The past couple of weeks, our bulletin has included Gospel-based reflections from the Catholic bishop of West Virginia and a popular Christian pastor-writer. This week’s bulletin is an article from the National Catholic Reporter. Each of these articles addresses different socio-political topics that people argue in the news and at dinner tables. However, the accent of these pieces is a Catholic-Christian perspective on those topics (and not just the opinion of some person on the street or some political writer. It is important to have the guidance of these people–given the “unprecedented” times in which we live.
For example, this past week in a UN vote, the U.S. aligned itself with the atheistic dictatorships of Russia, China, and North Korea (countries that were called by President Reagan “the axis of evil”). U.S. allies since WWII have all condemned the U.S. alliance with these regimes and expressed shock at the U.S. taking orders from Mr. Putin. Russia’s longstanding aim has been to separate the U.S. from its allies and has now been successful in both this and in dividing U.S. citizens. This is not just a “political” topic but is also a “religious” one. That is, our “position” on “political” issues should reflect our religious worldview. A challenge is that our Gospel perspective might conflict with our “political” point of view. Bulletin articles are intended to shed Christian light on issues now being argued. They are a Gospel lens on secular matters.
It is instructive to look at 1933 Germany when the Nazi party crafted a Nazi Christianity. It “converted” German citizens to believe that Jesus was born in Germany and was taken to the Holy Land as a child. Nazi teaching said that Jesus did his best to convert the Jews but they eventually hanged him on a cross. Paintings of Jesus and Mary showed them with light-colored hair and blue eyes (instead of dark hair and brown eyes). And the people believed!! [NOT in the real Jesus but an anti-Semitic Nazi Jesus who preached that “Aryans” (northern Europeans) were “brothers and sisters” in Christ]. This same ideology is promoted by racist groups today—so we need to be “on guard” against this type of thought. I knew a woman who was the secretary of “Fr. Charles Coughlin”—a Detroit priest in the 1930s & ‘40s whose popular radio show was pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic. His bigotry made him popular, and will forever be an embarrassment to Catholics for representing the Church the way he did. A moral of the story is that both he and we always need to discern if our thought is rooted in the Gospel or is a product of our prejudice.
The following is from National Catholic Reporter: Bishop Robert Barron said Mass for House & Senate legislators. Invitations into the corridors of power can be seductive. Perhaps he is grateful for the opportunity to speak truth to the powerful in this daunting national moment. To date, he has been oddly silent about the issues that are of greatest concern to his brother bishops and his pope. Maybe he was just waiting for the moment that would provide the greatest effect.
“Homily helps” are abundantly available. Here is one: It is rare that the heart of our Gospel speaks so clearly and unambiguously to current politics. As representative of the U.S. Catholic Church, Barron need only refer to the various statements issued by fellow Catholic leaders on behalf of immigrants, as well as those about Catholic efforts to aid the most desperate in other parts of the globe. They flesh out the Gospel in real-time.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the U.S. bishops listed what he called “deeply troubling” elements of the president’s agenda: the treatment of immigrants and refugees, foreign aid, expansion of the death penalty, and the environment. These policies, Broglio said, “will have negative consequences, many of which will harm the most vulnerable among us.”
Should anyone question the legitimacy or correctness of the widespread concerns among U.S. bishops, Pope Francis affirmed their alarm and implicitly scolded them for failing to speak out more forcefully. In an eloquent and highly unusual communication, he pleaded with U.S. Catholics to reject the narrative upon which the Trump administration is basing its mass deportation campaign. [for which the VP criticized the Pope]
Barron should give a note of support for Cardinal Robert McElroy. McElroy condemned the mass deportation scheme: “We must speak up and proclaim that this unfolding misery and suffering and, yes, war of fear and terror cannot be tolerated in our midst.” Barron might also mention the distress of major Church organizations — Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Charities and the United States Office of Jesuit Refugee Services. They can provide compelling and deeply disturbing witness to the devastation and human suffering from the administration’s cutoff of foreign aid.
A German research institute estimated total INTERNATIONAL aid to Ukraine since 2022 to be $383 billion—about one-third of which has come from the US and two-thirds from Europe. Mr. Trump often erroneously stated that the U.S. gave 385 billion and Europe far less. The US Department of Defense and the State Department did not offer clarification of the $300 billion figure when contacted by fact checkers.
Barron also could refer to the experience of two recent popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who lived under dictators, to challenge the administration’s distortions of the truth regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and warn against Trump’s penchant for buddying up to the homicidal authoritarian, Vladimir Putin. Nothing good can come from cozying up to brutal dictator. Silence in the face of Trump’s cruelty is complicity.
The church in the United States is being called to an unusual moment of witness in the public square. The call is for nothing less than to confront the cold cruelty resulting from deliberate policies to demonize the most vulnerable at home and to turn our backs on the most desperate abroad. God has given Barron a social media megaphone, a powerful platform that he chooses to use to engage in the most divisive, ideological culture war nonsense while looking askance from the most vulnerable in society. Barron might continue to ignore all of those difficult topics and the consensus of his brother bishops and Pope Francis. If he does, he would simply become one more clerical chump manipulated and exploited by the far right in exchange for a few fleeting moments in the balcony of the House of Representatives during a joint session of Congress, and an attaboy from Trump, Vice President JD Vance and their band of bullies.
As of this writing, we do not know if Barron took on the difficult issues and spoke the tough truths of the Gospel, fleshed out in modern times in the Church’s social teachings, That degree of courage might even get him disinvited from speaking again within that forum.
In June of 1941, Hitler’s Army began a rampage through Ukraine, razing towns, unleashing death squads, and massacring Jews by the hundreds of thousands. In one village, four Jewish brothers enlisted in the military, said goodbye to their parents, and walked off to fight the Nazis. By the war’s end in 1945, only one of the brothers was still alive. He returned to find that the Nazis had torched his entire village, burning his parents to death. His family was dead, and his beloved Ukraine was in ruins. The Nazis had murdered between 1.2 and 1.6 million Ukrainian Jews.
He married a fellow Ukrainian Jew who had survived the war by fleeing her city, in which the Nazis had killed 5,000 Jews. Two years later, in that same city, they had a son, Alexandr, keeping alive the family line that the Nazis had brought a razor’s width from extinction. Thirty-one years after that, Alexsandr had his own little boy.
That boy was Vladimir Zelensky, who grew up to become the President of independent, current democratic Ukraine. Today, he leads his outmanned, outgunned, ferociously defiant nation against the onslaught of Russia. As Russia dashes itself against the will of his people, Zelensky, the survivor of survivors, summons the resilience of his ancestors. His wife and two young children live in Kiev and are like other Ukrainians who refuse to submit to a Russia invaded their country 3 years ago.