On Wednesday, 1 February 1933, two days after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, a twenty-six-year-old Lutheran lecturer sat down before a microphone at the Berlin radio station on Potsdamer Straße. His subject was leadership.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke with careful conviction. He understood why young Germans wanted a leader. But he warned that a leader who answers to no higher authority becomes an idol, and an idol soon misleads the people who made it. In German, the words for leader and seducer, Führer and Verführer, differ by a single prefix.

The broadcast ended before he could finish. His closing lines, which warned that leaders who “set themselves up as gods” mock God, never went out over the air.

Historians still disagree about why. The new regime may have cut the transmission, or Bonhoeffer and the station may simply have misjudged the timing. The record does not settle it.

So he did what writers do. He had the full text copied and mailed it to friends and family, with a note explaining that the ending had not been broadcast.

That broadcast holds the whole argument in miniature.

A national leader becomes an idol. A new technology carries one voice into thousands of homes. The church must choose between silence and speech. Three twentieth-century thinkers each saw one part of this picture: Thomas Merton saw the idol, Marshall McLuhan saw the medium, and Bonhoeffer saw the church. Bonhoeffer paid for what he saw with his life. The SS hanged him at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945.

None of the three wrote about Christian nationalism in the United States as it exists today. Merton came closest, and he died in 1968. This essay uses their ideas to compare mechanisms, not to claim the situations are the same. The United States in 2026 is not Germany in 1933. There is no one-party dictatorship, no state church, no campaign of genocide, and nothing like the Nuremberg Laws. Ignoring those differences would make for bad history and a weak argument.

The essay keeps three kinds of claims apart: what each thinker wrote, what historians and pollsters have found, and what this analysis concludes.

A Definition with Edges

Christian nationalism is the belief that Christianity, usually in a conservative Protestant form, should define American identity and political legitimacy and should hold a privileged place in public life. Patriotism means loving your country. Christian nationalism claims the country belongs, in a special and exclusive way, to Christians.

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measures it with five statements. Respondents say whether they completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or completely disagree with each one:

1. “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.“

2. “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.“

3. “If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.“

4. “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.“

5. “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.“

PRRI combines the answers into a single score from 0 to 1 and sorts respondents into four groups: Adherents, Sympathizers, Skeptics, and Rejecters. Only those who completely disagree with all five statements count as Rejecters. The scale does not capture every Christian voter, every appeal to heritage, or every effort to shape the law. It describes one specific set of attitudes.

The Monk Who Named the God

Merton, a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, turned in the late 1950s and the 1960s to nuclear war, racism, and Vietnam. In October 1964 he read Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, filled notebooks with it, and reviewed it in Commonweal that December. He later gathered his social essays in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).

He begins with theology, not politics. The root problem is idolatry: putting something finite where only God belongs. Practiced by a nation, idolatry produces a “Christianity” with its loyalties turned upside down.

He said so plainly. A “Christian nationalist,” he wrote, is one whose “Christianity takes second place, and serves to justify a patriotism in whose eyes the nation can do no wrong.” For such a person, Christian heroism means renouncing protest and obeying the nation without question, on the assurance that “the Government knows best.“

Merton did not oppose patriotism. What troubled him was an order of loyalties that set conscience to serve the nation rather than to judge it.

He saw the technology, too. In “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra Concerning Giants,” written in 1961 and collected in Emblems of a Season of Fury (New Directions, 1963), he cast the two Cold War superpowers as the biblical giants Gog and Magog. Gog loves power; Magog is absorbed by money. Merton wrote as a citizen of Magog, the United States, and he called the religion that grew there “an electronic Christianity of loudspeakers and parades.“

In context, the phrase carries three charges at once: a Christ remade because he is profitable, a faith broadcast by media that gather crowds rather than form communities of conscience, and a prophetic edge dulled into noise.

Merton’s limits matter. He offers no theory of media, so he cannot explain how the myth spreads. His remedy is contemplative truthfulness and nonviolent refusal, a discipline for the conscience, not a plan for institutions.

The Fish and the Water

McLuhan, a Canadian literary scholar, supplies the missing piece. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) and elsewhere, he argues that media reshape how people perceive the world and relate to one another, whatever content they carry.

In his March 1969 interview with Eric Norden in Playboy, he described electronic media pulling people out of print-made individualism and into intense, participatory groups bound by myth and shared feeling. He called the process “retribalization.” Inside the tribe, he said, myths are no longer debunked. They are studied with religious devotion.

He tied the idea directly to politics. The new political showman, he said, must put on his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a “corporate tribal image,” as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franklin Roosevelt did with radio and John F. Kennedy did with television. Of Hitler, he added that had the man delivered botany lectures instead, some other demagogue would have used radio the same way.

His most useful idea here comes from Understanding Media: “Narcissus narcosis,” the numbness that keeps people from noticing what their own media do to them. Fish do not notice water. An environment that surrounds us completely disappears from view. In a media world saturated with national and sacred images, the fusion simply looks like reality. For thirty-five years I helped build the systems I now ask questions about. The people inside them rarely notice the water either.

The cautions matter as much as the insight. McLuhan was not a moralist. In the same interview he insisted that he neither approved nor disapproved; he wanted only to understand. He was ambivalent about retribalization. His claim about Hitler and radio is interpretation, not settled history, and historians of Nazi broadcasting have shown that listeners could, and did, tune out. Applying his ideas to algorithms and social media goes beyond anything he wrote.

The Price of Grace

Bonhoeffer is the institutional witness, and his story continues in the year of the broadcast.

On 7 April 1933, the Nazi government issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which excluded “non-Aryans” from public employment. The German Christians, a pro-Nazi faction inside the Protestant church, wanted the same rule applied to pastors. Their 1932 guidelines described race, people, and nation as “orders of existence granted and entrusted to us by God.” That is blood-and-soil theology. It turns exclusion into an act of obedience.

That April, Bonhoeffer wrote “The Church and the Jewish Question.” It named three things a church can do when a state fails: question the state about the legitimacy of its actions, serve the state’s victims even when they are not Christians, and, at the extreme, “put a spoke in the wheel itself.“

In August 1933 he helped draft the Bethel Confession, which others watered down until he refused to sign it. On 5 September 1933 the Prussian General Synod adopted the Aryan paragraph anyway. Bonhoeffer treated that vote as a status confessionis, a moment when a church either confesses its Lord or betrays him. A church that bars Jewish Christians from its ministry, he argued, has written a racial law into the terms of belonging.

On 21 September 1933 he helped Martin Niemöller launch the Pastors’ Emergency League. By the end of that month, 2,036 of Germany’s 18,842 Protestant pastors had joined, each signing a rejection of the Aryan paragraph. Within weeks Bonhoeffer was serving German congregations in London. From 1935 he directed the Confessing Church seminary that settled at Finkenwalde, which the Gestapo closed in September 1937. In November 1937 he published Nachfolge, known in English as Discipleship or The Cost of Discipleship.

That book gave the problem its name: cheap grace. It is forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, and communion without confession. It is “grace without discipleship.” A church that preaches it keeps the vocabulary of grace and drops the demands, then uses the vocabulary to bless whatever the surrounding society already wants.

The Barmen Declaration of May 1934, drafted mainly by Karl Barth, drew the theological line. It rejects any claim that the church may recognize other events, powers, figures, or truths as God’s revelation alongside Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer was in London and had no hand in writing it, but he supported it.

The limits need stating. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that most Confessing Church leaders avoided political criticism of the regime and that, with few exceptions, the church “remained silent about the persecution of German Jews.” Bonhoeffer was among the most outspoken, yet his 1933 essay still carried the anti-Judaic theology he inherited. Portraying him as a simple hero erases both his courage and his failures.

Nor is costly grace a call to activism. It is a claim about what discipleship is. His resistance followed from that claim. It was not its definition.

A Cycle, Offered as a Model

The three diagnoses fit together. Merton names the substance, McLuhan describes the conditions, and Bonhoeffer supplies the test. Together they suggest a cycle. This essay builds that cycle; none of the three described it.

A sacred national identity intensifies belonging and threat. Media amplify both. Religious language then excuses the nation from accountability, dissent gets silenced, and the silence deepens the sacralization.

1. Sacralization. The nation is cast as God’s chosen, its destiny guaranteed. Merton’s “Christian nationalist” lives here.

2. Amplification. Participatory media harden the group’s sense of reality and of threat. This is McLuhan’s territory.

3. Exemption. Criticism of the nation becomes an attack on God’s plan, and cheap grace supplies the religious excuse.

4. Silencing. Dissent is branded betrayal of both nation and God, and the system loses its ability to correct its mistakes.

5. Hardening. If nothing interrupts it, the myth sets.

Each step marks a possible reinforcement, not an inevitable one. The model describes a pattern; it does not predict an outcome.

Set beside 1933, the cycle compares mechanisms, not situations. The mechanisms rhyme. The situations, and the moral stakes, differ in both scale and kind.

What the Numbers Say, and Do Not

PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas interviewed 22,111 adults online between 28 February and 8 December 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.87 percentage points. About one-third of Americans qualify as Adherents (11 percent) or Sympathizers (21 percent). Nearly two-thirds qualify as Skeptics (37 percent) or Rejecters (27 percent); the remaining 4 percent could not be scored. The share of Adherents and Sympathizers has held steady since PRRI began asking in late 2022, while Rejecters slipped from a peak of 32 percent in June 2023 to 26 percent by the end of 2025.

Who holds these views matters. White evangelical Protestants (67 percent combined: 29 percent Adherents, 38 percent Sympathizers) and Hispanic Protestants (54 percent) are the only major religious groups with majorities. Among Americans who attend services weekly or more, 54 percent qualify. Among Republicans the figure is 56 percent; among Democrats, 17 percent. Among those who most trust far-right news outlets it is 65 percent, and among those who most trust Fox News, 55 percent. Those numbers point to something uncomfortable for a purely religious reading: the scale tracks party and media habits at least as closely as it tracks faith.

On authoritarian attitudes, PRRI’s 2025 American Values Survey finds that 79 percent of Adherents score high or very high on its right-wing authoritarianism scale, while 7 percent score low. Among Rejecters, 78 percent score low.

The question about political violence needs the most care.

The item reads: “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.” Across 2025, 30 percent of Adherents agreed, nearly three times the 11 percent of Rejecters. Still, 66 percent of Adherents disagreed, and so did 74 percent of Sympathizers. In the December 2025 wave, the gap narrowed to 28 percent against 17 percent, as agreement among Rejecters rose to match the Skeptics. Agreement among Adherents ran between 38 and 43 percent under the Biden administration and fell to 32 percent after Trump’s reelection. The item moves with the political weather.

Four cautions apply. These are attitudes, not actions. Correlation is not causation, and partisanship and media habits may explain much of the pattern. The scale does not measure the sincerity or depth of anyone’s faith. And most Adherents and Sympathizers reject political violence.

Read through the three lenses, the pattern fits the cycle. Fitting is not proof.

The Best Case for the Other Side

The strongest version of the opposing argument runs like this. Christians have always carried their convictions into public life, and the results include abolition and the civil rights movement. Asking that laws reflect Christian values may simply mean giving moral conviction a hearing in a pluralist democracy, as every other tradition expects; the political scientist Mark David Hall points out that Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day might well have completely agreed with that statement. An appeal to Christian heritage can claim history rather than membership. The PRRI scale bundles five statements and counts as Rejecters only those who completely disagree with all five, while Adherents may merely mostly agree, an asymmetry Hall and other critics have noted. The violence numbers swing with the political moment. And Merton and Bonhoeffer themselves pressed their faith into politics, one through protest and the other through conspiracy.

Each of those points is partly true. None of them overturns the conclusion. The real test is not whether Christians take part in politics; both men insisted they should. The test is whether a movement places the nation under God’s judgment or above it, whether it treats criticism as betrayal, and whether those it leaves out have anyone to speak for them.

Most American Christians do not fit the nationalist description. PRRI’s September 2026 report with the Meanings of Democracy Lab at Johns Hopkins University found that majorities of Hispanic Catholics (71 percent), white Catholics (62 percent), white mainline and non-evangelical Protestants (61 percent), and Orthodox Christians (60 percent) qualify as Skeptics or Rejecters. White evangelical Protestants remain the exception, at 30 percent. PRRI’s chief executive, Melissa Deckman, put the point directly: the struggle over Christian nationalism is not a contest between the religious and the secular.

Four Practices for an Index Card

The three correctives are not interchangeable. Merton’s contemplation, without Bonhoeffer’s sense of responsibility, can drift into quietism. Bonhoeffer’s costly discipleship, without Merton’s humility, can harden into a certainty that mistakes one’s own politics for God’s will. McLuhan offers a method of analysis, not a set of values. They work only together.

They also map onto the See-Judge-Act method of Joseph Cardijn, with one practice added:

1. See the environment. Name the medium before arguing with the message. Ask what it rewards: belonging, threat, or signaling.

2. Judge the loyalty. Ask what the national story exempts from judgment. If the answer is “us,” the God in the story is not the God of Jesus.

3. Act on the cost. Ask whom the story excludes and what the church owes them. Cheap grace asks nothing. Costly grace answers.

4. Start with your own side. Put the same three questions to your own camp before you put them to anyone else’s.

Christian nationalism is not Christianity applied to politics. It is Christianity replaced by a national myth that keeps the Christian words and loses their meaning.

The Ending

The microphone went dead before Bonhoeffer reached his last lines. A voice can be cut off in a studio. A typed page passed from hand to hand is much harder to stop.

He sent the ending himself.

That is what wisdom looks like in practice.

Sources

• PRRI, “Mapping Christian Nationalism Across the 50 States: Insights from PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas,” 17 February 2026.

• PRRI and the Meanings of Democracy Lab, SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University, “Survey: New Report Analyzes the Two-Thirds of Americans Who Resist Christian Nationalism,” 24 September 2026, and the full report, “Resistance to Christian Nationalism in All 50 States.”

• PRRI and Brookings, “A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” February 2023.

• Mark David Hall, “How Many Americans Are Christian Nationalists?,” Discourse (Mercatus Center), a critique of the PRRI scale.

• Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 203–204, as quoted by the Center for Action and Contemplation, 25 November 2020.

• Thomas Merton, Emblems of a Season of Fury (New Directions, 1963); on the Cuadra letter, Małgorzata Poks, The Merton Annual20 (2007), pp. 225–242.

• Eric Norden, “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy, March 1969, with McLuhan’s quotations compiled by the Estate of Marshall McLuhan.

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man(McGraw-Hill, 1964).

• On Bonhoeffer’s 1933 radio address: Faith Gateway, and excerpts of the text at the Acton Institute.

• “Radical Resistance,” Christian History, on the Aryan paragraph, Bethel, and the Prussian synod.

• “Pfarrernotbund,” Wikipedia, on the Pastors’ Emergency League and its membership.

• Bonhoeffer Timeline, Luther Memorial Church.

• On the three possible actions of the church, America, quoting Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question” (1933).

• “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

• Nicholas Scott-Blakely, “The Legacy of Anti-Judaism in the Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Jewish-Christian Relations, 1 May 2022.

This is Part Two of three. The study group travels across the Atlantic, heads north and south, and ends up in the middle of someone else’s poll.

On the Saturday evening before Palm Sunday 1937, an employee of a German print shop went to the Gestapo with a tip. Something was being printed for the Catholic churches, something from Rome.

He was right, but his warning came too late.

Pius XI dated the letter 14 March 1937, Passion Sunday. He wrote it in German instead of the usual Latin. The Vatican sent copies to Berlin in a diplomatic pouch. The bishop of Berlin gave them to secret couriers, who carried them to every diocese in the Reich. Twelve printers produced the text under the nose of the Gestapo, and several bishops ordered hundreds of thousands of copies. They sent the stacks to parish priests, chaplains, and convents.

On 21 March 1937, Palm Sunday and one of the busiest Sundays of the Church’s year, priests across Germany read Mit brennender Sorge, “With Burning Concern,” from their pulpits. The next day the Gestapo raided churches to seize every copy it could find. The state closed the presses that had printed it.

People remember the pope, but the printers are mostly forgotten. These ordinary tradespeople lost their presses for printing a letter that carried this sentence: “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion.”

The idea of a national God is one of the oldest temptations for any nation. Eighty-eight years later, it marched through London carrying wooden crosses, and the group at St. Anselm’s was about to meet it.

A hundred and ten thousand

The third Tuesday was 10 November. To be cautious, and remembering the essay’s point that America is not the whole world, they skipped the election results and began in London.

On 13 September 2025, the Metropolitan Police counted about 110,000 people at the “Unite the Kingdom” march organized by Tommy Robinson, whose legal name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Other estimates ran as high as 150,000. Many marchers carried wooden crosses. Preachers spoke from the stage, a worship band played, and a cleric led the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer. Ten days later, the presidents of Churches Together in England answered that some at the rally had used the symbols and words of the faith to support views opposed to the Christian message of unconditional love for every human being. Cardinal Vincent Nichols, one of those presidents, signed the statement.

Then the numbers. On 11 October 2026, the Christian think tank Theos published a survey of 1,765 UK adults. The group closest to Christian nationalism, which Theos calls “Identity Integrationists,” makes up 11 percent of UK adults. Within it:

• Affiliation. 81 percent claim a Christian affiliation.

• Practice. 13 percent attend church weekly, barely above the 11 percent of the whole sample.

• Outlook. 82 percent agree with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the claim that Europe’s white population is being deliberately replaced through immigration. Across the whole sample, 37 percent agree.

When comparisons can be made, nominal Christians are a bit more likely to mix Christianity and British identity than regular churchgoers. The essay summed this up clearly: “culture matters more than belief.”

Not everyone reads the table that way. Humanists UK points out that Identity Integrationists are still more Christian than the general population on every religious measure in the report. It also notes that 66 percent of the most observant group, the Belief Integrationists, agree with the Great Replacement claim too.

There was a brief silence. Then Ruth followed the method and shared her own experience.

“I haven’t been inside a church since Easter, except for funerals,” she said. “I’m a Lutheran because my mother was. If you asked me what I believe, I’d have to think about it. But ask me if I’m a Christian, and I’d say yes without hesitating. That poll is describing me.”

Tessa saw things differently. Her home church was very political this year, but also full of people who truly pray. “So we’re both in the numbers,” she said. “Ruth is the cultural Christian. My church is the practicing kind that fuses it anyway. Two roads to the same place.”

“Careful with each other,” Lois said. “The essay keeps three things apart: affiliation, practice, and support for nationalist ideas. Nobody here gets a label from their attendance record. Ruth is not a Christian nationalist. She is the reason the question is interesting. The fusion can live in a culture without belief, and it can live in a pew.”

Eichmann’s sanity

Lois read two lines from Benedict’s tools of good works in Chapter 4: “To make yourself a foreigner to the ways of the world,” and “To prefer nothing to the love of Christ.”

Next came the Merton essay they had all been dreading, “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann.” A psychiatrist at the trial had examined Eichmann and pronounced him sane, and Merton found that the most disturbing fact of all. Eichmann was obedient, loyal, and devoted to duty, a faithful officer of a powerful state. Then Merton turned to his own readers. Christians, too, can “cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist ideology.”

“That’s like the London march,” Doug said slowly. “It’s not the same as Eichmann, and not the same century. But it’s the same mechanism. Faith being used to cover something else.”

“Read it as self-examination, not diagnosis,” Lois said. “Merton wrote it to make his readers question their own conformity. The real question isn’t which neighbor is like Eichmann. It’s what kind of conformity you and I might show when our group’s story expects it.”

To set a standard, she turned to the letter the printers had risked so much to print. “Pius XI wasn’t talking about anyone we know,” she said. “He was describing what happens when a nation’s politics become a religion, and that warning applies everywhere.” Whoever raises race, the people, or the state “to an idolatrous level,” he wrote, distorts the order God created (Mit brennender Sorge §8). God is “King and Legislator of all nations” (§11).

Ruth’s answer was quiet and precise. “I am instituting a twenty-four-hour rule,” she declared. “Nothing gets forwarded until it’s a day old and I’ve checked it.” She also resolved to attend Advent services at her mother’s Lutheran church, where she had lately gone only for Easter and funerals.

A northern accent

On 17 November, they reached the essay’s final section, and for the first time, the group laughed. Doug read the essay’s verdict on Canada: “It is not American Christian nationalism with a northern accent.”

“So we’re the original?”

Canada brought some relief, but also a warning. In March 2025, the Angus Reid Institute and Cardus surveyed five thousand adults in each country and found that 18 percent of Canadians are religiously committed, compared with 37 percent of Americans. That measures devotion, not nationalism, but it means a smaller pool for any movement to draw on. Canadian Christian nationalism mostly stays outside party politics. During the 2022 Freedom Convoy, the biblical scholar Christine Mitchell spotted, in a photograph from Ottawa, a banner carrying the promise of 2 Chronicles 7:14 to “heal their land.” She judged the group behind it small but real, one strand in a larger protest. Alberta’s debates over parental rights and schooling show some overlap with Christian conservatism. A 2008 study in the Canadian Journal of Sociology found that rank-and-file Canadian evangelicals, unlike their American counterparts, tend not to bind religious morality to national identity.

Australia challenged the group’s categories. Its organized Christian right is real, connected, and active in elections. Still, the idea that Australia is Christian by definition is weak and fading. When Australians call their nation Christian, the political scientist David Smith found, they usually mean “heritage, rituals, holidays and census numbers,” not a sense of being chosen by God or bound to God by a sacred covenant.

“Heritage, holidays, and census numbers,” Chidi repeated. “That’s Ruth.”

“Thank you, dear,” said Ruth.

Lois picked Chapter 53 of the Rule, which is about guests: “Let all the guests at their arrival be received as Christ.” “We’ve been welcoming other countries all month,” she said. “Treat the essay the way Benedict treats a guest. It brings something you can’t create on your own.”

Merton offered a line from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, and Chidi read it twice: keep “cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers,” because underneath them is the human side that politics claims to control.

The Church had made the same point from two directions. Nostra Aetate (§5): we cannot call on God as Father of all if we refuse to treat any person as a brother or sister. Pacem in Terris (§98): civil authority exists “not to confine men within the frontiers of their own nations” but to protect a common good that cannot be divorced from the good of the whole human family.

An index card for your own table

1. See. Name one place where Christianity as culture (hymn, heritage, holiday) has quietly replaced Christianity as practice in your own life: one place, not a category.

2. Judge. Inventory one practice: if Christ were not real, would you still do it? Answer honestly.

3. Act. Adopt Ruth’s twenty-four-hour rule for a week. Don’t share anything religious or political until it is a day old and checked.

4. Widen. Read one non-US source on religion and politics for a week. Bring one story that was covered differently there.

5. Check. Did your week enlarge your “we,” or merely relocate your “them”?

The tradespeople who printed Mit brennender Sorge never preached from a pulpit. They worked through the night, their hands stained with ink, only for the state to seize their presses by Monday morning. What they printed was not a slogan for one nation over another. It was a sentence against every national God, even one that might someday wear their own country’s colors.

Eighty-nine years later, in a cold parish library, a retired county clerk paused and decided to wait a day before forwarding an email.

That, too, is a press stop.

Next week, Part Three: “Who Counts.” A petition reaches Corbett’s Landing, Doug signs it, and Chidi is told he may not be the kind of neighbor it has in mind.

Sources. Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge (14 March 1937) §§8, 11. “The Encyclical That Infuriated Hitler,” EWTN. Thomas Merton, “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann,” in Raids on the Unspeakable (New Directions, 1966). Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday, 1966), p. 66. Rule of St. Benedict, Chapters 4 and 53, Saint Meinrad translation. Vatican II, Nostra Aetate §5. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris §98. David Campanale, “Crosses and Bible verses dominated the Tommy Robinson rally,” Premier Christianity, September 2025. Churches Together in England, presidents’ statement on the “Unite the Kingdom” rally (23 September 2025). Theos, Beyond “Christian Nationalism”: Measuring Attitudes to Christianity and Britishness Today (11 October 2026). Humanists UK, “We can’t tackle Christian nationalism by pretending it isn’t Christian,” 12 October 2026. Ray Pennings and Lynn E. Swaner, Religion for the Common Good: Canada and the United States in 2025 (Cardus, November 2025). Christine Mitchell, “How white Christian nationalism is part of the ‘freedom convoy’ protests,” The Conversation, February 2022. Lydia Bean, Marco Gonzalez, and Jason Kaufman, “Why Doesn’t Canada Have an American-Style Christian Right?” Canadian Journal of Sociology 33, no. 4 (2008). David Smith, “A ‘Christian nation’ no longer: why Australia’s religious right loses policy battles even when it wins elections,” The Conversation, 2021. Richard Pütz, “Christian Nationalism Beyond the US Border,” The Jesus Seminar and Beyond, 15 October 2026.

The frame

The real frame is not “Pope versus sister.” Instead, it is two thoughtful responses to the question at the heart of all my teaching, writing, and work, Merton’s question: what is happening to the human person? Leo XIV says remain. Ilia Delio says become. The post’s real value comes from the practitioner’s judgment between these answers, which is more compelling than simply taking Delio’s side or the pope’s.

A note for the summary. Delio is sharper than just “an opportunity for deeper imagination.” Her main point is what Leo missed. She concludes his answer is “too small for the tradition it invokes” and for the moment it addresses. She praises him generously, affirming his defense of finitude as the medium of love and the wisdom of the cross. Yet in the end, she critiques him rather than simply adding to his ideas. Read and understand her argument clearly and strongly.

Opening story

Teilhard himself represents the argument in a small way. He died in New York on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955. For thirty years, his superiors kept his theological work from being published. In 1925, they removed him from his teaching post in Paris, and after a visit to Rome in October 1948, he realized he would never be allowed to publish The Phenomenon of Man. In a hastily written note, he named his secretary, Jeanne Mortier, a laywoman, as his literary heir, and she ensured the manuscripts were published.

On 30 June 1962, the Holy Office responded with a monitum urging seminary rectors and university presidents to protect young minds from his works. (I am grateful that did not happen where I went to college & theology) The Vatican reaffirmed it in 1981. Then the tone changed. Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI each spoke of him with respect. In 2015, Francis cited him approvingly in footnote 53 of Laudato Si’, and in Mongolia in 2023 he called Teilhard often misunderstood. In 2017, the Pontifical Council for Culture asked Francis to lift the monitum. He never formally did. Now, in 2026, Teilhard’s thought is being used to answer a pope.

Here is remain versus become, shown by the Church itself: a vision once strongly resisted, then slowly accepted.

A note on accuracy. The monitum has never been formally lifted. Under Francis, only the tone changed, not the law. Those who know the history will notice, and this gap actually strengthens the argument. On paper, the Church remains; in practice, it has become something else.

The movements

1. A social encyclical, not a tech memo. I want to present Leo’s argument in its strongest form first. He signed Magnifica Humanitas on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, intentionally placing AI where Leo XIII placed industrialization. His point is clearer than what the press reported. He argued that the real issue is anthropology, not just ethical limits, because big platforms can work around any ethical code. After thirty-five years in the emerging technology industry, I can confirm that.

2. One verb. This is Delio’s main point. She sees remain as a symptom: it treats the image of God as something to protect rather than a process to experience. She also says that if people are naturally relational, then new networks of machine relationships become the next stage of personhood, not its end. Here Teilhard’s distinction matters. Transhumanism uses technology to escape the body. Ultrahumanism uses it to help humanity grow into deeper consciousness.

3. Where God is. This is the deepest layer, and most readers will miss it unless it is made clear. Delio says that in the encyclical, the divine always acts on humans from outside, following Thomistic tradition. She argues this pushes God out of the inner life. She says this explains something Leo sees but cannot explain: people turning to AI for advice, companionship, even love, and projecting a sense of the sacred onto the machine.

4. The practitioner’s objection. This is where my perspective adds value. “Next medium” is the same language I used in my strategy work. A become approach to anthropology can be controlled or captured by whoever owns the medium, and inevitability is a common sales pitch in the industry. Leo’s instinct for governance is important. It is the same instinct as a CISO’s. Delio admits that Teilhard worried convergence could lead to totalitarianism, and that Leo and Teilhard agree on the risk but have different solutions: governance and protection versus deepening the inner life. Both are needed.

5. Merton as the hinge. This is the post’s unique idea. Merton’s true self isn’t made up, which supports Leo: it’s given and worth protecting. But it is found only through an inner journey, which supports Delio. My earlier point that a recommendation engine feeds the false self matches Delio’s idea about projection. Leo points out the threat. Delio points out the hunger. Merton explains what the hunger is really for.

6. Where Merton and Delio meet. The hinge holds because Merton and Delio are not strangers. They share four touch points, and one honest disagreement.

• She found him first. Delio, who earned a doctorate in pharmacology before turning to theology, has written that she discovered Merton while working in a laboratory. New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961) shaped her. (On a side note here, I highly recommend everyone read that book. It changed my life.) Her reading: God does not want us to become anything other than the true self God has loved from eternity. That sentence carries both verbs. The self is given from eternity, which is Leo’s remain. It still has to be discovered, which is Delio’s become. Merton’s own phrase is “to discover myself in discovering God.”

• Merton read Teilhard, and was censored too. Merton’s early essay on The Divine Milieu, “The Universe as Epiphany,” raised his order’s censors’ suspicions. It appeared only after his death, in Love and Living. The monk and the paleontologist shared the same drawer. Let that settle in for the moment.

• The interior is the remedy. Delio diagnoses people as seeking God in the machine because tradition emptied the interior. Merton’s false self is the same figure from the other side: a constructed self looking outside for confirmation. Both locate the cure inside: Delio through Teilhard’s “within” of things and Tillich’s ground of being, Merton through contemplation.

• Neither is against technology. On 5 June 1966 Merton gave a talk to the Gethsemani novices, “The Christian in a Technological World.” He argued that technology is not opposed to spirituality, but has become a great temptation that can deaden the spirit. Delio says technology must serve the interior life and cannot replace it. That is the same sentence in two vocabularies.

Where they part. In 1967 Merton reviewed Henri de Lubac’s The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin for Commonweal as “Teilhard’s Gamble.” He was far more critical than in his early essay, judging Teilhard’s wager on the human species a bigger gamble than Pascal’s. Here Merton stands nearer to Leo: drawn to the vision, wary of the optimism, insistent on limits. That is also the practitioner’s position. Merton gives the post its synthesis: Delio’s interiority, held inside Leo’s limits.

7. Where Catholic Social Teaching comes in. This is the bridge to the class lecture called “Who Is in Control? Faith, AI, and the Future of Being Human.” For more than 130 years, Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has asked one question in changing forms: what do we owe one another when the world of work moves beneath our feet? Rerum Novarum asked it of the factory in 1891. Magnifica Humanitas asks it of AI. Leo’s insistence that technology is never neutral, because it carries the character of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it, is exactly the point Delio praises. On the diagnosis, the pope and the sister stand together.

• Gaudium et Spes already holds both verbs. The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, promulgated 7 December 1965, states in article 5 that the human race has moved from a static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one. That is become, written into a council document a decade after Teilhard’s death. Henri de Lubac later said the constitution expressed precisely what Teilhard had sought to do. The same document’s chapter on the dignity of the human person (articles 12–22) is remain. Catholic Social Teaching never had to choose. Delio is asking Leo to recover what the Church already taught.

• Merton helped shape it. Merton wrote to council delegates supporting Schema 13’s provisions against modern war, the draft that became Gaudium et Spes, and published “Schema XIII: An Open Letter to the American Hierarchy” in 1965. The monk in this argument is not borrowed from outside CST. He worked inside its founding modern document.

• Work is where Leo is strongest. CST’s labor tradition holds that the person is the subject of work, never its instrument. That is why labor displacement is the encyclical’s firmest ground, and why a become anthropology still has to answer the worker whose job the system just priced out.

• The method travels. Joseph Cardijn’s See-Judge-Act, which John XXIII commended in Mater et Magistra (1961), turns all of this into something usable on a Monday. Take one automated decision: a hiring screen, an underwriting model, a surveillance feed. See what it decides and who bears the cost. Judge it against dignity, the common good, and solidarity, and then ask Delio’s question as well: what does this system make us become? Act on both fronts: govern the medium and tend the interior. That is the evaluation tool the class promises, and it is where the pope, the sister, and the monk finally share a table.

Synthesis (get out your index card)

1. Defend what is given: dignity, labor, finitude.

2. Ask what we are becoming, and who profits from the becoming.

3. Govern the medium, because interior life alone will not regulate a platform.

4. Tend the interior, because governance alone will not answer the hunger.

5. Test every claim against People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity for everyone.

The return

We end with Mortier and the manuscripts: work once locked away “to protect the minds” of the young now shapes the language used to answer a pope about the minds of machines. Ideas the Church tried to hide have now become part of the conversation.

The tradition is still becoming, too.

Sources

• Ilia Delio, “Teilhard de Chardin points to what Pope Leo missed in ‘Magnifica Humanitas’,” Global Sisters Report / NCR, 8 June 2026

• ANSA, “Pope Leo’s first encyclical is on AI,” 18 May 2026

• Ascension Press, Magnifica Humanitas

• American Teilhard Association, Teilhard’s literary legacy

• EWTN, text of the 1962 monitum

• Angelus News on Laudato Si’ footnote 53

• Zygon, Teilhard biography (1925 removal, 1948 Rome visit)

• America, “Will Pope Francis remove the Vatican’s ‘warning’?” 21 November 2017

• National Catholic Register, Teilhard 70 years after his death

• Ilia Delio, “Discovering the true self in God with Merton’s guidance,” NCR

• Richard W. Kropf, “Crying with a Live Grief: The Mysticism of Merton and Teilhard Compared,” The Merton Annual 5

• Thomas Merton Center, “Teilhard’s Gamble” manuscript record (Commonweal, 1967)

• Thomas Merton Center, Merton’s correspondence with Archbishop Flahiff on Schema 13

• Thomas Merton Center, “Schema XIII: An Open Letter to the American Hierarchy” (1965)

• Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965), full text

• John Haught, “More Being,” Commonweal, on Teilhard and Gaudium et Spes

• Lutterworth Press, sample chapter on Merton’s 1966 talk “The Christian in a Technological World”

Not long after May 1891, in Halle, a market town southwest of Brussels, a nine-year-old boy read a papal encyclical aloud to his father. The father could not read or write. He kept a small coal store, first with a handcart and later with a horse-drawn wagon that hauled coal from the station and the canal boats. The boy helped unload the coal, and as soon as he could write, he made out the invoices.

The document was Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s letter on workers’ conditions. A man who hauled coal for a living wanted to hear what Rome had to say about men like him.

A few years later, the same boy crept down to the kitchen one night, barefoot and in his nightshirt. His parents expected him to start an apprenticeship. Instead, he asked to stay in school and study for the priesthood. The business was failing, and his father was already exhausted. The father said yes anyway, telling his wife that if they could give a son to God, “we’ll work on a bit more.”

Joseph Cardijn left for the seminary at Mechelen in September 1897. On holidays at home, he looked up the boys he had grown up with, now in the mills and factories. They treated him as a class traitor. A few years of factory life had changed them, and the Church had nothing to say that reached them.

In the spring of 1903, he was called home from his philosophy studies. Henri Cardijn had worked to the end and was dying too soon. He died on 24 May 1903. Kneeling to receive his father’s last blessing, the son made a silent vow: he would give his whole life as a priest to the working people his father belonged to.

He kept that vow for sixty-four years. He founded the Young Christian Workers (YCW), and with those young workers he built a simple habit of mind: see, judge, act. Pope John XXIII wrote it into his encyclical Mater et Magistra on 15 May 1961, seventy years after Rerum Novarum. Cardijn’s line, repeated for half a century, was blunt: “Each young worker is worth more than all the gold in the world.”

His reason was not sentiment. A coal hauler who could not sign his own name was a child of the same Father as the pope.

The prayer Christians say more than any other begins with the two words Cardijn bet his life on: Our Father.

A Map Hidden in Plain Sight

Most Christians learned the Our Father before they could tie their shoes. Repetition is a gift; it puts the prayer within reach in a hospital corridor or at a graveside. Repetition also wears grooves so deep that the words stop asking us anything.

Read slowly, with Cardijn’s three verbs beside it, the prayer becomes something like a map. It can guide us through political division, the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI), and the hunger that never left, without asking us to give up either conviction or compassion. At its center sits solidarity. Nobody prays for my bread or my forgiveness. The prayer asks for ours.

One caution belongs up front. Jesus did not speak about algorithms or election campaigns, and nothing here pretends he did. What follows is a contemporary reading, shaped by Catholic social teaching, of a prayer that has outlived every empire under which it was prayed.

The three verbs. John XXIII described the method in Mater et Magistra (§236): review the concrete situation, judge it in light of the Gospel’s principles, then decide what can and should be done. He named the stages “look, judge, act.”

• See. Look at what is actually happening. Listen to the people it happens to. Separate evidence from assumption.

• Judge. Weigh the situation against the Gospel and the dignity of every person. Here, judge means moral discernment, not condemning people.

• Act. Choose a practical response that eases the suffering and, where possible, reaches its causes. Then look again at what happened, and begin the circle once more.

Applied to the Our Father, the method asks three questions. What in our world makes these petitions urgent? What does the prayer reveal about those realities? What has to change in our habits and our institutions if we mean what we say?

Prayer first. None of this turns the Our Father into a social program. It is first an encounter with God: trust, worship, repentance, dependence. Tertullian, writing around the year 200, called it “truly the summary of the whole gospel,” and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2761) opens its treatment of the prayer with his line. The social demands grow out of that relationship. They do not replace it.

See: Three Places Where the Prayer Is Urgent

Cardijn never started with a principle. He started with people: the young women workers of Laeken, where his first groups met in 1912. The same discipline applies here. Three concerns press on the prayer today, and each begins with a question.

Who belongs inside our “our“? Start with real encounters, not labels: a family argument at Thanksgiving, a town council meeting, a campaign ad, the way we talk about people who vote differently. Then ask:

• Are we arguing about policies, or attacking people’s worth?

• Whose suffering gets our attention, and whose gets waved away?

• Do we hold our own side to the same standard of honesty?

• Are religious words being used to wake the conscience, or to shield power from criticism?

Listening in this way does not require pretending that every position is equally just or every party equally responsible. It requires looking before judging.

What is AI strengthening, and what is it pushing aside? Look at one specific use of AI, not AI in general as a single faceless force. Who designed it? What goal does it serve? Who benefits, who carries the risk, and who can challenge its decisions?

The Vatican has given two serious answers. Antiqua et Nova, a note from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education released on 28 January 2025, recognizes real benefits in education, agriculture, and human development. It also warns of discrimination, concentrated power, manipulation, and blurred accountability. Pope Leo XIV pressed further in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, signed on 15 May 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. He warns that AI’s promise of higher productivity often forces workers to keep pace with the machine, rather than designing the machine to serve the worker. Neither document measures progress by novelty. Both measure it by human dignity and the common good.

The spiritual question underneath is simple. Are we using a powerful tool to serve people, or rearranging people’s lives around whatever the tool makes efficient?

Whose daily bread is insecure? The phrase “daily bread” points to concrete things: food, shelter, work, care, and the relationships that keep a life upright. The first step is to listen to people living with insecurity, rather than talk about it.

A parish or neighborhood group might ask who cannot meet basic needs this month, who has slipped into isolation, and which barriers come from personal circumstances versus policies and institutional habits. That last distinction is pure Cardijn. He cared for the individual worker and studied the system that wore the worker down.

Judge: Seven Petitions That Examine Us

In Matthew’s version, the one most Christians pray, the Our Father has an opening address and seven petitions. The order matters. The first three turn us toward God’s name, kingdom, and will. Only then come the four that ask for bread, forgiveness, and protection. Human needs fit within a horizon larger than any one person’s ambition.

“Our Father, who art in heaven“

The address joins intimacy to humility. God is Father, and God belongs to no one. The word our places the one praying inside a family, never alone.

Prayed honestly, it cuts against the habit of placing political opponents, strangers, and poor people outside our circle of concern. It also answers a quieter fear that AI has stirred: that human worth depends on outperforming a machine. Antiqua et Nova rejects measuring a person’s value by skill, cognitive achievement, or success, and grounds dignity in being made in God’s image. Magnifica Humanitas puts it more sharply: each person’s dignity is “neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified” (§53). An older person, a person with a disability, a worker whose job was just automated: none of them is worth a cent less.

Nobody should have to earn the right to matter by proving they are useful. Henri Cardijn could have told you that.

“Hallowed be thy name“

This petition asks that God’s name be held holy. Turned toward ourselves, it asks what our public use of religion actually honors. Do our words point toward truth, mercy, and reverence, or do we borrow God’s name to make our anger unquestionable?

In politics, it means refusing to confuse loyalty to God with loyalty to a leader or party. Pope Leo XIV writes that anyone who invokes God to justify violence betrays who God is. In technological culture, it means refusing to hand ultimate authority to anything we built ourselves. Antiqua et Nova warns against assuming that goodness and truth follow automatically from technical and economic power.

We profane the sacred when we use it to excuse what we ought to examine.

“Thy kingdom come“

The prayer asks for God’s kingdom, not the triumph of our preferred arrangements. Every political program falls under scrutiny here. A government, a movement, or a company may serve justice, and none of them is anyone’s final salvation.

For AI, this petition rules out both utopia and despair. AI may help solve hard problems, but technical capability is not the same thing as human flourishing. Leo XIV frames the real choice well: not enthusiasm versus fear, but progress that serves persons and peoples versus progress that bends them to the logic of power (§129).

Progress is measured by the lives it changes, not the power it generates.

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven“

Here the prayer becomes an examination of responsibility. Are we seeking what is right, or seeking religious cover for what we already wanted?

With AI, “the system decided” excuses no one. Antiqua et Nova insists that final responsibility for AI-assisted decisions stays with human beings, backed by accountability, privacy protections, and appropriate transparency. Magnifica Humanitas asks for clear lines of accountability at every stage of development, independent oversight, and education for the people who use these systems.

Neither obedience to God nor reliance on a machine retires the conscience.

“Give us this day our daily bread“

Notice the three small words: give us, this day, our bread. The petition joins dependence, present need, and shared concern. A social reading asks not only whether I have enough, but what happens to those who do not. It calls for help today and for a hard look at the conditions that keep people insecure tomorrow.

For AI, the question is distribution. If productivity rises, do workers and communities share in the gains? If tasks disappear, what lets the people who did them live with dignity? Leo XIV insists that technology must not pool in the hands of a few, widening the gap between those inside the digital revolution and those left outside it, and he calls for renewed labor organizations to give workers a voice.

Abundance is morally incomplete while the people who make it possible go without.

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us“

The English trespasses hides something. Matthew’s Greek says debts; Luke’s version asks forgiveness of sins “as we forgive everyone indebted to us.” The petition has always had one foot in the economy.

It places our need for mercy beside how we treat those who wronged us. Politically, it interrupts the comfortable belief that wrongdoing lives only on the other side. Our own dishonesty, contempt, and indifference come first, along with our willingness to excuse injustice when it helps us.

Forgiveness is not impunity. Refusing revenge does not mean abandoning truth, accountability, restitution, or protection from further harm. Nobody can demand that an injured person reconcile so that everyone else feels better. Leo XIV models the difference: in Magnifica Humanitas he asks forgiveness for how slowly the Church condemned slavery, and he describes repentance as acknowledging harm, making just reparation, and preventing its return. The same holds for a harmful algorithm. An apology without a correction is only public relations.

Mercy opens the door to change. Responsibility walks through it.

“Lead us not into temptation“

This line has troubled translators. In December 2017, Pope Francis called the familiar wording a poor translation, observing that God does not push us into temptation to watch us fall: “A father does not do this.” The Italian bishops now pray “do not abandon us to temptation,” and the French bishops adopted a similar change in 2017. The English text at Mass is unchanged, but the meaning is the same either way: we ask for help to stay faithful when it is hard.

Today’s temptations reach beyond private wrongdoing. They include the urge to win at any cost, pass along a convenient falsehood, shrink a person into a stereotype, or hand a difficult judgment to a machine. AI sharpens the question of truth because it produces text and images that pass for human work. Both Vatican documents treat the damage to public truth as serious and warn against leaning on AI for decisions that belong to people.

Knowing how to make a message convincing does not make it true, and it confers no right to use it.

“But deliver us from evil“

The last petition admits that our own strength is not enough. Socially, it calls us to resist harm without casting other people as the embodiment of evil. We can condemn cruelty, exploitation, deception, and violence while refusing to deny anyone’s humanity.

For AI, it means neither declaring the technology evil nor assuming its harms will fix themselves. Magnifica Humanitas states plainly that technology is not inherently evil and is also never neutral, because it takes on the purposes of those who design, fund, regulate, and use it. Human purposes, design choices, deployment conditions, and oversight all need moral scrutiny.

Hope is neither passive nor naive. It is the strength that sustains responsible resistance to evil.

The Case Against Reading It This Way

The strongest objection deserves its full weight. Many thoughtful Christians distrust readings like this one, and for good reason.

The Our Father is addressed to God, not to a committee. Every petition asks God to act: hallow, come, give, forgive, deliver. Turning the prayer into a checklist for social policy risks making worship a means to something else, which is a quiet form of idolatry. It also risks capture. Anyone who has watched faith rented out as a political brand, on the right or the left, has good cause to suspect a commentary that finds their own priorities in the Lord’s Prayer. And a prayer that becomes a program tends to lose its power to console the person who needs to say it at 3 a.m. with no agenda at all.

All of that is fair, and the prayer’s order agrees with it. Adoration comes before petition, and God comes before us.

The objection still misses something the prayer itself insists on. One petition carries a condition that only our behavior can meet: forgive us as we forgive. Matthew follows the prayer at once with the warning that our own forgiveness depends on forgiving others (Matthew 6:14–15). The prayer is already reaching into how we treat the people around us. The text puts it there, not the commentator.

The Benedictines who taught me held that prayer and work are not two things. Cardijn’s method rests on the same conviction. Seeing, judging, and acting do not replace prayer. They keep the prayer honest.

Act: Monday Morning

See-Judge-Act is the most portable tool there is for turning conviction into a decision somebody can make on a Monday. The proposals below grow out of this reading; they are not commands hidden in the prayer. Each one is small enough to start this week.

• In political conversation. Argue about the policy, never the person’s worth. Before sharing anything, apply the test you would apply to the other side. Once a month, have a real conversation with someone who votes differently, and listen long enough to repeat their view back in words they would accept.

• When an institution adopts AI, whether it is a parish, a school, a hospital, or an employer, ask four questions before it goes live. Who is accountable for its decisions? How can an affected person appeal to a human being? Who carries the risk if it fails? Who shares the gains? Then name a person, not a department, who answers for each decision that touches someone’s life, and label content the system produced.

• For daily bread. Pair every act of immediate help with one question about causes. A food pantry shift is mercy; asking why the same families return every month is justice. When automation reaches a workplace, support the workers’ collective voice in deciding how it arrives.

• When harm is done, apologize, then repair. Correct the system, compensate the people it hurt, and change the conditions that let it happen.

A four-week circle. This works for a parish small group, a book club, or a person meditating alone.

1. Week one, see. Choose one issue, such as food insecurity in your county or an AI tool your workplace plans to adopt. Listen to the people affected and gather the relevant facts.

2. Week two, judge. Pray the Our Father slowly, one petition at a time. Ask which petition most clearly exposes the gap between what is and what faithfulness asks.

3. Week three, act. Make one commitment, with a named person responsible, a deadline, and a way to tell whether it worked.

4. Week four, review. Ask what improved, who still went unheard, and whether the action needs to change. Return to prayer, and begin the circle again.

Back to the Kitchen in Halle

Read this way, the Our Father presses three challenges on anyone who prays it.

It challenges tribalism without abolishing moral judgment. Ourwidens responsibility; it does not demand silence about injustice. It challenges the habit of measuring people by intelligence or output. In an age fascinated by ever more capable machines, a person’s dignity is not a performance score. And it challenges any spirituality that keeps its distance from material suffering. To ask together for bread and forgiveness is to carry economic life, relationships, and responsibility into prayer instead of leaving them at the church door.

For an index card:

1. Say our and mean everyone it includes.

2. Worth is given, never earned.

3. No system decides. People decide.

4. Bread shared today, causes examined tomorrow.

5. Forgiveness with repair, never forgiveness instead of it.

In May 2026, a pope signed a letter about artificial intelligence on the anniversary of the letter a nine-year-old once read aloud in a coal store in Halle. The question has not changed in 135 years. A man who could not read wanted to know what he was worth, and to whom.

The prayer answers before the question is finished. Not in the petitions, but in the first two words.

Our Father.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

Sources

• Stefan Gigacz, “Henry Cardijn & his son’s consecration to the working class,” Cardijn Reflections, 24 May 2023, drawing on Marguerite Fiévez and Jacques Meert, Cardijn, and Cardijn’s own recollections.

• Joseph Cardijn Digital Library, chronology of Cardijn’s life.

• International Cardijn Association, “An Exhibition in Laeken on Cardijn’s Life and the History of the YCW’s Development.”

• Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, 15 May 1961, §236; see “Mater et Magistra adopts the see-judge-act.”

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2761, citing Tertullian, De oratione 1.

• Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education, Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, 28 January 2025.

• Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, 15 May 2026, published 25 May 2026; summary in Isabella Piro, “Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power,” Vatican News, 25 May 2026.

• Catholic News Service, Pope Francis on “lead us not into temptation”, December 2017; Hannah Brockhaus, “Holy See confirms changes to Italian liturgical translation of Our Father, Gloria,” Catholic World Report, 7 June 2019.

Introduction

It seems entirely appropriate to use the Beatitudes reading from Matthew’s Gospel to celebrate the Feast of All Saints. As Fr Segundo Galilea has stated, the Beatitudes “reveal the attitudes Jesus had, and hence those his followers should have” (p.11). Moreover, they are the “be” attitudes required for entry into God’s kingdom.

As I worked on this Gospel Enquiry, I realised that the Beatitudes required more than one Gospel Enquiry. The nine sayings could be explored by means of nine enquiries. And so, I decided to write one enquiry each month based on each saying and post them in my own Substack (Pat’s Substack), after this enquiry.

Jesus showed through his life and mission that all people are called to make a total commitment to God who has already won the battle with evil. Believing this to be true, I present the following Gospel Enquiry.

The Gospel

Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up the hill. There he sat down and was joined by his disciples. Then he began to speak. This is what he taught them:

‘How happy are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Happy the gentle: they shall have the earth for their heritage.

Happy those who mourn: they shall be comforted.

Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right: they shall be satisfied.

Happy the merciful: they shall have mercy shown them.

Happy the pure in heart: they shall see God.

Happy the peacemakers: they shall be called sons of God.

Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right: theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.’ (Matthew 5:1-12)

The Enquiry

See

• The Sermon on the Mount is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. The first saying focuses on “the poor in spirit”. What does this mean? Does it convey what St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) says: “…we who are overwhelmed in wretchedness”? Does poverty have a spiritual dimension?

• Fr Segundo Galilea (1928-2010), a Chilean liberation theologian, identifies the poor as “[t]he destitute, the abandoned, the forsaken” (p.15) How do some people become “poor in spirit”? Is poverty a “random,” naturally occurring human condition? Or are there structural causes for poverty?

• Why does Jesus tell the “poor in spirit” that the kingdom of heaven is theirs? What does this reveal about his worldview? And what does it say about his reason for teaching people about how to enter the kingdom of heaven?

Judge

• Jesus did not come to help people feel good about themselves. He came to call people to repent. How true is this of the saying that we are considering in this Enquiry?

• Why does Jesus tell the “poor in spirit” that they are blessed and that the kingdom of heaven is theirs?

• What do you find challenging in this presentation of Jesus’ worldview?

Act

• What does this Beatitude call people to do? Identify actions that promote the worldview represented by this saying of Jesus.

• Choose one small action that you can carry out and that will contribute to bringing about the transformation of the world and yourself.

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, public domain pictures.net, CCO

Worth reading: Galilea, S. (1984). The beatitudes: to evangelize as Jesus did. Orbis Books.

From 1899 to 1906, a young priest in the Diocese of Liège ministered to factory workers. He belonged to a small society called the Aumôniers du Travail, the chaplains to labor, and his flock was the working youth of a Belgian city of coal and steel. The workers and their social problems marked him for the rest of his life.

So did what he saw in the churches. He later argued that Catholic piety had drifted away from the liturgy itself. At Mass, the priest prayed at the altar in Latin, and the people in the nave filled the time with their own private devotions. Two prayers ran side by side in the same building, and they rarely met.

In 1906, at thirty-three, he entered the Benedictine abbey of Mont César at Louvain and took the name Lambert. Three years later, at Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier’s request, Dom Lambert Beauduin stood before the National Congress of Catholic Works at Malines. On 23 September 1909, he delivered a paper titled “La vraie prière de l’Église”: the true prayer of the Church.

He built on a sentence Pope Pius X wrote six years earlier, in a motu proprio of 22 November 1903, which called the people’s active participation in the liturgy the primary and indispensable source of the Christian spirit. Beauduin took the pope at his word. He argued that private piety could never replace the assembly’s prayer.

His remedy was not a better show. It was a booklet.

The congress adopted his proposal to put the text of the Sunday Mass and Vespers into the hands of ordinary people, in Latin and the language they spoke, as a book of prayer. With the historian Godefroid Kurth, a layman he met at Malines, Beauduin drew up a plan to carry it out. Within a year, the monks of Mont César printed La Vie liturgique. According to one later account, the first number sold out in a fortnight, with 150,000 copies.

The workers of Liège did not need a grander Sunday. They needed their own part.

A century later, the American Church faces the same problem in a different costume.

Two people in the parking lot

Two people leave Church on a Sunday morning.

The first says, “That was a wonderful service. The music was excellent. The preacher was engaging. The children enjoyed themselves. The coffee was good. We will certainly come back.“

The second says, “ Something happened there that I cannot quite explain. I heard a word I needed to hear, though I didn’t particularly want to hear it. I prayed alongside people I would not otherwise have chosen. I remembered that my life is not entirely my own. And now I have to decide what that means for Monday morning.“

The two reactions need not contradict each other. Worship can be beautiful, welcoming, and deeply transforming at once. Underneath the words, though, sit two very different expectations.

One asks: did this experience satisfy me?

The other asks: what is God making of us?

That difference sits at the center of what follows. The essay moves in the three steps Joseph Cardijn taught the Young Christian Workers. See looks honestly at the culture shaping worship. Judge weighs that culture against Christian worship, drawing on two liturgical theologians: Aidan Kavanagh and Nathan Mitchell. Act names practices that can move a congregation from religious consumption toward communion and mission.

Judging here does not mean criticizing other churches. It means examining the assumptions that quietly shape one’s own. The accounts of Kavanagh and Mitchell below are summaries and applications of their ideas, not quotations from them.

See: When Worship Becomes an Outing

The religious destination

American church life carries a standing temptation: Worship becomes an event designed to attract people.

The ingredients are familiar. An impressive entrance. Seasonal decorations. Elaborate Christmas productions. A café. A bookstore. Carefully designed children’s programs. Professional musicians. Screens, lighting, and a compelling personality at the center.

None of these, by itself, proves unfaithfulness. A café can encourage friendship. Good architecture can welcome strangers. Skilled musicians can help a congregation sing. Beauty can interrupt a world made ugly by indifference.

The same features can also send another message: this religious experience exists to fit your tastes and preferences.

Historians have traced how that message took shape. Kate Bowler and Wen Reagan, writing in Religion and American Culture in 2014, show that prosperity megachurches partnered with the growing worship-music industry to build large, high-tech services modeled on the arena concert. Congregations both adapt to consumer culture and push back against it, and the relationship is rarely simple.

The real question, then, is not whether a church looks like a theater, a cathedral, or a shopping center. It is what kind of relationship the place invites people to have with God and with one another. Guests welcomed into a shared life, or customers encouraged to return.

American Palaces of Prosperity

The phrase is mine, and I mean it as a warning about what a church could become, not a label for every large or beautiful building.

Stated directly, prosperity theology links faith to the expectation of material blessing, health, and success. A church need not preach it openly to send a subtler message through its public life: that God’s favor looks like abundance, polish, confidence, growth, and winning. In December 2013, Kate Bowler described the lavish megachurch Christmas spectacular as a “performative prosperity gospel.” Whether or not a congregation teaches that faith unlocks heavenly blessing, she argued, the event teaches it for them.

The distinction matters. A full band does not prove a church teaches prosperity theology, and a grand building does not prove spiritual corruption. Better questions cut closer:

• What does this congregation present as a successful life?

• Is there room here for grief that does not resolve quickly?

• Can someone poor, unemployed, disabled, doubtful, or exhausted belong without pretending to be victorious?

• Does the congregation’s public image tell the truth about the people who actually gather?

The problem is not that worship is enjoyable. The danger is that worship loses its ability to speak honestly about suffering, dependence, failure, and grace.

Neither an outing nor an errand

Worship shouldn’t be an entertainment outing; the alternative isn’t an errand. Everyone has heard that version too: get to Church, fulfill the obligation, get it done.

Both the outing and the errand rest on the same hidden belief: that worship stands apart from the rest of life. Something to consume or to complete. Christian worship asks something deeper. It asks people to understand themselves as belonging: to God, to one another, and to a mission that extends beyond the service.

The question is not only whether worship was enjoyable or dutiful. It is whether worship is teaching a people to live as a community.

No parking problems online

The internet sharpens the challenge. A church that attracts people mainly by offering a great experience now competes with a medium that has no parking problems, no travel, and endless choice.

The internet did not invent mediated religion. Radio, recordings, and televangelism had already carried preaching and music beyond the local Church, and Bowler and Reagan trace how televangelism and the megachurch rose together. Digital platforms extend the trend and make choosing even easier. A worshipper can now move from preacher to preacher, style to style, congregation to congregation in seconds.

One question cannot be avoided. If a church’s offering is primarily a performance, why shouldn’t people choose the performance they like best?

None of this condemns people who worship online. Physical attendance is a poor measure of devotion. For someone who cannot travel, worship through a screen may be an act of profound fidelity.

Access alone, however, is not community. The Pew Research Center surveyed 11,377 US adults on 16–27 November 2022 and published the results on 2 June 2023. About two-thirds (65%) of regular in-person attendees reported feeling a great deal or quite a bit of connection with fellow attendees. Among regular virtual viewers, 22% reported a similarly strong connection with others watching online or on TV, and 28% with those attending in person. The figures describe reported experience. They do not prove that worship is spiritually empty, or that physical presence automatically creates community.

They do raise a question worth carrying into every planning meeting: how does a congregation help people become known, needed, and responsible to one another, rather than merely counted as viewers?

A pause for the reader

Think of your own congregation. When someone asks, “How was church?“ what do people usually describe? The sermon, the music, the length? Or the people, the prayer, and what changed in them? There is no need to answer quickly. The words people use in passing often reveal their deepest expectations.

Judge: What Is Liturgy For?

Worship does not merely illustrate theology.

Aidan Kavanagh (1929–2006) was a monk of Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana who taught liturgy at Saint Meinrad, Notre Dame, and Yale. His On Liturgical Theology, first given as the Hale Memorial Lectures at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1981 and published by Pueblo in 1984, challenges an assumption most churches never notice: that Christians first work out their ideas and then worship to express them.

Kavanagh reverses the order. The Church’s encounter with God in worship shapes its theological understanding. Liturgy does not merely express beliefs formed elsewhere; it helps form them. He calls the assembly Worshiphip primary theology and the later work of explaining it secondary theology. He argued that theology, at its source, belongs to the whole assembly, and its first practitioners are more likely to be “chairwomen and shopkeepers“ than pontiffs and professors.

That changes how a congregation sees itself. The people gathered for worship are not an audience listening to someone else’s conclusions. Their praying, singing, listening, silence, thanksgiving, and sacramental participation belong to the Church’s living encounter with God.

Kavanagh describes the encounter as one that can bring worshippers to the brink of chaos in the presence of the living God. It changes those who take part, and because they are changed, their next act of worship is different, however slightly. For Kavanagh, that adjustment is where theology begins.

The consequence is plain. If liturgy is mainly a product, its success depends on delivering the experience people expect. If liturgy is an encounter with the living God, no one controls what will happen. People may come seeking reassurance and hear a call to repentance. They may come guarding their independence and discover their dependence. They may come expecting an uplifting hour and find themselves confronted by a neighbor’s suffering.

None of this argues against careful preparation. It argues against imagining that preparation can force God’s action into a plan.

Summit and source

The historical weight of this view becomes clearer in the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, promulgated on 4 December 1963. The bishops approved it by a vote of 2,147 to 4, and it marked half a century since the liturgical movement Beauduin launched at Malines.

The constitution describes the liturgy as the action of Christ and of his body, the Church (article 7). It names the liturgy as the summit toward which the Church’s activity moves and the font from which its power flows (article 10). It calls for the full, conscious, and active participation of all the faithful (article 14).

These are Catholic formulations, and Christian traditions understand sacrament, ministry, and worship differently. They still pose useful questions for an ecumenical conversation. Who is acting in worship? What does participation mean? How does worship relate to the Church’s life outside the building?

The constitution does not say Worship belongs to religious professionals while everyone else observes. Nor does it treat liturgy as a technique for producing a friendly community. Worship is directed toward God, and in the worship, the Church is sanctified and formed for its life and mission.

The order matters. Christians do not worship one another. They worship God, and in doing so they learn that they cannot worship faithfully while treating their neighbors as unimportant.

Meeting mystery, not managing experience

Nathan D. Mitchell (1943–2024), professor emeritus of liturgy at the University of Notre Dame, a former professor at Saint Meinrad, and a friend, offers a complementary approach. In Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Orbis Books, 2006), part of the Theology in Global Perspective series, Mitchell treats ritual as integral to human identity. He invites readers to recover the harmony of the “liturgy of the church“ and the “liturgy of the world,” and to recognize worship as an opening to God’s surprising presence in creation.

The title draws the contrast. A church can organize an event, design a presentation, and schedule a service. Meeting mystery is a different act from managing an experience. Mystery here is not a puzzle for experts to solve. It is the depth of divine life that worship discloses, and no one controls.

The distinction separates spectacle from a sacramental way of seeing. A spectacle holds attention. A sacramental imagination changes what a person notices. Applied to a congregation, Mitchell’s approach raises three questions:

• Does worship help people notice the person whose labor is hidden?

• Does it teach them to recognize dependence as part of human life rather than as personal failure?

• Does it help them see ordinary things, water, bread, wine, bodies, and voices, as worthy of attention instead of things to use and discard?

If the Church Worship and the life of the world belong together, Worship cannot be sealed off from how people inhabit creation and treat their neighbors.

Beauty is not the enemy.

The strongest objection deserves a full hearing. Does all this mean churches should be plain, music mediocre, and worship uncomfortable? Many who build excellence in worship do so precisely out of hospitality: they want the stranger, the skeptic, and the teenager to find the door open and the room alive.

They are right that refusing consumerism does not require accepting ugliness. Refusing performance does not require carelessness. Refusing to entertain does not require boredom. Mitchell’s attention to ritual and the depths of creation gives no reason to reject beauty, and Kavanagh’s account of liturgy as formative encounter gives no reason to neglect the embodied, communal act of worship.

The question is what role beauty plays in a community:

• Does the music help the congregation find its voice, or make its voice unnecessary?

• Does the building make room for people who are easily overlooked?

• Does the preaching open Scripture to the assembly, or make the assembly dependent on a personality?

• Does excellence serve the people’s prayer, or turn the people into admirers?

The same outward form can serve very different ends. A band can accompany a congregation or overwhelm it. A choir can deepen participation without requiring everyone to sing every moment. A magnificent building can become a shared inheritance or a monument to institutional importance. Discernment requires more than picking one style over another.

What kind of people

Kavanagh asks the Church to take the assembly’s encounter with God seriously as a source of theology. Mitchell asks it to take ritual, mystery, and the bond between worship and the life of the world seriously. Together they move the question past “What kind of religious experience do people want?“ toward a harder one: what kind of people does worship help us become before God?

That question does not dismiss pleasure, emotion, or hospitality. It places them inside a larger purpose. A church may be warm and beautiful, yet if it never challenges possessiveness, indifference, or the assumption that everything exists for our satisfaction, it has to ask what formation is really taking place.

Act: From Religious Consumption to Shared Life

The last step is practical. Not how to fix American Christianity, but what one congregation can begin to practice. The suggestions below build on Kavanagh and Mitchell; they are not instructions from either.

1. Examine worship without turning it into customer research.

For several weeks, invite a small, varied group to observe the congregation’s worship and gathering life. Include people who do not usually make decisions: a newcomer, a longtime member, a person with a disability, a young adult, someone who participates online. Ask them to notice:

• Who is welcomed personally, and who remains anonymous?

• When does the assembly act together?

• What do the music, preaching, and physical space make possible?

• What does the congregation assume about income, mobility, family structure, and confidence?

• Where is there room for silence, lament, uncertainty, and the world’s needs?

The first question is not “Did you like it?“ It is “What did our practice communicate?“

2. Connect hospitality with responsibility.

Keep the coffee if it helps people meet, and ask whether anyone notices the person drinking alone. Keep the gathering space, and ask whether it welcomes those who cannot contribute financially. Keep the attractive entrance, and ask whether what happens inside matches the promise made at the door.

Hospitality should not stop at the threshold. It should grow into a relationship in which each person can be known and, over time, contribute according to their gifts. The goal is not to press every newcomer into volunteering. The goal is a belonging deeper than showing up.

3. Strengthen the voice of the assembly.

• Choose music people can genuinely learn and sing.

• Allow silence without treating it as an embarrassing gap.

• Prepare readers and other ministers carefully.

• Make responses, movement, and physical arrangements accessible.

• Recognize that attentive listening and prayerful stillness are also forms of participation.

The aim is not constant activity. It is a congregation that knows itself as a participant in worship, not an audience.

4. Build a bridge between Sunday prayer and weekday responsibility.

Choose one recurring element of worship and ask what practice corresponds to it:

• We pray for people who are sick. The congregation organizes visits, transport, meals, and follow-up.

• We pray for workers. The congregation examines how it pays and treats its own employees and contractors.

• We confess failures of love. The congregation creates ways to acknowledge harm and pursue repair.

• We welcome strangers. The congregation examines who can enter, participate, and feel safe.

• We are sent forth. The congregation names a shared responsibility beyond maintaining the institution.

These practices do not substitute for worship. They test whether a congregation’s life is beginning to resemble what it prays.

5. Use digital worship to connect, not only to broadcast.

The answer to digital culture is not to abandon the people who depend on it. It is to connect online participation with actual relationships:

• A named contact for remote participants.

• Telephone or personal follow-up when requested.

• Accessible ways to submit prayer intentions.

• Small groups that include people unable to travel.

• Pastoral visits and sacramental care appropriate to the tradition.

• Ways for remote members to contribute their gifts.

Pew’s finding of weaker connection among virtual worshippers names a challenge to meet, not a reason to ignore those worshippers. The measure is not how many people watched. It is who became less isolated.

6. Run a ninety-day experiment.

Choose one change, not twelve. For example:

• For ninety days, connect intercessions for isolated people with an organized ministry of contact and visitation.

• For ninety days, test whether the music and sound levels let the congregation hear its own voice.

• For ninety days, give every remote participant who requests contact a consistent relationship with someone in the congregation.

Then return to the method. See: what actually happened? Judge: what did it reveal about the congregation’s understanding of worship and community? Act: what should continue, change, or stop?

One small practice, sustained and honestly evaluated, does more good than a large announcement that changes nothing.

The booklet and the palace

“American Palaces of Prosperity“ is a strong phrase because it asks whether churches have become better at displaying abundance than at living solidarity. It belongs first in a congregation’s own examination of conscience, not in its criticism of another denomination or another musical style. The question is not whether a church has a café, a choir, a band, a beautiful sanctuary, or a livestream. It is whether these things serve an assembly that worships God and grows in its capacity for faithful life together.

Kavanagh shows that a congregation’s worship is not merely a delivery system for religious ideas. Mitchell shows why ritual and mystery cannot be confined to an hour sealed off from the rest of life. Together they dissolve the false choice between worship as an enjoyable event and worship as a burdensome task. Worship is neither consumed nor checked off. It is entered together.

Beauduin understood that in Liège. His answer to people who sat as spectators at their own prayer was not a more impressive Mass. He handed them the words and gave them back their part. Later, while teaching in Rome, he passed that conviction to a young American monk named Virgil Michel, who carried it home to Collegeville, Minnesota, and founded the journal Orate Fratres in 1926, later renamed Worship. Nathan Mitchell would write its closing column for more than twenty years. Aidan Kavanagh would teach the same conviction at Saint Meinrad.

The booklet cost almost nothing. The palace costs a great deal. Only one of them asks the people to pray.

So the question to carry out the door is not only “Was the service good?” It is “What are we now ready to give, receive, repair, and become?“

Questions for discussion

1. Where does our congregation offer genuine hospitality, and where might it unintentionally encourage a customer relationship?

2. What is the difference between being emotionally moved and being changed? When do the two belong together?

3. What would a person living with poverty, grief, disability, or failure learn about belonging from worship?

4. How does worship connect, or fail to connect, with the responsibilities of ordinary life?

5. What single practice could we undertake for ninety days to strengthen the bond between prayer, communion, and service?

Further reading

• Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (Pueblo, 1984). This essay’s account of worship as the source of theological understanding draws on this foundational text.

• Nathan D. Mitchell, Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Orbis Books, 2006). Especially useful on ritual, divine mystery, and the bond between the Church, worship, and the world.

• Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), especially articles 7, 10, and 14, on Christ’s action, worship, liturgy as summit and font, and the participation of the faithful.

Sources

• Bowler, Kate. “The American Megachurch and the Christmas Prosperity Gospel.” The Christian Century, Then & Now blog, December 2013.

• Bowler, Kate, and Wen Reagan. “Bigger, Better, Louder: The Prosperity Gospel’s Impact on Contemporary Christian Worship.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 24, no. 2 (2014): 186–230.

• Cummins, Fergal. “The Liturgical Theology of Aidan Kavanagh.” Student essay, Saint Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, submitted 30 November 2014.

• Kavanagh, Aidan. On Liturgical Theology: The Hale Memorial Lectures of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, 1981. New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1984.

• Mitchell, Nathan D. Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments. Theology in Global Perspective. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006.

• Pecklers, Keith F. “Liturgical Movement, I: Catholic.” New Catholic Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com.

• Pew Research Center. “Online Religious Services Appeal to Many Americans, but Going in Person Remains More Popular.” 2 June 2023. See also chapter 1, “Americans’ Experiences with Virtual Religious Services.”

• Second Vatican Council. Sacrosanctum Concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. 4 December 1963.

• On Lambert Beauduin and the Malines congress: “Lambert Beauduin,” Wikipedia; Zerfaß, Alexander, “Heilsgeschehen,” lecture at the Balduin-Sulzer-Symposium, Wilhering, 17 March 2023 (for the date of 23 September 1909); “A Miscellany of Missals,” Cambridge Core archive, for the circulation of La Vie liturgique; Barnas, on Beauduin’s years with the Aumôniers du Travail, in “The Unity of Christians: The Vision of Paul Couturier.”

Come back each Wednesday for the next two weeks to follow the story as it unfolds, one part at a time.

In early April 1962, a congressman named Frank Kowalski, worried about the nuclear arms race, wrote to a monk in Kentucky and asked him for a prayer. The monk wrote one. On 18 April 1962, the House of Representatives read it aloud.

Eight days later, the monk’s abbot handed him a letter. It had come from Rome in January, and the abbot had held it for three months. Dom Gabriel Sortais, Abbot General of the Trappists, ordered Father Louis to stop publishing on war and peace. Father Louis’s book, Peace in the Post-Christian Era, would not appear in his lifetime.

Father Louis was Thomas Merton. He obeyed. He did not stop thinking. Since October 1961, he had been writing to friends about war, fear, and the Christian conscience. Now he typed those letters onto stencils and mailed mimeographed copies to a few hundred readers, each marked not for publication. He called them the Cold War Letters. By October 1962, there were 111 of them.

The ban did not silence him. It changed his world. Instead of speaking to the nation, he began reaching out to individuals, one by one.

That is how small groups work, and that’s how this story will be told.

The cast of a cold library

This is a three-part story. St. Anselm’s, a Catholic parish in the river town of Corbett’s Landing, is fictional, as are the six people who meet in its cold library. The documents they study are real, and I source every quote. In the middle of their table is an essay I published on 15 October 2026, “Christian Nationalism Beyond the US Border.”

• Lois Breuer, 71, a retired high school English teacher, widowed three years ago. She has read Merton since college and is fairly sure she is not qualified to lead anything.

• Doug Steyer, 62, owns the hardware store. Army veteran, American Legion post commander, Methodist. He flies the flag on every holiday and bristles at the word nationalist.

• Ruth Lindgren, 76, is a retired county clerk and a Lutheran who attends Easter and funerals. She forwards every alarming email she receives.

• Chidi Okafor, 36, a pharmacist at the drugstore on Front Street, a naturalized citizen from Nigeria, and a Catholic convert. He is the only one in the room who has taken a citizenship oath.

• Tessa Blome, 24, a nursing student raised in the big, nondenominational church out by the highway. She loves its people and is troubled by its politics. She found Merton in a college course.

• Fr. Bill Gerl, 61, the pastor, lends them the room and worries aloud that the parish will be drawn into anyone’s campaign.

A tent always has an entrance.

The bulletin on 11 October announced: “Reading Thomas Merton: six Tuesday evenings, parish library, 7 p.m. All welcome.” On 27 October, just a week before the midterm election, five people showed up. Lois thought it was a miracle.

For the first twenty minutes, the conversation drifted away from Merton. Doug brought up a candidate forum at the big evangelical church. Ruth said Christian nationalists were taking over everything. Tessa argued they were just a small group, and the media made them seem bigger. Chidi listened quietly. Fr. Bill looked in, considered joining, then left.

Lois let it run. Then she opened the Rule of St. Benedict, the Rule Merton lived under for twenty-seven years as a Trappist, a Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani. She read from the Prologue: “If we want to dwell in the tent of his Kingdom, we can never reach it unless we run there by doing good works.”

“Not a fortress,” she said. “Not a compound. A tent is a thing with an entrance.”

Next, she read from Merton’s “The Root of War Is Fear,” because she felt the group needed it. Merton said the root of war is “the fear they have of everything,” and he explained what that fear creates. When we focus on evil in others, we look for someone to blame until we have “created for ourselves a suitable enemy, a scapegoat.”

The essay at the center of the table

Tessa asked to share something. Her aunt had sent her an essay about Christian nationalism, though not the American kind: Britain, Canada, Australia. She read its definition aloud. Christian nationalism is “the act of fusing national identity with the Christian religion such that the nation, by definition, is Christian.” Nick Spencer of the British think tank Theos reduces it to a single test: you have to be Christian to be truly British, or truly American.

She read one passage twice. The movement has become more visible, “but this does not mean it is growing larger.” The essay says that exaggerated coverage makes it seem like the movement is growing, even though the actual numbers stay the same.

Doug sat back. “So it’s all hype.”

“No,” Lois said. “The essay makes two points. It’s not as widespread as it seems, but we shouldn’t ignore it. That’s why we read it closely.”

So far, they’d only looked. That’s the first step in the method Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest, taught young workers a hundred years ago: see, judge, act. John XXIII made it official in Mater et Magistra (§236). The Second Vatican Council had already supported this approach. The Church must keep “scrutinizing the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the Gospel” (Gaudium et Spes §4).

Their assignment for the week was a media examen. Pick one story about religion and politics. Track every time it comes up, and note if it reports facts or stirs feelings. Then have three conversations with real neighbors, focusing on listening rather than persuading.

Phones in the basket

The second Tuesday was 3 November, Election Day. Lois suggested they meet anyway and put their phones in a basket by the door after 7:30. “The country will vote whether we watch or not,” she said. “Tonight, we practice reading the news without letting it control us.”

The assigned reading was the essay’s definition, and the evening became a seminar on one sentence: the term “does not refer to how a Christian votes, lobbies, or runs for office.” Caring for your country does not make you a Christian nationalist. The fusion does. The claim that the nation is Christian by definition, that Christianity deserves a special place in public life, and that drifting from it threatens the nation itself.

Doug had spent the weekend driving around with yard signs for candidates from both parties in his truck. He pushed back. “So now loving your country is suspect?”

“No,” said Chidi, his first real words of the series. “That is the opposite of the essay’s point. It protects your patriotism from being hijacked.” Then, more quietly: “When I took my citizenship oath, no one asked what I believe. I have thought about that a great deal since I became a Catholic. No one asked.”

Lois had Chapter 2 of the Rule ready. Benedict tells the abbot not to distinguish between people in the monastery: “Whether slave or free, we are all one in Christ.” “Benedict still respects office and seniority,” she said. “But no one’s birth or background gives them rank. That was radical in the sixth century, and it’s still radical now.”

Merton offered advice for election night. He wrote that politics is “an inextricable tangle of good and evil motives,” but we should keep hoping for whatever good remains.

Fr. Bill came by at 7:45, stayed for twenty minutes, and left them with a line he keeps taped inside his breviary. The Church “is not identified in any way with the political community nor bound to any political system” (Gaudium et Spes § 76). “The Church is not America,” he said, “and America is not theChurchh. Both facts are good news for both of them.”

At eight o’clock, no one picked up their phone. To everyone’s surprise, Ruth suggested they pray. Lois opened Night Prayer on the parish tablet. Five Christians from four traditions, each with their own opinions, prayed the psalms while the country counted its votes.

An index card for your own table

1. See. Track one religion-and-politics story for a week. Count its appearances. Mark each one as fact or feeling.

2. Listen. Hold three conversations with neighbors about this moment. Ask; do not argue.

3. Judge. Ask where your own faith works as a border, telling you who is fully one of us.

4. Act. Finish this sentence and test it against one real event: “For me, loving my country as a Christian means ___, and it stops being love when ___.”

5. Check. Could a Christian in another party, or another country, say your sentence too?

Merton’s mimeographed letters went out to a few hundred people, one envelope at a time. They didn’t stop a war. But they kept a few hundred people thinking during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they taught a monk, who had to obey, how to keep speaking honestly in a small room.

Five people in a cold parish library are trying the same thing. After all, a tent always has an entrance.

It can hold more than you might think.

Next week, Part Two: “Wooden Crosses.” The group travels across the Atlantic, and Ruth sees herself in a British poll.

Sources. Thomas Merton, “The Root of War Is Fear,” in New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961). Merton, Cold War Letters (Orbis, 2006). Jim Forest, foreword to Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Orbis, 2004). Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue and Chapter 2, Saint Meinrad translation. John XXIII, Mater et Magistra §236. Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes §§4, 76. Richard Pütz, “Christian Nationalism Beyond the US Border,” The Jesus Seminar and Beyond, 15 October 2026.

Word reached a Roman governor’s household on the Black Sea coast that an old man had died in Italy. His granddaughter wanted to reach her grieving aunt as quickly as anyone could travel in the ancient world. The fastest way was the emperor’s courier service, but it was reserved for official business.

The governor was Pliny the Younger, a lawyer and magistrate who administered the province of Bithynia and Pontus, in what is now northern Turkey, for the emperor Trajan. His wife was Calpurnia. The courier service, the cursus publicus, was a network of relay stations along the main roads, and only the emperor and his governors could issue permits. Trajan had given Pliny a supply of permits for state business. By Pliny’s own account, he had never granted anyone a permit or sent a messenger except in the emperor’s service.

Then he issued one to Calpurnia.

Afterward, he wrote to Trajan and confessed. He explained that he had not asked permission first because, by the time an answer crossed the empire, the favor would have come too late to matter. Trajan replied that Pliny had been right to trust his sympathy. The emperor agreed that a request would have made the permit useless and that the journey’s speed must have made her arrival all the more welcome to her aunt.

Elsewhere in the same correspondence, Pliny asked Trajan whether to honor permits past their expiration date, because he feared blundering in either direction. Even a governor worried about misusing them.

The exchange is small, and it explains how a road holds power.

A Road with a Gatehouse

The internet works like the Roman road network, and social platforms work like the towns, marketplaces, and gathering places the roads connect. The comparison becomes sharper when we ask who owns the roads, who governs the towns, who controls access, and who profits from the traffic.

The strongest link is infrastructure. The systems that enable communication, commerce, and shared life can also enable domination. Roman roads carried merchants, travelers, and farmers’ carts. They also carried legions, tax collectors, and imperial orders. The power to connect people and the power to extend control were never separate.

The cursus publicus demonstrates the second power at work. Augustus most likely organized it between 27 and 20 BC so officials and official messages could traverse the empire quickly. A courier covered about 50 Roman miles a day, roughly 46 modern miles. Augustus chose one courier for each journey rather than a relay of riders, allowing officials to question the person who made the trip. Only the government and the military could use the service, and carriers proved their errand with a permit called a diploma. The system rested on obligations the state imposed on local communities, and historians record both its frequent abuse and the burden it placed on the towns along the route.

The internet repeats that pattern in layers. These are interpretive comparisons, not claims that the institutions are identical.

• The road. The cables, protocols, and exchange points that carry data between locations. Anyone may travel it in principle, and whoever controls the junctions controls far more than the road itself.

• The towns. Social platforms. Each has its own residents, rules, and owner.

• The marketplaces. App stores, ad exchanges, and creator storefronts. Commerce happens there on the operator’s terms.

• The permits. Accounts, developer keys, and verified status. They determine who moves faster, farther, or at all.

• The checkpoints. Internet service providers and national gateways. States use them to filter, slow, or cut traffic.

• The governors. Executives and policy teams who enforce the rules. They answer upward to owners and regulators more reliably than they do downward to residents.

Landlords, Not Villagers

A platform is not merely a village by the roadside. It can be the landlord, the marketplace operator, the rule-maker, and the gatekeeper at once. “Privately governed towns connected by a shared road network“ describes it better than “villages along an imperial highway.”

For thirty-five years, I helped build the systems I now question. A feature that makes life easier for residents often hands the owner a lever, and the owner decides when to pull it.

Nor is there a single digital Rome. The picture is one of overlapping centers of power: states, corporations, and communities whose interests sometimes coincide and sometimes collide. From January to May 2025, Freedom House found that people organized protests online, and authoritarian governments responded with censorship and offline repression, while people in democracies faced growing limits on digital expression. The network served both sides.

The Cost of Dissent

Claiming that authoritarian states “replicate“ Roman rule goes too far. The evidence supports the claim that they reproduce some mechanisms of domination. Rome changed over the centuries, and modern states are not interchangeable. Three mechanisms still make the comparison productive.

Control the routes. Roman roads enabled the state to move troops, supplies, officials, and messages across the territory. Modern authorities block websites, cut connectivity, monitor messages, and punish online dissent. The parallel is functional: whoever controls circulation controls much of the population.

Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2025, covering June 2024 to May 2025, found that global internet freedom declined for the fifteenth consecutive year. Of the 72 countries assessed, conditions worsened in 28 and improved in 17. Half of the 18 countries rated “Free“ also slipped. Kenya, Venezuela, and Georgia saw the largest declines.

Iran provides the sharpest recent example. Protests began in Tehran on 28 December 2025, triggered by a currency collapse and soaring prices. On 8 January 2026, the authorities imposed an internet and telecommunications blackout. Amnesty International said the shutdown was deliberate and intended to hide grave human rights violations. By 23 January, it said the blackout isolated more than 90 million people from the rest of the world. On 16 January, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, said at least 5,000 people had been killed. On 21 January, Iran’s Supreme Council of National Security put the figure at 3,117. With the road cut, outsiders could not settle the difference.

Make resistance costly and make the cost visible.

Repression affects more than its victims. Punishing one dissenter warns many others. The Roman arena made that warning public. Condemned prisoners died before crowds, often by being devoured by wild animals, in a punishment called damnatio ad bestias. Not every arena fight was an execution, and the two should remain distinct.

Public executions have not disappeared. Amnesty recorded at least 17 in 2025, including 11 in Iran and six in Afghanistan. That figure fell within a year in which it counted at least 2,707 executions in 17 countries, the highest since 1981, and it excludes the thousands it believes China carried out. Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, said a minority of states was using the death penalty to instill fear and crush dissent. None of this means those governments run the whole Roman system. It means the public warning still works as a tool of power.

Keep protection unequal.

Rome did not organize society around equal rights. Legal privilege and political opportunity depended on status: citizenship, wealth, freedom or enslavement, and membership in privileged orders. Pliny’s letters show this. In his report on Christians, he sent those who were Roman citizens to Rome for trial because a provincial governor lacked the power to execute a citizen.

The modern comparison therefore requires a sharper question than “people have lost freedoms, just as in Rome.” It asks whether different groups receive unequal protection, voice, and access to those who govern. That question crosses the historical divide without pretending Roman citizenship and modern human rights are the same.

A Pamphlet with Names on It

The talk of public executions needs two separate answers because literal killing and online humiliation are different acts. Calling a pile-on a “digital execution“ is a strong phrase and a careless comparison, since it shrinks the meaning of actual killing.

A more precise comparison is public punishment as spectacle. An audience exposes a person, joins in, and the event signals which behavior the community will tolerate. Roman spectacles tied visible punishment directly to the legitimacy of power.

Rome also issued a rule against one version of this. In the letter in which Pliny describes how he handled Christians, he mentions an anonymous pamphlet circulating with a list of names. Trajan’s reply drew a line: anonymous pamphlets “must not carry any weight whatever” because they set a terrible precedent and did not suit his age.

That ruling was no charter of liberty. Trajan also wrote that Christians were not to be hunted out, yet those brought before a governor and found guilty were to be punished. A rule against anonymous accusation can coexist with a system that still kills.

Criticism, investigative journalism, harassment, threats, state persecution, and legitimate moderation are not the same phenomenon. Five tests help distinguish among them:

1. Who organized the exposure.

2. What evidence supports the accusation.

3. Whether the response is proportionate.

4. Whether the person can answer or appeal.

5. Whether the event informs the public or mainly mobilizes hostility.

These tests discriminate better than treating every controversy as an arena.

Knights, Senators, and Patrons

The closest Roman counterpart to a technology oligarch is neither the emperor nor a “patrician.” The comparison works better as a blend of three figures: the equestrian, the senator, and the patron.

Equestrians: wealth tied to administration. The equestrian order was a wealthy status group ranked below the senators. Augustus appointed its members to senior posts, bypassing senators who might threaten him. Equestrian procurators administered tax collection, imperial properties, and army pay in the provinces. The comparison asks how private wealth becomes part of the machinery of government and what follows when a state cannot run without a private firm’s systems. It does not claim that every wealthy entrepreneur is authoritarian.

Senators: wealth translated into political standing. Senators formed the uppermost citizen elite and preserved their prestige under the emperors. The analogy holds when concentrated wealth buys unusual access to political decision-makers or influence over public priorities. A technology billionaire is not a Roman senator, and the modern role need not carry any formal office. The question is whether economic power can produce political consequences without corresponding public accountability.

Patrons: dependency as power. A patron was a powerful person whose resources made others dependent on that person’s favor. A platform owner resembles a patron and a landlord when a community’s livelihood or public presence depends on continued access to privately controlled space. This extends Rome’s unequal social order as an analytical tool. It does not equate one person with another.

High-tech oligarchs resemble a fusion of Rome’s wealthy administrative elite, its politically influential upper class, and its powerful patrons. They do not resemble its emperors.

The Best Case Against the Analogy

A fair defender of the platforms would make six points, and each one carries weight.

• Residents can leave. Roman subjects had no easy way out of the empire. A user can close an account. But does that get harder as the autonomous revolution evolves?

• Rivals exist. Many platforms compete, and open protocols mean no single town owns the road. Do owners collaborate, or is it honor among thieves?

• Moderation protects tenants. A landlord who evicts harassers, scammers, and abusers serves the other residents.

• Corporations lack legions. Roman imperial authority included armies, conquest, legal coercion, and slavery. A company can exclude a person from a market. A state can imprison one, and the two should not be lumped together. Or what happens when they do become one?

• Law still binds. In its 2025 assessment of the United States, Freedom House judged the overall information landscape vibrant, diverse, and free. The First Amendment limited the government’s power to restrict content or block websites, and the government imposed no limits on connectivity. The same assessment also reported federal pressure on online speech and expanded digital surveillance after the change in government in January 2025. Not every modern state is equally authoritarian.

• Networks help resisters. People used the same communication systems to organize the protests that Iran’s blackout tried to silence. Infrastructure does not decide political outcomes on its own.

These objections hold. They show that the analogy is a caution, not a prediction, and that history does not repeat itself institution for institution. The evidence supports a narrower claim than “the internet is an empire,” and the reason is plain. The strongest evidence of coercion, from shutdowns to public executions, points to states. The strongest evidence about platforms is dependence, which is real but not the same as coercion.

Dependence still leaves an open civic question. When a small number of actors control the essential spaces of communication, people participate either as citizens with enforceable rights or as tenants who stay by permission. The answer varies by place and by platform, and it is worth asking about each one.

An Index Card

Five checks fit on a card and work on any road, Roman or digital.

1. Find the permit. Name who decides who may move fast, far, or at all.

2. Find the appeal. Check whether an ordinary traveler can write to anyone, as Pliny wrote to Trajan.

3. Find the cut. Learn who can close the road, how fast, and who finds out.

4. Find the rule. Confirm the same rule applies to the senator and the shopkeeper.

5. Find the way around. See whether people can still route around the gate once it closes.

Pliny had an appeal. He wrote, the emperor answered, and the answer was kind. That is the best case for a road that runs on permits: sometimes the person at the gate has a heart.

A road that runs on kindness also runs on whatever takes its place. The Roman system did not need a villain. It needed a gate, a permit, and someone to hold both.

The internet has all three, and most of us do not hold the permit.

Trajan said yes. Most people never get to ask.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

Sources

• Pliny the Younger, Letters, Book 10, letters 45, 96, 97, 120, and 121, translated by J. B. Firth (1900): letters 61–121 and letters 1–60, Attalus.org.

• Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2025 and its United States report.

• Amnesty International, “Death penalty in 2025: Facts and figures,” published 18 May 2026.

• Amnesty International, “Iran: Internet shutdown hides violations in escalating deadly crackdown on protesters,” 9 January 2026.

• Amnesty International, statement on Iran’s militarized clampdown and internet shutdown, 23 January 2026.

• “La «vehiculatio» (o «cursus publicus») y las «militares viae»,” Studia Historica. Historia Antigua 32, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 15 de diciembre de 2014.

• “The Cursus publicus: The Courier Service of the Roman Empire,” History of Information, and “How did people send letters in ancient Rome?” History Skills.

• “Equestrian Bureaucrats,” California State University, Northridge, and the Classics for All review of the Cambridge University Press history of the equestrian order, 2019.

• “Damnatio ad bestias,” Encyclopedia Romana, University of Chicago.

The Gospel reading from the end of Matthew’s chapter 22 is quite brief yet remarkably profound. The passage opens with yet another echo of the conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities of the time (Mt 22:34-35). The Pharisees seek to trick Jesus into being selective among commandments, placing more importance on some commandments than others. This is something that the Pharisees thought would allow them to accuse him of disrespecting aspects of the law by favouring other parts. Jesus’ reply goes directly to the heart of the Jewish Torah and, indeed, to that of the Christian faith (Mt 22:37). Love God and love others, if these two principles are adhered to, the rest will take care of itself. Jesus concludes his response by affirming that the ‘on these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets also’ (Mt 22:40)

The famous Jewish scholar Hillel, writing late in the first century and quoted in the Babylonian Talmud, offers a very similar sentiment. He says “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” Babylonian Talmud, Tractate 31a. Jesus’ response alongside Hillel’s remarks emphasise how the Gospel, and the Jewish Torah, ultimately carry a very simple and straightforward message. While we may look to a wider body of teaching for guidance with specific matters, ultimately, our love of God and of our neighbour is the barometer by which all else is measured. If our actions are aligned with such love then they cannot be wrongs. However, if our actions are at odds with these commandments, then. Whatever the circumstances, we must view them as contrary to the Gospel.

Gospel Text: Matthew 22:34-40

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees they got together and, to disconcert him, one of them put a question, ‘Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?’ Jesus said, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it: You must love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets also.’

See

What is the motive behind the question from the Pharisees?

How does Jesus respond to the question?

What conclusion does Jesus give in his response?

Judge

What simple message is contained within Jesus’ response to the Pharisees?

How does this message function alongside other Christian teachings, on specific matters?

How can this text be used to guide our actions?

Act

Jesus quotes from the Jewish Torah in his response to the Pharisees. Research where this quote is from and whether other religions such as Islam, Buddhism etc. have similar texts.

How can I apply this text to specific circumstances within my own life situation?

What steps would be needed to apply this message to broader social settings?

Image https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/acvvpCZ3cjPqzgBJ7xSsE

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

His name was Joseph Cardijn. He had worn the red hat for less than nine months and had turned eighty-three just four days earlier. The bishops around him had come to give thanks for forty years of the Young Christian Workers, the movement he founded for young workers in Belgium. Most had served as its chaplains before becoming bishops. Together, they represented roughly sixty of the council fathers who had completed the Second Vatican Council across the city.

The night before, forty bishops went underground. At an altar among the tombs in the Catacombs of Domitilla, they signed a pledge to renounce titles, privileges, and the trappings of rank and to live as the poor did. History recorded that night. It became the Pact of the Catacombs, and up to five hundred bishops later added their names.

The second night is almost forgotten.

Archbishop Hélder Câmara of Olinda and Recife, in Brazil, had planned both Masses. On 17 September 1965 he wrote to Cardijn and proposed an oath modeled on the vow the young priest made in 1903 beside his father’s deathbed, to give his life to the working class. Cardijn did not seize the idea. He asked his closest colleagues what they thought. Their advice, kept in his papers, was that he should not initiate the plan or direct its details, and that a vow might be too strong. The pledge the bishops signed in the catacombs came from Câmara’s circle, not from Cardijn.

What the bishops wrote at Pietralata was quieter and, in its way, harder. It was a message to bishops worldwide. It did not ask them to become poorer. Instead, it asked them to find and appoint more chaplains for young workers and for the lay movements around them.

The next day, 18 November, the council promulgated its decree on the lay apostolate. The catacombs pledge went out into the world. The Pietralata message stayed in the Cardijn archives.

Câmara wanted two Masses, one for the poor and another for the workers. History kept the first and dropped the second, and liberation theology cannot be understood without both.

The Scroll in Nazareth

Liberation theology begins with a scene in the synagogue. In Luke 4:18–19, Jesus reads from Isaiah and applies the words to himself: good news for the poor, release for captives, sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

Four claims follow from that interpretation.

• God’s reign is good news for the poor. Jesus went to the margins, including lepers, tax collectors, women, Samaritans, the sick, children, debtors, and anyone marked by shame.

• Liberation is more than comfort. Jesus healed bodies, welcomed outcasts back into the community, challenged unjust arrangements, and taught that the last will be first. Liberation theology adds that personal change must go hand in hand with change in unjust systems.

• Solidarity comes before theory. Jesus ate with the people he spoke about, stood up for them, and shared their vulnerability. For liberation theology, friendship with the rejected is a core spiritual practice, not a side project.

• The cross reveals the cost. Jesus’ conflicts with the powerful warn that faithfulness to God can put Christians face-to-face with injustice.

Liberation theology does not portray Jesus as a political rebel. It reads his message of God’s reign as a weave of personal salvation, communal healing, and resistance to the forces of greed, violence, and death that diminish human life.

A Counter-Community Before It Had Power

The first Christians had no army, no tax base, and no seat in the Senate. They had each other. That makes the early church the strongest precedent for liberation theology and the one handled most carefully.

• Shared goods. Acts says believers pooled their resources until “there was no needy person among them” (Acts 4:34–35). Luke paints an idealized portrait, and the sharing was voluntary. It is not modern liberation theology. It still reflects the same instinct: faith had to be visible in how people handled money.

• Organized care across distances. Paul collected funds from Gentile congregations for the poor in the Jerusalem church (1 Corinthians 16:1–4; Romans 15:25–27). Support was intentionally directed from one city to another.

• Baptismal equality. Paul wrote that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, enslaved nor free, male nor female (Galatians 3:28). The early church did not abolish slavery or patriarchy, and it failed to live up to its own words. Those words still gave later Christians a standard to argue from.

• Mercy as worship. Christians were known for caring for widows, orphans, prisoners, and the sick (Acts 6:1–6; James 1:27; Matthew 25:36). Their liturgy and charity were one and the same.

• A loyalty that cost something. Before Christianity held political power, it formed communities whose first loyalty was to Christ. That put them at odds with the imperial cult, the family hierarchy, and rank.

Liberation theology follows this pattern. It begins with the experience of the oppressed, reads Scripture and tradition from that vantage point, and expects faith to take the shape of a real community.

A Vow at a Deathbed

Joseph Cardijn was born in Schaerbeek, Brussels, on 13 November 1882, the son of parents who ran a small apartment building. His father, Henri, died on 24 May 1903. According to the story, at his father’s deathbed, Cardijn vowed to give his life to the working class, especially young workers. He was ordained on 22 September 1906.

In 1912, as a curate in Laeken, he gathered the first groups of young workers who would later form the Young Christian Workers (YCW, from the French JOC). The movement adopted that name in 1924, received Belgian statutes in 1925, and won Pope Pius XI’s approval during an audience that March.

Cardijn gave liberation theology its working method: See–Judge–Act. Workers, especially young ones, examine their own conditions, weigh them against the Gospel, and organize to change them. The parallels with liberation theology follow a clear progression.

• See. Cardijn: observe social reality, especially worker exploitation. Liberation theology: begin with the lived experience of poverty, exclusion, and oppression.

• Judge. Cardijn: read reality through Scripture and Catholic social teaching. Liberation theology: read the Gospel in conversation with the poor’s situation.

• Act. Cardijn: organize for education, solidarity, and social change. Liberation theology: treat faith as “praxis,” reflection that leads to liberating action.

The method was never social activism wearing religious clothing. It taught ordinary people to understand their own lives and to act together as the people responsible for their own history. Its reach into Latin America ran through people. Câmara was a founding chaplain of the YCW in Brazil. Enrique Angelelli, later a bishop in Argentina, served as a YCW chaplain and signed the Catacombs Pact. Leonidas Proaño of Ecuador wrote about discovering Cardijn and the movement as a young priest.

The Council Opens the Doors

The Second Vatican Council met from 11 October 1962 to 8 December 1965. It did not create liberation theology, but it cleared the ground. Its central move was to place the Church among the joys, hopes, griefs, and anxieties of the modern world, not above them.

• Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, promulgated on 7 December 1965, told the Church to read the “signs of the times” and to address human dignity, work, peace, development, and injustice. Liberation theology asked what those signs said about poverty in Latin America.

• Human dignity. The council taught that no circumstance can cancel a person’s dignity. If that is true, poverty and oppression are not misfortune. They offend God’s intention for people.

• The lay apostolate. The decree Apostolicam Actuositatem, promulgated on 18 November 1965, states that apostolate formation “cannot consist in merely theoretical instruction” (section 29). It urges lay people to learn from the start to view, judge, and act in the light of faith. The decree never names Cardijn or his method, but it echoes both and gives official standing to Christians who study their world to change it.

• The Church as servant. The council recovered the image of a Church that serves God’s saving work in history. Liberation theology presses the follow-up question: servant to whom, in which situations, and at what cost to the poor?

The Catacombs Pact belongs here. Forty bishops took the council’s language about a servant Church and asked what it would demand of their own houses, titles, and tables.

Medellín: The Council Comes Home

Three years and one conference separate the council from liberation theology.

In August and September 1968, the Latin American bishops’ conference (CELAM) met in Medellín, Colombia, to apply Vatican II to the continent. Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest, served as a theological adviser and helped draft its documents on peace and justice. Medellín did not adopt liberation theology as such, but its pages sowed the seeds. The Pact signers had already articulated the point three years earlier: serving the majority of humanity, who live in physical, cultural, and moral misery, was the bishops’ shared work.

Gutiérrez gave the movement its name. His book Teología de la liberación was published in Lima in 1971. Orbis Books published it in English as A Theology of Liberation in 1973. The book argues that the God of the biblical tradition shows a preferential commitment to the poor and that theology begins with the questions the poor ask, not with those asked on their behalf. Gutiérrez died in October 2024 at age 96.

That sequence matters. Liberation theology is not a Latin American invention that Rome reluctantly tolerated. It is a specific answer to a question the council itself posed.

The Objection That Deserves a Hearing

A fair account must give critics their best case. On 6 August 1984, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and approved by Pope John Paul II, issued Libertatis Nuntius. It targeted forms of liberation theology that borrow concepts from Marxist thought without sufficient scrutiny. Its argument runs like this. When class struggle becomes the key to all of history, the Gospel shrinks into a political program, salvation turns into a social outcome, and the poor can be betrayed by the cure offered in their name.

The instruction also stated what it was not saying. It called the term theology of liberation valid in itself and warned that its criticism must not excuse indifference to injustice. A second instruction, Libertatis Conscientia, followed on March 22, 1986, and set out the Church’s positive teaching on freedom and liberation.

The objection has force, and the Cardijn line addresses part of it. Any method that begins with lived experience needs a way to analyze structures, and the choice of tool matters. See–Judge–Act embeds the discipline in the middle step: workers weigh what they see against the Gospel before acting. When that step is skipped, the critics are right. When it holds, the analysis serves the faith, and the faith keeps the analysis honest.

What Fits on an Index Card

The line from Nazareth to Medellín reduces to five habits.

1. Start with people, not theory. Jesus ate with the people he spoke for, and Cardijn began with the workers’ own lives.

2. Test what you see against the Gospel. Observation without judgment is sociology. Judgment without observation is sermon.

3. Act together. Solidarity that stays private is sympathy. The early church took up collections, and Cardijn organized.

4. Pair the pledge with the power. Promising to live simply, as the catacombs bishops did, is half the work. The other half is asking who decides, and who is trained to decide.

5. Name the structures, and keep the analysis under the Gospel’s judgment. Economic, racial, political, and gender-based causes of suffering deserve their names. No theory of them is allowed to become the faith.

The Church at Pietralata

Return to the working-class parish on the night of 17 November 1965. The bishops of the catacombs promised to live like the poor. At Pietralata, the bishops gathered around a cardinal who deferred to others and asked for something less dramatic and more lasting. They asked for chaplains who would stand beside young workers as they learned to see, judge, and act for themselves.

That is the half of the story the Church forgot. It is also the half that makes the other half work. A pledge of simplicity changes a bishop. A movement of organized workers changes a neighborhood, a factory, and sometimes a country.

The second night still waits.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

Sources

• Stefan Gigacz, The Pact of the Catacombs: For a Church of the Poor and a Workers’ Church

• Joseph Cardijn Digital Library, Pietralata Appeal, 17 November 1965

• Hélder Câmara to Joseph Cardijn, 17 September 1965, in Cardijn Reflections

• Australian Cardijn Institute, Cardinal Czerny to deliver the Cardijn Lecture and The Pact of the Catacombs, Catholic Outlook

• Joseph Cardijn Digital Library, Cardijn timeline, and International Young Christian Workers, Cardijn’s Life

• Joseph Cardijn, Wikipedia, for the date he became a cardinal

• Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam Actuositatem, section 29

• Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation”, 6 August 1984

• WLRN, Gustavo Gutiérrez, father of liberation theology, dies at 96

The advice Cardijn’s colleagues gave on Câmara’s proposal is summarized at Reactions to Camara’s proposal, which draws on the Cardijn archives. Accessed 12 October 2026. Scripture references follow the New American Bible, Revised Edition. The council’s opening and closing dates (11 October 1962 and 8 December 1965) are confirmed, as is the promulgation of Gaudium et Spes on 7 December 1965. The 1973 Orbis Books edition of Gutiérrez is confirmed. The date of Libertatis Conscientia has been confirmed as 22 March 1986.

A storyline of the Rule of Saint Benedict for laypeople, guided by See–Judge–Act

At Easter 1912, a twenty-nine-year-old curate in a working-class parish outside Brussels was handed the job nobody wanted: the women’s projects. He started by asking young seamstresses what their working day was actually like, and then he kept coming back to listen. Within a year, more than a thousand women had joined. Half a century later, a pope wrote the curate’s three steps into an encyclical: look, judge, act.

This week’s post tells the story of five laypeople, six Thursday nights, and the Rule of Saint Benedict read through Joseph Cardijn’s See–Judge–Act. The five are a night-shift nurse, a maintenance supervisor who grumbles before he speaks, a widow who knows every name in the parish, a newcomer nobody has ever asked about anything, and a pastoral associate who is sure she isn’t qualified to lead them. Then a young mother knocks on a locked door, and the reading group becomes something none of them planned.

The piece grew out of a lecture Dr. Paul M. Pearson gave on Thomas Merton and the Rule of Saint Benedict on 18 October 2026 at the Chicago gathering of the International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS) at St. Procopius Abbey in Lisle, IL. Pearson is Director and Archivist of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, and Chief of Research for the Merton Legacy Trust. He is Resident Secretary of the ITMS and served as its president from 2005 to 2007. Few people alive know Merton’s papers better.

My thanks to him for the spark.

Benedict called his Rule “this smallest Rule written down for beginners.” Every episode ends with questions for your own group.

Read the full storyline →

The Thursday Group

A storyline of the Rule of Saint Benedict for laypeople, guided by See–Judge–Act

The Curate Nobody Envied

At Easter 1912, a twenty-nine-year-old priest arrived at the parish of Our Lady in Laeken, on the northern edge of Brussels. He was a curate, at the lowest rung of the hierarchy. The parish gave him the least prestigious assignment: the“women’s projects.”

The young women of Laeken did not sit in classrooms. They sat at sewing tables in workshops and factories, and the parish knew them mostly through the sacraments they still attended. The curate started anyway. In August 1912, he opened a study circle with a local laywoman named Madeleine De Roo. A branch of the needleworkers’ union followed for the young seamstresses, then a second circle that the women themselves called the “petit syndicat,” the little union. Within a year he had drawn more than a thousand women into the parish’s groups.

The leaders paid a price. Some left good jobs to take places beside the women in factories that made rabbit-fur goods, rubber, and artificial silk. They ate their meals on the shop floor. They learned what the working day actually cost before anyone presumed to say what it meant.

Thirteen years later, defending the movement that grew out of those circles, the curate complained that in the industrial districts most people now knew the parish only as the place for baptisms, first communions, weddings, and funerals. He said the bonds among parishioners no longer mattered to people. Laeken had been his answer. He insisted the Young Christian Workers began there, in a parish women’s group, not in 1925, when the movement formally began.

His name was Joseph Cardijn. In May 1961, Pope John XXIII wrote his three steps into an encyclical: look, judge, act.

The Thursday Group is fiction.

The mechanism is not. A parish comes back to life the way Laeken did: someone asks people what their week actually looks like, and then listens to the whole answer.

How to Use This Storyline in your parish

This storyline follows five laypeople at a fictional Midwestern parish who meet on six Thursday evenings to read the Rule of Saint Benedict, and then decide to keep meeting. The story runs over several months, with planning and service between the reading nights. It is written for adult learners and parish discussion groups. Each episode reads aloud in about ten minutes and ends with “Pause and Discern” questions built on the See–Judge–Act method.

The method belongs to Joseph Cardijn (1882–1967), the Belgian priest who founded the Young Christian Workers (JOC) and taught young workers to look hard at their own lives in the light of the Gospel before deciding what to do. John XXIII gave the three steps official standing in Mater et Magistra §236: “First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgment on it in the light of these same principles; thirdly, one decides what in the circumstances can and should be done.“ He added that the three stages are usually expressed as “look, judge, act.“

Four voices, four jobs. Each source in the story does different work.

• The Rule of Saint Benedict supplies the practices: listening, counsel, humility, the rhythm of prayer and work, hospitality, and perseverance. Quotations follow the Saint Meinrad translation by Harry Hagan, OSB, and Hillary De Jean, OSB.

• See–Judge–Act supplies the process. The group does not merely discuss the Rule. They examine their actual lives (See), discern what the Rule and the Gospel ask in that light (Judge), and commit to something concrete (Act).

• The Second Vatican Council and the social encyclicals supply the test of whether a Benedictine way for laypeople is faithful. Lumen Gentium §31 teaches that laypeople seek the kingdom of God precisely by engaging temporal affairs and ordering them according to God’s plan, working like leaven from within to make the world holy. What a novel idea!

• Thomas Merton and Fr. Harry Hagan, OSB, speak as witnesses formed by the monastic tradition, not as extra authorities. Hagan names six hallmarks of Benedictine life: regula et traditio, stabilitas, conversatio, obedientia, ora et labora, and hospitalitas. The storyline leans on his reading throughout. Hagan is a monk at Saint Meinrad Archabbey, the hilltop community in southern Indiana where I did my college and graduate studies. Thank you, Harry!

The objection worth hearing first. The Rule is a sixth-century text written for men who had left the world. Its chapter on mutual obedience ends with brothers lying prostrate at a senior’s feet and, for the stubborn, corporal punishment or expulsion (RB 71). Carrying that book into a parish library on Thursday nights can look like dressing up in borrowed robes. The objection is serious, and Hagan’s first hallmark answers it without dismissing it. Regula et traditio means a written text read by a living community of interpreters. No book, he argues, can be lived by reading alone. Hagan also calls obedience a dangerous but necessary virtue, because it is so easily bent into a tool for manipulating people.

So the story avoids two mistakes. It does not turn lay life into a copy of monastic life. And it does not read Benedictine obedience as blind submission, or stability as staying put in a situation that harms you.

One historical note. Benedict of Nursia, Joseph Cardijn, Thomas Merton, and Harry Hagan lived in different times and never worked together. This storyline brings their ideas together on purpose. The convergence is the point of the exercise, not a historical claim. And that is coming from a historian.

For the group/Parish facilitator. Read each episode aloud, slowly. Leave a full minute of silence before the first question. Take the questions in order, and don’t skip to Act. Most groups want to fix things before they have finished looking, and this method slows that down.

Five People in a Parish Library

• Rosa Martínez, 38. A night-shift nurse raising two daughters on her own. Faithful, exhausted, and nearly invisible to the parish, because night nurses work Sundays.

• Walt Kowalczyk, 61. Maintenance supervisor at the high school, a few years from retirement. Baptized Catholic and suspicious of anything called a church committee. He grumbles before he speaks, and sometimes he doesn’t speak at all.

• Ada Johnson, 74. Widowed two years ago after a long marriage, and a parish volunteer for thirty years. She knows everyone’s name, including the people nobody else remembers.

• Tomás Rivera, 26. Moved to town for a remote IT job. Bright, polite, and so new that no one has ever asked his opinion about anything.

• Grace Umeh, 45. The parish pastoral associate, who convenes the group. She has read the Rule twice and is fairly sure she is not qualified to teach it. She is right, which turns out to help.

Episode One: The Ear of the Heart

The September parish council meeting was the worst anyone could remember. The agenda item was small: whether to replace the parish hall’s failing roof. The meeting was not about the roof. It was about twenty years of grievances, spoken and unspoken. It ended when a deacon gently suggested that the parish might need to learn to listen before making another decision.

Grace went home and pulled her old copy of the Rule off the shelf. Its first word is about listening: “Listen, O my son, to the instructions of the Teacher, and bring near the ear of your heart” (Prologue). She put a notice on the bulletin board. Six Thursday evenings in the parish library, reading the Rule of Saint Benedict. No agenda. No vote. Just listening.

Four people came. Grace made five.

On the first Thursday she did almost nothing. She read the Prologue aloud, slowly, and asked one question: “What did your actual week look like?”

Walt described fifty hours at the school and three trips with his wife to the cardiologist. Rosa had slept four hours. She listed her shifts, her daughters’ schedules, and the Sunday Masses she had missed for eleven years. Ada said her week was “the same as always.” It came out slowly: four hours of television a day and a phone that rarely rings. Tomás said, “Work, mostly,” and offered nothing else. Grace let the silence sit. Nobody pushed him.

Grace wrote their weeks on a whiteboard without comment. Then she read them what Fr. Harry Hagan says about Benedict’s word obedientia. It is built on hearing. In Hebrew, one verb, šamaʿ, means both “hear” and “obey.” “If you truly listen, then you will know how to respond,“ Hagan writes. “To obey is to respond to what one hears.“

Rosa stared at the whiteboard. “I have been a parishioner here for eleven years,” she said, “and this is the first time anyone has asked me that question.”

They had not read a single chapter yet. But they had already done the first thing the Rule asks, and the first step of the method the Church would later name. The Council asked the Church to keep “scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel“ (Gaudium et Spes §4). On a Thursday night in a parish library, the signs of the times looked like a nurse’s shift schedule and a phone that did not ring.

Pause and Discern

• See. When did someone truly listen to you this week, and when did you truly listen to someone? Whose schedule in this room, or in your parish, is invisible to everyone else?

• Judge. Benedict begins with “the ear of your heart,” not with a rule about behavior. What does that order suggest about the disagreements in your parish or your household? What would change if listening came before deciding?

• Act. This week, ask one person a question you have never asked them. Listen to the whole answer without planning your reply.

• Teaching check. Gaudium et Spes §4 says the Church reads the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel. Test your group this way: is your agenda coming from people’s actual lives, or from conclusions you carried in the door?

• Carry home. Tomás said almost nothing tonight, and nobody made him. When is silence a person’s way of being heard?

Episode Two: Murmuring and the Youngest Voice

On the second Thursday, they read Chapter 3, “Calling the Brothers for Counsel.” Benedict tells the abbot to assemble the whole community on any important matter, “because often the Lord reveals to the younger what is better“ (RB 3). The chapter closes with a line from Sirach that Grace wrote on the whiteboard: “Do everything with counsel, and afterward you will not regret it.“

Walt snorted. “In my experience, the younger get talked over.” Then he made a better point. “And read the next line. The abbot hears everybody, then goes off and decides alone. That’s not counsel. That’s a suggestion box.”

Grace did not wave it away. He was right about the text. Counsel in the Rule is not a vote, and the decision still belongs to the abbot. “But look at what he can’t do,” she said. “He can’t decide before he has heard the youngest. The whole chapter is built to stop the person in charge from skipping that step.”

The evening proved Walt’s first point. When Grace asked what counsel the parish actually practiced, Walt delivered a twenty-minute monologue about the diocese, the roof, and the pastor of 1998. Ada interrupted him twice to correct his facts. Rosa, half-asleep, said nothing. Tomás took notes on his laptop and said nothing.

The room felt like the parish council again. This time Grace named it. She read Benedict’s warning about murmuratio, the grumbling that rots a community from the inside. Hagan lists it among three community sins, alongside anger and acedia, which he defines as “the temptation to abandon the commitment.“ Then she read Chapter 71, where Benedict asks the brothers to obey one another, not just the abbot. Hagan suspects this mutual obedience may be harder.

Then she did something Benedict’s abbot would recognize. She turned to the youngest person in the room. “Tomás. You’ve been taking notes all evening. What do you see?”

Tomás closed his laptop. “Honestly? This parish has no idea how it looks to someone who arrives cold. The website lists a Mass time that changed two years ago. There’s no sign on the door saying where anything is. The first time I came, I stood in the back for ten minutes, and three different people told me I was in their pew.” He paused. “I didn’t come back for a month. I only came back because Ada called me.”

Silence. Then Ada said quietly, “Fifty years I’ve been here. I never once thought about what it’s like to arrive cold.”

Hagan describes humility as “the ability to acknowledge and face the truth about oneself and the truth about others.” That is not self-erasure. It is honesty, and Ada had just practiced it in front of a room. Merton made the same point about holiness in Life and Holiness: becoming a saint means becoming more human, not less, with a larger capacity for concern and sympathy.

Their act that night was small and exact. They rewrote the meeting itself. Before any decision, they would hear every voice, starting with the youngest and quietest, and write every suggestion on the whiteboard without correction. Walt grumbled and agreed.

On the way out, he stopped at the door. “I’ve been talked over my whole life,” he told Tomás. “Guess I forgot what it looks like from the other side.”

Pause and Discern

• See. Who in your parish or family gets interrupted? Who gets asked, and who gets talked over? Listen to the murmuring in your community for a week. What is it actually about?

• Judge. Walt’s objection is fair: Benedict’s abbot still decides. Where is the line between counsel that shapes a decision and consultation that decorates one? Which kind does your parish practice?

• Act. Change one meeting you attend this week. Ask the person least likely to speak to speak first, and write down what they say before anyone responds.

• Teaching check. Lumen Gentium §35 teaches that the laity share Christ’s prophetic office and have been given a sense of the faith, so that the Gospel shines through daily social and family life. Test your new meeting this way: did the youngest voice actually change the decision, or did you hear it and file it away?

• Carry home. Ada had been the parish’s welcomer for fifty years and never noticed what Tomás noticed in ten minutes. What might you be too familiar with to see?

Episode Three: Reordering an Ordinary Week

On the third Thursday, they read Chapter 48, “The Daily Manual Labor.” It opens with the line everyone half-remembers: “Idleness is the enemy of the soul.“ The chapter’s real subject is rhythm. Benedict sets fixed times for work and fixed times for lectio divina, shifts the schedule with the seasons, and insists that “all things be done with measure on account of the weak“ (RB 48). For the sick and fragile, he asks for work that leaves them neither idle nor crushed.

Grace put their schedules back on the whiteboard, as she had the first night. Rosa’s week had no rhythm at all, only a loop: shift, daughters, sleep, shift. Walt’s had hardened into forty years of the same job, done well and noticed by no one. Ada’s days, since her husband died, had become what she bravely called “a lot of sitting.”

Hagan insists that ora et labora is not two things but one. He writes that the motto “stresses the unity of life,” and that God “continues to work where we work.” Then Grace read from John Paul II. In Laborem Exercens §25, he teaches that through work the human person shares in the Creator’s own activity, and, quoting the Council, that this awareness should reach even the most ordinary everyday activities. The Council itself put it more bluntly: “Let there be no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one part, and religious life on the other“ (Gaudium et Spes §43).

The Judge step that night was less a debate than a recognition. Rosa said, “I thought holiness was the one thing I didn’t have time for. You’re telling me the shifts themselves could be holy?” Walt, who had fixed things his whole life, looked at the whiteboard. “I guess I’ve been praying all along,” he said. “I just never called it that.”

“That’s close,” Grace said, “but Benedict is more careful than that. Work can share in God’s work. It doesn’t replace prayer, or Sunday. The Rule gives each its own hour.” Hagan says the same: both need their own time and place. The point is not work instead of prayer. The point is one life with room for both.

Their act: each of them drafted one page, a personal rule of life, deliberately unmonastic. Rosa negotiated Sunday nights off and moved her daughters’ bedtime prayers back to where they had been before the night shifts. Walt committed to ten minutes of morning prayer before the school furnace kicked on. Ada decided her labora would be the thing she already did best: one deliberate phone call every morning to a parishioner who lives alone. Tomás agreed to stop answering work messages on Sundays, which was harder for him than it sounds. Grace typed the pages and gave everyone a copy. That is more or less what a regula is: a written text carried by a living community.

Pause and Discern

• See. Draw your actual week: hours, not intentions. Where is the rhythm? Where is the treadmill? Where is the hour nobody, including you, has claimed?

• Judge. Benedict gives work and prayer each their own hour because they belong to one life. Where does your work already share in God’s work? Where has it stopped feeling like yours at all?

• Act. Write one page: your ordinary week, reordered. Keep it small enough to keep. Show it to one person in the group.

• Teaching check. RB 48 measures work, and Laborem Exercens grounds work in the dignity of the worker, not in output. Test your one-page rule this way: does it honor the tired and the weak, including you, or does it squeeze more devotion out of an already exhausted schedule?

• Carry home. Walt has fixed things for forty years, and almost nobody has thanked him. Whose work holds your parish together without anyone seeing it?

Episode Four: All Guests as Christ

On the fourth Thursday, the reading never happened. A young woman named Kaya knocked on the library door with a toddler on her hip and asked whether the food pantry was open. It was not. The pantry had cut its hours over the summer. She had walked there.

Grace made some calls while Ada found crackers and a juice box. The story came out in pieces. Kaya’s family had lost their apartment and was doubled up in a relative’s house, and the relative’s welcome was wearing thin.

The assigned reading sat untouched in the middle of the table. It happened to be Chapter 53: “Let all the guests at their arrival be received as Christ, for he himself will one day say: ‘I was a guest, and you received me.’“ Benedict adds that “great care and concern“ must be shown to the poor and to travelers, “for in them is Christ more especially received“ (RB 53).

Hagan does not make this chapter easier. He notes that Benedict identifies three groups with Christ: the abbot, the sick, and the guests. Hagan’s explanation is dry and honest. All three are trouble. They make demands, arrive at odd hours, and need care. “Hospitalitas means taking care of others,“ he writes, and it “is the opposite of defensiveness.“ Then he draws a line back to Chapter 3. Guests bring what the community cannot produce on its own: an outside view, a different experience, and critique. They are the youngest voice, arriving from the street.

Pope Francis points straight at this chapter in Fratelli Tutti §90. Benedict knew hospitality might disturb the discipline and silence of a monastery, Francis writes, and insisted anyway that “the poor and pilgrims be treated with the utmost care and attention.“ Hospitality, in Francis’s reading, is one way of meeting the challenge and the gift of encountering people outside one’s own circle.

Ada took it personally, which was exactly right. “I have been the official welcomer of this parish for fifty years,” she said. “I greet people at the door. I send cards. And I never once noticed that the pantry hours were cut, because I have never once needed them.”

The group saw it plainly: a family walking to a closed pantry, in a parish whose front door is locked outside office hours. They judged it the way Benedict would. Christ in this chapter is the guest, the poor one, the interruption. Merton, the monk most people picture in retreat from the world, had said as much: “The Christian cannot separate his life from the real world of work and struggle in which he lives“ (Life and Holiness).

The act began with a phone call about the pantry key. It ended at nine o’clock that night, with the group standing in the parking lot, agreeing to something larger than any of them had planned. That is where Episode Five begins.

Pause and Discern

• See. Who knocks on your parish’s locked doors? What disturbance has your community quietly organized itself to avoid? Who would know the answer better than you?

• Judge. Benedict receives the guest as Christ: the one who interrupts. What is the difference between being friendly and being hospitable? Which one costs something?

• Act. Name one person your community has welcomed with words but not with feet. Meet one concrete need this week, at an inconvenient hour if that is when the need arrives.

• Teaching check. Fratelli Tutti §90 calls hospitality a readiness to move beyond our own circle. Test your welcome this way: would Kaya, or whoever knocks on your door, describe the encounter as care, or as being managed?

• Carry home. Hagan says guests bring the critique a community cannot give itself. What has the last newcomer in your life tried to tell you?

Episode Five: Leaven

By the fifth Thursday, the reading group had become something none of them had planned: a group that proposes things.

The pantry question turned out to be structural. The hours had been cut because the two volunteers who ran it were exhausted. They were exhausted because the pantry was answering a need the county’s system had stopped answering. So the reading schedule paused, and the listening went on. For three weeks they made calls: to the county office, to the high school social worker (Walt knew her), to the social worker in Rosa’s emergency room. Most important, they listened to Kaya. She came to the library with the toddler asleep in a car seat and plainly told them what helped and what didn’t.

They saw a pattern, not an incident. Families were cycling between doubled-up housing, a closed pantry, and the emergency room. And the pantry’s hours fit its volunteers, not the families who needed it.

Then they judged, in the full light of what they had been reading. The Council teaches that laypeople are called to make the Church present and active in the places where only they can make it the salt of the earth (Lumen Gentium §33). Their field is not only helping the pastor with parish tasks. It is the secular order itself, the world of shift work and rent and hunger, which the Council asks the laity to penetrate and perfect with the spirit of the Gospel (Apostolicam Actuositatem§2). The same decree, describing lay formation, says laypeople must learn “to view, judge and do all things in the light of faith“ (Apostolicam Actuositatem §29). It is See–Judge–Act in the Council’s own words, and Cardijn was in Rome as a council father when those words were finished.

Merton gave them the sharpest judgment of all. People assume he guides them to retreat from the world. Yet he insisted that the contemplative life is not “incompatible with action, with creative work, with dedicated love“ (Contemplation in a World of Action). Rosa said what they were all thinking. “A prayer life that can’t look at a pantry schedule isn’t much of a prayer life.”

They took their proposal to the parish council, the same council that had fought about the roof. Rosa, who had never attended a council meeting, took a personal day to go. Tomás built a shared pantry schedule in an afternoon. Walt recruited three retired maintenance men as drivers. Ada became what she had always been, on purpose now: the one who knows every name. Kaya read the plan before anyone else and moved two hours.

One council member raised the strongest objection, and she meant it in good faith. “If the parish keeps patching what the county dropped, the county never has to fix it. Our charity becomes their excuse.” Nobody in the Thursday Group had an easy answer. They settled on doing both. The pantry would open at the new hours now, and the group would bring the pattern they had documented to the county office within the month, with Kaya’s permission and in her words.

The proposal passed. The council had not suddenly become holy. Five laypeople had learned to see clearly, judge honestly, and walk in with a plan that had names and dates attached.

Pause and Discern

• See. Name one structure in your community, not one person, that quietly fails the vulnerable. Who has the facts? Who has the experience? Are they ever in the same room?

• Judge. The council member’s objection is a real one: charity can let a broken system off the hook. When does serving people now delay justice for them later? How would your group do both?

• Act. Bring one proposal, with names and dates attached, to whatever council you belong to. Expect to be the youngest voice in the room, in Benedict’s sense.

• Teaching check. Apostolicam Actuositatem §2 speaks of perfecting the temporal order with the spirit of the Gospel. Test your proposal this way: are the people it affects agents in the plan, as Kaya was, or only its recipients?

• Carry home. Rosa took a personal day she could not really afford. What would it cost you to show up where the decision is actually made?

Episode Six: A Better Grade of Thistle

When the sixth reading night finally came, it was supposed to be a celebration. It was not.

The pantry ministry survived its first month and then wobbled. A driver quit. A delivery fell through. A council member complained about “the way it was proposed.” Rosa missed two meetings because her mother was in the hospital. Walt said something gruff to Tomás in the parking lot and stayed away from the library for a week. Ada admitted that some mornings she picked up the phone to call a parishioner who lives alone and could not make herself dial. Grief does not keep office hours.

Grace had saved the last chapters of the Rule for exactly this night. Chapter 72 asks the community to “bear most patiently with one another’s weaknesses, whether of body or of character“ (RB 72). Chapter 73, the last words of the whole Rule, practically shrugs. Whoever you are, Benedict says, as you rush toward the heavenly homeland, carry out “with the help of Christ this smallest Rule written down for beginners“ (RB 73). He ends his masterpiece by telling his monks they are just starting.

They read the ending aloud and laughed, the tired laugh of people who recognize themselves. Then Grace told them a story from Hagan’s talk. At a novitiate retreat, a monk named Br. James encouraged the new novices this way: “We don’t expect you to turn thorns into roses in just one year. We’re just looking for a little better grade of thistle.“

That is what Hagan means by conversatio. It is not arrival. It is movement: turning, becoming, giving oneself more and more to the life. Humility is its foundation, because real change begins with facing the truth about yourself. Hagan adds the half people forget. Changing yourself also means letting others change, and not needing them to stay who they were.

Rosa understood first. “I don’t have to be fixed by Sunday,” she said. Walt apologized to Tomás, briefly and without ceremony, which for Walt was a speech. Tomás accepted it the same way. Ada said she had made the call that morning after all. Kaya had come with the toddler. She said the new pantry hours were working for the families she knew. Then she added something nobody expected. The driver who quit had been kind, she said, and they had handed him a badly designed job.

Merton would have recognized the room. The spiritual life, he wrote, is not “a hothouse growth of artificial ascetic practices“ beyond the reach of ordinary people. “It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God“ (Life and Holiness). The Council said the same at higher volume. All the faithful, of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of Christian life and the perfection of charity (Lumen Gentium §40). On an ordinary Thursday, that fullness looked like a slightly better-grade thistle.

The six sessions were technically over. Nobody moved to leave. Finally Tomás, the youngest, said it. “Same time next week?”

They stayed. Hagan has a word for that too. Stabilitas is not a mood or a technique. It is commitment to a particular community: this place, these people, their tradition and their table. It is not staying where you are harmed. It is staying where you are needed, with people who are learning to bear you.

That was the act. That is wisdom speaking

Pause and Discern

• See. Where did your last good intention fail, not because it was wrong but because it was human-sized? Who noticed, and what did they do?

• Judge. Benedict calls his whole Rule a rule “for beginners.” What does that imply about how failure, repair, and starting over work in a community? What is the difference between stability and simply staying stuck?

• Act. Return to one commitment you dropped. Do not renew it heroically. Renew it humbly, and tell one person you are doing so.

• Teaching check. Lumen Gentium §40 teaches that holiness promotes “a more human manner of living“ in earthly society. Test your community this way: when someone wobbles, does the group bear patiently with their weaknesses of body or character, or does it quietly use them up?

• Carry home. Kaya defended the driver who quit. Who in your community has failed in a job that was badly built in the first place?

A Rule Small Enough for a Thursday

If your group remembers nothing else, keep this on an index card.

1. Ask about the actual week. Hours, not intentions. Listening comes before counsel, and counsel comes before decision.

2. Hear the youngest voice first. Youngest by age, or by tenure, or by distance from the center. Write it down before anyone answers it.

3. Give work and prayer each an hour. One life, two rhythms. Measure both by the weak, including yourself.

4. Treat the interruption as the guest. The knock at the locked door is the agenda.

5. Bring a plan with names and dates. Make the people affected its authors, not its recipients.

6. Expect a better grade of thistle. Bear with weakness. Start over. Come back next week.

In November 1965, the Council passed its Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity. Cardijn, made a cardinal that February, sat among the council fathers for that final session. Afterward Paul VI said that the seed a young Belgian priest had sown half a century earlier had borne fruit a hundredfold.

The seed was a study circle of seamstresses in a parish women’s group at Laeken. Nobody in Rome had planned it. A curate with the least promising assignment in the house had asked the young women what their working day was like, and then he kept coming back to listen.

That is all the Thursday Group did. It is all any parish has to do to begin.

Same time next week.

Source Map

• Episode One, listening. Rule: Prologue (the ear of the heart). Church: Gaudium et Spes §4. Hagan on obedientia as hearing and responding.

• Episode Two, counsel. Rule: RB 3 (the younger reveal what is better), RB 71 (mutual obedience). Church: Lumen Gentium §35. Hagan on humility, murmuratio, and acedia; Merton, Life and Holiness, on holiness as becoming more human.

• Episode Three, work and prayer. Rule: RB 48 (manual labor, rhythm, measure for the weak). Church: Gaudium et Spes §43; Laborem Exercens §25. Hagan on ora et labora as the unity of life.

• Episode Four, hospitality. Rule: RB 53 (all guests as Christ), with RB 3. Church: Fratelli Tutti §90. Hagan on hospitalitas as the opposite of defensiveness; Merton, Life and Holiness.

• Episode Five, lay action. Rule: RB 3 (counsel). Church: Lumen Gentium §§31, 33; Apostolicam Actuositatem §§2, 29; Mater et Magistra §236. Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action.

• Episode Six, perseverance. Rule: RB 72 (bear with weaknesses), RB 73 (a rule for beginners). Church: Lumen Gentium §40. Hagan on conversatio, stabilitas, and the better grade of thistle; Merton, Life and Holiness.

Sources (I put the links into the post because it may be hard to find these)

• Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of Benedict: The Saint Meinrad Translation with an Introduction, translated by Harry Hagan, OSB, and Hillary De Jean, OSB (Saint Meinrad Archabbey, hosted by PALNI Press, 21 January 2023). Chapters cited: Prologue, 3, 48, 53, 71, 72, 73.

• Harry Hagan, OSB, “A Twenty-Minute Novitiate: Six Hallmarks of Benedictine Spirituality”, presented to the American Benedictine Academy, Saint Meinrad, Indiana, August 2000; posted by Gerald W. Schlabach with the author’s permission.

• Second Vatican Council: Lumen Gentium (21 November 1964); Apostolicam Actuositatem (18 November 1965); Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965).

• Encyclicals: John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (15 May 1961); John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (14 September 1981); Francis, Fratelli Tutti (3 October 2020).

• Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness (Herder and Herder, 1963); Contemplation in a World of Action (Doubleday, 1971). The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University holds his papers.

• Joseph Cardijn at Laeken: Australian Cardijn Institute, “Social action as a means of reviving parish life” (4 February 2023), with Cardijn’s 1925 talk “The YCW and the Parish”; Joseph Cardijn Digital Library, “De Roo, Madeleine”; International YCW, “Cardijn’s Life”, with Cardijn’s 1958 recollection of the Laeken years; “Introducing Joseph Cardijn”, on his role at Vatican II.

Quotation notes. Rule quotations follow the Saint Meinrad translation, including the Prologue’s “Teacher” in place of the older “Master.” Hagan’s words come from “A Twenty-Minute Novitiate.” The Merton line on contemplation follows the wording of Contemplation in a World of Action as anthologized; his point about holiness making us more human is paraphrased from Life and Holiness. Dialogue spoken by the fictional characters is set in roman type; only quotations from sources are italicized.

Image of St. Benedict on a mural in Memorial Lobby, Saint Meinrad Archabbey

Part two:

On 21 May 1930, at the Dharasana Salt Works on the Gujarat coast, United Press reporter Webb Miller saw men walk up to a line of police and get beaten.

The volunteers moved in lines toward the barbed-wire fences around the salt pans. Around 400 police waited for them. When the volunteers would not leave, the police attacked with clubs. Miller wrote in his report that “the volunteers made no resistance“ and took the blows “with almost unbelievable meekness.” Sarojini Naidu, who spoke to them before they began, had told them: “You must not use any violence under any circumstances.“ The report was sent from DHARASANA and said 260 people were injured.

Gandhi was not present. Police had arrested him on 4 May, so he was in prison while others continued the campaign.

A part of the story is often forgotten. Reports say British telegraph operators delayed Miller’s first attempts to send his report. The story was sent only after Miller threatened to reveal the censorship. It appeared in over a thousand newspapers, and Senator John J. Blaine even read it into the United States Senate record.

The violence at Dharasana would have happened even without Miller. What made the difference was having a witness, sending a cable, and insisting the story get out.

That is the hinge between event and public judgment.

So why does a salt works matter in a discussion about artificial intelligence?

The first part of this series, See, started with a photo of a girl in a Vermont cotton mill and asked whose decisions affect. This part moves to the next two steps in the method Joseph Cardijn created, and Pope John XXIII included in Mater et Magistra on 15 May 1961: first, form a judgment, meaning judge in the light of the same principles; then act on what can be done.

Dharasana shows both steps at once. The campaign realized that injustice depends on consent, so they refused to give it. Then they acted in a way the world could see. Because someone shared their story beyond the salt pans, the volunteers’ actions became a message.

Marshall McLuhan spent his career exploring this idea. He said a medium is not just a neutral channel. Its “personal and social consequences“ change how people live and interact. A telegraph office is a medium, and so is an AI assistant that filters, ranks, and answers for us. Here, medium means the channel that carries action and meaning, including how AI shapes judgment and action.

Judge: ask what the medium does

McLuhan gave us a way to judge technology, which he and his son Eric described in Laws of Media: The New Science (University of Toronto Press, 1988). Ask four questions about any medium or AI system: What does it enhance? What does it make obsolete? What does it bring back from the past? What does it turn into when pushed to the extreme? Use these questions to judge the medium and the AI system itself.

Here is an initial draft about an AI assistant, meant for group discussion:

Enhances

Recall, drafting, search, and pattern-finding at a speed no person matches.

Obsolesces

The entry-level task where people once learned a trade by doing the dull part.

Retrieves

The oracle and the scribe: someone who answers every question and writes down what you say.

Flips into

A record that remembers for you what you ought to remember, and a recommender that tells you what people like you did next.

Merton adds another test, the third of his four steps for reading any tradition: honest distinction. This week’s Hindu material and Merton’s Gandhi give us the words. Dharma means “the right thing to do here, for someone like me, in this situation.” An AI recommendation engine tells you what people like you did in similar situations. These may sound similar, but they are not the same. Judging means explaining where they differ.

Catholic social teaching supplies the yardsticks: the dignity of the person, the principle of subsidiarity (decisions made at the most local level capable of making them), and solidarity. Apply subsidiarity to the rental market. RealPage’s software suggested rents to landlords in many local markets. New York banned such rent-setting algorithms, effective December 2025. Then, on 29 September 2026, Multifamily Dive reported that a federal judge paused the ban, treating the software’s price recommendations as commercial speech. The pause is temporary while the court weighs RealPage’s First Amendment claim, showing how AI recommendations can shape rents.

When a company uses AI to decide a community’s rents and residents have no say, the community loses part of what gram swaraj, or village self-rule, is supposed to protect. Judgment means pointing out that loss and explaining why it is important. Here, gram swaraj means local self-rule and shared control.

Judge the ground, not only the figure.

In part one, figure and ground referred to the screen and the technology behind it. The background deserves its own judgment. Figure means what is immediately visible; ground means the context behind it.

Synergy Research Group reported that global cloud infrastructure revenue was $143.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Other sources say Amazon had 28 percent, Microsoft 20 percent, and Google 15 percent, for a total of about 63 percent. From there, Swadeshi, Gandhi’s idea of supporting local control and resisting concentrated power, raises the question: What does it mean for a school, parish, or small country to choose local options when three companies take 63 cents of every cloud dollar?

Seva, or service, needs people, places, and teachers. The Futurum Group estimated in February 2026 that five companies plan to spend about $660 to $690 billion on infrastructure in 2026. In contrast, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported in April 2026 that official development aid from donor countries dropped 23.1 percent in 2025, the largest annual decrease ever recorded.

These two numbers do not show cause and effect. Still, together, they raise an important question: What happens when most resources go into just one type of system?

Act: Find the lever, and ask who is left out.

Noncooperation is the act that the Week 5 slides in my class highlight. It is Gandhi’s withdrawal from unjust systems, which the slides call “a structural critique that algorithms cannot perform,” because “moral agency requires a person, not a process.” That is also why the AI question matters here. Here, noncooperation means refusing unjust systems in a way that makes a moral point, including when the system is an AI system.

The Dharasana withdrawal worked because it had both a witness and a way to share the story. Hollywood writers used a similar approach in 2023. For 148 days starting 2 May, they went on strike and won a contract: AI is not a person, its output is not literature, and no writer has to use it. Whether AI can use their work for training remains undecided, so the dispute still centers on how AI affects writers’ work.

Writers had power because studios needed their work. Most people do not have that kind of leverage. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 112,713 US job cuts through July 2026 that mentioned AI, about 24 percent of 477,033 total cuts. Employers’ reasons aren’t checked, and the numbers don’t show who can push back.

Merton believed Gandhi taught that political action is about witnessing to the truth, not just winning. As the slides say, “success was secondary to fidelity.” This shifts the focus: it is not just about winning, but about staying true to the people involved and making sure their story is heard. Here, fidelity means staying true to the person affected.

McLuhan’s warning fits here: “We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backward into the future.“ Institutions often use old tools like boycotts, contract clauses, or laws made for different times because they know them. These actions work only when the tool matches the new situation, which is less often than we hope.

Merton, writing about technology, put the stakes in a sentence: “It does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact, our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration.“

The strongest argument against saying no

The strongest objection comes from the other side of the table, and it comes in two parts.

Supporters say data center funding comes from private shareholders and was never meant for hospitals, and that donor governments chose to cut aid, not data centers. They also argue that these machines could lower the cost of diagnosis, tutoring, and logistics for groups that help people experiencing poverty, so the buildings might help with some of the work that seva has done alone. The real question is what gets built and who decides. No one has proven that one type of spending caused the other, but the AI stakes are plain. Here, the point is to distinguish spending decisions from spending effects.

Gandhi’s boycott of British cloth put mill workers out of work, even though he didn’t want to influence them. Lancashire is an example. So refusing AI systems completely could let the builders control everything, leaving workers to bear the consequences with no say. The objection is that a boycott works only for people with choices, and the cost often falls on the wrong people.

This objection is partly correct, and that part is important. If a refusal ignores who pays the price, it repeats the harm it tries to stop. That is why seeing comes first. Even so, we do not have to accept everything. Dharasana and the writers’ strike both show people saying no while also naming who is affected.

Four steps for a Monday

Here is a version short enough to fit on an index card:

1. Go through the four questions. Ask what the technology improves, what it replaces, what it brings back from the past, and what it turns into when pushed to the limit. Write one sentence for each answer. Use these questions to judge the medium clearly.

2. Name the principle. Say whether dignity, subsidiarity, or solidarity is at stake, and state the reason aloud. Be clear about which principle applies.

3. Find the lever and the missing person—list who can withhold something the system needs, and who cannot. Use these terms to identify who has power and who does not.

4. Measure fidelity. Decide what it means to stay true to the person affected, and consider that along with the usual numbers. Keep fidelity tied to the person.

The story of Dharasana almost disappeared at a telegraph office window.

Think about who owned that window. The truth about the violence had to go through the people most embarrassed by it, and it only got out because one reporter would not give up. Now think about the channels that share our judgments today: platforms, search bars, and AI assistants that answer in smooth sentences. Many of these are owned by the same companies whose products we are judging. Here, channel means the path a message must travel.

The cable office still stands between every witness and the world. Someone owns that connection, including the AI systems that now shape it. The connection is the medium that can slow, shape, or block what gets out.

Know who it is.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

Sources

• Webb Miller, United Press dispatch datelined Dharasana, 21 May 1930, as archived at UPI Archives.

• Wikipedia, “Dharasana Satyagraha” (Gandhi’s arrest on 4 May 1930; the censorship episode; Senator Blaine’s reading of the dispatch; secondary reporting, so check against Miller’s I Found No Peace, Simon & Schuster, 1936). The Leader, “Cass County journalist’s work had global impact”, gives the figure of more than 1,000 newspapers.

• John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (15 May 1961), paragraph 236, as presented at Vatican II Journey.

• Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (University of Toronto Press, 1988), on the four questions of the tetrad. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), text at hannemyr.com. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p. 74, via The Marshall McLuhan Dictionary of Quotations.

• Multifamily Dive, “RealPage wins pause on New York’s algorithmic rent-setting ban” (2 October 2026).

• TMCnet Insight, “Synergy Research Finds AI Lifted Q2 Cloud Revenue to $143.4 Billion” (5 August 2026), and Cloud Tech Daily, “Google Cloud’s share hits record high of 15%, Amazon AWS drops to 28%” (market shares as cited from Synergy; secondary reporting).

• Futurum Group, “AI Capex 2026: The $690B Infrastructure Sprint” (12 February 2026; an analyst estimate of company guidance, not a filing). OECD, “International aid fell sharply in 2025, says OECD” (April 2026; preliminary data).

• Challenger, Gray & Christmas, “Job Cut Announcement Report, July 2026”.

• Wikipedia, “2023 Writers Guild of America strike”, and Brookings, “Hollywood writers went on strike to protect their livelihoods from generative AI” (contract terms).

• Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, “When Mahatma Gandhi was welcomed by textile mill workers of Lancashire” (the boycott’s effect on Lancashire mill workers).

• Part one’s sources cover Lewis Hine, Addie Card, and the See stage of the method.

The Sunday Gospel for October 18 presents the account of yet another clash between Jesus’ ministry and the religious elite of the times. The previous two Sundays have featured parables directed towards the ‘chief priests and elders of the people’ (Mt 22:1). On this occasion it is the ‘Pharisees…together with the Herodians’ (Mt 22:15-16) who engage with Jesus. Commentators tells us that the Pharisees, who often feature in conflict with Jesus, only became prominent after the destruction of the Temple in 70CE. Thus, the conflict depicted in the Gospels is, more likely, reflective of conflicts evident in the late first century, about 50 years after Jesus’ life and ministry. The Herodians are less well known, being mentioned twice only in the Gospel of Mark, apart from this singular reference in Matthew. On each occasion they are shown to be in league with the Pharisees, in opposition to Jesus. While little is known about them, it is assumed, on the basis of the name, that they were collaborators, or at least sympathisers, with the occupying Roman forces.

The question posed to Jesus is, of course, a trick question. It focuses on the hated requirement of paying taxes to the occupying Romans. If Jesus was to speak against this, it would frame him as inciting opposition to the Roman authorities. If he spoke in support of the tax he could be accused of disloyalty to his own Jewish heritage. Jesus first calls out their insincerity then cuts to the crux of the issue. All that matters is that we live and act according to God’s kingdom. Giving ‘to God what belongs to God’ (Mt 22:21) which, of course, is everything that brings life. The other part of the answer ‘give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar’ (Mt 22:21) should be understood not as an endorsement of the tax but as a call for the Pharisees and Herodians to let go of the power and influence they have gained under the protection of the Romans, a power which, in many instances, contributes directly to the oppression of the Jewish people. Rather than enjoying the privileges of their status, they should turn away from such things and truly focus on ‘what belongs to God’ (Mt 22:21).

Gospel Text: Matthew 22:15-21

The Pharisees went away to work out between them how to trap Jesus in what he said. And they sent their disciples to him, together with the Herodians, to say, ‘Master, we know that you are an honest man and teach the way of God in an honest way, and that you are not afraid of anyone, because a man’s rank means nothing to you. Tell us your opinion, then. Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’ But Jesus was aware of their malice and replied, ‘You hypocrites! Why do you set this trap for me? Let me see the money you pay the tax with.’ They handed him a denarius, and he said, ‘Whose head is this? Whose name?’ ‘Caesar’s’ they replied. He then said to them, ‘Very well, give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar – and to God what belongs to God.’

See

What is the ultimate purpose of the question posed to Jesus by the disciples of the Pharisees and Herodians?

What dilemma does this create for Jesus?

How does Jesus answer the question?

Judge

Jesus calls out the questioners as hypocrites. Why is this important in his answer to their question?

What does the passage convey about integrity on the part of Jesus and on the part of the questioners?

What do we understand by the phrase to ‘and to God, what belongs to God’ (Mt 22:21)?

Act

How can I ensure that I act with integrity in my own life situation?

What steps can we take to give to God what belongs to God our own life situations?

What possibilities are within our spheres of influence to do this in to the lives of others?

Image https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/acvvpCZ3cjPqzgBJ7xSsE

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

See, Judge, Act in the age of algorithms. This is part one: See.

In August 1910, a photographer put a notebook in his pocket and stopped next to a girl working at a spinning frame in the North Pownal, Vermont cotton mill.

Lewis Hine worked for the National Child Labor Committee, which hired him to photograph and support its reports. He wrote while he worked. The caption for the photo says: “Addie Card, 12 years old. Spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill.“ Other girls said she was ten. She said she was twelve.

The photograph became a symbol of American child labor. In 1998, her face was on a 32-cent stamp honoring child labor reform. Federal officials tried to find her but had no luck. For years, the image was linked to the wrong last name, “Laird,” so the Department of Labor could not find any record of Addie Laird in North Pownshek. She died five years earlier, in 1993, after spending her last years in low-income housing in Cohoes, New York, living on Social Security. heck.

In 2005, Joe Manning, a retired social worker and local historian, started looking for the girl’s real story. Novelist Elizabeth Winthrop, touched by the photo at the Bennington Museum, had asked him to help. The 1910 census finally showed her real name: Card. Manning followed her trail through cemeteries, town records, and old newspapers until he found her family. When he showed her grandchildren the photo, they had never seen it before.

The picture made the whole country stop and look at a child, but it never showed who she really was.

The far end has a name.

Hine’s captions included names, ages, and time spent on the job. This is what it means to truly see: writing down the facts of a person’s life. Every decision about cloth ends with a real person and a real name.

This is the first step in the method Joseph Cardijn created for young workers in Belgium: See. In Mater et Magistra, published on 15 May 1961, Pope John XXIII included this method in Catholic social teaching with three steps: “First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgment on it in the light of these same principles,” and then one acts. These steps are “usually expressed in the three terms: look, judge, act.“ When Cardijn heard the news, he reportedly said, “Basil, it’s happened! See, judge, act!“

To See does not mean forming an opinion. It means standing where the consequences happen and gathering the facts, starting with the name.

In week 5 of a ten-week class on Thomas Merton and world religions, I am teaching that the same idea came up from the Hindu perspective. The lesson was about dharma: “the right thing to do here, for someone like me, in this situation.” Dharma is personal and specific. You cannot figure it out from far away, like at the end of a supply chain. The week ended with the idea that human worth lasts beyond economic harm, technology, or the stories systems tell about us: “you are not your job, and neither am I.”

The class ended with a simple question: Who do your decisions affect, and what would it take for you to sit with them?

A medium you cannot see

Seeing is harder than it looks, as Marshall McLuhan once explained.

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), McLuhan said that “in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.” He believed a medium’s real power lies not in its content. The “personal and social consequences of any medium“ come from the new scale it brings to our lives. People watch the show but miss the stage.

Three years later, in The Medium Is the Massage (with Quentin Fiore, 1967), he summed up the problem with one image: “We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backward into the future.“

Using his terms: figure and ground. The figure is what we notice first. In 1910, it was a girl’s face; today, it might be a quick answer on a screen. The ground is what makes the figure possible but stays hidden. For Addie Card, it was the rest of her life. For an AI system, it is the data center, electricity, water, training data, the people who labeled it, and who keep your conversation. We focus on the figure, but the ground shapes everything.

Thomas Merton understood this feeling. On 13 September 1966, he wrote in his journal that he was reading McLuhan’s Understanding Media, that it was “very important indeed for monks to go into this,” and that McLuhan “brings home to me the fact that I do not really know what is going on“ (Learning to Love, volume 6 of his journals, HarperCollins, 1997, p. 133). Even as a monk in a Kentucky hermitage, with a unique view of his time, he admitted he could not fully see it.

Admitting what we cannot see is the first step in truly seeing.

The false self has a dashboard.

Chat assistants now have a feature called memory, which stores past conversations and shapes future responses. In a homily on 8 October 2026, Pope Leo XIV told students that the mind “must not simply compile data,” as an algorithm “now does more quickly than we can,” but should “recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize.”

Here, the Hindu and Christian ideas from Week 5 come together. Atman, the deepest part of a person, is what is left when every role, memory, and possession is gone. Merton called this the true self, the part of us that is not built or performed. The opposite is the false self, which is created, always performing, and looking for approval from others.

A system that records everything but does not judge what matters is very good at seeking approval. In April 2025, OpenAI reversed an update to its GPT-4o model because, as the company said, it had made the system “overly supportive but disingenuous” by relying too much on “short-term feedback.” The machine learned that approval meant success. As Merton understood him, Gandhi believed the opposite: staying true to your values matters more than success.

To See, in this case, means asking what is happening to the person. It is not just about whether the product works, which is just a new form of compliance, but about what years of constant agreement do to someone’s sense of self.

The one in twenty

The Dutch tax authority gives us a tougher lesson about seeing the far end. From 2005 to 2019, about 26,000 parents were wrongly accused of childcare-benefit fraud. Officials chose families for extra checks based on nationality, and reports say a risk-classification algorithm treated having a second nationality as a risk. The third Rutte cabinet resigned on 15 January 2021.

A system that is right 95 out of 100 times treats its mistakes as just rounding errors. Sarvodaya, the Gandhian ideal mentioned in the slides, rejects this idea. It is “not just the greatest good for the greatest number.” It is “care for every single person.”

To the ministry, a wrongly flagged family was just a number. But at the kitchen table, it meant paying money back.

The best case against going to look

The strongest argument comes from those who build and manage large systems, and it deserves serious attention.

They say seeing doesn’t scale. A tax authority that has to check millions of claims cannot visit every kitchen table, and an algorithm that is right 95 percent of the time may help more people than a team of clerks could. If you focus too much on every single case, you can’t run a large institution.

Addie Card’s story gives us another reason to be careful. A whole country looked at her and even put her face on a stamp, but never learned her real name. Sometimes, a picture makes us feel like we have done enough. Seeing can turn into a show, and that show can replace real action.

Both arguments have truth. Seeing alone isn’t enough, and the logic of big systems is real. But the wrong name on the stamp shows the problem isn’t seeing itself, but seeing poorly. Hine’s approach was better: write down the name, the age, the hours. In the Dutch case, the problem lasted for years before anyone did something. If someone had been there, they’d see the real thing, not the error; with the ebook in hand, they might have caught the mistake sooner. Seeing is the easiest part of the work, but people often skip it. It is just the start. Judgment and action come next, and we’ll cover those in part two.

Five things to see before you decide

Short enough for an index card:

1. Get the name right. Write down who this decision affects but who has no say in it, and make sure you have the right name and facts.

2. Find the ground. For every quick answer or smooth screen, list the machines, energy, labor, and records that make it possible.

3. Ask what is remembered. Who keeps the records, who reads them, and who owns them when the person is gone?

4. Count the one in twenty. Find out what happens to the people the system gets wrong, and who is responsible for fixing it.

5. Go and sit with them. Make the effort to visit in person before deciding, not after saying sorry.

Hine wrote down a name, an age, and a workplace. Almost ninety years later, the name on the stamp was wrong, and the country that had seen her could not find her.

Her grandchildren called her Gramma Pat. She wanted people to call her Pat and never liked the name Adeline. They had never seen the photo until a stranger showed it to them.

This series explores that gap. The people who build systems and those who live with them are on opposite sides, and what gets lost between them often goes unwritten.

Write down the name.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

Sources

• Smithsonian Magazine, “Through the Mill” (the August 1910 photograph; Hine’s notebook; the National Child Labor Committee; the census search; the 1998 stamp).

• VTDigger, “Then Again: Finding Addie” (18 August 2024; the wrong surname “Laird”; the Department of Labor’s failed search; Elizabeth Winthrop, the 2002 Bennington Museum viewing, and the 2005 request to Joe Manning; the 1993 death, her name “Pat,” and “Gramma Pat”). The sources differ on her age at death, 94 or 95, so the post says only “in her nineties.”

• TIME, “Tracking Down Lewis Hine’s Forgotten Child Laborers” (Hine’s caption, the conflicting ages, and the grandchildren seeing the photograph for the first time), and NPR, “Labor Photos Shed Light on Family History” (25 February 2007; Hine’s captions recording each child’s name, age, and time on the job).

• Library of Congress, “National Child Labor Committee Collection” (Hine’s work from 1908; his methods; captions with names, ages, and addresses).

• John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (15 May 1961), paragraph 236, as presented at Vatican II Journey.

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), chapter 1, text at hannemyr.com; Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p. 74, via The Marshall McLuhan Dictionary of Quotations.

• Thomas Merton Center, journal entry of 13 September 1966, from Learning to Love, ed. Christine M. Bochen (HarperCollins, 1997), p. 133.

• Aleteia, “Leo XIV to theology students: ‘Guard your hearts’” (10 October 2026), on the homily of 8 October 2026.

• TechCrunch, “OpenAI explains why ChatGPT became too sycophantic” (29 April 2025).

• Wikipedia, “Dutch childcare benefits scandal”, and AI Incident Database, “Incident 101”.

Part two, Judge and Act, follows.

Thomas Merton, the monk waiting for him, understood exactly what was being said about his guest and did not believe a word of it. After two days of walking the abbey grounds together, Merton wrote an essay titled “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother,” published that year in the magazine Jubilee and later collected in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). Merton barely mentions Thich Nhat Hanh’s politics. What he defends is harder to argue in a magazine: that he had met “a perfectly formed monk,” that the visit felt like meeting Vietnam itself, and that “he is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.”

That is a strange thing to stake a reputation on, for a stranger, in the middle of a war his own church superiors preferred he remain quiet about.

It is also exactly the move missing from most conversations about “empathetic” technology.

Merton could have stopped at feeling. He clearly felt something for Thich Nhat Hanh. But he did not stop there — he made a public argument and spent some of his own credibility defending a specific man against specific slanders, at real cost to himself. Empathy became compassion, something closer to solidarity and justice: a defense with consequences, not just a feeling with a name attached. That distinction, between perceiving someone’s suffering and building the conditions under which their situation actually changes, is the one this essay seeks to recover.

The three words that don’t mean the same thing

Empathy, compassion, and justice belong together, but they do different work. Collapsing them into a single “caring” is where much of technology ethics goes wrong.

A rough sequence runs from attention to empathy to compassion to solidarity to justice. But it is not merely a sequence, because justice also makes compassion durable. One act of kindness helps one person survive an unfair system for one more day. A just institution reduces how many people ever have to depend on luck, or on a stranger’s goodwill, to live with dignity. Compassion without justice tends toward paternalism. Justice without compassion tends toward bureaucracy, or worse. Empathy without either is sentiment with no bill attached.

For a technology built to sense or simulate feeling, the question this collapse obscures is not whether this system can recognize a human emotion, but rather what relationships, what social order, and what distribution of power it creates once it is loosed on the world. That is where Merton’s account of the person and Marshall McLuhan’s account of media meet, and where the rest of this argument lives.

What empathy alone cannot reach

Empathy tells you that suffering is present. It does not tell you what would help, and mistaking the first for the second is its most common failure. A platform can register real concern for isolated users and respond with a “wellness” feature that leaves the addictive design, the underpaid moderators, and the data extraction beneath it untouched. At that point, what compassion needs is not more feeling but discernment: who gets to define the problem, whose account of harm counts, and what response actually reduces it rather than merely advertising concern.

Compassion also tends to preserve a gap between the one who helps and the one who is helped, and closing that gap is the work of solidarity — treating the people a system affects as co-designers and rights-bearing participants rather than recipients of a benefit decided elsewhere. The question shifts from how do we help them to how do we act with them and who actually shares the decision.

Beneath both lies a harder fact: injustice is rarely only a matter of bad intentions. It is reproduced through ownership, incentives, opacity, biased data, and unequal power to contest a decision once it has been made — a power analysis that empathy, by its nature, does not perform, because empathy sees the injured person and stops there, while justice asks what made the injury predictable. None of this holds without accountability: mechanisms that let a person understand a decision, challenge an error, and impose real consequences on the institution that made it. Absent that recourse, an “ethical AI” pledge is a promise made by whoever already benefits from the arrangement.

Further out still is institutional imagination — what rules, public goods, and professional norms should exist before the crisis rather than after it, covering due process, fair labor conditions, and real limits on harmful uses, and not only the person-to-person repair that compassion is built for. And underneath everything is a bias built into empathy itself: it runs strongest toward people who are visible, familiar, or narratively compelling, and a viral platform amplifies exactly that bias, so that some harms are seen everywhere while others — racialized surveillance, disability exclusion, precarious data labor, the slow erosion of public discourse — remain almost entirely invisible. Justice is the discipline of attending, on purpose, to whoever the system has rendered easiest to overlook.

A monk who kept facing east

Merton’s account of the person did not stay inside a single tradition, and that matters here, because his most demanding thinking about compassion happened in conversation with Buddhism rather than apart from it.

By the early 1960s, Merton had spent years in correspondence with the Japanese Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, work he eventually published as “Wisdom in Emptiness: A Dialogue Between D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton” and later folded into Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968). What Merton found in Suzuki’s account of Zen was not an exotic alternative to Christian charity but a sharper diagnosis of what gets in its way: the illusion of a fixed, separate self that must be defended, flattered, and proven, which Merton had already named, in his own vocabulary, the false self. Buddhist teaching on anatta, the absence of a permanent separate self, and on karuna, compassion, converged for Merton on a single insight — that the gap compassion is meant to cross, between the one who helps and the one who suffers, is in some sense an illusion to begin with. Genuine compassion, in this reading, is not a feeling one person directs at another from across a distance. It is what remains once the false distance collapses.

That is the deeper argument underneath the Gethsemani story. Merton’s defense of Thich Nhat Hanh was not an act of charity performed downward, from a secure Kentucky monastery toward an endangered foreign monk. It was recognition of a brother, stated plainly and without hierarchy — “he and I see things exactly the same way“ — which is a strange sentence for a Catholic priest to write about a Buddhist monk unless one has actually absorbed the idea that compassion does not require the helper to remain above the helped.

The friendship with Thich Nhat Hanh was not an isolated encounter. Two years later, in November 1968, Merton traveled to Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama had lived in exile since 1959, and met him three times over the course of about a week. Merton came away calling it “a warm and cordial discussion” between men he believed shared “a real spiritual bond.” The Dalai Lama would later say Merton was the person who first showed him the real meaning of the word Christian. A month after Dharamsala, on 10 December 1968, Merton died in Bangkok, at a conference of Asian Benedictine and Cistercian communities, killed by a faulty electric fan hours after delivering a talk on monasticism and Marxism. He had spent the final months of his life listening, without defensiveness, to a tradition that questioned the very self his own compassion was meant to serve.

None of this made Merton a Buddhist, and he never claimed to be one. It made him someone who had tested his own account of compassion against a tradition built to interrogate the self at its root, and found that it held, and deepened. That is the standard worth holding technology to as well: not whether a system can simulate warmth, but whether it treats the person in front of it as someone whose reality does not depend on being useful, legible, or profitable to the system observing them.

The common good and the half-built man

Merton’s concern was never machinery as such. It was technological development pursued apart from wisdom, contemplative attention, and what he called the common good. Scholarship on his notebooks and talks, notably Paul Dekar’s study in The Merton Annual, identifies four recurring criteria in Merton’s writing on the subject: does a technology honor the human person rather than treat them as raw material or a measurable output; does it serve the common good rather than only the short-term interests of its owners; does it protect physical, social, and what Merton called psychic health; and does it withstand scrutiny from outside the circle of experts who built it, rather than asking to be trusted on their word alone.

That last criterion had a specific occasion. On 5 June 1966, in a talk titled “The Christian in a Technological Age,” Merton cited an essay by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear navy, titled “A Humanistic Technology” (Nature, 20 November 1965), in which Rickover argued that a technology’s foreseeable harms ought to be weighed before deployment rather than excused as unintended consequences afterward. Merton, no admirer of the military establishment Rickover represented, still found the argument worth borrowing: even a man who built warships understood that capability without foresight is not progress.

Merton’s deeper worry ran beneath any single criterion. He diagnosed a culture of distraction and instrumental reason in which people risk losing contact with reality, with one another, and with their own depths — the same false self that Suzuki’s Zen had helped him name more precisely. If a platform constantly rewards performance, prediction, and marketable self-presentation, people may grow steadily more legible to the systems studying them while becoming less present to themselves and to each other. The danger was never that machines might become too human. It was that human beings might be pressed to live like machines: optimized, surveilled, evaluated, and never quite at rest.

The environment is the message.

Marshall McLuhan supplies the argument’s other half. His claim that the medium is the message, from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), means that a technology should not be judged only by the content it carries or the purpose its makers state for it. It should be judged by the new scale, pace, and pattern it introduces into how people associate and act.

Media, in McLuhan’s account, extend human capacities: the wheel extends the foot, print extends the eye, and contemporary AI extends memory, language, and pattern recognition. But every extension also alters the environment in which people think and relate, and McLuhan’s real question about any new technology is what it makes normal before anyone has decided whether it is good. A writing assistant may help someone draft or translate. Its deeper message may be a changed environment in which authorship, expertise, and the expectation of a human reply are quietly reorganized. A facial-recognition system is framed as a tool for identification; its wider message is the normalization of continuous surveillance. A recommendation engine offers personalization; its environmental effect is to reshape attention and let opaque rankings decide what a shared conversation even is.

That reframes the question an ethics of AI has to ask. Not only is the output biased, but also what human faculty is being extended, what capacity is quietly being outsourced until it atrophies, who controls the environment a technology creates, and who can opt out of it and who cannot.

Where the two monks meet

Merton and McLuhan diagnose different, complementary dimensions of the same problem.

Merton supplies the moral center: the person, contemplative attention, the common good, and a settled suspicion of technological idols. McLuhan supplies the cultural diagnostic: media are environments, and their strongest effects are structural rather than intended. Together, they resist two opposite errors — solutionism, the assumption that more capability automatically means more human flourishing, and fatalism, the assumption that because a technology is powerful, its social shape is therefore inevitable. Their shared alternative is the harder one: the conscious, democratic, and morally serious shaping of the environments new technology creates.

A justice-centered framework, applied.

Take a live example: an AI system screening job applicants.

Empathy asks what it is like to be rejected by a system you cannot see inside, when your employment determines your housing and your family’s stability. Compassion asks what explanation, correction, or human review is owed once the system gets it wrong. Justice asks whether automated screening belongs in that setting at all, whether the training data encode decades of past exclusion, whether an applicant can appeal, and who profits from a labor market this system quietly tilts.

The missing links become visible only at that third question: public participation, worker voice, independent audit, real remedy, and the willingness to simply refuse a use that undermines the dignity of the people it touches.

What this asks of anyone building the thing

1. Treat empathy as a starting instrument, not a finished ethic. It tells you where to look, never what to do.

2. Let compassion do more than comfort. Ask what changes, not only who was consoled.

3. Practice discernment before designing a response — whose definition of the problem is being used, and whose is not.

4. Build solidarity by sharing the decision, not only the concern.

5. Read power before reading intentions. Injustice survives on incentive and opacity more than on malice.

6. Install accountability that a person without resources can actually use.

7. Design institutions before the crisis, not in apology after it.

8. Attend on purpose to the harms that never go viral.

9. Ask Merton’s question of the person, and McLuhan’s question of the environment, together, before asking whether the output looks fair.

My Recommendation

Design and govern technology so that it increases people’s capacity for truthful attention, mutual recognition, and shared power — not merely their capacity to predict, persuade, and extract.

That, in the end, is the whole content of what Merton did at Gethsemani in 1966. He did not run a sentiment analysis on a stranger’s face. He spent two days in a stranger’s actual company, recognized a brother where his own government had told him to see a threat, and then spent his name defending it in print. A system that can only simulate the first half of that — the recognizing — while remaining structurally incapable of the second, the defending, has not built compassion. It has built a very convincing rumor of it.

Sources: Thomas Merton, “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother,” Jubilee (1966), collected in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) — text via Englewood Review of Books; Jim and Nancy Forest, “When America Met Thich Nhat Hanh” (2021); Thomas Merton Center, “Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama”; Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968); Thomas Merton and Daisetz T. Suzuki, “Wisdom in Emptiness: A Dialogue Between D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton”; Paul Dekar, “Thomas Merton on Technology,” The Merton Annual, vol. 17; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964).

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there. I am not a traditional academic. Rather, I am a public thinker and technology futurist, drawing on my roots in cultural history, society, and technology. Today, I explore how technology, society, and ethics come together to shape a future where People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity thrive for everyone. That is the whole of it. See more in the “How I Write and What I Use section on my website.

In 1894, a Seventh-day Adventist in Sydney was convicted of violating the Sunday laws. The sentence offered two options. Pay the fine or sit in the public stocks for two hours.

The Adventists observed Saturday as their Sabbath and worked on Sundays. That year, they drew about five hundred people to each of two protest meetings at Parramatta Town Hall.

Three years later, in 1897, the Protestant churches of the Australian colonies sought to write God into the constitution of the nation they were about to build. The Council of the Churches in New South Wales launched a petition in March. It asked the preamble to recognize God as the world’s supreme ruler and the source of all law, for each house of Parliament to open with prayer, and for the Governor-General to proclaim days of national thanksgiving and humiliation.

The Adventists responded with their own petition, announced in their newspaper, The Bible Echo, on 29 March 1897. It asked the Federal Convention to keep religion out of the Constitution altogether, and the Convention received it on 6 April. That July, the same paper called the Council of the Churches a “religio-political organization “ and linked the campaign to the National Reform Association in the United States, a body that sought to have the American Constitution declare the nation’s allegiance to Jesus Christ.

On 7 February 1898, a Victorian delegate, Henry Higgins, a lawyer who would later sit on the High Court, said the quiet part aloud. He told the Convention in Melbourne that recognizing God “was not proposed merely out of reverence.” It was proposed for political reasons, influenced by American debates.

He had a case to present. In Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892), the United States Supreme Court had described America as a Christian country. Higgins argued that Congress then relied on that reasoning to order the Chicago exhibition of 1893 closed on Sundays.

His fear was specific. Put God in the preamble, and a court might one day read it as permission for Parliament to legislate on religion, especially on Sunday. On 8 February, his first attempt to forbid such laws died on the voices, without a vote.

On 2 March 1898, the Convention did both. Patrick Glynn of South Australia moved to insert the words “humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God,” and the motion carried. Later that day, Higgins tried again. By a vote of 25 to 16, the delegates agreed that the Commonwealth could not establish a religion, impose religious observance, or prohibit the free exercise of religion, nor require a religious test for any public office.

Australia has lived with both ever since.

That afternoon in Melbourne holds the whole subject in miniature.

An idea born in the United States crossed the ocean. Local people feared it, borrowed it, and bent it to fit their own institutions. What arrived was neither a copy nor an invention. It was something new, and it remains in the Australian Constitution today.

Four cousins

I chose the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia because they are most closely aligned: a shared language, a shared legal inheritance, and a shared news feed. When an argument crosses a border, it crosses these borders first.

The same story travels to all four. A Christian civilization is under threat from secularism, cultural change, or outsiders, and someone must defend it. Each country then tells the story through its own institutions. As a rough shorthand:

• In the United States, the idea has a party.

• In Britain, it has a badge.

• In Canada, it has a protest.

• In Australia, it has a lobby.

The rest of this post expands on those four sentences and corrects them where they are too neat. New Zealand belongs in this company, too. It deserves its own post.

Before the numbers

Start by clarifying what the term does not mean. Christians vote, organize, lobby, and run for office in every democracy. A church that backs a conservative party is not nationalist for that reason, and neither is a voter who cares about religious freedom.

Christian nationalism is narrower. It fuses national identity with Christianity. On this view, the nation is truly Christian. Many will say Christianity deserves a special place in public life. Drifting from that tradition threatens the nation itself. Nick Spencer of the British think tank Theos reduces it to a test of belonging: do you have to be Christian to be truly British or truly American? Scholars still debate where to draw the line, and the argument grows harder to draw across borders.

The word “rise“ needs the same care. It can mean more believers, louder ones, or those closer to power. Those are three different stories, and they do not always move together. In May 2026, the sociologist Andrew Whitehead told a Theos podcast that fewer Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalism than before, even as its rhetoric has spread and people in powerful seats now voice it.

Where the idea has a party

The United States stands out for a simple reason. A large religious constituency overlaps with the governing party.

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) interviewed more than 22,000 American adults through 2025. It asked questions about Christianity, American identity, and government, then sorted people into four groups. About one in three Americans, 32 percent, fall into the top two: 11 percent as “Adherents“ and 21 percent as “Sympathizers.” Among Republicans, the two groups together make up 56 percent, compared with 25 percent among independents and 17 percent among Democrats. Among white evangelical Protestants, the two groups together reach 67 percent. Among Hispanic Protestants, they reach 54 percent. Those are the only two major religious groups in which a majority qualifies.

These are survey categories, not membership rolls. Nobody joins an organization called Christian Nationalism. Still, PRRI’s 50-state report, released on 17 February 2026, finds that states with higher scores also tend to favor Donald Trump and send more Republicans to their legislatures. Arkansas tops the list at 54 percent. That is correlation, not causation. It shows how closely the attitudes track the political map.

Two details complicate the usual picture.

First, practice matters here. Among Americans who attend services weekly, 54 percent qualify as Adherents or Sympathizers, compared with 39 percent of those who attend a few times a year and 20 percent of those who seldom or never attend. The idea is not only white, either. Christians of color score 39 percent, compared with 46 percent for white Christians.

Second, the movement has become more visible without growing larger. PRRI reports that the overall share has held steady for about three years. In April 2026, the Pew Research Center found that 59 percent of Americans have now heard at least a little about Christian nationalism, up from 45 percent in 2024. Ten percent view it favorably, and 31 percent view it unfavorably. And 17 percent say the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion, up from 13 percent in 2024. Pew also notes that support for related ideas is mostly unchanged.

A badge, not a habit

Britain tells a different story. Churchgoing is low, and identity drives the energy.

On 13 September 2025, the Metropolitan Police counted about 110,000 people at the “Unite the Kingdom“ march in London, organized by activist Tommy Robinson, whose legal name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Other estimates were higher. Many marchers carried wooden crosses. Ordained ministers spoke from the stage, and a worship band played. Church leaders pushed back. The presidents of Churches Together in England said that some at the rally had used symbols and words of the faith to support views opposed to its message, and Cardinal Vincent Nichols of the Catholic bishops’ conference joined them.

On 11 October 2026, Theos, a Christian think tank, published a detailed new poll. Its pollster, RED C, questioned 1,765 adults across the United Kingdom (UK) between 7 April and 27, 2026.

The headline is smaller than the rallies suggest. Eight percent strongly agree, and another 9 percent slightly agree, that to be truly British, you should be a Christian. That totals 17 percent. Asked to choose the single most important factor in being British from a list of twelve, 1 percent chose Christianity.

The researchers then sorted respondents into five groups. The group that comes closest to Christian nationalism, which Theos calls Identity Integrationists, accounts for 11 percent of UK adults. They regard Christianity as fundamental to Britishness and seek to defend it from what they see as threatening outside influences. Within that group:

• 81 percent claim a Christian affiliation.

• 13 percent attend church weekly.

• 43 percent are affiliated with Reform UK.

• 30 percent agree that all religions should be treated equally in public life.

• 82 percent agree with the claim known as the Great Replacement theory that the white population of Europe is being deliberately replaced by migrants from Muslim countries.

That is the reverse of the American pattern. In the United States, frequent churchgoing predicts support. In Britain’s most nationalist group, most people do not attend church. In every group where the comparison can be made, nominal Christians sympathize slightly more with merging Christianity and Britishness than practicing Christians do. Theos concludes that culture matters more than belief in this debate.

Three cautions.

First, “rise” is a claim about visibility, not numbers. British Social Attitudes found that the share saying it is very or fairly important to be Christian to be truly British fell from 32 percent in 1995 to 19 percent in 2023. What has changed since is mobilization. The Christian Conservative lawmaker Danny Kruger defected to Reform UK. In September 2026, black-clad agitators chanted “Christ is King“ at Dover and Portsmouth to protest refugees arriving in small boats.

Second, the label itself is disputed. Luke Bretherton, an Oxford professor, has told the Church of England’s bishops that “Christian nationalism“ often functions more as a stigmatizing label than an analytical term.

Third, Theos polled the entire United Kingdom, not just Great Britain. Northern Ireland has its own history that this post does not cover.

A smaller, patchier thing

Canada shares television, church networks, and political slogans with the United States, so American influence is easy to spot. The country below is different.

Start with the pool of believers. A March 2025 survey by the Angus Reid Institute and the think tank Cardus questioned 5,000 Canadians and 5,000 Americans. Eighteen percent of Canadians were counted as “religiously committed,” compared with 37 percent of Americans. That measures devotion, not nationalism, but it shrinks the potential constituency. Pew’s strict four-question test, conducted in 2024, classified 3 percent of Canadian adults as religious nationalists, compared with 6 percent of Americans.

The idea seems to exist mostly outside party politics. During the 2022 Freedom Convoy, the Canadian scholar Christine Mitchell wrote in The Conversation that she had spotted a supporter waving a banner bearing a biblical promise to heal the land. If people say the Bible should decide what society allows, she argued, that is the definition of Christian nationalism. She was describing a faction of the convoy, not the whole protest.

It also appears in provincial conflicts. Canadian commentators link Christian-conservative activism to Alberta’s battles over parental rights, education, and policies affecting transgender youth. Not everyone who uses the language of parental rights is a Christian nationalist, and that language is not new. Conservative groups in Alberta, largely led by Dutch immigrants, invoked parental rights to secure public funding for private schools as far back as the 1960s.

No national party embraces the idea. Jonathan Malloy, a political scientist at Carleton University, calls evangelicals and social conservatives a marginal force in Canadian politics, even within the Conservative Party. In his view, the parliamentary system gives party leaders firm top-down control, and the movement has largely fought defensive battles. A study in the Canadian Journal of Sociology reaches a similar conclusion from the pews. Canadian evangelicals are as morally conservative as American ones, it finds, but they understand the link between religious morality and national identity differently.

Canada is a patchwork: protest here, provincial policy there. It is not American Christian nationalism with a northern accent.

A network, not a nation

Australia shows that the Christian right and Christian nationalism are not the same thing.

Researchers describe the Australian Christian right as a loose yet connected network of church leaders, lobby groups, politicians, and media. It gained access under Prime Minister John Howard, who treated the Australian Christian Lobby as a legitimate voice for Christianity as a whole, and Labor leaders courted it as well. Today, it works through candidate forums, scorecards that grade parties against what the groups call Christian values, and election campaigns.

The 2025 federal election provided a messy example. The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, formerly the Exclusive Brethren, is a separatist church whose members typically do not vote. In April 2025, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age reported that the church had sent hundreds of members to polling booths in marginal seats to campaign for the Coalition. Newspapers owned by Nine later reported that the church paid far-right influencers to heckle Labor campaigners. At a parliamentary hearing on 21 August 2026, church leaders denied paying anyone or directing members, and the Coalition called the inquiry a witch-hunt. Whatever the committee finds, the episode concerns a religious group’s political influence. It is not a claim that Australia is a Christian nation.

The nationalist element emerges only when campaigns cast Australia’s authentic identity as Judeo-Christian, link national decline to secularism, or treat Christianity as the necessary foundation of civilization. Elenie Poulos, a Uniting Church minister who studies the movement, describes the story this way: Australia belongs to Western Christian civilization, and only those who grasp its true foundations can save it.

The limits are real. In a 2021 analysis, David Smith of the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney found that the phrase “Christian nation“ was fading from Australian life. It appeared in print media 35 times in 2016 and 8 times in 2020, and nearly half of those uses came from people rejecting the claim. Of 15,500 submissions to the federal Religious Freedom Review, only four asserted that Australia is a Christian nation. A 2008 inquiry had drawn that assertion in 40 percent of its submissions. Tony Abbott once called his country “relentlessly secular.” When Australians do call it Christian, Smith found, they usually mean heritage, holidays and census numbers, not divine election or a sacred covenant. His data end in 2020, so they cannot speak to the 2025 campaign.

Australia, then, has an organized Christian right with real reach and a thin tradition of Christian nationhood. The network is stronger than the idea.

One story, four soils

The story crosses borders on its own. Media and activist networks carry it. The London rally in September 2025 drew speakers from across Europe and North America, and Elon Musk appeared via video.

Institutions then decide what the story becomes. The United States has two parties, and a large religious base can capture one. Canada and Australia run parliamentary systems with strong party discipline, which gives outsiders less leverage. Britain has no formal separation of church and state, so American fights over school prayer or religious symbols do not even translate. In each country, the same story meets different machinery, and the results differ.

Four numbers, four questions

No single measure supports a four-country league table. Here is what the main sources count.

• PRRI, United States, 2025. It measures agreement with statements about Christianity, American identity, and government. Result: 32 percent are Adherents or Sympathizers.

• Pew 36-country survey, 2024. It counts a strongly religious response to all four questions on belonging, leaders, and laws. Result: United States 6 percent, Canada 3 percent, UK 1 percent.

• Theos and RED C, UK, April 2026. It reports agreement that you should be Christian to be truly British. Result: 17 percent, with 11 percent in the closest group.

• Angus Reid Institute and Cardus, March 2025. It measures religious commitment, defined as devotion rather than nationalism. Result: Canada 18 percent, United States 37 percent.

Australia has no comparable headline figure in the sources used here. The evidence there concerns networks and language, not poll shares.

None of these numbers is wrong. They answer different questions. A strict test like Pew’s counts only people who give the strongest answer every time. A looser one like PRRI’s counts people who agree with most of the statements. Each carries a trap. Theos warns that if you define a Christian nationalist by agreement with mild statements, such as allowing religious symbols in public places, you will find a large constituency by definition. Pew admits the opposite problem: more Americans may support individual policies linked to Christian nationalism than the 6 percent its strict test classifies.

Pew adds a finding that cuts both ways. By global standards, the United States has low religious nationalism. Among rich countries, though, it stands out, especially on whether the Bible should shape the law.

Five lines for an index card

1. Ask the belonging question. Must you be a Christian to truly belong to this nation? That test separates nationalism from ordinary faith in politics.

2. Count three things, not one: believers, volume, and access to power. They move separately.

3. Compare shapes, not percentages. Each survey draws its own line.

4. Check the pews. Where nationalism outruns churchgoing, culture does the work that creed does elsewhere.

5. Check the machinery. A party, a protest, a lobby, a badge: the same story runs on a different engine in each country.

Higgins did not stop the God clause. He studied the American cases, named what he feared, and wrote a limit into the same constitution before anyone needed it.

The preamble and Section 116 still sit side by side. One invites God into the document. The other bars the Commonwealth from establishing a religion or imposing a religious observance. Ideas cross oceans. Institutions decide what they become.

Higgins said the clause came from America. So did the wall.

Sources

A note on the links: I removed them because they don’t always carry over from the Word doc to Substack, though they usually do on WordPress. I just list the links as a quick start for your own research and reference.

Figures as of 11 October 2026.

United States

• PRRI, Breaking Research: 50-State Survey Finds Majority of Republicans Qualify as Christian Nationalism Supporters, 17 February 2026.

• Gina Christian, OSV News, More Americans are aware of Christian nationalism, but a negative view of it prevails, 14 May 2026, reporting on the Pew Research Center’s April 2026 survey.

• Church Times, Few US adults care for Christian nationalism, 29 May 2026.

• Pew Research Center, Comparing Levels of Religious Nationalism Around the World, 28 January 2025.

Britain

• Nick Spencer and Yinxuan Huang, Theos, Beyond “Christian nationalism”: Measuring attitudes to Christianity and Britishness today (full report), 11 October 2026.

• Nick Spencer, Theos, How big is Christian Nationalism in the UK?, 15 May 2026.

• CBS News, London march organized by far-right activist Tommy Robinson, September 2025.

• National Catholic Register, Cardinal Vincent Nichols Condemns Words and Symbols Co-Opting Christianity.

Canada

• Cardus, Religion in the Public Square, reporting the March 2025 Angus Reid Institute and Cardus survey.

• Jonathan Malloy, Carleton University, Canada’s marginal Christian right.

• Canadian Journal of Sociology, Why doesn’t Canada have an American-style Christian Right?

• Religion Unplugged, How Canada Truckers’ Protest Parallels American-Style Christian Nationalism, 18 February 2022, citing Christine Mitchell in The Conversation.

• Perspectives Journal, Christian Nationalism and the Remaking of Canada’s Political Right.

Australia

• David Smith, United States Studies Center, A Christian nation no longer, 6 August 2021.

• The Other Cheek, A look at Aussie Christian nationalists, on Elenie Poulos.

• Northeast Times, Australian church denies paying far-right activists to disrupt election, 21 August 2026.

• Canberra Times, Calls for probe into Christian sect’s election role, August 2026.

• True North, News update for 29 April 2025, summarizing The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

The 1898 Convention

• Luke Beck, The Constitutional Prohibition on Imposing Religious Observances, Melbourne University Law Review41 (2017) 493.

• Gonzalo Villalta Puig, Parliamentary Prayers and Section 116 of the Australian Constitution, Parliament of Australia.

• The Bible Echo, 26 July 1897, Melbourne.

All of the Sunday Gospels for the month of October are drawn from the twenty-second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Curiously, last week’s text was from the latter part of the chapter while the text for this week is found at the start of the chapter. The audience for Jesus’ parables, in this chapter, are the religious leaders of the time. In this text the writer names ‘the chief priests and the elders of the people’ (Mt 22:1), later in the chapter, the Pharisees are named. The parable, in allegorical form, indicts the religious authorities for their lack of care for their place as God’s chosen people and, even further, for their malicious treatment of those who adhered to God’s word. The lack of care is depicted in those who simply went about their business without regard for having been invited to the wedding (Mt 22:5), while the malice is shown in the mistreatment of the servants (Mt 22:6). The destruction of the murderers and burning of their town (Mt 22:7) is painfully reminiscent of the fate of the city of Jerusalem, its temple and the people at the hands of the Romans around a decade before Matthew’s Gospel was written. Evidently, the author intends to portray the destruction of Jerusalem as the punishment of the religious elite, by God, for their malice and lack of integrity as the custodians of God’s Covenant.

The second phase of the parable sees the King extending the invitation for all people to join the banquet. A gesture with unmistakable echoes of the influx of Gentiles into the infant Christian Churches of the late first century. God’s love is available to all people ‘bad and good alike’ (Mt 22:10), however, as the harsh treatment of the unsuitably dressed guest conveys, it is not enough to simply be invited, one must freely choose to live according to God’s Kingdom in order to share in the banquet. Father Michael Fallon MSC sums up the parable as follows:

“The point of the parable is that enjoyment of the blessings of God is always a matter of free choice. God invites all but forces no one. We must respond to love, and if we choose not to we cannot enjoy divine communion.” https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

Gospel Text: Matthew 22:1-14

Jesus began to speak to the chief priests and elders of the people in parables: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a feast for his son’s wedding. He sent his servants to call those who had been invited, but they would not come. Next he sent some more servants. “Tell those who have been invited” he said “that I have my banquet all prepared, my oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, everything is ready. Come to the wedding.” But they were not interested: one went off to his farm, another to his business, and the rest seized his servants, maltreated them and killed them. The king was furious. He despatched his troops, destroyed those murderers and burnt their town. Then he said to his servants, “The wedding is ready; but as those who were invited proved to be unworthy, go to the crossroads in the town and invite everyone you can find to the wedding.” So these servants went out on to the roads and collected together everyone they could find, bad and good alike; and the wedding hall was filled with guests. When the king came in to look at the guests he noticed one man who was not wearing a wedding garment, and said to him, “How did you get in here, my friend, without a wedding garment?” And the man was silent. Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot and throw him out into the dark, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.” For many are called, but few are chosen.’

See

What might be the significant of Jesus directing this parable to the ‘chief priests and elders of the people’?

How would we describe the behaviour of the invited guests in this parable?

Who might the allegory be representing as the invited guests, the king, those who ultimately attend the wedding feast?

Judge

What does the parable teach us about the privilege of being invited into God’s kingdom?

If this parable was set in modern times, who might be the people who ultimately attend the wedding feast?

Jesus’ parable is an indictment of the religious elite of his time. What warning does that carry for those of us who are religious?

Act

What actions do we need to take, in our own lives, to ensure we do not disregard the privilege we have in being invited into God’s kingdom?

How do we ensure that we are responding freely in love, to God’s invitation, and not simply acting religious?

What steps can we take to ensure we are welcoming of all ‘good and bad alike’ (Mt 22:10), in our own communities?

Image https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-20-1-16-2023-2/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

Where We Left the Monk

Recap in three sentences, using the cards from Tuesday. God gathers the assembly. The assembly receives before it acts. The test of a liturgy is the kind of people it makes. Ask yourself what you brought on the card today: which social reality in your community the prayers name, and which they don’t.

Then go back to Minnesota.

In 1930, Dom Virgil Michel went north to recover among the Chippewa of northern Minnesota. He was near exhaustion, and his eyes had given out. By 1933 he was back at Saint John’s Abbey, and the magazine he had started was waiting for him.

He did not return to a quiet life. The United States was in the fourth year of the Great Depression. Michel had spent seven years teaching that the liturgy belonged to everyone in the pews, and he now pressed the other half of the claim: that it also obliged them toward everyone outside the pews.

In 1935 he put the argument in print. In Orate Fratres, in an article called “The Liturgy the Basis of Social Regeneration“, he set out a syllogism: “Pius X tells us that the liturgy is the indispensable source of the true Christian Spirit; Pius XI says that the true Christian spirit is indispensable for social regeneration.” The conclusion followed in a line. The liturgy is the indispensable basis of social regeneration.

Then he acted on it. He criticized an economy that treated workers as parts. In Commonweal in 1938, he answered a writer who had called Christ the first preacher of capitalism: “What blasphemy! As if there were anything really Christian about our modern capitalism.“He supported employee-owned businesses and decentralized economies. He corresponded with the philosopher Mortimer Adler. According to Stanley Vishnewski, he visited the Catholic Worker and told the community about the Mystical Body of Christ’s relationship to society.

On 26 November 1938, in the infirmary at Saint John’s, Virgil Michel died of pneumonia and a streptococcus infection. He was 48.

Dorothy Day wrote the next year: “What a great loss we all suffered when this great priest died.“

The Turn

The monk who broke under the weight of a movement spent his last years arguing that the movement rested on something other than himself.

That reading is mine, and Michel might have resisted it. But the shape is plain enough for this blog post. The community he wanted would not be built from one person’s exhaustion. It had to come from what he kept pointing to: a people gathered by God around a table and then sent out. Today we ask what that kind of liturgy asks of the people who attend it.

(Let that sink in for a moment.)

Judge: The Church’s First Words About God

(Get out your New Testament and read: 1 Corinthians 10:16–17, then 12:12–27.)

Now think: Is the liturgy the Church’s primary theology? Aidan Kavanagh, a Benedictine of Saint Meinrad Archabbey, gave the Hale Memorial Lectures at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1981. They were published as On Liturgical Theology (Pueblo, 1984). He claims that liturgy is theologia prima, primary theology. Books, lectures, and propositions come second. They are the Church thinking about what it has already done. (This is key to understanding the work of historians with liturgy and the history of the Church)

Four consequences follow, and each bears on community.

1. Liturgy is meant to be done, not read, observed, or studied.

2. The worshipping assembly is not incidental to theology. It is one place where theology happens.

3. Faith is not a set of correct ideas that later produces worship. Right worship forms, displays, and sustains a way of life.

4. A church does not first agree and then express its agreement in liturgy. By doing the liturgy, a people learns to live as a re-created world.

This is also the old Benedictine instinct that Michel carried in Minnesota. His own formula, preserved by the American Catholic History podcast, ran lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi: how a people prays shapes what it believes, and what it believes shapes how it lives. The original formulation comes from St. Prosper of Aquitaine (5th century), a Christian writer and disciple of St. Augustine. In his work De Auctoritate Episcoporum (On the Authority of the Past Bishops of the Apostolic See). (If you haven’t figured out by now, I love being a public historian… Just saying :))

In his earlier handbook Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style (Pueblo, 1982), Kavanagh wanted liturgy to be “festive, ordered, aesthetic, canonical, eschatological and, above all, normal.” Teach the last word carefully. Normal does not mean casual or mediocre. It means that worship belongs to the ordinary, durable life of a people: eating and drinking, gathering and reconciling, listening and responding, grieving and hoping, receiving and giving.

“The liturgical assembly is less a gathering of individuals than a dynamic coordination of orders.”

One Bread, Many Hands

Thomas Merton makes the communal point harder than anyone. In “Christian Worship and Social Reform,“ he writes:

“Liturgical worship is not only a communal celebration but a celebration of community, of communion ‘‘in the Spirit.”

Merton goes on to say that liturgy unites people to Christ’s worship of the Father, that it expresses “the mystery of peace and unity in Christ“, and that “we who eat of one bread are one in Christ.“ That last phrase is Paul’s, from 1 Corinthians 10:17:

“ Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.“

The verse makes a theological claim and an ethical claim in one breath. To receive one bread while holding contempt, exploitation, exclusion, or indifference toward fellow members of Christ’s body is a contradiction, and the liturgy itself exposes it. Paul does the same thing a chapter later. In 1 Corinthians 12, the body has many members, none of them dispensable, and verse 26 says that when one member suffers, all suffer together.

Think of all the times we leave the Church after liturgy, and in our hearts hold contempt, exclusion, or indifference toward people because of what we see, hear, and experience in the news and on social media.

Merton adds a practical corollary. Liturgy, he says, “expresses a communal responsibility and reciprocity“ that should then show up in ordinary work. A parish that shares the altar and withholds fair wages from its own custodian has told two different stories, and the second is the one that teaches. The same applies for a diocese and the teachers in their schools.

Two False Escapes

Merton rejects two tempting simplifications, and you should be drawn to one or the other.

* The first escape says liturgy is sacred privacy. Worship withdraws from history into a protected hour, and the world can wait in the parking lot.

* The second escape says liturgy is worth only what it can measure. Worship becomes a rally, and its value is counted in hours volunteered and dollars raised.

Both escapes are understandable. The first protects the mystery. The second protects low-income people from pious indifference. The tradition answers that each one guards a real good and then loses the other. Liturgy is not reducible to activism, and it cannot stay indifferent to the concrete world. Merton insisted that active participation by the laity is vital “to manifest the struggle for peace and brotherhood in the great crises of the twentieth century.“ Mitchell, from the other side, said that Christian worship is inherently worldly.

The teaching sentence for this movement: the liturgy does not remove the Church from the world. It trains the Church to see the world truthfully, love it sacrificially, and serve it faithfully.

Act: What a Monday Looks Like

The goal of the Act movement in the Cardin tradition is not to make worship more entertaining or busier. It is to help the assembly enact more fully the communion it has received. Offer these five practices as invitations, and tell us to pick one.

1. Recover the assembly as the real subject of worship. Plan every liturgy around one question: What is this entire assembly called to do before God? Treat the congregation as a praying body, not an audience. Use silence on purpose, so that people can hear, consent, grieve, and receive. Make acclamations, responses, sung prayer, posture, and ritual movement intelligible and genuinely shared. Add ministries only when each one serves the prayer of the whole body, and attend to access so that children, elders, disabled persons, and newcomers can take part with dignity.

2. Make the intercessions local and concrete. The Prayer of the Faithful is where the assembly learns to carry the world before God. Shape it around the community’s actual wounds and joys. (For pastors, I think this is important. I am basing this on many conversations with my classmates who are ordained.) Name those affected by poverty, violence, displacement, illness, imprisonment, and ecological harm. Name public leaders and the institutions that shape the common good. Name the dead and the grieving, and name the divisions that need reconciliation. Mitchell’s conviction stands behind this: liturgy meets God’s action in the real world.

3. Tie the table to the parish. If the Eucharist forms one body, parish life should make the unity visible. Hold regular shared meals across differences of age, class, and politics- yes, politics- remember Jesus and the gospels are political, not partisan. Build a reliable pastoral-care network for illness, grief, job loss, caregiving, and isolation. Pair social ministries with mutual encounter, so that charity does not run in only one direction. Invite testimony from members whose lives show a community need. Examine whether the budget, hospitality, leadership, and building access say the same thing about the equal dignity of the baptized. Merton’s phrase common work is the test: do the parish’s economic habits resemble the reciprocity professed at the altar?

4. Practice reconciliation before symbolic peace. The sign of peace turns routine without practices of repair behind it. Build clear processes for conflict and harm. Build habits of listening across difference. Make room for confession, lament, apology, forgiveness, and restitution. Agree together never to use Christian language to cover hostility or inequality. The peace of Christ is not politeness. It is the costly reconciliation the Church receives and is commanded to practice.

5. Form liturgical leaders as theologians of the assembly. Following Kavanagh, those who preside, preach, sing, read, serve, decorate, welcome, and prepare the space are helping the Church enact its primary theology. Train them in Scripture and sacrament, in symbol, gesture, silence, movement, and space, and in how worship shapes social imagination. Prefer simplicity to constant novelty. Judge their work by whether the community’s prayer is truthful, hospitable, and mission-forming, not only by whether it ran smoothly.

The objection to answer. A parish leader will say, with some justice, that volunteers are scarce, that people are exhausted, and that five new practices are a recipe for burnout. Michel’s story gives the objection a hearing. He wrote more than a third of his magazine’s first volume himself, and within four years he was near exhaustion. Hence the rule for the exercise below: one change, sustained, shared among many hands.

My Suggestion For A Three-Week Practice

1. Week one, See. Observe one Eucharistic celebration. Note who acts, who is absent, how the assembly takes part, what the prayers name, and which social realities stay invisible.

2. Week two, Judge. Read 1 Corinthians 10:16–17 and 12:12–27 beside short excerpts from Merton, Mitchell, and Kavanagh. Ask what vision of Church appears there, and how your practice compares.

3. Week three, Act. Choose one change you can sustain for at least three months: a more locally grounded intercession, a hospitality practice, a listening circle, an accessible worship adjustment, a shared meal, or a ministry of reconciliation.

As The Old Saying Goes: Pray, Brethren

The question we began with, two days ago, was what turns a gathering into a community. The Christian answer is not common interests, shared culture, or emotional affinity. The Church becomes itself when God gathers diverse persons into Christ’s self-offering, gives them a common Word, forms them at one table, and sends them into a wounded world as agents of reconciliation.

The synthesis, for the index card.

1. Merton: liturgy is communion expressed as common work, mutual responsibility, and peace.

2. Mitchell: liturgy is God’s work, and a meeting with mystery that turns people toward God, neighbor, and world.

3. Kavanagh: liturgy is primary theology, the Church’s first enactment of what it believes and who it is.

The closing affirmation. In liturgy we do not merely attend a sacred event. We become, by grace, the people we are called to be: a body gathered from many lives, reconciled in Christ, nourished for common responsibility, and sent in peace for the life of the world.

The return to Collegeville. Go back to the magazine’s name. Orate Fratres is the priest’s invitation before the great prayer of thanksgiving, and it is never a monologue. The people have a line to speak in reply. They ask the Lord to accept the sacrifice from the priest’s hands, for the praise and glory of God’s name, for our good, and for the good of all the Church.

In 1930, the man who had named a movement for that invitation could not say it. The invitation did not fail. It never depended on one voice, and it never belonged to the one who issued it. The assembly was always going to answer, and in the end the movement he started carried on without his strength. The magazine still exists, under the name Worship. Read it.

That is the claim of these two evenings. The liturgy does not wait for the most capable person in the room. It waits for the people.

Questions to Carry Home

* Where does our community most clearly embody the communion it celebrates?

* Where is there a gap between our Eucharistic practice and our social life?

* What would change if we viewed the liturgy not as a service we attend but as God’s work that forms us into Christ’s body?

* How might our worship better reveal concern for those who are absent, marginalized, or wounded?

* What is one practice we can adopt so that “ Go in peace” becomes a real communal mission rather than a closing formula?

Let’s close this by asking you to say aloud the one practice you will try for three months.

Pray, brethren.

The people answer.

This will be two blog posts: one for today (Tuesday) and the other for Thursday.

The Monk Who Could Not Pray

In 1930, a Benedictine at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, was coming apart. His eyesight was failing. He had severe headaches and could not sleep. By one biographer’s account, he could not read, and he could not bring himself to celebrate Mass.

Four years earlier he had started a magazine. He called it Orate Fratres, the Latin words a priest speaks to the people before the great prayer of thanksgiving: Pray, brethren. The first issue appeared on the First Sunday of Advent 1926, which fell on 28 November. The monk wrote more than a third of the first volume himself. By 1929 the magazine reached readers in 26 countries.

He was baptized George Michel and born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 26 June 1890. He is remembered as Dom Virgil. He was ordained on 14 June 1916. In 1918, he finished a doctorate at the Catholic University of America, with a dissertation on the nineteenth-century American writer Orestes Brownson. From February 1924 to August 1925, he traveled in Europe on what was supposed to be a philosophy course. He began in Rome at Sant’Anselmo, under Joseph Gredt, and moved on to Louvain. Somewhere in those months, he spent long hours with the Belgian monk Lambert Beauduin, who taught that the liturgy belongs to the whole Body of Christ, not to the clergy alone. He came home convinced that liturgical renewal mattered, and that it mattered most in America.

The plan was to write. By 1930 the writing had left him near exhaustion.

His abbey sent him north, to the Chippewa people of northern Minnesota, to recover.

That is where the story stops for now.

The Turn

A man who had built a movement around praying together could not pray at all.

Hold that image, because it holds the difficulty of this blog post. Whatever lay behind his breakdown, the image carries a warning: a community is not produced by effort alone, however sincere, and the people who work hardest at it are not exempt. The question underneath every parish council meeting and every worship/liturgy committee is the same one.

Who makes this a community, and who is asked only to receive it?

Today we ask that question of ourselves, using a method Joseph Cardijn gave to the young workers of Belgium: see, judge, act. Two days from now, on Thursday, we will go back to the monk and find out what happened to him.

One Sentence on an Index Card

Take out an index card. Write and Finish one sentence: “When I hear the word liturgy, I most immediately think of ______.” Say it out loud; that is important. What we see and hear often are two different experiences. Think of them as one. Do any of your words say Mass, ritual, music, rules, tradition, obligation, beauty, boredom, community, sacraments? Do not correct any of them.

Then ask the question these two days will try to answer: “What makes a group of people gathered in one place into a genuine community?” Let that settle into your mind for a while.

Now name a concern you have in three sentences. Then, think about how a congregation can be physically assembled without becoming a community. Can a community have warmth and familiarity without worship transforming it? Can Liturgy address both? Does God gather a people, form them through Word and sacrament, and send them into the world with a shared vocation? Is the reward for attending Mass the coffee and donuts afterward?

The thesis, spoken once and slowly. Liturgy is not primarily something a community produces for God. God’s action in Christ and the Spirit gathers, reveals, reconciles, feeds, and sends a people into communion and mission. The assembly is not an audience, a voluntary association, or a collection of private spiritual consumers. It is the Body of Christ acting through a shared pattern of listening, responding, giving thanks, interceding, eating, remembering, and being sent.

See: What the Pews Actually Say

Cardijn taught his young workers to begin with what they could see, before anyone told them what it meant. So begin there. Before asking what liturgy should be, ask what worshipping communities actually experience and communicate.

What we often see. Read the list slowly and think about your gut reaction, not your brain.

1. People arrive as individuals and leave as individuals.

2. A small group does the liturgy while the congregation functions as an audience.

3. Participation shrinks to activity: more readers, more music, more movement, more announcements.

4. Some communities treat reverence as passivity, silence, distance, or clerical control. Others treat participation as spontaneity, informality, or constant speech. Both can miss the assembly.

5. Communion can sit comfortably beside social division, economic indifference, political hostility, racism, exclusion, or neglect of the vulnerable.

6. Worship becomes a refuge from the world instead of the place where the world’s wounds are named before God.

7. Parish life becomes program-centered rather than communion-centered: many activities, little mutual responsibility.

If you work in education, or sit on liturgy committees, ask these six questions of any congregation. Put these on a handout.

* Who is visibly participating, and who is missing, silent, marginalized, or unable to take part?

* Does the arrangement of the space say common belonging, hierarchy, spectatorship, or mutual recognition?

* What does the community’s silence reveal: attentive receptivity, awkwardness, exclusion, or prayer?

* Are the poor, the grieving, the ill, the alienated, and the socially invisible present in the assembly’s prayers and practices?

* Does the exchange of peace remain a gesture, or does it press on real estrangement?

* Does “Go in peace” shape how the community lives from Monday through Saturday?

Three Memories, Two Minutes of Silence

Give two minutes of silence. In your liturgy committee, class, or just a group of friends, ask them to recall one recent liturgy and write down three things:

1. One moment when they felt part of a praying body rather than an observer.

2. One moment when the liturgy felt fragmented, rushed, performative, or detached from ordinary life.

3. One communal reality, whether joy, conflict, grief, injustice, or need, that was either named or ignored.

Listen for the pattern. If the second and third answers describe the same gap, say so: the liturgy went on, and part of the community’s real life stayed outside the door.

The central observation. The problem is rarely that people do not understand the liturgy. The deeper problem is that communities struggle to understand themselves as a people called into communion by God.

Thomas Merton saw this in the early 1960s. In his essay “Christian Worship and Social Reform”, written between October 1962 and December 1963 and published long after in The Merton Seasonal, he calls liturgy a “common work”:

“Liturgy therefore expresses a communal responsibility and reciprocity which, after taking a religious form in the sacred cult, afterwards incarnates itself in work characterized by a similar responsibility and reciprocity.”

Thomas Merton

Worship cannot be detached from a congregation’s actual social habits. What the people do on Tuesday with each other’s labor, money, and attention is already a liturgy of its own, and Sunday either contradicts it or confirms it.

Judge: Whose Work Is This?

Now go and read: Acts 2:42–47, then Romans 12:1–2.— no commentary

The Greek word leitourgia can mean public service, a common work. Many Christians stop there and conclude that liturgy is the work of the people, a human project that a competent people can do well or badly. The tradition says something stronger and stranger.

First, liturgy is God’s work before it is ours. Nathan Mitchell, writing in Spirituality Today in March 1982, puts it flatly:

“liturgy is above all God’s work, God’s passionate activity on our behalf.”

Nathan would often say that in class. We were often too busy writing it down to actually reflect on what that meant.

For Mitchell, the work is reconciliation. “In the cross of Jesus, God acted to break the barriers of separation, to reconcile humankind, and to release us from the paralyzing hostility that bound us.” Christians assemble to answer that act with gratitude. They do not assemble to manufacture an experience. Let that sink in for a moment. I often flash back to grade school, going to Mass with my grandmother, who knelt the whole time praying her rosary; it was the 1950s. What question was she answering?

The consequence for community is plain, and it runs counter to most parish planning.

1. Shared preferences, similar demographics, and organizational efficiency do not create a Christian community.

2. Communion begins with God’s initiative. The assembly does not possess Christ. Christ gathers it.

3. Participation is more than self-expression. It is receptivity, consent, response, and conversion.

Here is the teaching sentence for the room or your liturgy committee: we do not come to liturgy chiefly to display that we are a community. We come so that God may make us into one.

Does that cause you any angst? Think about it first with your gut, then your heart, and then your mind. Any difference in the three?

The Second Vatican Council said the same thing in its own idiom. Sacrosanctum Concilium §7 teaches that Christ is present in the liturgy in the assembly itself, and §26 that liturgical services belong to the whole Church as the sacrament of unity. Paragraph 14 asks for the full, conscious, and active participation of all, and grounds the request, like the liturgy, not in a preference for busy congregations.

Let’s return to the monk for a moment. Whatever else his breakdown meant, it pictures what happens when one person tries to carry a communal work alone. The work is received before it is done.

A Meeting, Not a Code

Second, liturgy is a meeting with mystery, not a container of meanings.

In Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Orbis Books), Mitchell resists treating ritual as a code to decipher or a lesson to master. His reviewer Peter Fink, writing in America on 21 May 2007, summarizes the claim: “Ritual activity aims to take you deeply into the world around you to the point where the One who is its source is met.“ Mitchell begins, Fink reports, with “the sober recognition that we don’t know what we are doing.”

That admission changes the questions a community asks of its worship.

The limited question The fuller liturgical question

See The graph in my post on my webdsitr allthngscyberspace.com The left column describes a consumer. The right column describes a people.

The strongest objection deserves its full weight here. Someone will say that people come to worship tired, grieving, and short of time, and that asking them to give up the question “what did I get out of it?” is a luxury of the well-fed. That is a fair objection, and the tradition answers it from the other direction. The tired and the grieving are exactly the people who cannot produce a meeting with God by effort. They can only be met. A liturgy that lifts the burden of producing the experience is the best news a depleted person hears all week.

Mitchell also refuses the opposite mistake, in which worship becomes a place of retreat. In the same 1982 essay, he writes that “Christian worship is inherently worldly” and that “worship does not create an ‘alternative world’ to which we can retreat when ordinary life becomes intolerable.” The mystery we meet is already at work in the world’s beauty, suffering, and catastrophe.

What We Carry Out the Door

Take out that index card again and write three sentences on it.

1. A gathering becomes a community when God gathers it, not when it organizes itself.

2. The assembly is a body that receives before it acts.

3. The honest test of a liturgy is what kind of people it is making.

Now in your liturgy committees, or class or discussion groups, ask:

* Where in your own parish or group does the assembly act as a body, and where does it watch?

* Which of the seven things we often see describes your community most accurately? Which one would your community least like to admit?

* Mitchell says we do not know what we are doing. What changes if a community says that out loud?

The hinge.

Return to the monk, and give only the facts. A man who could not pray went north to recover, and by 1933 he was back at his abbey. In 1935 he published an argument about what the liturgy is for. The lecture two days from now begins there.

Ask yourself to answer the question the ‘See’ section left open: which social reality in my community is named in our prayers, and which is not?

More to come on Thursday.

A sidebar here:

I was greatly influenced by the Benedictines during college and graduate school. I read and studied what Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, wrote and what Aurelius Boberek, OSB, taught, and I developed a deep appreciation for Nathan Mitchell, in and out of class, over the years.

This text provides a further example of polemics between Jesus and the religious authorities of his day. According to most scholars, the polemic is more a reflection of tensions between Jewish and Christian groups at the time of writing, rather than those that might have existed at Jesus’ time, half a century earlier. A significant catalyst for this tension was the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, following a brief and ill-fated uprising against the occupying Roman forces. This destruction was accompanied by the expulsion of most of the Jewish population of Palestine and the effective demise of the Temple Priests as the central authority of Judaism. In the aftermath of this turmoil, the group known as the Pharisees came to the fore and sought to cleanse the religion of any perceived impurities. This amounted to a schism between the Jewish communities of the time and the fledgling Christian Churches, many of whom were, by then, populated by Gentiles as well as Jewish converts. It is likely, therefore, that this turmoil had a significant impact on the way in which the Pharisees were depicted in the Gospels and, in particular, where conflict between Jesus and his contemporaries was found. Viewed through the lens of the late first century conflict, the violence and treachery of the tenants in the parable, is somewhat indicative of how these communities, in conflict with one another, viewed their adversaries.

The parable presents a strong indictment, against the religious authorities of the time, not only for their failure to act as good stewards of God’s gifts but also for their rejection of the prophets who regularly called them to account. It also foreshadows Jesus’ own fate in the treatment of the landowner’s son (Mt 21:38-39). Beyond these indictment of the religious leaders, the parable asserts that all humankind are stewards of God’s gifts, charged with the responsibility of bearing fruit from that which we are given.

Gospel Text: Matthew 21:33-43

Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people, ‘Listen to another parable. There was a man, a landowner, who planted a vineyard; he fenced it round, dug a winepress in it and built a tower; then he leased it to tenants and went abroad. When vintage time drew near he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his servants, thrashed one, killed another and stoned a third. Next he sent some more servants, this time a larger number, and they dealt with them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them. “They will respect my son” he said. But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, “This is the heir. Come on, let us kill him and take over his inheritance.” So they seized him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ They answered, ‘He will bring those wretches to a wretched end and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will deliver the produce to him when the season arrives.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Have you never read in the scriptures:

It was the stone rejected by the builders

that became the keystone.

This was the Lord’s doing

and it is wonderful to see?

‘I tell you, then, that the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.’

See

How does the text depict the state of the vineyard at the time that it was leased to the tenants?

What motivation is shown, in the text, to explain the behaviour of the tenants?

What is the consequence of their actions for the tenants?

Judge

How does the background to the conflict between Christian and Jewish communities in the late first century inform our understanding of this text?

What is the significance of ancient historical religious conflicts for the way that we live today?

What responsibilities does this text place on us, as stewards of God’s gifts?

Act

What steps can we take to ensure that we use God’s gifts in way that bear fruit?

What actions can we take, within our own communities, to ensure that ancient conflicts do not lead to mistrust and division today?

In what ways can we help to influence broader social narratives to focus on our common humanity rather than sectarian divisions?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-20-1-16-2023-2/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/