker detention facility in Florida, participants praying outside the fences heard whistles and greetings from detained immigrants inside responding to hymns and prayers being sung outdoors.

Elsewhere, clergy and faith leaders successfully advocated for expanded pastoral access to detention facilities so detainees could receive prayer, accompaniment, and sacramental ministry.

For many participants, these moments revealed something important: public prayer still matters.

“We are rediscovering that Catholic faith is not only something practiced privately,” Lopez said. “It is also something we carry into the world together—in prayer, in procession, and in solidarity with one another.”

Rediscovering Public Catholic Life

One of the reasons the Season of Faithful Witness has resonated so widely is because it taps into something ancient within Catholic life.

Catholicism has never been solely private. The church has always processed through streets, gathered publicly in prayer, accompanied vulnerable communities, and proclaimed human dignity through visible communal practices.

What feels new today is not the tradition itself, but the rediscovery of it.

Many participants have described feeling moved simply by seeing Catholics pray publicly together again—not as performance or culture war, but as an act of hope.

That hope has become especially meaningful in a moment when many Catholics feel exhausted by ideological conflict and hungry for forms of public engagement that feel genuinely rooted in the Gospel.

The movement has intentionally tried to remain grounded in that spirit.

Its materials consistently encourage communities to keep public witness rooted in faith rather than partisan politics. Organizers are reminded to create spaces that are welcoming, prayerful, and non-anxious. Meetings begin with listening and prayer rather than strategy alone.

Again and again, participants return to one simple realization: they are not alone.

From Isolation to Communion

Near the conclusion of one of the movement’s Corpus Christi resources appears a line that has become, for many participants, a summary of the entire season:

“We hope these faithful witnesses will make possible that parishioners move from concern to courage, from isolation to communion, from private faith to public witness.”

That movement—from isolation to communion—may ultimately be the deepest significance of the Season of Faithful Witness.

Not every gathering has been large. Not every witness has received media attention. Some have involved only a handful of parishioners gathered after Mass. Others have brought together clergy, families, ministry leaders, and local communities in public spaces across the country.

But together, these acts of prayer and witness are revealing something important about this moment in the church.

Many Catholics are searching not simply for new programs or political answers, but for renewed ways of walking together as church in a fragmented and fearful world.

And across the country, communities are beginning to rediscover that path together. ♦

Four Ways to Get Involved

1. Join the Movement

Commit to working alongside Catholics across the country to engage in prayerful discernment and public expressions of faithful, nonviolent, and prophetic witness. Complete the sign-up form and you’ll receive:

• invitations to national events and calls to action

• timely resources and trainings to respond to the moment direct to your inbox

• ongoing support for you and your community

2. Unlock Your Toolkit

Attend one of the upcoming trainings and access the library of previous sessions. They include designing events rooted in Catholic tradition, outreach and building your team, media training, and more. Multiply your impact by signing up or watching with others.

Catholics in Communion creates toolkits and resources to provide step-by-step guidance and planning tools and templates. It also provides a library of resources from its partnering organizations.

3. Start a Conversation

Catholics in Communion produces toolkits to support your next steps. The “Called to Courage: A Conversation on Pope Leo’s Leadership” Toolkit invites parishes into a guided conversation on Pope Leo’s leadership and the church’s call to live out our faith in today’s world. It includes a facilitator guide for prayerful dialogue and utilizes a recent 60 Minutes video segment with three US cardinals. In just 90 minutes, this conversation can support your community in taking a small but meaningful step toward what the church calls us to be: a people who listen, discern, and respond together.

4. Get Connected

Find people in your local community and invite others to join you in faithful witness. Visit the Catholics in Communion website to find local actions and leaders near you and to sign up for upcoming welcome and training calls.

This is the hope that action in communion will make possible: that parishioners move from concern to courage, from isolation to communion, from private faith to public witness. Whether you bring together 5 people or 500, public faithful witness allows the wider church to see Catholics across the country responding not with fear, division, or despair, but with prayer, solidarity, and moral courage.

In this episode, we speak with Sergio about his awakening to faith as a son of Mexican immigrants, his transition from seminary to the vocation of parish ministry and community organizing, and how recent cuts to US foreign aid impacted the mission of Catholic Relief Services and other international development organizations. Sergio shares how Catholics in Communion arose in response to a “pastoral emergency of hope,” especially around issues of anti-immigrant violence, and gives us an overview of their Season of Faithful Witness initiative and ways that people can get involved—“Catholics being Catholic in the public space,” as he explains, “coordinating love, organizing hope.”

Our conversation also touches on the opportunity to “speak as one church” in the era of Pope Leo XIV by reinvigorating social teaching and developing a “shared language around what it means to be Catholic.” Listeners are encouraged to read the accompanying article, “A Season of Faithful Witness: Catholics Are Learning to Walk Together Again,” published in tandem with this episode in Tomorrow’s American Catholic.

With hammer in hand, Martin Luther (1483-1546) struck a significant blow against clericalism and for the laity in the world by insisting on the universal call to holiness. A cobbler’s work is as valuable to God as is a priest’s, he explained. The vocation of a homemaker is no further away from God than that of a priest in the pulpit.

Subsequent leaders of the Reformation lost sight of Luther’s significant contribution on the primacy of baptism and the centrality of lay spirituality. Instead, those leaders preached the “utter depravity” of each person and claimed that the world was a playground for the devil. Temptation lurked all around. This pessimistic turn in Protestant thinking only reinforced the heaven and earth dualism, the difference between clergy and laity.

Gradually, Protestants found a way to balance the good that people can do in the world and the persistence of worldly evil. For example, successful industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) pointed to the philanthropic responsibilities for monied Christians in his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth.”

Max Weber (1864–1920), a founder of sociology, popularized the balanced approach in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). Certain Christian virtues (like thrift, competence, loyalty, efficiency, and measured charity) reinforce habits that are important to success in a capitalist economy, he wrote. Unfortunately, the Christian side of this philosophy has been eclipsed these days by a laissez-faire style of capitalism that prizes utilitarian ethics, individualism, and consumerism.

What does Catholicism have to say about work?

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) were greatly disturbed by the downside of capitalism: crowded housing, dangerous occupations, child labor—in a word, misery. Their radical proposals included the abolition of private property.

Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) came to the defense of private property in his 1891 encyclical, On the Condition of Labor. Leo XIII added, however, that capitalism must have restraints, like government regulation, labor unions, professional standards, and more.

In his Theology of Work (1966), Fr. Marie-Dominique Chenu, OP (1895–1990) further developed Catholic doctrine about the laity at work. His perspective, like that of other contributors to Vatican II, was pegged to an industrial economy with its impoverishing downside.

Before his election as pope, Saint John Paul II (1920–2005) was a stonecutter in a limestone quarry. He was employed in a chemical plant and as a railroad maintenance man. He was a dramatist and a theater promoter. He was also quite fluent in the Marxist perspective on work. As pope, he wrote a September 1981 encyclical, On Human Work. It stands as a masterful Catholic reflection on the philosophy and theology of work.

Kate Ward of Marquette University brings the topic into our postindustrial context with Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work (National Center for the Laity, 2026).

Ward begins with a contrast between a work-until-you-drop mindset and a Catholic worldview. Our current economy is premised on what she calls workism. It values activity in the world exclusively by “outputs that can literally be counted.” Workism is associated with long hours on the job, with unpredictable job schedules, and with “side hustles” (aka entrepreneurship or gigs).

By contrast, as she details, Catholicism uses “an inclusive definition of work.” For starters, Catholic theology regards work as “more than what we do for pay . . . Unpaid work is work.” It is “any activity through which humans transform the world.”

Ward heaves aside the pessimistic idea that work is a punishment for sin. Adam and Eve were (in one translation) “dressing paradise” before the Fall, and they continued to work thereafter. Rather than a punishment, work in and of itself contributes to holiness.

Though Catholicism maintains ideals about work, it is realistic; work—on the job, around the home, and in the community—is irksome. Nonetheless, keep in mind that through toil and accomplishment the “primary importance” of our activity “is how it shapes the worker, rather than what work produces,” Ward urges.

Injustice finds its way into the world of work—again, on the job, in the home, and in the community. Inadequate wages are a prime example. Yet a person’s employer might be paying “the best they can afford,” Ward interestingly acknowledges. She goes on to explain the concept of indirect employers. These are the entities that set the terms within which a person’s direct employer (like a small business owner, a nonprofit agency, or a franchise) operates—factors like government regulations, the sector’s expectations, or the corporate office that controls significant variables.

Ward concludes Making a Life with applications of Catholic doctrine to caregiving and art and leisure. She also examines food preparation from farm to table. Like all products of work, a meal is “a larger reality that can be called sacramental.” It stands “for something larger; the labor that produced it.” That labor is an extension of God’s ongoing creation and thus a meal (like other products or accomplishments) contains grace.

Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name, he says, precisely to build upon the Catholic theology of work begun in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII. Specifically, Leo XIV says Catholicism must reflect on an AI economy. Kate Ward’s Making a Life is a good start to such reflection. ♦

William Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629). It distributes On the Condition of Labor by Pope Leo XIII (free), On Human Work by Saint John Paul II ($7), and Making a Life by Kate Ward ($18).

In the mid-nineties, Ms. McKenzie began to incorporate diversity, children, and symbolic imagery into her work portraying women. She is well known for her internationally acclaimed painting Jesus of the People, which was the first-place winner of the National Catholic Reporter’s global competition, “Jesus 2000.” She was invited to be the 2013 William Belden Noble Lecturer at Harvard University’s Memorial Church. In 2017, Memorial Church commissioned The Divine Journey—Companions of Love and Hope, a new painting which honors diversity and Radcliffe/Harvard women past and present.

Ms. McKenzie’s work is included in numerous collections throughout the US. The Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis holds 17 of her paintings in their collection. Her painting Sanctuary was displayed on the pulpit for the funerals of assassinated Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, in June 2025. She states, “As an artist I work to be a voice for inclusion and positive change. My art comes from that sacred place within each of us where we exist beyond gender, race, and perceived differences.”

Our conversation with Ms. McKenzie touched on her early life and studies, painting as a weekly practice and the “transition” she makes between her home and studio, and art as a form of sacred activism that can embolden people emotionally and spiritually. She also shared how she approaches working with models, why it is important for her to create compositions that people of all backgrounds can see themselves in, and the ways she prayerfully attunes herself to the evolution of each painting as “one thing builds after the next.”

We could say McKenzie’s famous painting Jesus of the People (2000) took up Millais’ mantle, showing Jesus as truly “one of us” in a contemporary context. In her powerful painting Woman Offered #5, McKenzie asks the viewer to take the next theological step.

Here McKenzie paints in her impeccably skilled manner a person both dignified and suffering. She need not add a halo or give a religious name to the woman she depicts. She simply portrays a Black woman in a cruciform position, in a stark silhouette of black and white.

Can this woman image Christ to us? Must this woman be an image of Christ for us to care? Can she not just be herself, in all her unique specificity—a particular Black woman with her particular hardships and struggles? Would that be enough to stir our hearts and minds? And what is she “offered” for, as the title of the painting proposes? Is she offered for our sins? Is she offered for our selfishness and greed? Is she offered for our failures to see all people as made “in [God’s] image, according to [God’s] likeness”? (Gen. 1:26–27).

— John Christman, U.S. Catholic, February 23, 2023

Additional Resources:

Official website of Janet McKenzie

The Divine Journey: A Painter’s Mission (documentary on the commission for Harvard University’s Memorial Church)

Art That Surrounds Us (video on the acquisition of the painting Sanctuary by the Basilica of St. Mary, Minneapolis)

HOPE (video presentation of Ms. McKenzie’s work in the world of vigils and protests)

The Way of the Cross: The Path to New Life (collaboration with Sr. Joan Chittister)

Part I of “The Last Supper: Last(ing) Lessons” was published on March 30, opening our series of offerings for Holy Week. Now, book-ending the Easter season and in preparation for Pentecost, we’re pleased to share the second part of O’Neill D’Cruz’s essay interpreting Jesus’s instructions at the Last Supper to “do this in memory of me.”

In Fr. Erik Varden’s homily for the Solemnity of the Ascension, he describes the day as “mark[ing] the end of the first forty days of Paschaltide, corresponding to the forty days of Lent.” He adds a beautiful image with appropriate baptismal overtones: “The two periods are like giant waves flowing up to, then away from, Easter: ebb and flow.”

Like a mirror to Holy Week, this period between the Ascension and the arrival of Pentecost is a time, Varden writes, of “recollection, silence, and expectancy.” As we waited for the promise of the resurrection then, so we wait now for the sending of the Spirit and its impression upon what O’Neill names here as the “heart-prints of Christian compassion”—Ed.

We must obey God rather than men.

– Acts 5:29

When the apostles sought high places in his kingdom, Jesus warned them: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:42-43). Jesus also outlined how high officials of religious organizations exercise authority over faith communities: “Beware of the teachers of the law, who like to go around in long robes and accept greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets. They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers” (Mark 12:38-40). Two thousand years later, one can identify the “Roman kingdom” and the “catholic kin-dom” models in today’s Roman Catholic Church. The former is predicated on the love and service of temporal power, the latter on the power of eternal love and service.

How well did Jesus’s earliest disciples comprehend his last(ing) lessons to define their mission? Judging by the first few chapters of Acts, as poorly and/or as well as we do two thousand years later. We find early signs that the community of believers would follow parallel paths, and we trace both paths to present-day interpretations of Jesus’s instructions at the Last Supper to “do this in memory of me.”

In Acts 1, the disciples’ foremost concern is unchanged from before the Last Supper, and it pertains not to any of the lessons of Last Supper, but rather to empire building. When Jesus was among them, the disciples vied with each other for place and rank in the kingdom to come and asked about future returns on their investments. After Jesus’s resurrection, their first question referred to a timeline: “Are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). While waiting for the Holy Spirit, Peter, the apostle who denied Jesus three times, found it “necessary to choose one of the men” (Acts 1:21) to replace Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus. Instead of the all-inclusive participation at the Last Supper, the church that Peter organized denied one half of the faith community—women—from being nominated for the first recorded election for the apostolic ministry.

When communal sharing was centralized “at the feet of the apostles, to be distributed to any who were in need” (Acts 4:35), Greek-speaking believers voiced grievances (Acts 6:1) since, unlike at the Last Supper, they were denied equal access to the daily distribution (Acts 6:1). This led to distribution of tasks by rank, which was the opposite of what Jesus had demonstrated to his disciples at the Last Supper (John 13:13-15). The apostles chose to preach and pray rather than “wait on tables” (Acts 6:2) as Jesus did, and again denied women equal participation in apostolic ministry (Acts 6:3).

While the apostles were supported in their ministry by the prayers and possessions of believers who lived the lessons of the Last Supper, the community also demonstrated fear-based compliance with apostolic mandates (Acts 5:11) and hero worship (Acts 10:25). Thus, with or without their knowledge, the all-too-human apostles who worked earnestly to “obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) put in place a “management model”—selective nomination for leadership positions, bias and discrimination, unequal access due to exclusion and favoritism, fear-based compliance, hero-worship of leaders—that replicated the strategies and tactics of Rome and other power-based, worldly empires.

In our times, this “kingdom”-management model persists in the form of a clerically oriented church. The “kingdom” model adopted the Latin word for church, ecclesia, which is derived from the ancient Greek ekklesia, the governing body composed of wealthy male citizens. In the “kingdom” model, Christ is “king,” every pope shares the title pontifex maximus with Caesar and the Roman emperors, cardinals are the “princes of the Church,” and male clergy hold rank-based honorific titles. At a diocesan level, the managerial role of the clergy is highlighted by the familiar English word bishop, derived from Spanish obispo and Latin episcopus, meaning supervisor, overseer, or foreman. Patriarchy, hierarchy, clericalism, and authoritarianism, which are not aligned with the lessons of the Last Supper, are hallmarks of the clerically oriented church. It is supported and sustained by a faith community that endorses “pay-pray-obey” as the preferred form of spiritual practice.

Theologically justified wars of the cross (e.g., the Crusades), invasions and inquisitions, and acquisition of property and territory (e.g, the Doctrine of Discovery) are among the footprints of Christian imperialism across the sands of time. Thus, the urge to build a Christian “kingdom” on earth in the name of Jesus, who explicitly stated “my kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), began in the very first chapter of Acts and continues to this day. It is surely not what Jesus meant when he asked his disciples to “do this in memory of me.”

Meanwhile, in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit is poured out without prejudice and removes all regional and language barriers. While the early church excluded entire groups (women and Gentiles, for example), the Holy Spirit was clearly not limited to or by these practices. Both Saul, whose militant tactics to preserve the integrity of the Jewish faith tradition (Acts 8:3), and Peter, whose purity codes dictated no interactions with Gentiles (Acts 10:28), needed heavenly visions (Acts 9 and 10, respectively) to realize that, similar to the uninitiated people that Jesus taught in parables, they had seen but not perceived, heard but not comprehended the catholicity of his new commandment. Both came to realize that “God shows no partiality; rather in every nation all those who revere God and do what is right are acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35). To remove any lingering doubt after Peter’s heavenly vision, the Holy Spirit descended on the Gentiles before they were baptized by the apostles and well before the faith community “were first called Christians” (Acts 11:26)! Devout folks from all stations and walks of life—the Samaritan community, an Ethiopian eunuch, and a Roman centurion—were added to the community of believers.

The diverse and beloved community of believers followed the lessons of the Last Supper by being radically inclusive. The community-based church actualized these lessons early and often. Bread broken in domestic settings was followed by joyful and generous universal sharing, worship and fellowship were communal, and co-operative ownership was the hallmark of stewardship of earthly goods (Acts 2:42-46). In the faith communities of the first century, we read about examples of fidelity and faith (“the entire community was united in heart and soul” [Acts 4:32]) as well as persecution and martyrdom (as in the story of Stephen in Acts 7). Along with fraud and fear (as in the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-11), bribery, simony, false witness, and other assorted practices found their way into the community of believers.

In our times, the community-oriented “kin-dom” model is present “where two or more are gathered in [Jesus’s] name” (Matt 18:20). In the “kin-dom” model, Christ is “friend”(John 15:15) and “brother” (John 20:17), and the community functions as “members one of another” (Eph 4:25). This model is supported and sustained by a faith community that ministers to human needs as spiritual practice, based on Jesus’s example and advice: “If I have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14).

In Tracy Kidder’s Rough Sleepers, we read how volunteers, including physicians, wash the feet of the homeless population they serve. The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness outlines attitudes and models for radically inclusive approaches based on author Greg Boyle’s lifelong work with gang members. In contrast to nulla salus extra ecclesiam (“No salvation outside the church”), the Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino proposes a community-oriented approach in No Salvation Outside the Poor. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, such as those organized by Desmond Tutu in post-apartheid South Africa, are models for forgiveness and healing from historical and intergenerational trauma. Do these examples sound closer to Jesus’s Last Supper deeds when he said, “Do this in memory of me”?

Charitable institutions that care for the sick, poor, and orphans, humanitarian aid and relief efforts, and social service organizations that work to restore human dignity are among the heart-prints of Christian compassion and “kin-dom” across the ages. Thus, the outpouring of healing and grace that began with the descent of the Holy Spirit as described in the second chapter of Acts continues to shower us with blessings to this day.

Finally, let us note that being a cleric or community member does not automatically define one’s affiliation with one of these models of church, but rather by how well one actualizes Jesus’s new commandment and the ideals and lessons of the Last Supper in one’s daily life. As G. K. Chesterton famously wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. Rather it has been found difficult and left untried.” Thus, how well we “do this in memory of me” begins with and depends on whether or not we do this: the “to-do” list of the Last Supper parable mission statement.

At Pentecost, we celebrate the birthday of the already-and-not-yet, “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.” May the Holy Spirit empower all of us on the faith journey to “obey God rather than men” as we emulate Jesus’s last(ing) lessons and follow Mary’s advice: “Do what he tells you” (John 2:5).

Envia tu Espiritu,
Sea renovada la faz de la tierra

Send us Your Spirit
May the face of the earth be renewed

Spirit of the living God, burn in our hearts,
And make us a people of hope and compassion.

Amen! ♦

O'Neill D'Cruz retired once from academic clinical practice as a pediatrician and neurologist, a second time from the neuro-therapeutics industry, and now spends his time caring, coaching, and consulting from his home in North Carolina, known locally as the "Southern Part of Heaven." He is a wounded healer who works to heal the wounded, in order that All Shall Be Well.

This afternoon we released the 16th episode of our podcast, a conversation with Jesuit priest, journalist, and senior analyst for Religion News Service, Fr. Tom Reese. Fr. Tom brought decades of experience covering and commenting on the church to our discussion, sharing with us his impressions of Pope Leo XIV’s first year, his take on the state of Catholic media today, and his thoughts on the perennial question of how the US church engages with the public square. He also made a compelling historical comparison between Pope Leo and Pope Paul VI that’s sent me to Peter Hebblethwaite’s biography of Paul—and, next, to Populorum Progressio, Paul’s 1967 encyclical on human development that Hebblethwaite believes marks the moment when “the Church became truly Catholic, universal and planetary.” You can find the episode on our website, and we’re now available through Apple Podcasts, too.

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, April marked four months since the relaunch of our journal. We’ve since grown by over 150 subscribers, and just this week exceeded 3,000 downloads of our podcast. As we conclude this initial cycle and look to the next season, we thought it might be fruitful to pause and reflect with our readers and listeners on how the process is unfolding, ways our understanding of “tomorrow’s American Catholic” is evolving, and what subjects, themes, events, and movements you’d like to see us cover in order to keep expanding the story.

To this end, we’ve put together a brief, seven-question survey to help us direct our efforts. If you have a moment, we’d love to hear your feedback. Last week, we also released “Aural Iconography,” a “seasonal check-in” with our podcast co-facilitators. We conceived this episode as a companion to the survey, inviting others to develop with us our animating question: Who is tomorrow’s American Catholic, and how is their understanding of themselves, their faith, and their church evolving in time?

We remain grateful for everyone’s interest and support. If you know others who may find meaning in our journal, please feel free to forward our newsletters along, or even consider sending a gift subscription. We also graciously accept donations on a one-time or recurring basis. Every little bit helps us sustain our work.

We have more good things in store for the spring and summer that we look forward to sharing. In the meantime, blessings for tomorrow’s Solemnity of the Ascension,

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic

Fr. Tom entered the Jesuits in 1962 and was ordained in 1974. He was educated at St. Louis University, the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and at the University of California Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in political science. He was a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center from 1985 to 1998 and 2006 to 2013. While at Woodstock, he wrote his trilogy on the organization and politics of the church: Archbishop: Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church, A Flock of Shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.

In 2014, Fr. Tom was appointed by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission that reviews the facts and circumstances of religious freedom violations and makes policy recommendations to the president, the secretary of state, and Congress. He was reappointed to another two-year term in May 2016, and he was elected to a one-year term as chair of the commission in June 2016.

In this episode, we speak with Fr. Tom about the origins of his vocation as both a Jesuit and a journalist, his take on the state of Catholic media today, and the historical roots of political polarization we see within the church and society. Fr. Tom also shares his impressions of Pope Leo XIV’s first year, reflects on the perennial question of how the US church should relate to the public square, and offers the practice he feels is essential for “tomorrow’s American Catholic.”

A Migrant’s Trail

She’s knocking on the door of light one more time,
and one more time it opens only to darkness.
There are shadows lying across the land,
but she knows the desert has two faces,
the terror of death and the treasures of life.

A migrant’s trail, where a smile is a jewel,
a meal, a miracle, a safe place to sleep, heaven on earth.
Yes, the desert has two faces, she’s seen them both.
The terror of death and the treasures of life.

She knows all too well the trail of cruelty,
and the trail of love,
and where moments of kindness can turn into a last instant.
I wonder if she drowned in the irrigation canal.

Only “Jane Doe” and a row number mark the red brick of her pauper’s grave.
A privacy fence stretching hundreds of yards posts NO TRESPASSING,
where for uncounted migrants, death hits a wall.
Yet it is strewn with flowers, some fresh and alive,
others wilted and dead.

It does something to you, weeping at the edge of this field.
In sackcloth, you cross over a deep sadness, a loneliness, to a gentle presence:
God the Great Solitaire.

And from our first moment to our last instant,
the desert closes us down and breaks us open
to the terror of death and the treasures of life.

The Child King

Ramon puts feet over head with the ease of a butterfly.
He and his father are up from Honduras,
fleeing terror and looking for work to pick our fruit,
A million cartwheels away from home.

Grandfather was killed for denouncing corruption,
Father is next in line.
No time to lose, lives packed in knapsacks and plastic bags,
should have been gone yesterday.

They find refuge for three days in Mexico.
A meal and rest and then papa continues weaving paracord through the handles of plastic milk jugs,
fitting them to Ramon’s tiny waist.
With each twist and cinch, eyes knot in fear.
Neither knows how to swim.

No chance for asylum,
They prepare to cross the All American Canal.

At seven, Ramon is old enough to know he has no home,
and young enough to upright an upside down world,
spinning cartwheels.

“Watch me, watch me, here I am.”
Innocence calling to innocence.
All things new, floating across the All American Canal.

This will be their third attempt to reach the fields.
Fields that feed thousands in a valley called Imperial.

On their second try, over the wall and across the canal,
they make it all the way up to Interstate 8.

Hiding in a gully, the Border Patrol spots the boy and calls him out, “Amigito, salgas de alla.”
“Weez no espeakid espanish herz,” he answers.

Out of the gully, he spins a cartwheel, and asks for water.
The agent kindly obliges and then drops them back to Mexico.

Tomorrow they’ll try again. After that I hear nothing.

Camping at Drop 3 on The All American Canal, a blue ribbon of water
drops over turbines to illuminate this valley called Imperial,
and then flows on to irrigate its fields.

A slight breeze splashes through branches of salt cedars.
Roots dive to drink. Deep calls to deep.
Green feathery leaves, white flowers blooming all around.

I imagine Ramon spinning cartwheels and his father picking our fruit.
Oranges spin the color of sunrises, plumbs the color of sunsets.
Crowns of fire burning for justice, proclaiming the greatest gift of all.
A child’s heart big enough to hold everything anyone could ever feel and love,
Peace on Earth.

Maryknoll Lay Missioner Richard Dixon serves in El Salvador. “A Migrant's Trail” was originally published by Maryknoll Magazine.

Christians today are mistaken to reduce St. Francis (1181–1226) to merely a wanderer who talked to birds and negotiated peace with a wolf. The essence of his life was a cultural and deeply spiritual critique of his society, a critique that pertains even more so to today.

The world’s Catholic bishops, meeting at Vatican II between 1962 and 1965, affirmed our modern ambitions and achievements, specifically noting advancements in commerce, technology, and research. Our bishops then raised poignant questions: What is the meaning and value of this feverish activity? How should all these things be used? Toward what goal are the strivings of individuals and societies heading?

St. Francis dealt with these questions dramatically. The title to a 1979 biography by Adolf Holl captures Francis’s stance: The Last Christian. Holl begins by noting the introduction of public clocks in Europe, including the first mechanical clock in Italy. The mercantile economy of St. Francis’s time and of our own capitalist economy need the minute-by-minute precision of clocks, watches, mobile devices, and other inventions. St. Francis foresaw where such emphasis on efficiency was heading. “One man looked into the motivating thrust behind the whole modern thing and decisively rejected it,” Holl declares.

St. Francis valued solitary prayer. But, unlike a hermit, he did not withdraw from the world. Nor was he a monastic, living in a gated community inside a larger town. St. Francis was “out and about.” His religious order of mendicant friars had a mission to the world.

St. Francis preached the raw gospel, though more by using gestures than words. His interaction with animals, for example, was meant to teach his followers, including ourselves, that we are interrelated with all creation, that we participate in God’s desire to reestablish Eden and to enjoy a preview of heaven here on earth.

Francis’s compassion toward lepers and beggars calls attention to those left behind in our busy society. A fellow friar once told St. Francis about a beggar looking for an offering. However, the friar found nothing of value in their modest dwelling. “Go to our chapel,” St. Francis instructed. “Give this beggar a cherished vessel. Our Blessed Lady is more pleased with our care for the poor than with our care for her chapel.”

St. Francis’s father was in the textile trade. No surprise, then, that he was attuned to fashion. However, in keeping with his skepticism of the latest fads, he suggested a simple garment for the friars, what people today call a hoodie. Rather than an expensive belt, he instructed the friars to use a piece of rope. With exceptions, the upwardly mobile of his time dismissed St. Francis. Young people, however, caught his countercultural spirit and joined his community.

It is difficult to live the gospel of poverty in our land of plenty, to separate sanity from the chaos around us. But we can push back against the alienation of our culture and model an alternative. For most, that does not mean imitating St. Francis in all his gestures. We can, however, make our daily encounters personal, instead of mediated on mobile devices. We can add visits to the homebound to monetary donations we make to St. Vincent de Paul or other charities. We can affirm the edginess of young adults rather than judge their lifestyles.

During this Year of St. Francis, I recommend reading Reluctant Saint by Donald Spoto, an accessible biography. It would also be beneficial to obtain (or reread) Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’, whose legacy includes his insistence that care for the earth is linked to our option for the poor. Subtitled On Care for Our Common Home, Laudato Si’ explicitly draws upon St. Francis’s concern for those two related challenges. ♦

William Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629).

As we concluded this initial cycle, we thought it might be fruitful to pause and reflect with our podcast co-facilitators, Patrick Carolan, Barbara Mariconda, and Michael Centore, about how the process is unfolding. In our mission statement when we launched our new website, we spoke of trying to create a “sustained and multimodal conversation.” This episode is really just an extension of that: we’ve come up with a few guiding questions to help us think through what we’ve been learning, where we’re finding hope, and how our understanding of the church is evolving through these podcast encounters.

We’re also seeing this episode as part and parcel of our seasonal survey, inviting our listeners and readers to reflect with us as we develop our animating question: Who is tomorrow’s American Catholic, and how is their understanding of themselves, their faith, and their church evolving in time?

• Our latest podcast with Fr. Vincent Pizzuto, author of Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life

• The final installment of Sarita Melkon Maldjian’s essay, “The Oppression of Women in Patriarchal Religious Institutions”

• Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. on the wisdom of 16th-century nuns

• Plus a note about our seasonal survey

Describing a present moment “where things are fundamentally uncertain” due to technological advances such as robotics and artificial intelligence, Dr. Meghan Clark observed that when work changes, “something very fundamental and essential about human existence changes.”

Her comments came as part of a vigil for the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker convened by the Catholic Labor Network on the evening of April 30. Joining her to discuss Catholic contributions to labor history and the theological ethic of work were Dr. Joe McCartin, co-director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, and author and activist Andrew Lee.

Clark, a professor of moral theology at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, drew parallels between the radical changes of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries and our current time. She said that Catholics can lend a special perspective to contemporary views on labor and workers’ rights because “we understand work to be a particular kind of thing” that gives a sense of how “humanity shapes the world around it.”

“We are in some way co-creating the world along with our creator” when we engage in work, she said, which “creates an understanding of dignity tied to work.”

“You can’t talk about work without talking about human dignity,” she said, adding that a Catholic conception of work is “not just a paycheck” but a part of how we form our identities and communities.

Clark pointed out how Pope Leo XIII recognized a moment of uncertainty around labor during the late 19th century and “put the full moral weight of the Catholic Church behind the dignity of workers.” He promulgated the encyclical Rerum Novarum, or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, in 1891. It is considered a watershed moment in the history of Catholic Social Teaching and a direct inspiration on the pontificate of Leo XIV, who is anticipated to release a major document on labor as a signal statement of his papacy.

Leo XIII’s legacy on labor has been upheld by every subsequent pope through the present day, Clark noted. She referenced Pius XII’s address to the Christian Association of Italian Workers in 1955 where he declared May 1 as the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, John Paul II’s notion of the “subjective nature” of work as set forth in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, and Pope Francis’s assertion in 2022 that “Not enough consideration is given to the fact that work is an essential component of human life, and even a path of holiness.”

McCartin focused on the history of Catholic contributions to the labor movement, particularly the “’seminal” period between the Civil War and the early 20th century.

The history of Rerum Novarum and the application of Catholic Social Teaching to labor issues has “deep roots in the United States experience,” McCartin said. The Civil War ended enslaved labor while “[throwing] open the question of what rights free laborers would have,” he added.

In the 1880s, the organized labor movement began to embrace the slogan “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” Catholic workers played a key role in this moment of American history and “helped to sharpen the critique” of the “basic lack of rights of working people.”

McCartin shared the story of Edward McGlynn, a Catholic priest and Civil War chaplain. While ministering at St. Stephen’s Church in Manhattan, McGlynn saw the impact of poverty on working people. He helped found the Anti-Poverty Society and supported the Knights of Labor even though it was a Protestant organization.

McGlynn’s support of political economist Henry George for mayor of New York City in 1886 was a bridge too far for some of his superiors. George was the author of the book Progress and Poverty, and his ideas on public land holdings were seen as tantamount to socialism.

McGlynn was excommunicated from the church for a time due to his association with the labor movement. In 1887, Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore stepped in and began to work with the Vatican and the Knights of Labor “to head off a break between Catholics and the labor movement,” McCartin explained. In the 1890s, after the release of Rerum Novarum, McGlynn was received back into the church.

Catholics at this time began to recognize “the need and the right of workers to organize.” Once the teachings of Rerum Novarum were announced, “Catholic Church people in the US played a key role in legitimizing the labor movement” and helping it grow, McCartin said. He cited John A. Ryan’s book A Living Wage from 1906, which defended the policy of a living wage as essential to Catholic Social Teaching.

“The Catholic Church began to take positions on public questions regarding worker rights,” McCartin said. This continued throughout the 1930s, when the church and Catholic Social Teaching were key in legitimizing “industry-wide organization” and “a broader representational presence for workers” in various industrial sectors.

Lee’s comments added a sense of urgency to the vigil, as he brought forth several of the pressing issues facing workers today.

“I’m here to make the claim that the concerns of Rerum Novarum are not merely historical problems” but are of “vital importance to all of us today,” he said.

Farm workers are legally prohibited from organizing unions without even a guarantee of a minimum wage, Lee said. He stated that 67 percent of Americans are one paycheck away from financial ruin and 48 million Americans lack the means to access food necessary for a “healthy, dignified life.”

Lee said that we are living in a new “Gilded Age” with many similarities to the time in which Rerum Novarum was written, yet “we can see resistance blossoming around us today.” He spoke of a recent meatpacking strike in Colorado and an active boycott of outdoor-apparel supplier REI called by its workers.

Workers “are coming together across this country to demand dignified work and therefore dignified lives,” he said.

Lee quoted from paragraph 42 of Rerum Novarum: “the first thing of all to secure is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making.”

Rerum Novarum does not say that “workers have dignity if their governments allow it,” Lee said. The right to organize is not something “bestowed to us by the state,” but rather a right granted by virtue of people’s humanity, he added.

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic

Fr. Vincent Pizzuto, PhD, is a professor of New Testament and Christian Mysticism in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the (Jesuit) University of San Francisco and an Episcopal priest who serves as vicar of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church and Retreat House in Inverness, California. His book Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life, was published by Liturgical Press in 2018.

In this episode, we speak with Fr. Vincent about the origins of his spiritual journey and discernment of the distinction between “contemplative” and “monastic” vocations, his vision for St. Columba’s as a kind of “contemplative leaven” for the larger church, and the links between the Eucharistic liturgy and the Christian approach to social justice. Along the way, we explore the importance of learning “how to maneuver in the landscape of Scripture,” consider the image of the body of Christ as a means of integrating our various ministries and vocations, and find in the concept of “catholicity” a framework for thinking with, and about, the universal church.

Listen here »

Sarita Melkon Maldjian concludes her essay on the women of the Gospel of Mark: “The knowledge of the Good News through the resurrection and the unconditional clean faith within the heart of a person are, for the Jesus of the gospels, the marks of a true disciple. Mary Magdalene, the anointing woman, the hemorrhaging woman, and the Syrophoenician woman made wonderful disciples and apostles, spreading the Good News as they themselves believed and experienced it.”

Read more »

Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. on Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita’s Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life: “The book is also a social commentary how humanity experiences the world now, where things deemed as essential (like TikTok trends and K-Pop Demon Hunters) are nothing but a smokescreen for more serious issues of capitalist overreach, xenophobia, war crimes, exploitation, and immigration. The nuns prayed to God and Jesus Christ; we now pray to false idols and care more about what makes us comfortable and happy than our religious obligations. Convenience and our insatiable need to constantly be occupied by visual imagery have taken precedence over contemplation, faith, and spirituality.”

Read more »

It’s been four months since we relaunched our journal as Tomorrow’s American Catholic. In that time, we’ve grown by nearly 140 new subscribers, released 14 podcast episodes with over 2,700 cumulative downloads, and issued 14 weekly newsletters anthologizing dozens of weekly offerings, from essays, reportage, and reviews to poems and spiritual reflections. Throughout this, we’ve continued to host and facilitate two weekly Zoom-based small Christian communities to study, pray, and meditate together on the lectionary readings.

We’re making inroads on our professed goal to “help shape a sustained a multimodal conversation” on the idea of “tomorrow’s American Catholic.” But we know that we must continue refining our mission to best speak to the needs, hopes, and spiritual stirrings of our readers and listeners.

This is why, next week, we’ll be sending out a survey to solicit your feedback on what you’d like to see in the next cycle of Tomorrow’s American Catholic—how we can continue to evolve, and how we can better incorporate the voices of those who share in our work. As part of this survey, we’ll also be issuing a “seasonal check-in” episode of our podcast to help guide collective reflection.

Thanks to everyone who’s joined us on this venture so far—we’re looking forward to many more offerings in the seasons to come!

Part I of this essay is available here, and part II is here.

Though they do not appear in the Gospel of Mark, the writer of Matthew chooses to have similar figures to the anointing woman in Christ’s passion narrative: the three Magi, who appear during Christ’s birth narrative with the same type of ointment. The author of Matthew may have picked up on Mark’s use of anointment as a prophetic or messianic-initiating motif and chosen to introduce it at the moment when Jesus is born.

The Magi bring with them gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh (Matt 2:11). The Greek noun for myrrh is the same one used in the scene of the anointing woman in Mark 14:3-5. The Magi could here be seen to symbolically “baptize” Jesus into a life of messianic work. The role of the Magi is hidden within the context of the birth narrative; so, like the anointing woman, churches tend to trivialize their act, treating it as a sweet, sentimental gesture from those who knew that this was the birth of the Messiah and felt the need to bring gifts.

The anointing woman brought Jesus the same ointment when her action foretold his death as the Messiah. Just as she was initiating him into his messianic role upon his death, so the author of Matthew chose the Magi to initiate him into his messianic role upon his birth. Since it is evident that the writer of Matthew had a copy of Mark’s gospel with him as a source, the author could have attempted to round out that account by having the Magi at one end and the anointing woman at the other. Karen Jo Torjesen observes: “Like the prophet Samuel pouring oil over the head of the rough shepherd David, she lifted the vial over the head of the Galilean Jesus and poured her expensive ointment over his hair. As the prophet Samuel had identified David as the king of Israel, her symbolic action proclaimed Jesus publicly as the Son of David, the coming Messiah, Christ, the anointed one.”

In addition to Mary Magdalene and the anointing woman, two of the most noteworthy disciples are Syrophoenician woman and the hemorrhaging woman. These women, like the anointing woman, are anonymous in the Gospel of Mark. “The anonymity and relative invisibility of women in Mark is due in part to the androcentric bias of his culture which viewed women only in terms of their relation to men, usually as their mothers, wives, or daughters, except in instances of extraordinary importance,” writes Winsome Munro. Mary Ann Tolbert adds: “These anonymous ones illustrate the fertile ground which bears abundant fruit, and their anonymity, courage, generosity, and ministry, as well as their concrete healing, witness to their position among the fruitful elect of God’s kingdom.”

Neither the Syrophoenician woman nor the hemorrhaging woman is associated with a male figure, like Mary Magdalene and the anointing woman. The healing of the hemorrhaging woman is the only Markan healing that occurs without the expressed intent of Jesus, and the healing of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter is the only Markan healing that occurs at a distance from Jesus. These two women are healed in their own right, each healing in its own way related to the transcending of the law. In many ways, they both have accomplished much more for themselves through their faith in Jesus than all the twelve male disciples.

Both Munro and Susan Lochrie Graham have highlighted the importance of these two women in relation to Jesus. For Graham, the hemorrhaging woman’s healing concerns menstrual uncleanness:

She has “suffered” for twelve years, a description used only of Jesus in this gospel (8:31; 9:12), and is the only character said to have suffered this way. She experiences her illness as a scourge, the same way in which Jesus predicts will happen to him (10:34); and like Jesus she is said to tell the truth (5:33; cf. 12:14, 32). The image of blood is related to suffering and to women’s inability to give birth during the twelve years. Like her, Jesus will suffer; unlike her, through his blood new life will come. In touching him, she is healed, that is, she takes on this new life, so that the image of death is infused with an image of new life. The exchange of the miracle is like no other. There is silence: no word is spoken aloud; there is only touch. The theology of touch is related to the Eucharist in Mark, for Jesus instructs his disciples to take and eat (14:22-25).

Healing this woman allows her to become an active member of her society, as Jesus has rendered her ritually clean again. The boundary between clean and unclean has been broken, and Jesus chooses not to chastise her for touching him but instead calls her “daughter.” Through her faith, she became a “daughter” or female disciple of Jesus.

The healing of the Syrophoenician’s daughter involves a heated debate between the woman and Jesus. The silence of the anointing woman and the hemorrhaging woman is not an issue here. Touch is no longer necessary when speech has taken its place, as Munro points out:

What is at issue in [Mark] 7:24-30 is not the female identify of the Syrophoenician, but that she is a Gentile. Nevertheless, to some extent she disturbs the more usual Markan pattern for Jesus’ encounters with women in that she comes from the outside into the privacy of a house to meet with Jesus. Even more, she is the only woman with whom Jesus engages in verbal sparring in Mark. She alone, in contrast to the worsted scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees, has victory conceded to her, winning an apparent change of stance which brings about the healing of her daughter.

Graham gives further context: “Placed between the two feeding stories (6:35-44; 8:1-10), the interchange between Jesus and this woman reflects the imagery of nourishment, that which is literally given to both Jews and Gentiles in the loaves that are miraculously multiplied, and that which will figuratively be given in the body that is broken.” Thus we encounter another eucharistic metaphor aimed at a female disciple of faith who has successfully proven herself to be a worthy follower of Jesus.

The knowledge of the Good News through the resurrection and the unconditional clean faith within the heart of a person are, for the Jesus of the gospels, the marks of a true disciple. Mary Magdalene, the anointing woman, the hemorrhaging woman, and the Syrophoenician woman made wonderful disciples and apostles, spreading the Good News as they themselves believed and experienced it. To recognize this is not enough; but to invoke it through the acceptance of women in the clergy affirms that the women in the Gospel of Mark, and the parallel passages in the other canonical gospels, were witnesses to Christ’s mission, experiencing it more profoundly than Jesus’s chosen Twelve even if they did not partake of it equally.

Women are reading the gospels “against the grain” and voicing the silence of 2,000 years. There is really only one step left to take: Women must be granted the same opportunities as men in ecclesiastical ordination. Now is the time to read the canonical gospels as texts which can include women in the chain of apostolic succession. This would still be staying within our 2,000-year-old tradition—just merely expanding it. ♦

Dr. Sarita Melkon Maldjian is a professor of the Core and the English departments at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. She is an advocate for Catholic school education and ordaining women in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Apostolic churches. She and her family are active members in the Armenian Apostolic Church, and all of her children have attended Catholic schools from pre-K through grade 12. She and her family are professional classical musicians and have performed all over the tri-state area. She holds her master’s degree in theology and doctorate degree in Biblical studies and music pedagogy from Drew University, Madison, New Jersey.

Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns
Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life
By Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita
Avid Reader Press / Simon and Schuster, 2025
256 pp. $28.99

Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita’s Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life is one of the best books of 2025. To be able to equate what happened to sisters from centuries ago to what happens to contemporary women who do not wear a habit—most especially to those women who are earning graduate degrees in a misogynistic academic system—is remarkable. From its introduction to its final chapters, this new book is at turns captivating, humorous, astute, and welcoming. It takes up what could be a difficult subject matter and delves into serious issues surrounding women’s physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health, resulting in an accessible study of historical female figures and current misogynist tropes geared toward suppression and assumed ownership.

Convent Wisdom begins with the fact that nuns, whether they want to be or not, are pervasive throughout American culture. While working on their doctorates and essentially taking a vow of poverty because of their studies, Garriga and Urbita shrewdly identified this societal obsession with nuns and ran with it. They noticed, based on their extensive research of Christian exemplars such as Saint Teresa of Avila, the Discalced Carmelites, Maria de Salazar, Maria de San, and others that work problems, money troubles, dieting trends, and the lures and pitfalls of fame all were happening, in their own way, during the 1500s and 1600s. This recognition leads to some beautifully crafted observations: “Venetian nuns were the crème de la crème of DIY, renowned for their skills in painting, music, and most notably their needlework.” The sentence may seem simple and unassuming; however, this is just one illustration of Garriga’s and Urbita’s uncanny ability to equate contemporary terminology with moments in history.

Another example comes when the authors speak of the “nuns of the Royal Discalced” and how they “knew nothing of mortgages or haggling with moneylenders. Had they been able to get a gel manicure in those days, they would have never suffered a single chipped nail.” These sorts of moments, peppered throughout Convent Wisdom, draw readers into an understanding of the complexities of what these women went through in a time of limited means and great strife.

The book is also a social commentary how humanity experiences the world now, where things deemed as essential (like TikTok trends and K-Pop Demon Hunters) are nothing but a smokescreen for more serious issues of capitalist overreach, xenophobia, war crimes, exploitation, and immigration. The nuns prayed to God and Jesus Christ; we now pray to false idols and care more about what makes us comfortable and happy than our religious obligations. Convenience and our insatiable need to constantly be occupied by visual imagery have taken precedence over contemplation, faith, and spirituality.

I may be extrapolating a bit from Garriga and Urbita’s central thesis; however, it is obvious that their religious and academic journeys, which feature prominently throughout Convent Wisdom (along with multiple amusing if disconcerting paintings of nuns from previous centuries engaged in modern-day activities such as working on a computer), have led them to think about how the worlds of present and past, secular and sacred, could collide or have collided. They speak about how their time in college was like that of living in a convent, so it made sense for them to take a peek “through the looking glass” to see if similarities existed between them and those residents of a real convent.

It is unclear if the two authors are trying to produce an argumentative work here, but they are certainly presenting a claim, and it is clear they are capable of proving that claim. With that said, though, the work is also written in a matter-of-fact way: the tone of the voice comes across like that of an individual who has resolved herself to the idea that she may never get a job in academia, but at least she can feel connected to women of different eras and to the friends she has made along the way.

Convent Wisdom, thus, is not only humorous but also speaks to the healing effects of camaraderie, friendship, and love when one can easily become bitter and lonely, whether by choice or otherwise. The writers present a profound discussion about the state of humanity in dark times—and how, even with tenacity and a strong work ethic, success still may be hard to come by. As long as we connect with the people around us and the core our beliefs, we can get by, exhausted but fulfilled. Garriga and Urbita’s book teaches how all of us, even with differing backgrounds and differing ideals during differing times, are one and the same: variations on a theme, living together in our own convents, attempting to connect to anyone or anything we can in the hopes that we find true or fleeting happiness. ♦

Dr. Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. is an associate professor of composition and communication at SUNY Cobleskill. He has written multiple book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, and book reviews throughout his almost 20-year career as an academic and teacher. Recently, he has had essays published in Childhood and Innocence in American Culture: Heartaches and Nightmares (Lexington Books); Holocaust vs. Popular Culture: Interrogating Incompatibility and Universalization (Routledge); and Film as an Expression of Spirituality: The Arts and Faith Top 100 Films (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He lives in Upstate New York with his wife, Patty.