When Power Forgets the Human Person

April 6, 2026  

There are moments when the Church must speak not because she imagines herself to be a political party, but because she remembers that she is not one. There are moments when silence becomes a kind of cooperation, when euphemism becomes cowardice, and when the refusal to name a moral disorder is itself part of the disorder. This is such a moment.

Comments from the administration in Washington over the past twelve months raise grave matters in light of Catholic social teaching. They concern the dignity of the human person, the moral use of language, the treatment of immigrants, the conduct of war, and the spiritual corruption that takes place when power learns to speak as though some human beings no longer fully belong to the human family. These are not secondary concerns for Christians. They go to the center of the Gospel and to the heart of Catholic Social Teaching.

The Church begins not with ideology, but with anthropology. Before there is policy, there is the human person. Before there is strategy, there is the image of God. Every man, woman, and child, regardless of nationality or legal status, possesses an inviolable dignity that does not come from the state, does not depend on public usefulness, and cannot be taken away by rhetoric, slander, or fear. A nation may regulate its borders. A government may enforce its laws. But no authority on earth has the right to strip persons of their humanity in word or in deed.

For this reason, language matters. It matters profoundly. When immigrants are described in terms that reduce them to refuse, contamination, vermin, animals, or biological threat, something poisonous is being introduced into the moral bloodstream of a people. Such language does not merely express hostility; it forms the imagination. It teaches citizens not to see neighbors, not to see families, not to see souls, but to see burdens, invaders, pollutants, disposable lives. It prepares the conscience to accept what it would once have rejected. Cruelty rarely begins with action. More often it begins with vocabulary.

Catholic Social Teaching insists upon the dignity of every person not because it is naïve about evil, but because it is realistic about it. The Church does not deny that some migrants commit crimes, just as some citizens commit crimes. She does not deny that a government has obligations to maintain order, protect its people, and uphold justice. But the Christian moral tradition rejects the lazy and deadly habit of allowing the sins of some to become the essence of many. Human beings are not abstractions. They are not categories. They are not stains upon the nation to be scrubbed away. They are persons, and persons are never to be treated as less than persons.

The same moral seriousness applies to the conduct of war. Catholic teaching has never embraced the fantasy that because a cause may be just, any means become permissible. The just war tradition exists precisely to place moral limits on violence, especially when violence is carried out by powerful states capable of destruction on a scale ordinary persons can scarcely imagine. Among those limits are two principles that remain non-negotiable: discrimination and proportionality. Discrimination means that noncombatants are not to be directly targeted. Proportionality means that one may not inflict destruction wildly out of scale with legitimate military aims, especially when the predictable result is widespread civilian suffering.

For that reason, any rhetoric that openly threatens the destruction of civilian infrastructure essential to life must be judged with the utmost seriousness. Power plants, bridges, transportation systems, and other forms of civilian infrastructure are not morally neutral when they sustain hospitals, food distribution, water sanitation, and the ordinary conditions of human survival. To speak glibly, boastfully, or vindictively of crippling such systems is to speak in a register profoundly at odds with Christian moral seriousness. One need not romanticize hostile regimes to recognize that millions of ordinary people depend upon what bombs and missiles can erase in an instant. The child in the hospital, the elderly woman in the apartment, the family trying to preserve food, the worker trying to cross a bridge—these are not abstractions in a strategic memo. They are also our neighbors.

This is where some Christians become confused. They imagine that moral concern for the victims of state violence implies indifference to threats posed by hostile governments, terrorist proxies, or geopolitical aggression. It does not. The Church is not pacifist in any simplistic sense, nor is she blind to evil. But she does insist that even in war, perhaps especially in war, the enemy does not cease to be human, and civilian life does not become cheap. The state is not God, and military necessity is not a sacrament that transforms destruction into righteousness.

There is a further dimension to the scandal, and it is not trivial. To invoke or threaten such destruction on Easter, the day on which Christians proclaim the triumph of life over death, redemption over hatred, and mercy over vengeance, reveals not merely poor taste but a deeper spiritual disorder. Easter is not a decorative backdrop against which the theater of domination may be staged. It is the Church’s proclamation that death is not sovereign. It is the announcement that the crucified and risen Christ has exposed the lie that violence, fear, and power are ultimate. To lace that holy day with threats of devastation and the language of taunting bravado is not simply politically inflammatory. It is a dark parody of moral seriousness. It is the sort of thing that should trouble the conscience of believers.

Now it must also be said, clearly and honestly, that Christians should resist the temptation to speak only when the offending figure belongs to the opposing tribe. Catholic Social Teaching is not a weapon to be unsheathed selectively. The Church loses credibility when she appears indignant only at vulgar barbarism while remaining strangely calm before polished barbarism. Dehumanization is wrong whether it comes wrapped in nationalist bombast, bureaucratic detachment, technocratic language, or humanitarian slogans masking indifference. The targeting of civilians is wrong whether the perpetrator is one’s enemy, one’s ally, or one’s own nation. A Christian conscience must not be outsourced to party loyalty.

That is why prudence also requires truthfulness. If we are to make grave moral judgments, we must do so carefully, accurately, and with intellectual honesty. We do not strengthen the moral case by exaggeration, sloppy sourcing, or rhetorical inflation. In fact, we weaken it. Truth matters not only because lying is wrong, but because falsehood gives the wicked a refuge. If one fact is misstated, many will use that error as an excuse to ignore the deeper truth. So Christian witness must be both courageous and exact. It must refuse both sentimental vagueness and partisan hysteria. The Church should speak with a clear voice, but also with a disciplined one.

What, then, are the faithful to do?

First, we must refuse to let our political loyalties numb our moral perception. If a statement, policy, or action degrades human persons, we must be willing to say so, even when it is done by those we otherwise support. If an act of war violates moral limits, we must be willing to say so, even when it is carried out in the name of our security. The Christian is not allowed the luxury of tribal innocence.

Second, we must recover the discipline of seeing. Modern politics often teaches us not to see persons but only functions, categories, enemies, or symbols. Catholic faith teaches the opposite. It teaches us to see Christ in the stranger, in the vulnerable, in the suffering, in the one whom the world has already judged to be expendable. The test of a civilization is not whether it flatters the strong, but whether it can still recognize the image of God in those whom fear teaches it to despise.

Third, we must guard our own speech. It is easy to condemn the dehumanizing rhetoric of others while indulging a more respectable form of contempt ourselves. Christians are called not only to oppose evil language but to refuse its spirit. Our speech must be truthful, sober, and charitable, which does not mean timid. There is a difference between charity and softness, just as there is a difference between clarity and cruelty. The saints knew how to speak hard truths without surrendering to hatred.

Finally, we must remember that the Church’s task is not merely to denounce, but to call people back to reality. And reality, in the Christian sense, is never merely the balance of power. Reality is that every human being is created by God, fallen yet redeemable, wounded yet not disposable. Reality is that Christ died not for categories but for persons. Reality is that nations rise and fall, empires swagger and decay, parties shout and accuse, but the moral law remains. Reality is that no political triumph can compensate for the corrosion of conscience.

The great danger in times like these is that people begin to believe that brutality is realism. It is not. It is only brutality. Others imagine that reverence for human dignity is weakness. It is not. It is the last defense against barbarism. In a frightened age, the temptation is always to become smaller in soul while claiming to be stronger in will. But the Christian path is otherwise. It asks us to become larger in soul, more truthful, more disciplined, more courageous, and more reverent before the mystery of the human person.

That is the standard by which we must judge our public life. Not whether a leader appears strong. Not whether a policy satisfies our anger. Not whether a threat thrills our tribe. But whether the dignity of the human person is upheld, whether justice is served without cruelty, whether peace remains the goal even in conflict, and whether our words and deeds bear witness to the God who is not the author of contempt, but the Lord of life.

April 13, 2026

This past Sunday night, President Trump called Pope Leo XIV "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy," told him to "stop catering to the Radical Left," and suggested that the Pope owes his position to Trump himself: "If I wasn't in the White House, Leo wouldn't be in the Vatican." He then posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus Christ, hands glowing as he healed a man in a hospital bed. He later deleted the image, claiming he thought it showed him as a doctor.

What had the Pope done to provoke this? He prayed for peace. During a vigil at St. Peter's Basilica, Leo spoke of a "delusion of omnipotence" fueling war and called on the faithful to reject "the idolatry of self and money" and "the display of power." He named no names. He preached the Gospel.

Catholics are not required to agree with the Pope on every policy judgment. The Church herself teaches that prudential matters — how best to secure peace, how to structure immigration law, how to weigh the costs of military action — admit of legitimate disagreement. But there is a vast difference between thoughtful disagreement and contemptuous dismissal. When the President tells the Vicar of Christ to "get his act together," we are no longer in the territory of policy debate. We are watching political power attempt to subordinate the Church to its authority.

What makes this moment especially instructive for us as Catholics is the silence — and worse, the complicity — of prominent Catholic public officials. Vice President JD Vance, who has written a forthcoming book about his conversion to Catholicism and frequently speaks of the faith that changed his life, was asked directly about the President's attacks on the Pope. His response? The Pope should "stick to matters of morality" and "let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy." He called the AI image of Trump as Jesus "a joke." Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also Catholic, has said nothing at all.

Consider what Vance is actually saying: that when the Pope speaks about war, peace, human dignity, and the destruction of civilizations — which are precisely matters of morality — he is overstepping. That the Gospel's call to be peacemakers is a political opinion, but the President's war is not. This is the inversion the Church has always warned us about. It is not faith shaping politics. It is politics editing faith.

We should be honest with ourselves. The temptation is not unique to one party. Any of us can fall into treating our political commitments as the lens through which we judge the Church, rather than allowing the Church to be the lens through which we judge our politics. But this week offers an unusually clear test: When a political leader publicly mocks the Holy Father, posts an image of himself as Christ, and Catholic officials in his administration defend him rather than defend the faith they profess — something has gone badly wrong.

The question for each of us is simple. If our first instinct when the Pope speaks is to ask whether he is helping or hurting our preferred politician, then our compass has already been recalibrated. Faith that cannot say "no" to our own side is no longer functioning as faith. It is functioning as a jersey.

Archbishop Coakley, president of the U.S. bishops' conference, said it plainly: "Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls."

We do not have to agree with every word. But we are obligated to listen with the seriousness that the Gospel demands — and to notice when we have stopped listening because someone else told us not to.

What the Church Actually Teaches About the Kingdom

April 20, 2026

We are living in a confusing time for Christians. Two very different groups of people are saying very similar things — and both of them, the Church teaches, are getting something deeply wrong.

The first group says: welcome the wars. They look at conflicts in the Middle East and do not see tragedy — they see prophecy coming true. Some of them actually want more war, believing that chaos and destruction will force Jesus to come back sooner. A few have even pushed for certain foreign policies because they think it will speed up the end times.

The second group says: get the right people in power. If Christians can win enough elections, pass enough laws, and control enough institutions, we can build God's Kingdom here on earth. For them, faith is mostly a political project.

Both groups claim to be following the Bible. Both groups are wrong — and the Catholic Church says so directly.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§676) names this error. It is called millenarianism — the belief that Jesus' return can be brought about through human action, whether through starting wars or winning elections. The Catechism does not call this a minor mistake. It calls it a falsification of the Kingdom of God. That means a fake version — something that looks like the real thing but isn't.

Here is what both groups are missing.

God's Kingdom is not something human beings can build, force, or rush. Not by fighting. Not by voting. Not by any amount of military destruction or political power. The Kingdom of God is a gift. It comes when God decides it comes. Jesus himself said that no one knows the day or the hour — not the angels, not even the Son in his human knowledge. No prophecy chart changes that. No war changes that. No election result changes that. 

There is something even more troubling about the first view — the one that welcomes war as a good thing. When people celebrate bombings, or look at dead civilians and call it God's plan unfolding, they have confused the Kingdom of God with something the Church calls counterfeit messianism — a kind of false salvation that works through violence and domination instead of love and sacrifice. The Cross tells us everything we need to know about how God actually works. God did not redeem the world through force. He redeemed it through suffering love. Any theology that treats human suffering as useful raw material for an end-times timeline has lost the plot entirely.

So what are we supposed to do?

We are called to witness — to live as people who already belong to the Kingdom, right now, in the middle of a broken world. That means caring for the poor. That means mourning with those who mourn, including the victims of war. That means working for peace, even when peace is hard and slow. It means trusting that God is in charge of history — and that our job is faithfulness, not management.

The Kingdom is coming. But it comes as a gift, not a conquest.

Come, Lord Jesus. On your terms, not ours.