Editor’s (admin’s)note. Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director in advance of our monthly Zoom call, archived here so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about when I posted it. Taken together, these emails give me a rough benchmark of my spiritual journey, although they don’t necessarily reflect what we actually talked about. This month’s email is prompted by the hope that Catholic and mainline Protestant clergy ,(like the ELCA Lutheran pastor quted in the local TV news report above), can stand up to intimidation from the federal government where other institutions of civil society have failed. An encouraging step in that direction was taken this month by Catholic archbishops in Chicago, Washington and Newark, NJ, and an editorial in the National Catholic Reporter.
Sat, Jan 31, 3:41 PM
Hi Sister —
Welp, the good news is, you won’t have a lot of my journaling to wade through before our Zoom call Monday evening. The bad news? In just one month the world, from the streets of Minneapolis to Greenland and Denmark, and back around to my cozy little nest in Springfield, has been engulfed in a dumpster fire. The upshot: I haven’t been journaling at all, and I have no blog posts to share with you.
Instead, I’ve been sharing articles and political cartoons to Facebook. Even before the latest extrajudicial killing by border patrol agents in Minneapolis, I was convinced the federal government is so deeply wrong on immigration and foreign policy issues, I have to speak out and use my little social media platform to amplify my voice.
I’ve been known to make fun of keyboard warriors, but I’ve been arguing with strangers on Facebook for a while now, and I do what I can as an 83-year-old. Back in anti-Vietnam War days, I never could have imagined I’d be still have to join demonstrations 50 years later, but I’ve discovered I can sit down when things get tiring if I bring my walker. And what I consider the gross immorality of the Trump regime has made me more conscious, if anything, of my own faith.
I feel like this month some kind of red line — or Rubicon — has been crossed, and it’s a moral imperative now to oppose the regime. A couple of weeks ago, I was convinced by a National Catholic Reporter editorial citing the statement issued by Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington and Joseph Tobin of Newark when President Trump threatened to invade Greenland. (Linked below.) They noted the Trump regime’s failings extended beyond foreign policy:
In total, it takes issue with the administration’s Hobbesian view of human nature and the world as articulated by Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief of staff on policy. Miller’s might-makes-right approach is being executed not only in the international arena but also in our own streets with the unrestrained activity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, an issue the bishops previously addressed as a national body and individually.
In terms that I believe people of any faith tradition can relate to, NCR’s editorial staff added:
There is no hiding from the inhumanity in depriving the neediest abroad of life-saving medicine and food. There is no longer turning away from the brutal treatment of not only immigrants but also U.S. citizens at the hands of a paramilitary force accountable to no one. There is no rationale that any longer justifies a self-indulgent president and his minions lusting after an irrational and destructive hemispheric hegemony.
We have asked previously what it means to be a Catholic in this country at this moment. The American hierarchy has begun to answer the question and it cannot be surprising that the answer is more challenging than comforting.
This administration’s extreme assaults on human dignity and increasingly dangerous threats to peace summon religious practice, in unusually demanding ways, from the confines of the sanctuary to the public square. We Catholics in America at this moment face an unprecedented test of the faith we proclaim.
Substitute “Lutheran” for “Catholic,” and that’s how it landed with me. I suspect the same would work for a lot of Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, mainline Protestants or “n-o-n-e-s” (short for “none of above”). Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or adherents of any other faith tradition, for that matter.
If that makes me a keyboard warrior, so be it.
See you Monday at 6!
— Pete
“Editorial: The church speaks out. A new era has dawned,” National Catholic Reporter, Jan. 20, 2026 https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/editorial/editorial-church-speaks-out-new-era-has-dawned [links in the original].
[Uplinked Feb. 1, 2026]
Ordinary Time 