Cardinal Tobin and executive director of NETWORK speak on National Faith Call to Action

The interfaith call was convened "to lament, pray, and take action" in response to ongoing violence in Minneapolis and elsewhere.

Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, C.Ss.R., archbishop of Newark, and Laurie Carafone, the executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, were both featured speakers on the National Faith Call to Action on Sunday evening.

The interfaith call assembled over 15 speakers representing Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist communities, along with several Christian denominations. Over 8,000 people were on the call, which was transmitted live via Zoom and Facebook.

The call was hosted by Faith in Action, a global organization focused on faith-based community organizing, and cosponsored by other organizations including NETWORK and the Latino Christian National Network. In an accompanying flyer, the purposes of the call were identified as mourning the death of Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old man shot by Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis on January 24; praying for justice, healing, and protection; and issuing a call to action and demanding accountability.

Bishop Dwayne Royster, the executive director of Faith in Action, began the call by saying, “We are gathered tonight because blood has been shed, and that blood demands our time.” He remembered not only those individuals who have been shot by federal agents, including Pretti, Renee Good, and Keith Porter, but also the numerous individuals who have died in ICE detention centers.

“Faith that refuses to tell the truth is not faith,” Royster said. He compared the tactics of ICE to those of “slave patrols” in previous centuries, adding, “They do not represent safety, they represent fear.”

“This moment calls us out of our pews” and “into accompaniment, resistance, and action,” he continued. “This is not a time for a performative faith; this is a time for conviction.”

Bishop Mariann Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC, offered an opening prayer in which she asked for “a spirit of consolation and strength” on behalf of those on the call.

“We need you, gracious God, and we need one another,” she continued, praying “to follow in your ways of love and courage.”

Rev. Everett Kelley of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a federal employee union representing 820,000 government workers, spoke of Pretti as a fellow union member and a “family man.” Pretti was a registered nurse who worked in the intensive care unit at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center.

“When a worker is killed under the authority of the state,” Kelley said, “this is a moral failure that demands accountability.”

Minister JaNaé Bates Imari, co-director of the Minnesota-based ISAIAH coalition, gave firsthand testimony from a state she said was “under occupation by the federal government.”

“There is a depth of mourning in this state that we are feeling,” she said, which at the same time “has strengthened our resolve and our commitment to one another.” She pointed to the 75,000 people who took to the streets “on the coldest day of the year” to march, offer mutual aid, and pray and fast to protest ICE-related violence.

ICE agents “have completely disrespected the sanctity of life,” she said, leading to a crisis “not just about our democracy, but about who we are.”

Following three “prayers of lament” from Rev. Dr. John Welch of the Gamaliel Network, Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T’ruah, and Hugh Byrne of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW), Rev. Carlos Malavé shared his impressions of a recent pastoral visit to Minneapolis, where he said that “people are living in terror.”

Malavé is the founder and president of the Latino Christian National Network. He described a situation in the Minneapolis Latino community where churches and businesses are closing out of fear. He cited the case of a five-year-old boy who was taken by ICE and transported to a detention center in Texas.

Malavé identified an opportunity in the midst of this, sharing how he visited a Latino Pentecostal church that is delivering food to people who are afraid to leave their homes. The effort has served 30,000 homes and drawn 1,000 volunteers from all faiths and backgrounds uniting in what Malavé called a “crisis mode.”

Carafone affirmed to her fellow faith leaders and those on the call that “we join you in lament for our communities” and for “all the lives lost on our streets and in detention centers.”

She invoked Catholic Social Teaching (CST), which she said “leads us back to the heart of the gospel: protecting human life and upholding the inherent dignity of every person.” She contrasted these tenets of CST with the violent tactics of ICE.

ICE “blatantly disregards the US Constitution,” she said, leading to “broad abuses of civil rights and civil liberties and growing violence against Americans everywhere.”

The present administration has allowed “agents of our own government to kill US citizens,” she continued. She called on Congress to cut funding for tactics carried out by ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“We are heading towards tyranny” unless Congress acts, she said. “We must continue joining in defense of our shared freedom to speak out.”

Describing the present situation as “a critical moral moment for our nation,” she referenced Pope Leo’s call “to bring gospel values to economic and political life through justice, peace, and care.”

Tobin, who recently issued a joint statement on US foreign policy co-authored with Cardinal Blase J. Cupich and Cardinal Robert McElroy, used Ignazio Silone’s 1936 novel Bread and Wine as a departure point for his reflections.

The novel, written at the height of the fascist era in Italy, includes a scene where a young woman asks a parish priest what people can do to combat the culture of death that surrounds them. Tobin shared the old man’s response: “I am not sure what we can do, but I am sure of this: that what topples empires and what keeps dictators awake at night is the sole person who steals into the piazza in the middle of the night and scrawls on the wall, no.”

Tobin continued, “If we are serious about putting our faith in action, we need to say no.”

In Catholicism, rituals of mourning are a way of saying no, he explained. “We do not celebrate death. We do not pretend it doesn’t happen. We say names. We pray for the dead. We mourn for our world and our country that allows five-year-olds to be kidnapped and protestors to be slaughtered.”

“The question isn’t about legal categories,” he clarified. He drew on the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the person “who acted as a neighbor to the one who is suffering” is “the one who showed him mercy and compassion.”

Tobin referenced “two major detention centers” in his archdiocese where protestors go each day to “say no” by talking to ICE officials, insisting on the rights of detainees, and bringing “human comfort” to grieving families.

“How will you scrawl your answer on the wall?” he asked. “How you will restore a culture of life?”

Bishop Francine Brookins of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Jamie Beran of Bend the Arc, Haris Tarin of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Rev. Thomas Bowen of the Progressive National Baptist Convention offered further prayer, reflection, and encouragement.

“We have everything we need to operationalize God’s commandments,” Beran said. “We are the ones coming to rescue us.”

Tarin prayed to “steady our hearts not into silence, but into moral clarity.”

Rev. Dr. Cassandra Gould, political director of Faith in Action, reiterated a key theme of the call when she said that “we reject the lie that faith only belongs in private.”

Gould asked people to email their senators to urge them to oppose final passage of the Homeland Security funding bill (H.R. 7147) and any other funding of ICE.

“We have an opportunity to demand that our senators do something different,” she said.

Of the evening’s call, she said: “This is what theology looks like: it looks like people of faith coming together across traditions.”

“God is not divided, and neither are we,” she added.

Rev. Dr. Karen Georgia Thompson, general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, closed the call with a prayer that included the petition: “May the resistance give way to a new time of your love, your grace, and your mercy.” ♦

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic