Thomas Merton’s reflections on war begin inside the Christian tradition, not outside it. He accepted that Catholic teaching had long allowed for just war in principle, but he also believed that modern warfare had made it nearly impossible to apply those principles faithfully. For Merton, the question was not whether Christians could ever think morally about the use of force; it was whether twentieth-century weapons had rendered the old moral limits meaningless.

As Merton wrote in Peace in the Post-Christian Era:

“The duty of the Christian in this crisis is to strive with all his power and intelligence, with his faith, his hope in Christ, and love for God and man, to do the one task which God has imposed upon us in the world today. That task is to work for the total abolition of war.”

That conviction helps explain why Merton looked back to the early Church, and especially to Origen of Alexandria. To understand this connection, it is important to consider Origen’s context. Writing in his great defense of Christianity, Against Celsus (c. 248 AD), Origen declared that Christians “no longer take up the sword against nation, nor do we learn war anymore” — a deliberate echo of Isaiah 2:4 — because they had become “sons of peace” through Jesus Christ. Merton saw in Origen a Christianity shaped before empire, before the Church’s entanglement with political power, and before theology had to make its peace with armies. In that older witness, peace was not a private sentiment; it was woven into the Church’s very identity.

Origen was not alone in this witness. Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Cyprian of Carthage all stand within a broad early Christian tradition that consistently and strongly leaned away from violence and military service. Justin Martyr, writing around 155 AD, described Christians as people who had exchanged instruments of war for instruments of peace — swords into plowshares, in the spirit of the prophets. Clement of Alexandria said that believers are trained “not in war, but in peace.” Tertullian went further still, arguing in On the Crown (c. 211 AD) that Christ’s command to Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane — “Put away your sword” — symbolized the disarming not just of one apostle, but of Christian life as a whole. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage in the mid-third century, was equally forthright: he found it inconsistent that the world condemns private murder while calling mass killing in war a virtue.

The just war tradition arose when the Church came to inhabit a very different world. The conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312 AD and the Edict of Milan in 313 AD marked a dramatic shift, as Christianity moved from a persecuted minority faith to the empire's religion. With this new relationship to power, theologians — most profoundly Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century, and later Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth — wrestled seriously with how war might be restrained and governed by justice, rather than left to brute force and unchecked power. That development was historically understandable, even admirable in its intent. However, Merton remained deeply skeptical that just war reasoning could survive the nuclear age intact.

“The root of war is fear.” — New Seeds of Contemplation.

If war can no longer be limited to combatants, if civilian populations cannot be protected, and if nuclear exchange risks the annihilation of entire peoples, then the moral conditions that just war doctrine requires — proportionality, discrimination between combatants and innocents, a reasonable hope of success — cannot be met. In this new era, the logical foundation collapses. Merton did not reach this conclusion with despair, but with a clear-eyed sorrow that he believed the Gospel demanded.

For older Christians who grew up during the Cold War and lived through the anxieties of the nuclear standoff, Merton’s words resonate particularly. He was not a pacifist in a naïve or politically abstract sense. He was a monk who had thought long and hard about human nature, about sin, and about what the Cross actually means for how we live in the world. He understood the temptation to trust in weapons. He understood fear. And he understood that fear, not hatred, is usually where violence begins.

“We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.” — The Ascent to Truth.

This is the heart of what Merton wanted Christians to hear: that peace is not first a political program, but a spiritual condition. To move from outer arguments to personal challenge, he insisted it begins in the soul before it reaches the world. And it costs something.

“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.” — The Nonviolent Alternative.

Merton’s warning remains urgent because it calls the Church to recover its oldest instinct. The early Church did not begin with a theology of managed violence. It began with Christ, who refused the sword, absorbed the world’s violence upon the Cross, and rose to offer a peace the world cannot give. The first Christians understood themselves as a people formed by that event, summoned into a different kind of power: one rooted in love, in witness, and in the refusal to let fear and hatred have the final word.

For those of us who are older, who have seen wars come and go, who have buried friends and prayed for enemies, Merton offers not easy answers but a serious challenge. In moving from history to personal reflection, he asks whether we have allowed the Gospel to form our conscience on these matters as deeply as it has formed us on others. He asks, gently and persistently, whether we truly believe that Christ is our peace — and whether we are willing to live as though that is true.

“The Christian is and must be, by his very adoption as a son of God in Christ, a peacemaker.” — Seeds of Destruction.

That is not a political slogan. It is a baptismal claim. Drawing together his argument, Merton spent his life asking what it would look like to take it seriously.

What Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God didn’t quite predict — and why AI makes it so much more urgent.

Let’s be honest: American democracy has a confidence problem. Not just a political one, but a deeper, almost spiritual crisis of shared reality. We are living in a moment when millions of people can look at the same event and come away with completely different “facts”—and increasingly, that’s not an accident.

Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God details how a Christian Nationalist movement seeks to replace pluralism with theocratic authoritarianism. Her argument is strong, but she didn’t foresee AI, which doesn’t just accelerate this crisis—it fundamentally transforms it.

To navigate this complex territory, let’s turn to a framework borrowed from Catholic social thought: See. Judge. Act. This method guides us to observe reality, reflect deeply on it, and then determine appropriate actions. Transitioning from Stewart’s observations to a methodical approach, let’s apply it step by step.

See: The Digital Disintegration of Truth

We are in the middle of a mass exodus from shared reality — and shared reality is the precondition for democracy. You can’t govern together if you can’t agree on what’s actually happening.

Stewart’s book documents how this is deliberately engineered. Deep-pocketed donors fund a movement that uses religious language as a political weapon, sowing just enough confusion and grievance to make authoritarian “order” sound appealing. But here’s where AI enters the picture and changes everything.

The late media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” He meant that every technology reshapes our minds, not just our habits. Television didn’t just deliver news — it made politics visual and emotional. Social media didn’t just connect people — it made outrage the dominant currency of public life.

AI is the next, and most powerful, medium in that lineage. And it has two features that are particularly dangerous at this moment:

AI-driven algorithms intensify echo chambers, now tailoring content using psychological profiles. Stewart describes lies as a political tool—AI is now the most efficient infrastructure for spreading them.

AI can now generate convincing fake content of any kind, making reality itself unreliable. When truth becomes subjective, people withdraw to what feels satisfying—fertile ground for authoritarianism.

Judge: Three Thinkers Who Saw This Coming

Now for the harder work: what do our deepest moral and intellectual traditions actually say about this moment?

Mortimer Adler and the loss of logic. Adler, the great American philosopher and educator, believed that democracy is possible only when citizens engage in rational argument about the common good. That doesn’t mean everyone has to agree — it means everyone has to be willing to reason together. When AI-driven disinformation replaces argument with what we might call “outrage content,” the intellectual foundation of self-governance crumbles. We’re not just losing facts; we’re losing the habit of thinking together.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the cost of silence. Bonhoeffer, the German theologian executed by the Nazis for his resistance, warned against “cheap grace” — the comfortable religion that costs nothing and demands nothing. He also wrote with painful clarity about how ordinary people could be made into instruments of evil through what he called “folly” — not stupidity, but the willing surrender of independent judgment to a charismatic collective. He watched as religious language was co-opted by a cult of personality and used to justify atrocities. Stewart’s book documents the same dynamic in our own time. When the name of God is invoked to justify suppressing votes or demonizing neighbors, that is precisely the kind of idolatry Bonhoeffer died resisting.

Thomas Merton and the tyranny of technology. The Trappist monk and mystic Merton spent decades warning that modern people had become prisoners of their own machines — not physically, but spiritually. He argued that contemplative life, the capacity to simply be still and see clearly, was being colonized by the noise of technological progress. He might have called AI the ultimate fulfillment of that prophecy. When an algorithm is shaping your resentments, curating your enemies, and filling every quiet moment with stimulation, you lose what Merton called the monastic capacity to see the inherent dignity in other people. And that dignity — the recognition that your neighbor is fully human — is, in the end, the soul of democracy.

Having evaluated the challenge, we arrive at the question of action: What practical steps can we take in response? Here is where strategy must meet conviction.

Act: Money funds the movement; lies are its weapon; God is its shield, as Stewart argues. Despair isn’t an option. Here are four concrete responses.

1. Practice digital asceticism. Merton would recognize this immediately: reclaiming your attention is a political act. You don’t have to delete your accounts or move to a cabin in the woods. But deliberately stepping outside the algorithmic rage-cycle — reading long-form, sitting with complexity, choosing boredom over the dopamine hit of outrage — is a form of resistance. The algorithm needs your clicks. Starve it.

2. Rebuild the culture of reasoning. Adler was passionate about liberal education — not as a luxury, but as a democratic necessity. AI can generate “facts” on demand, but it cannot exercise judgment. It cannot evaluate why something matters or what it means. We need to teach the next generation how to spot a logical fallacy as easily as they spot a meme. Critical thinking isn’t just an academic skill; it’s civic infrastructure.

3. Demand moral courage from faith communities. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and every other community of faith face a choice right now: do they serve the powerful and profitable, or the marginalized and the truthful? Bonhoeffer’s example is instructive — and sobering. He didn’t survive his courage. But he was right. Communities of faith need to actively reject the nationalist label that has been draped over Christianity in particular and recover a gospel that begins with the poor, the stranger, and the enemy.

4. Treat AI as a regulated environment, not a neutral tool. McLuhan’s insight demands that we stop thinking of AI as just a fancy search engine. It is an environment — a powerful one that reshapes cognition at scale. That means we need real regulatory frameworks: mandatory transparency about training data, algorithmic auditing, and serious “proof of personhood” standards online so that synthetic content can be identified and labeled. The medium will destroy the message of freedom if we let it run unchecked.

A Final Thought

Democracy is not a machine that runs on its own. It’s a spiritual commitment — a daily choice to recognize your neighbor as someone whose voice matters as much as yours.

In a world saturated with money, lies, and weaponized religion, the antidotes might sound almost naive: humility (the willingness to be wrong), truth (the commitment to objective reality, even when it’s inconvenient), and love (the stubborn insistence that the person on the other side of the screen is fully human).

We must intentionally choose to be citizens every day. Engage in your community, question what you see, and act to protect democratic values in your daily life. Move beyond being just data and demand accountability from those shaping our information environments.

Remember, making this active, conscious choice every single day—despite the odds and the noise—is not just symbolic. It is the most radical and necessary political act of our era. Start today. Choose citizenship. The health of our democracy depends on it.

NB: This blog was inspired by Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God (2023) and the work of Mortimer Adler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Thomas Merton.

A Note on my blogs

When I write blogs, or keynotes, etc., I will, at the end, use Grammarly to correct my spelling and grammar, mainly because I am a product of that educational experiment back in the 1950s, when they thought Phonics was not necessary (Read Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (and I will add can’t write) became a national bestseller that shook the educational community.) So there is a whole group of us (Baby Boomers) nationwide who suffer today. So I use Grammarly because my wife, who is a retired English/Journalism teacher, says “Grammarly is a whole lot cheaper and less frustrating”, …just saying…😎

A reflection on the Prayer Vigil for Peace, St. Peter’s Basilica, April 11, 2026

In a world fractured by conflict, Pope Leo XIV’s prayer at the Vatican Vigil for Peace stood out for its clarity: “War divides; hope unites. Arrogance tramples others; love lifts them up. Idolatry blinds us; the living God enlightens.”

Crucially, the heart of Pope Leo XIV’s message is clear: the divisions that erupt in violence and war stem from a deep spiritual blindness. The Pope’s mandate is not about improved politics or information, but about conversion that addresses the core spiritual condition—idolatry displacing the living God. Every part of his call flows from this diagnosis, forming the central thesis of his vigil.

Using the See-Judge-Act method, we can delve deeper into the mechanics of our current discord and find a path forward.

1. See: The Blindness of Idolatry

We live in an era when information is instantaneous, yet understanding is rare. We see the “idolatry of self” manifest in our digital echo chambers, while the “idolatry of money” drives global policy. But Leo XIV pushes us beyond mere social critique: he names it a spiritual condition rooted in self-worship.

The philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” When our tools are designed to display power and monetize outrage, we become a society that sees the other as an obstacle rather than a neighbor. But in Leo XIV’s framework, the deeper problem is not the tool — it is the idol. When a person or a nation “has turned their back on the living God, making themselves and their own power a mute, blind, and deaf idol,” as the Pope put it, every relationship becomes a threat, and every disagreement becomes a war.

This is the blindness Leo XIV identified at the Vigil — not merely a failure of diplomacy or empathy, but a spiritual and moral cataract that keeps us from seeing the humanity behind enemy lines.

2. Judge: The Cost of Arrogance

To judge our situation, we must hold it up to the light of truth and ethics. War is not merely a political failure; it is a moral one, rooted in arrogance.

The Pope brought his predecessors into the room. He cited Saint John XXIII, who wrote in Pacem in Terris: “The benefits of peace will be felt everywhere, by individuals, by families, by nations, by the whole human race.” He then quoted Pius XII’s warning: “Nothing is lost by peace; everything may be lost by war.”

He also recalled Saint John Paul II, who, in 2003, reflected on surviving World War II and witnessing a continent in ruins. John Paul II addressed youth: “I have the duty to say to all young people, to those who are younger than I, who have not had this experience: No more war.” Leo XIV made that call his own.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from the heart of a world torn apart by the Third Reich’s ultimate arrogance, diagnosed the same root cause: the church and society that choose power over service produce a world unfit for the vulnerable to inhabit. We judge our current path unsustainable for the same reason Leo XIV does — it values the accumulation of influence over the distribution of love.

3. Act: Lifting Up Through Love

How do we move from the division of war to the unity of hope? Leo XIV was clear that action without conversion is merely a display of power.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who bridged the mystical East and the troubled West, saw that peace begins within. He wrote: “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It shall allow no bribes of self-interest. It shall be such as to invite the world to a new life.”

But Leo XIV did not stop with the interior life. He issued a direct, unambiguous call to the leaders of nations: “Stop! It is time for peace! Sit at the table of dialogue and mediation — not at the table where rearmament is planned, and deadly actions are decided!

The Pope also linked this call to what Pope Francis called the “architecture of peace” in Fratelli Tutti. Peace, Francis wrote, is built collectively: institution by institution, person by person. Alongside that, there must be an “art of peace that involves us all.” Leo XIV embraced both ideas.

To act, then, is to:

Reject the idols. Instead of pursuing wealth and status at others’ expense, choose to step away from them. Doing so is not about self-denial for its own sake but is essential to gaining clear vision and moral clarity.

Recognize each person’s place in the mosaic. As Leo XIV said, protecting peace “is not only the responsibility of rulers.”Each of us has a place in the mosaic. Peace advances “word by word, deed by deed, just as a rock is hollowed out drop by drop, or fabric woven stitch by stitch.”

Make love an action. Support grassroots peace initiatives, practice radical empathy in your daily interactions, and urge your leaders to choose diplomacy over dominance. Intentionally seek ways to elevate others and foster unity.

Enough. Enough. Enough.

Thus, the cry from the Vigil was not a single word but three — a deliberate escalation that moves from the interior to the political to the absolute: Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!

Notice the sequence. It begins not with politics but with the soul. War does not begin in foreign ministries or on battlefields; it begins when a person — or a nation — places itself at the center of the universe, in God’s place. The idolatry comes first. The display of power follows. The war is where it ends.

With the problem diagnosed and the cost weighed, the only remaining question is whether we will act in hope. As Pope Leo XIV said, we are already a risen people. This is not comfort for the complacent; it is a call to the courageous.

Hope unites. If spiritual blindness drives division and war, only conversion—personal and collective—can begin the work of unity. Let us put the Pope’s mandate into action today.

NB: The full text of Pope Leo XIV’s reflection at the Prayer Vigil for Peace (April 11, 2026) is available on the Vatican website: vatican.va

A Note on my blogs

When I write blogs, or keynotes, etc., I will, at the end, use Grammarly to correct my spelling and grammar, mainly because I am a product of that educational experiment back in the 1950s, when they thought Phonics was not necessary (Read Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (and I will add can’t write) became a national bestseller that shook the educational community.) So there is a whole group of us (Baby Boomers) nationwide who suffer today. So I use Grammarly because my wife, who is a retired English/Journalism teacher, says Grammarly is a whole lot cheaper and less frustrating than having her read my stuff, …just saying…😎

The first Sunday after the Feast of Easter is known as Divine Mercy Sunday. It comes with a focus on the forgiveness of God and calls upon followers to repent and seek forgiveness. The Gospel account, from the fourth Gospel, is set on two consecutive Sundays, the first is the evening of the day of the resurrection, the second, eight days later. The first scene finds the disciples in hiding for fear that they would suffer the same fate of Jesus, at the hands of the religious authorities. Jesus appears among them, despite the locked doors, indicating the risen Lord is not subject to the same physical constraints as the human Jesus. The presence of the risen Jesus brings an immediate sense of joy among the disciples. He greets them twice with the powerful words ‘Peace be with you’ before commissioning them and bestowing the Spirit upon them. The disciple Thomas, absent from the first scene and sceptical of reports of Jesus’ appearance is, subsequently present, eight days later when Jesus again greets the disciples with peace.

The notion of peace, repeated three times in Jesus’ greetings, is a central notion of Christianity. St Benedict, quoting from the Psalms, urged his community to ‘seek peace and pursue it’ RB Prol, PS 34:14. It has been a frequent theme of Christian writers throughout the centuries and has become a most urgent message from Popes of recent decades, as the capacity for warfare to destroy all of God’s creation has become so apparent. Pope Leo recently wrote “peace is a principle that guides and defines our choices” https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/peace/documents/20251208-messaggio-pace.html highlighting the importance action in pursuit of peace. Peace activists have regularly used the aphorism ‘what if peace is a verb’. Recently, Nigerian poet and spoken word artist Maryam Bukar Hassan popularized the concept of expressing peace as a verb in her 2025 performance ‘Peace is a Verb’. This concept of peace has much to offer today, forcing us to consider peace as an active step, a deliberate strategy and a purposeful plan.

Gospel Text: John 20:19-29

In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week, the doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, ‘Peace be with you’, and showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy when they saw the Lord, and he said to them again, ‘Peace be with you.

‘As the Father sent me,

so am I sending you.’

After saying this he breathed on them and said:

‘Receive the Holy Spirit.

For those whose sins you forgive,

they are forgiven;

for those whose sins you retain,

they are retained.’

Thomas, called the Twin, who was one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. When the disciples said, ‘We have seen the Lord’, he answered, ‘Unless I see the holes that the nails made in his hands and can put my finger into the holes they made, and unless I can put my hand into his side, I refuse to believe.’ Eight days later the disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them. The doors were closed, but Jesus came in and stood among them. ‘Peace be with you’ he said. Then he spoke to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here; look, here are my hands. Give me your hand; put it into my side. Doubt no longer but believe.’ Thomas replied, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him:

‘You believe because you can see me.

Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe.’

There were many other signs that Jesus worked and the disciples saw, but they are not recorded in this book. These are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life through his name.

See

How is the risen Jesus portrayed in this text?

What does the text say about belief, in the episode with Thomas?

When does the greeting of peace occur in the text?

Judge

What significance can be drawn from Jesus’ commissioning of the disciples and bestowing the Holy Spirit immediately after his greeting of peace?

How do we see the relationship between forgiveness and peace in our own lives?

How does the ‘motif’ of peace, in this text, speak to the current situation in our world?

Act

What steps can we take to bring peace into our own life situations?

What possibilities are within our spheres of influence to bring peace in to the lives of others?

How can we use our personal choices to further the cause of peace in our world?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/john-20-19-31-2024

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/

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/peace/documents/20251208-messaggio-pace.html

Starting with the Person

Everything in Catholic Social Teaching begins with a single, radical conviction: every human being — without exception — is made in the image of God. That’s not a platitude. It’s the foundation of the entire tradition. And it’s the first thing Christian nationalism puts at risk.

When a political movement — even one draped in Christian language — starts sorting people into more American and less American, into those whose religion earns them a seat at the table and those who must earn their place by conforming, it has already departed from the Gospel. Dignity isn’t conditional. It doesn’t depend on your faith, race, origin, or politics. When religion is used to rank people rather than to serve them, faith is being misused — full stop.

The Common Good Isn’t “Our Side Winning”

Catholic Social Teaching uses a phrase that sounds almost old-fashioned: the common good. But the idea is sharp and demanding. The common good isn’t the sum of individual interests, and it certainly isn’t the victory of one group dressed up as the good of the nation. It’s the set of conditions that allow all people and all communities to flourish — together.

Christian nationalism narrows that vision dramatically. It privileges one community’s understanding of what America should look like and quietly turns neighbors into outsiders. Catholic teaching insists that public life must be ordered toward justice and peace for everyone — not the domination of some by others, however righteously that domination is framed.

Solidarity: The Opposite of “Us vs. Them”

One of the most misunderstood words in Catholic Social Teaching is solidarity. It doesn’t just mean feeling sympathy for people who are struggling. It means recognizing that we are, in a deep and binding sense, responsible for one another. It means seeing the person across the political or cultural divide not as a threat but as a brother or sister.

Christian nationalism tends to run in exactly the opposite direction. It draws circles — insiders and outsiders, the faithful and the foreign — and builds its identity on those distinctions. Catholic Social Teaching pushes back hard: toward encounter, toward mutual responsibility, toward a love that doesn’t stop at the border of the familiar.

The people most likely to be excluded or scapegoated by nationalist movements are precisely the people solidarity requires us to stand with.

Religious Freedom Is for Everyone — or It’s for No One

Here’s something Catholics in America sometimes forget: the Church has extensive experience being on the outside of the dominant culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholics were the suspicious foreigners, the ones whose loyalty to Rome was considered incompatible with American citizenship. That history should make Catholics especially alert to the dangers of any movement that seeks to grant one faith tradition privileged status in law or public life.

Catholic Social Teaching defends religious freedom — not as a perk for the powerful, but as a fundamental human right. That freedom belongs to Christians, yes — but also to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, and everyone else. The moment a government begins favoring one religious tradition over others, religious freedom for all is in jeopardy. You cannot build a genuinely free society on a foundation of religious favoritism.

Power Is for Sharing, Not Seizing

Subsidiarity — another cornerstone of Catholic Social Teaching — holds that decisions should be made as close to the people affected as possible, with real respect for the dignity and agency of persons and communities. It’s about dispersing power, not concentrating it.

But subsidiarity is not a license for local majorities or religious blocs to impose their will on everyone else. And Christian nationalism, whatever its stated intentions, tends toward exactly that kind of imposition: the idea that a “godly” faction should hold the reins of power and steer the nation toward its particular vision of the good.

Catholic teaching favors genuine democratic participation — institutions that protect everyone's rights, accountability that runs in multiple directions, and a deep skepticism toward any movement that treats electoral or cultural power as something to be seized rather than shared.

The Gospel Test: See~Judge~Act

Underneath the political and philosophical arguments, there’s a simpler question — and it’s the one that cuts deepest.

Does this movement look like Jesus?

The Christ of the Gospels did not build a movement of religious triumphalism. He did not gather a coalition of the powerful to impose righteousness on the unwilling. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. He touched lepers. He stopped for the person everyone else had stepped around. He told his followers that whatever they did to “the least of these,” they did to him.

Any politics that forgets the poor, that excludes the stranger, that wraps cruelty or contempt in the flag of faith — that politics stands far from the heart of the Gospel. The question isn’t whether a movement uses Christian language. The question is whether it embodies Christian love.

So What Should Catholics Actually Do?

The answer isn’t panic or withdrawal. It’s fidelity — to the tradition, to the teaching, and to the person of Christ.

That means recommitting, in concrete and practical ways, to the dignity of every person, regardless of where they were born or what they believe. It means defending religious freedom not just for ourselves but for everyone, including those whose faith looks nothing like ours. It means resisting racism and nativism wherever they appear, including when they appear in our own communities. It means showing up for democratic life — voting, organizing, advocating — with a genuine commitment to justice for all rather than advantage for some. And it means practicing solidarity with those who are most at risk, most marginalized, most likely to be left out of the story we tell about who this country is for.

Christian faith is at its best when it serves the neighbor. It is at its worst when it seeks control.

Catholic Social Teaching has spent more than a century building an alternative vision: a public life shaped by dignity, solidarity, justice, and peace. That vision is more urgently needed now than ever.

Questions to Sit With

• Where is the line between healthy patriotism and the kind of nationalism Catholic Social Teaching warns against — and how do you know when you’ve crossed it?

• Whose flourishing does your political vision actually include? Who gets left out, and why?

• If religious freedom is a universal right, how should Catholics respond when the rights of minority religious communities — Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, or nonreligious — are threatened, even by Christians?

• What would it look like, in your own community, to practice solidarity with people who are most vulnerable to exclusion or scapegoating?

• Does the movement — any movement, including ones you sympathize with — pass the Gospel test? Does it look like Jesus?

• How does the Church’s own history of marginalization in America — the anti-Catholic prejudice of earlier centuries — shape how Catholics should respond to movements that seek to privilege one faith tradition over others today?

Why stillness is the key to understanding — and surviving — the age of AI

In the era of the Autonomous Revolution, we have been handed the most powerful cognitive tools in human history — and no instruction manual for our own minds. We’ve outsourced memory to the cloud, judgment to the algorithm, and attention to the feed. We equate “optimized” with “good,” and “automated” with “inevitable.”

But there is a radical, ancient discipline re-emerging precisely because it is so foreign to the world AI is building around us. It’s called Contemplative Resistance, and its central claim is this: you cannot think clearly about artificial intelligence if you cannot first think clearly at all. The most subversive act in the age of machine cognition is to reclaim your own.

The colonization of your judgment

Before we can evaluate AI, we must be honest about the conditions in which we encounter it. We do not approach these technologies as calm, sovereign thinkers. We arrive pre-shaped.

The dopamine loop doesn’t disappear when we open a chatbot — it accelerates. We ask AI for the answer before we’ve fully formed the question. The outrage economy trains us to react to AI headlines with fear or hype before a single independent thought is formed. And as Thomas Merton warned, the “false self” — that version of us built on status, speed, and social comparison — is precisely the self that most eagerly embraces whatever technology promises to make us faster, smarter, or more impressive to others.

When your attention is colonized, your capacity to evaluate AI is gone. You are not adopting tools — you are being adopted by them.

Contemplative Resistance names this for what it is: not progress, but a new form of idolatry. The algorithm is not neutral. It has interests. And if you cannot sit in silence long enough to hear your own mind, you will never be able to hear where the machine ends, and you begin.

Three guides for the age of machine intelligence

Three thinkers, writing decades apart, left us the tools we need now.

THE MONK

Merton

Interior distance creates the vantage point AI cannot give you: a self not flattered by its outputs.

THE MARTYR

Bonhoeffer

Grounded ethics cannot be automated. Cheap grace — like cheap AI assurance — costs everything.

THE PROPHET

McLuhan

The medium restructures consciousness. AI is not just a tool — it is reshaping what it means to think.

The interior distance — Merton and artificial clarity

Thomas Merton entered a monastery not to escape the world but to see it plainly. By dismantling his false self in silence, he gained the precision to critique nuclear war and systemic racism with a clarity that the noise-dwellers could never achieve. The lesson for AI is direct: the person who has never sat with their own uncertainty will be the easiest to convince by a confident language model. The machine produces fluency. Only you can produce judgment. Interior distance — the capacity to step back from the feed, the chatbot, the generated summary — is not a luxury. It is the minimum condition for thinking about AI at all.

The cost of discipleship — Bonhoeffer and automated ethics

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Hitler was not born in the streets; it was forged in the painful work of prayer. His warning against “cheap grace” — faith without cost, obedience without sacrifice — maps onto our moment with eerie precision. We now have access to AI systems that will generate an ethical framework, a mission statement, or a DEI policy in seconds. This is cheap grace for institutions. True ethical discernment cannot be automated because it requires a self willing to be wrong, to suffer consequences, to stand firm when standing firm costs something. No model has that skin in the game. You do.

The medium is the message — McLuhan and the restructured mind

Marshall McLuhan warned that our devices are not neutral carriers of content — they restructure the consciousness that uses them. He diagnosed the 2026 crisis fifty years early. Every AI system you use doesn’t just answer your questions; it shapes which questions feel worth asking. It habituates you to a certain rhythm of inquiry: fast, confident, resolved. The contemplative tradition has always known that wisdom lives in the unresolved — in the question held long enough to reveal its real shape. McLuhan’s warning is an invitation: use the tool, but protect the interior architecture it is quietly renovating.

A method for thinking about AI you can actually trust

Not a framework generated by AI — a rhythm practiced before you open the app.

1 See. Look past the headline, the demo, the viral thread. Who is actually affected by this technology — not in the use case the press release describes, but in the supply chain, the data set, the displaced workforce? Strip away your tribe’s talking points about AI (utopian or dystopian) and ask what is actually happening.
2 Discern. Bring what you see into stillness before you act on it. Ask honestly: Am I excited about this AI tool because it is genuinely good, or because it makes me feel smart? Am I afraid of this technology because I’ve assessed it, or because fear is the frame my feed has handed me? Strip the ego. The answer that remains is closer to the truth.
3 Act. Move from transformed understanding, not adrenaline. This means your AI adoption decisions, your policy positions, your purchasing choices about technology are slower to hype, slower to panic, and far more durable. Action rooted in discernment does not need to be revised every news cycle.

Why stillness makes you ungovernable by the machine

The forces that profit from your uncritical adoption of AI — and those that profit from your uncritical rejection of it — share a single requirement: that you remain reactive. Reactive people make predictable consumers, predictable voters, and predictable data points.

But you cannot reduce a person who has found their center. You cannot sell AI-generated authority to someone who has already learned to sit with genuine uncertainty. You cannot exhaust someone with urgency — “this model will change everything,” “AI will take your job,” “you must adopt this now” — when they act from a place that adrenaline cannot reach.

The contemplative tradition does not make you a Luddite. Merton was not afraid of the world. Bonhoeffer was not paralyzed by its evil. McLuhan was not a technophobe — he was technology’s most penetrating diagnostician. The stillness they practiced gave them not distance from the crisis but the capacity to engage it without being consumed by it.

That is exactly what the age of AI requires of you now.

Stop the scroll. Find the silence. Then, and only then, decide what the machine is for.

QUESTIONS TO SIT WITH

1. When was the last time you formed a complete opinion about an AI tool before you saw what others thought of it? What would it take to practice that more deliberately?

2. McLuhan argued that every medium shapes what we can think, not just what we think about. In what ways has your daily use of AI systems begun to change the questions you ask — not just the answers you receive?

3. Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace” was religion without cost. What is the equivalent for AI? What are we accepting too easily, and what would “costly” discernment about technology actually look like in your life?

4. Merton gained clarity by removing himself from noise — not permanently, but as a practice. What would a modern equivalent look like for you? Where is your monastery?

5. If AI systems are optimized to give you what you already want, how would you ever discover what you actually need? What disciplines protect that distinction?

6. I argue that stillness makes you “ungovernable.” But is there a version of contemplative withdrawal that becomes its own avoidance — a way of opting out of the difficult work of engaging AI’s real consequences for real people?

The deepest response to artificial intelligence is not the loudest.
It is the one rooted deep enough to last.

There’s a version of spirituality that looks like an escape hatch—a way to retreat from the chaos of the world into candles, silence, and personal peace. Thomas Merton spent his life arguing that this version is a fraud.

Merton was a Trappist monk who entered a Kentucky monastery in 1941 and remained there. Yet, from inside those walls, he became one of the most politically engaged Christian voices of the twentieth century—writing against nuclear war, racism, and the spiritual emptiness of modern consumerism. For Merton, the deeper you go into genuine prayer, the more you find yourself fiercely caring about the world outside.

That’s the insight at the heart of what we might call contemplative resistance theology, and it’s more relevant now than ever.

What Is “Contemplative Resistance Theology”?

The phrase “Contemplative Resistance” names the distinctive integration at the heart of Merton’s theology: the conviction that genuine contemplation — the deep, silent encounter with the living God — is not a retreat from the world’s suffering, but the very ground from which authentic resistance to injustice must arise. All of us have studied and read Merton, and at many times we have described Merton as representing “the beginning of an era of integration, in which mysticism and the social gospel were seen to stand or fall together”. For Merton, the seer must act. In Henri Nouwen’s classic formulation, “contemplation and action can never be separated. The seer acts”.

This integration is explicitly theological. Merton was not simply a politically engaged monk who happened to pray. He argued that without a deep interior life, activism risks becoming just another expression of the very violence it claims to oppose. His 1966 Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander warns against “total involvement in the intricacies of a movement,” however worthy. No matter how commendable, the logic of movements can cast blame on others while leaving the roots of violence within us unchallenged. True resistance, Merton insisted, must be born of a place within us that has been transformed by the love of God. This is what distinguishes Contemplative Resistance from mere political activism: it begins not in strategy or outrage but in prayer, silence, and the painful, liberating encounter with our own complicity in what we oppose.

The Problem with the False Self

One of Merton’s most enduring contributions is his distinction between the false self and the true self.

The false self is our fear-driven persona—eager for approval, status, and control. It chases validation, aligns with tribes, and reacts impulsively. Most of us inhabit this place, often unknowingly.

The true self is who we are in God—rooted in love, liberated from compulsion, and open to real connection. Contemplative prayer strips away the false self and lets the true self emerge.

This matters for justice because Merton saw social sin as rooted in the human heart. Racism, greed, and indifference grow from people shaped by fear and illusion. Broken systems can’t heal without personal transformation.

Prayer That Gets Its Hands Dirty

The Gospel has never asked Christians to be neutral. Mercy, justice, truth-telling, and peacemaking aren’t add-ons to faith—they’re central to it. Merton’s contemplative life didn’t lead him away from the world’s suffering; it led him deeper into it.

Catholic social teaching captures what Merton lived: the dignity of every person, solidarity, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor. These are not theories but demands on how we live, vote, consume, speak, and pray.

For Merton, resistance means rejecting anything that dehumanizes—whether obvious injustices or subtle habits of indifference or superficial living.

Three Scriptural Anchors

Merton’s vision is deeply rooted in Scripture, even when he doesn’t explicitly cite chapter and verse.

Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Here, stillness means clarity, not passivity. Without stillness, we can’t see reality clearly.

Romans 12:2 urges, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” This calls for discernment—a refusal to let modern trends dictate our inner lives.

Micah 6:8 proclaims, “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” Merton kept justice, mercy, humility—and prayer and action—in tension. Action without prayer breeds self-righteousness; prayer without action becomes indulgence. (think of what we see with Christian Nationalism today)

A Simple Pattern: See, Discern, Act

Merton never wrote a self-help book, but his spirituality suggests a practical rhythm for Christian life that’s worth taking seriously.

See. Pay attention to reality as it actually is, not as you wish it were or as your preferred media portrays it. Notice suffering. Notice your own reactions. Notice what you’ve been trained to look away from.

Discern. Pose sincere questions. Where am I acting from fear, ego, or illusion? Where do Gospel values influence me, and where do consumerism or anxiety shape me? Compare your desires with Scripture and the Church’s social teaching.

Act. Select one concrete act of justice, mercy, or peace. Not a grand gesture, but one authentic action that builds communion, upholds dignity, or rejects contempt.

This pattern matters especially now. We live in an environment engineered to keep us reactive and distracted. The pressures of social media, the pace of the news cycle, and the invitation to perform for an audience all work against inner freedom. Contemplation, among other things, resists this.

What This Actually Looks Like

Living as a contemplative resistance theologian is not a dramatic posture. It is mostly quiet and often unremarkable. It may include:

• Refusing to use dehumanizing language about political opponents, even when it’s satisfying

• Practicing a form of prayer that genuinely softens your heart toward people who are suffering

• Supporting works of justice — locally, concretely, not just virtually

• Examining how your technology habits, media diet, and consumption patterns are shaping your soul

• Building enough interior silence into your life to actually hear what God might be asking of you

• Choosing truth with charity, even when the culture rewards neither

None of these actions will draw attention. That is essential to their meaning.

Why Merton Still Matters

Merton died in 1968, accidentally electrocuted while attending a conference in Bangkok. He never saw the current pace of change, but his questions still matter.

How do we stay human in an inhuman moment? How do we resist injustice without becoming what we oppose? How do we act in the world while remaining rooted in something deeper than the world?

Merton’s answer was not a program but a practice: go deeper into God, and you’ll go deeper into love—for family, neighbors, the poor, and even enemies. The greatest revolution, he believed, starts in the heart.

If the Church wants to be a faithful witness in troubled times—and she must—she needs people formed in this way: those who pray deeply, discern wisely, and act courageously. Not because it’s strategic, but because it’s holy.

That’s the path of the contemplative resistance theologian. Merton walked it. The invitation is still open.

Interested in exploring Merton further? His books New Seeds of Contemplation and The Seven Storey Mountain *are excellent starting points. For grounding in Catholic social teaching, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church is available free from the Vatican.

Introduction

What did Fr Joseph Cardijn teach young workers about the resurrection of Jesus? It is obvious from published talks he gave to young workers that he believed that Jesus was raised to life three days after he was crucified. But as is consistent in his teaching, his focus was on putting this belief into action.

He made the following reference to the resurrection in a talk he gave on the mystery of vocation at a congress for YCW, held in Godinne, Belgium, in 1949:

The working class will rise again, because it has apostles who, with and by Christ, by their sufferings and prayers, and even by their death on the Cross, merit with Christ this resurrection of working-class youth and of the working class of the world.

Cardijn focused on the three truths of faith, experience and method. His teaching about the truth of faith emphasises the eternal and temporal destinies of each and every worker. These destinies are not separate and distinct; they co-exist to the extent that those who are baptised seek to know and do God’s Will.

The Gospel

It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark, when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb and came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved. ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb’ she said ‘and we don’t know where they have put him.’

So Peter set out with the other disciple to go to the tomb. They ran together, but the other disciple, running faster than Peter, reached the tomb first; he bent down and saw the linen cloths lying on the ground, but did not go in. Simon Peter who was following now came up, went right into the tomb, saw the linen cloths on the ground, and also the cloth that had been over his head; this was not with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in; he saw and he believed. Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead. (John 20:1-9)

The Enquiry

See

• Observe what happens in this scene. Who is involved? What grabs your attention in this scene? Why?

• Find out about the burial customs in Jewish culture during the time of Jesus. What prevented Jesus’ family and friends from fully preparing his body for burial after he was crucified? Why did Mary Magdalene go to the tomb on Sunday morning before sunrise?

• Why was Jesus’ resurrection so controversial in his time? How has the empty tomb impacted the followers of Jesus and the world? Why do so many people today take no notice of the resurrection of Jesus?

Judge

• What do you make of this event in Jesus’ life?

• Why wasn’t his resurrection announced with a fanfare and great public celebration?

• How is your life today shaped by the resurrection of Jesus?

Act

• So, having reflected on this story, what part are you being called to play in God’s transformation of the world?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to the change God is calling you to make?

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

Image Source: Wannapik Studio (Creator), Palm Sunday Parishioners Carry Palms, Wannapik Studio, CC BY 3.0

Worth reading: The mystery of vocation, Part 3 of “The young worker faces life”: The 1949 Godinne Lecture Series. In Challenge to Action: Forming Leaders for Transformation. You can download a copy of this book from here.

Parishes across the country will welcome new members into the faith and into the church as an organization on Saturday evening.

A friend and colleague who is now retired from the pastorate. Fr. Charles Niblick, DMin, continues as a senior priest in the parish where he served for twenty years; he prefers to call himself a “pastor emeritus”. I just smile when he tells me that. He writes a weekly column for the parish bulletin, called Words For The Wind. At the liturgy I usually attend on weekends, you see many people reading the bulletin before Mass begins. I usually glance over and see what pages they are reading, and so many are reading his page.

What is really good about the way he framed the entire article this Sunday is that it is applicable to cradle catholics as well as converts. What Catholic Church is the American catholic sitting in a pew looking for? My gosh, just look around at some of our parishes and ask what version of Catholicism is being promoted?

Think about where Catholic Social Teachings weave into the article, and what role AI is playing in the conversation about the medium being the message in our world today, and in relation to religion.

I often wonder what Thomas Merton, Joseph Cardijn, Louis Putz CSC, and Albert Nolan would think about the American Catholic Church.

Wfw Easter

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In the summer of 1966, Thomas Merton sat in his hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He wrote something that, with uncomfortable precision, seems to describe American Christianity today.

Merton was not envisioning the future, but diagnosing his present. The illness he named—the fusion of religious identity with national pride, the intoxication of power wrapped in sacred language, and the slow death of faith under ideology—remains and has only intensified.

“Christian Nationalism” was barely used in Merton’s day. Yet, he understood the deeper issue of Christianity serving political dominance and cultural exclusion—seeing through such illusions after years of contemplation.

“The great danger is the absurd overestimation of the moral perfection, the wisdom, and the providential mission of one’s own people, nation, or class.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, CONJECTURES OF A GUILTY BYSTANDER

That sentence was written sixty years ago. Sit with it for a moment.

What We’re Actually Talking About

Christian Nationalism is not simply the belief that faith should inform public life. That, in itself, is an ancient and legitimate theological conversation. Rather, Christian Nationalism is a specific ideology that claims America was founded as, and must remain, a Christian nation. At its core, Christian Nationalism seeks to privilege Christian identity over all others. It fuses religious devotion with political loyalty and uses Christian symbols—such as the cross—as banners for achieving political power. In this context,

Christian Nationalism refers to the belief that citizenship or belonging in America requires conformity to a particular vision of Christianity, often at the expense of pluralism or equality for people of other faiths or none.

Its roots run deep: from the Spanish conquistadors with their swords and crosses, to Manifest Destiny, theological support for slavery and Jim Crow, and most recently, Christian symbols joining Confederate flags at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This recurring dynamic is neither new nor an aberration. It has always been fueled by what Merton called collective illusion—the shared fantasy that God favors our side, sanctifies national power, and opposes those who disturb our dominance.

“The biggest problem is the immense power of collective illusion. The danger is that people begin to love the lie.”~THOMAS MERTON, DISPUTED QUESTIONS

The Monk Who Saw Through the Myth

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) is usually remembered as a mystic — a man who sought silence, who explored Eastern meditation, who wrote lyrically about the inner life. And he was all of that. But he was also one of the sharpest social critics of the twentieth century, a man for whom contemplation and confrontation were inseparable.

From inside his monastery, Merton wrote passionately against the Vietnam War at a time when many American churches were blessing it. He corresponded with Martin Luther King Jr. and declared racism a spiritual emergency. He saw nuclear weapons as an expression of a civilization that had lost its soul. And he identified, with remarkable precision, the spiritual mechanism that made all of these atrocities possible: the construction of what he called the “false self” — not just in individuals, but in nations.

Nations, Merton argued, create false selves as individuals do. They build myths of divine election, project evil onto enemies, dress power as God’s will, and draw even good people into uncritical worship of the nation.

“He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, CONTEMPLATION IN A WORLD OF ACTION

This is not abstract theology. Instead, it serves as a warning and a diagnosis—aimed squarely at the activist, the reformer, and the well-meaning Christian who has not done the interior work. You cannot bring clarity to the world if you have not first found it within yourself.

Fear Is the Root of the Problem

What drives Christian Nationalism? Merton would say: fear of change, fear of the other, and fear of losing security—all of which can become religiously charged.

“The root of war is fear... the fact that I am afraid of you, afraid that you have what I lack, afraid that you threaten what I possess. The only way to end war is to conquer the fear within.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION

Fear-driven religion is tribal religion. It draws tight circles of belonging and labels everyone outside as a threat. It mistakes security for faithfulness and dominance for blessing. It forgets — or never really knew — the God who told Abraham to leave what was familiar and go to a land he did not know; the God whose son said, “My kingdom is not of this world”; the God who, at Pentecost, spoke every language at once, not just one.

The Gospel has always been cosmopolitan, porous, and boundary-breaking. Christian Nationalism is none of these things. It is, at its core, a failure of theological nerve — a retreat from the terrifying openness of genuine faith into the manageable certainties of group identity.

What Authentic Faith Looks Like

Merton did not leave us only with the diagnosis. He also pointed toward the cure — and it begins, characteristically, not with politics but with prayer.

Authentic faith, for Merton, is contemplative before it is anything else. It involves the radical willingness to be still, to let go of the ego’s agenda — including the collective ego of the nation or the tribe — and to encounter reality as it actually is, not as we have been told it should be. This is what he called “pure prayer,” and it is not a luxury for monks. It is the foundation of any genuinely prophetic public life.

From that contemplative center, the faithful person becomes capable of what Merton called “nonviolent resistance” — not just as a tactic but as a way of being. You resist domination not by seizing power but by refusing to be hypnotized by it. You resist the lie not by shouting louder than the liars but by inhabiting a different kind of truth.

“The contemplative is not one who has fiery visions... but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION

This vision of faithful action — rooted in interior transformation, expressed in nonviolent witness, oriented toward universal rather than tribal love — is Merton’s gift to our moment. It is not naive. It is not quietist. It is, in fact, the most demanding form of resistance.

A Word About the Church’s Responsibility

Merton deeply believed in the Church, and precisely because he did, he was willing to criticize it. He understood that institutions, including religious ones, are always tempted to trade prophetic witness for social acceptance, to become chaplains to power rather than voices crying in the wilderness.

When the Church baptizes nationalism — when it blesses military adventures, sanctifies racial hierarchies, or provides sacred cover for the powerful — it does not merely fail politically. It fails theologically. It becomes, in Merton’s resonant phrase, “too much at home in the world, too tame, too predictable.” It loses the very thing that makes it the Church.

But the reverse is also possible. Communities of faith that refuse the seduction of power, that stand with those on the margins, that practice the hard discipline of welcoming the stranger — these are signs that the Gospel is still alive and working in the world. They are, as Merton might say, little islands of clarity in a sea of collective illusion.

So how do we move from insight to action?

The method is deceptively simple: see what is actually happening, without flinching and without illusion. Judge it in the light of genuine faith, not tribal loyalty. Then act — not from rage or ideology, but from the deep place in yourself that Merton spent his life trying to reach.

These three verbs were given to us by Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest who developed them for young workers navigating the injustices of the early twentieth century. They have since become a cornerstone of Catholic social teaching and liberation theology worldwide. And they are, we believe, exactly the right framework for encountering this moment.

STEP ONE

See

Name what is actually happening — in our churches, our media, our politics — without denial or deflection.

STEP TWO

Judge

Bring the light of the Gospel and Merton’s contemplative theology into dialogue with what we observe.

STEP THREE

Act

Move from awareness and discernment to concrete, grounded, nonviolent action — personal and communal.

The process is uncomfortable and demands clear vision, honest judgment, and faithful action. It takes courage to confront our own communities and assumptions, and to act differently when the culture flows in another direction. Yet, as Merton shows, this is the vital path forward—a way beyond illusion and fear, toward truth and transformative faith. The times demand this clarity and courage from us now.

Merton would not have called it courage, exactly. He would have called it contemplation in action. The kind of action that is possible when you have stopped being afraid of the truth.

One Last Word from Merton

There is a prayer that Thomas Merton wrote near the end of his life that, for many readers, has become the most honest thing they have ever heard a religious person say. It begins: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me.”

It is not a prayer of certainty. It is a prayer of trust — trust that the desire to be faithful, even in the dark, even without a map, is itself a kind of faithfulness. Merton did not promise that following God would be clear, comfortable, or politically advantageous. He promised only that it would be true.

In a moment when so many are trading truth for power, comfort for clarity, and love for loyalty to the tribe, that prayer strikes us as exactly what we need.

“We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves. And we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.” ~ THOMAS MERTON, THE SIGN OF JONAS

Reclaiming the Revolution

A Christian Response to Modern Nationalism — Drawing on Merton, Adler, and Bonhoeffer

See · Judge · Act

On what organizers have called No Kings Day — a national day of protest against executive overreach — marches are echoing across the country. The headlines, the political rhetoric, and the blueprints laid out in documents such as Project 2025 all point toward a troubling surge in Christian Nationalism: an ideology that trades the radical, subversive love of Jesus for the familiar, oppressive allure of empire, hierarchy, and patriarchy.

If you are wrestling with how to remain faithful to the Gospel in an era of cruelty and division, two books worth serious attention are The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg. This text has shaped a generation of historical Christian thinkers. Also gaining attention is a book I have just finished reading: Jesus and Justice: Organizing for God’s Reign on Earth Then and Now, by Crossan and pastoral organizer Michael Okinczyc-Cruz, which applies that scholarship to congregational action, think Praxis. For faith leaders or group facilitators, these books can serve as foundational texts for small group study or adult education sessions.

Leaders might introduce The Last Week as a Lenten reading, paired with weekly discussions on how Jesus’s final days challenge and inspire Gospel-centered resistance. Jesus and Justice provides practical frameworks for organizing action; a community could assign chapters and gather to reflect on how its historical insights translate into concrete steps toward Justice in its own context. Including guided questions or brief summaries before each meeting can help participants connect the material directly to daily discipleship and community engagement.

Jesus and Justice: Organizing for God’s Reign on Earth Then and Now ~ John Dominic Crossan & Michael Okinczyc-Cruz — This book does not merely offer history; it offers an urgent confrontation with the present. Crossan’s historical-Jesus scholarship is wedded here to practical community organizing, asking what discipleship looks like in the streets, not only in the sanctuary.

To navigate our current moment, I have applied the classic See–Judge–Act pastoral framework — developed by Belgian Joseph Cardinal Cardijn in the early twentieth century and adopted widely in liberation theology and Catholic Social Teaching — drawing inspiration from three giants of Christian intellectual and spiritual life: Thomas Merton, Mortimer Adler, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

SEE

Awakening to Reality

Drawing from Thomas Merton (1915–1968) — Trappist monk, poet, and social critic — taught that contemplation is never an escape from the world but a deeper penetration of it. He was not content to sit in the monastery while Birmingham burned. The first movement of faithful action, he insisted, is seeing: we cannot transform a world we refuse to look at honestly.

In New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), Merton wrote that the person who has found their true self in God no longer needs to project fear onto others or defend an identity built on domination. “The person who is not afraid,” he argued, “is free to love.” This is directly subversive of nationalism’s core anxiety — the need to secure identity through exclusion. Merton’s later work, particularly Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966), applied this mystical anthropology to political commentary with remarkable sharpness.

When we look at the rise of Christian Nationalism — through the voices of those who advocate for its power structures — we encounter a disturbing mirror of the Roman Imperial cult that executed Jesus. It is a system built on exclusion and domination.

Merton’s insight is that genuine awakening dissolves the illusion that people can be sorted into the worthy and the unworthy, allies and enemies, citizens and threats.

To see clearly today is to recognize that the early titles given to Jesus — Son of God, Savior, Lord, Prince of Peace, bringer of Good News — were not invented by Christians. They were titles of Caesar Augustus, stamped on coins and carved into imperial stone. The early Gospel writers applied them to a peasant carpenter from Galilee as a deliberate act of political counter-proclamation. Christian Nationalism, in co-opting the Gospel to serve national power, inverts this original subversive meaning entirely.

“If I had a message to contemplatives, it is… be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man, for it is the image of God.” ~ Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable, 1966

JUDGE

The Discipline of Understanding

Drawing from Mortimer Adler (1902–2001) — philosopher, author, educator, and architect of the Great Books of the Western World curriculum — championed what he called the “great conversation”: the ongoing, demanding encounter with the best thinking humanity has produced across centuries. Adler was not naive about power; he understood that ideas have consequences, and that sloppy reading produces sloppy citizens.

Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940, revised 1972), one of my favorites, remains one of the finest manuals for critical engagement ever written. He distinguished between reading for information and reading for understanding. To “judge,” in Adler’s sense, is to ask not merely what a text says, but whether it is true, consistent, and complete. This is precisely the discipline required when encountering political theology: we must read the Gospels as rigorously as we read any manifesto — and hold each accountable to the same standard of coherence and evidence.

We must ask honestly: Does the message of current political movements align with the historical Jesus, who challenged the imperial power structures of his day? Crossan’s decades of historical-Jesus scholarship — grounded in archaeology, social history, and textual criticism — demonstrate that Jesus operated within a specific first-century Jewish peasant context of Roman colonial violence. He was not apolitical; he was directly counter-political.

Adler would push us further: examine the premises. Christian Nationalism typically rests on the premise that the United States has a unique covenant relationship with God analogous to biblical Israel — a claim with no exegetical grounding in the New Testament and a history deeply entangled with the displacement of Indigenous peoples and the justification of slavery. Rigorously judged, it does not hold.

“The person who says they know what they think but cannot express it usually does not know what they think.”— Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book, 1940

(A Note on Attribution: It is worth noting that the See–Judge–Act method originates with Joseph Cardijn (1882–1967), the Belgian priest who founded the Young Christian Workers movement, and was formally embraced in Catholic Social Teaching. The framework was developed extensively in Latin American liberation theology by figures such as Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Medellín Conference (1968). Acknowledging these roots deepens rather than diminishes the conversation.)

ACT

The Cost of Discipleship

Drawing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) — Lutheran pastor, theologian, and conspirator against Hitler — did not write about resistance from a comfortable distance. He wrote from prison, awaiting execution. His witness is among the most costly in Christian history, and his warning about “cheap grace” is among its most clarifying concepts.

The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Bonhoeffer defined cheap grace as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession… grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.” Costly grace, by contrast, is “the treasure hidden in the field” — worth everything, demanding everything, transforming everything. It is grace that calls us to follow, not merely to believe.

Crucially, Bonhoeffer’s later writing in Letters and Papers from Prison (1953, posthumous) gestures toward a “religionless Christianity” — a faith stripped of its collusion with power and cultural privilege, available to all precisely because it serves the vulnerable rather than the comfortable. This is the Bonhoeffer most relevant to our current crisis.

Christian Nationalism is a form of cheap grace — it wraps imperial ambition in sacred language, asks nothing of the powerful, and extracts everything from the vulnerable. It offers belonging without the cross, identity without kenosis (self-emptying), and nation without the Kingdom.

Bonhoeffer’s life insists that faithfulness has a cost. He did not arrive at resistance easily — he wrestled deeply with pacifism, with Romans 13, with the limits of Christian political engagement. His ultimate choices were anguished, not triumphalist. That honesty is itself instructive: faithful action in dark times is rarely clean or simple.

What does costly discipleship look like in practice? Drawing on the Crossan/Okinczyc-Cruz framework and the broader tradition of nonviolent organizing, it includes:

- Hosting educational forums or book discussions on topics like Christian Nationalism and Gospel-centered resistance, creating space for honest conversation and critical engagement.

- Organizing service projects that connect the congregation directly with marginalized communities in your area, making concrete the call to solidarity and Justice.

- Facilitating letter-writing or advocacy campaigns on local justice issues, inviting members to raise their voices as citizens informed by faith.

- Establishing a justice and peace working group within your congregation to coordinate ongoing action, prayer, and learning.

- Partnering with other faith communities to build networks of support and accountability for sustained nonviolent action.

Embracing Principled Nonviolence. Following the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Romero, Dolores Huerta, and the broader nonviolent resistance movement, our resistance must be rooted in love — including for those we oppose. This is not passivity; it is the most demanding form of engagement.

The Path Forward

The life of the historical Jesus is a revolutionary story — and it has been buried before. The institutional church buried it under Constantine. European colonialism buried it under conquest. Christian Nationalism is burying it again, this time under flags and electoral maps.

The work of reclamation is not nostalgic; it is urgent. Merton teaches us to see without flinching. Adler teaches us to judge without sentimentality. Bonhoeffer teaches us to act without counting the cost. Together, they form a complete posture for faithfulness in a dangerous time.

We are not called to build an earthly kingdom or empire of power. We are called to be agents of what the Gospels call the Basileia tou Theou, the Reign of God. This Reign is a vision of radical equality before the law and before each other, nonviolent resistance to systems of domination, and transformative love that refuses to sort human beings by their usefulness to power. In our contemporary context, this means connecting faith with real justice issues unfolding in our own neighborhoods and communities. Whether confronting the impacts of discriminatory policing and immigration enforcement, advocating for fair housing, responding to the struggles of the unhoused, or supporting those harmed by unjust labor practices, the call of the Reign of God asks us to discern how Gospel values can directly address the divisions and injustices we see around us. By relating Jesus’ message to tangible concerns, faith communities can make discipleship visible and relevant amid the challenges of their local context.

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

That is the revolution worth reclaiming—and it begins with you. Take this vision into your community, speak up for Justice, and embody these values where you live and work. The time to reclaim the radical message of the Gospels is now.

Stand up. Organize. Act.

Start the Conversation in Your Community

Are you part of a local congregation, study group, or faith community? A structured discussion guide, drawing on Jesus and Justice, the See–Judge–Act framework, and the insights of Merton, Adler, and Bonhoeffer, can help your group engage these questions with both intellectual honesty and pastoral care.

Introduction

One of my New Year resolutions is to write a novel of sorts, featuring a meeting between St Francis of Assisi and three friars (St Bonaventure, Blessed John Duns Scotus and St Maximilian Kolbe). The topic of their conversation is the Blessed Virgin Mary and what each believed and taught about her.

Guiding my research and writing is a statement taken from a Church document that was written after the second session of the Synod on Synodality:

Listening to the Holy Spirit, welcoming the testimony of Scripture and reading the signs of the times in faith, She [the Church] can harmonise differences as an expression of the inexhaustible richness of the mystery of Christ.

Cardinal Joseph Cardijn intended that his Review of Life method (See, Judge, Act) be used by young workers who were seeking to understand how to act in a way that deepened their faith and transformed lives, including their own.

The four verbs found in the statement can be used in this Gospel Enquiry: “listen”, “welcome” (seek unity), “read” (the signs of the times in faith) – Cardijn always began his enquiries with the Truth of Faith as his bedrock – and “harmonise”.

The Gospel

When they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them,

‘Go into the village facing you, and immediately you will find an ass tied,and a colt with her: untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, “The Lord has need of them,” and he will send them immediately.’

This took place to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet, saying, ‘Tell the daughter of Sion, Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass.’

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the ass and the colt, and put their garments on them, and he sat thereon.

Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him shouted,

‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!’

And when he entered Jerusalem, all the city was stirred, saying, ‘Who is this?’

And the crowds said, ‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.’ (Matthew 21:1-11)

The Enquiry

See

• Summarise what happens in this Gospel scene. Put yourself in the story, even in just a small part of it, and describe what you see and hear. Are you aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit?

• There are some contrasting responses to the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. Which response is closest to how you respond to Jesus? Are there palm fronds in your life that you wave as he enters? Or is his entry a source of puzzlement to you?

• Why did people welcome Jesus to Jerusalem whereas others seemed to not know him? Do you have the same view of Jesus that they had? Or has the passage of time sharpened or dulled your senses and your faith?

Judge

• What do you make of this event in Jesus’ life? Do you act spontaneously when you become aware of his presence in your life?

• Is the public demonstration of your faith in Jesus an ideal that you aspire to have?

• How do the words and actions of Jesus fit with the description of the Church on mission as listening, welcoming, reading and harmonizing? How does he accomplish these in your life?

Act

• So, having reflected on this story, what part are you being called to play in God’s transformation of the world?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to the change God is calling you to make?

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

Image Source: Wannapik Studio (Creator), Palm Sunday Parishioners Carry Palms, Wannapik Studio, CC BY 3.0

Worth reading: How to be a synodal Church on mission? Five perspectives for theological exploration in view of the Second Session of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops

Who Can Afford to Be Catholic?

When tuition at our own schools rivals the cost of college, we must ask: have we lost the soul of Catholic education?

Catholic Social Commentary ~ A See–Judge–Act Reflection

SEE

What is actually happening in Catholic schools today? Look honestly at the data, the tuition, and the enrollment.

JUDGE

What does our faith demand of us? Measure reality against the Gospel and the example of our founders.

ACT

What must change? Concrete steps that individuals, parishes, and institutions must take right now.

Now SEE and OBSERVE

There is a question that many Catholics quietly carry but rarely voice aloud: Do our schools still belong to all of us? Walk into a Catholic high school in most American cities today, and you will find excellent teachers, vibrant faith communities, fine athletic programs — and a tuition bill that runs anywhere from $12,000 to $25,000 per year, per child. In some markets, it climbs higher still.

This is not a rumor or a perception problem. It is the lived reality of millions of Catholic families who have done the math and concluded, however painfully, that a Catholic education is simply out of reach. The price of a single year at many Catholic high schools now rivals that of a year at a state university. For families with two or three school-age children, the arithmetic becomes impossible.

$15K–$25K

Average annual tuition at Catholic high schools in major U.S. metropolitan areas is approaching the cost of many state universities.

25%

Decline in Catholic school enrollment over the past two decades, as affordability and school closures have accelerated.

The families who are priced out are often not wealthy. They are nurses, teachers, tradespeople — the very working and middle-class families that Catholic schools were built to serve. They believe in the faith. They want that formation for their children. The price tag tells them no.

JUDGE and DISCERN

What Would St. Ignatius Say?

To answer the question of what should be, we need only look to who built these institutions and why. When St. Ignatius of Loyola established the first Jesuit schools and colleges in the sixteenth century, he laid down a founding principle so radical it bears repeating plainly: no tuition fees. None. His insistence was deliberate and theological — education was a work of God, and therefore the poor must be able to sit beside the rich in the same classroom without shame, without barrier, without the indignity of being told they could not afford to learn.

The poor must be able to participate with the rich. That was not a footnote in Ignatian spirituality — it was the founding premise.

THE SPIRIT OF JESUIT EDUCATION, 16TH CENTURY

This was not naïve charity. It was a vision of education as a universal good — a common inheritance, not a commodity. The Society of Jesus funded their schools through endowments, benefactors, and the labor of the Jesuits themselves, precisely so that the schoolhouse door would never become a financial checkpoint.

Now consider the distance between that founding vision and where we stand today. The question is not whether individual Catholic schools are doing good work — many are. The question is: what does the price structure of our entire system reveal about our actual commitments? And the honest answer is troubling. We have allowed the economics of prestige and operating costs to quietly override the charism of accessibility. We have turned institutions built for the common good into institutions that, in practice, serve the privileged.

A Sign of Hope from Notre Dame and even public universities. Will Catholic Grade Schools and High Schools follow the example?

A PROPHETIC EXAMPLE

The University of Notre Dame’s “Pathways” Initiative

The University of Notre Dame has announced that, beginning in the 2026–27 academic year, it will extend free tuition to families earning less than $150,000 annually. This initiative represents a significant shift—Notre Dame is making a deliberate institutional choice to remove financial barriers for lower- and middle-income families, directly addressing accessibility concerns in Catholic education.

Families earning under $150,000/year — zero tuition

The following year: Families earning under $200,000/year — full tuition covered

Families earning under $60,000/year — tuition, fees, housing, and food covered through need-based aid

Notre Dame’s “Pathways to Notre Dame” program is named with intention. The pathway was always supposed to exist. The university is rebuilding it.

Notre Dame’s decision goes beyond generosity. It is a major Catholic institution realigning its financial approach to match its mission of accessibility. By doing so, Notre Dame proves that Catholic institutions with sufficient resources can prioritize access over financial barriers when they choose to. This example invites all other Catholic schools and universities to consider whether they have the resolve to take similar action.

Just last month, Texas A&M — the largest public university in the country — made a similar announcement, expanding its free tuition for students whose families make less than $100,000. Yale University did the same in January.

The University of Chicago waives tuition for students who are the first in their families to attend college or who come from families earning under $125,000. Students from families earning less than $60,000 a year will have tuition, fees, and standard room and meals covered.

MIT, Columbia University, Stanford University, and Duke University are just some other schools with similar policies.

The See–Judge framework demands that we sit with the discomfort of the gap between what Ignatius envisioned and what we have built. That discomfort is not a counsel of despair. It is an invitation to conversion.

ACT

What Must Change, and we must start at the grade school and high school levels. This means a new vision of education for Catholic dioceses: Innovate-Educate-Collaborate.

Naming the problem is not enough. The See–Judge–Act methodology — itself a gift of Catholic social thought, developed in the tradition of the Young Christian Workers movement — demands that reflection move toward concrete action. So what does action look like?

Vouchers are not the end solution. Partisan politics is woven into the voucher program in many states and school districts. History has taught us where these patterns eventually lead.

For Catholic school leadership, it means making access a non-negotiable strategic priority, not a line item that gets trimmed when budgets are tight. It means pursuing endowments aggressively, as Notre Dame has done, so that student support is structurally guaranteed and not dependent on year-to-year fundraising. It means asking honestly: if Ignatius walked through our doors today, would he recognize what we have built?

Dioceses and bishops: Act now to build collaborative funding across schools, so stronger schools support those in lower-income parishes. Immediately halt school closures in underserved neighborhoods. Establish oversight teams this year to reverse consolidation trends and bring resources to where they are most needed.

Catholic parents and alumni: Recognize that your education was made possible by others’ sacrifices. Step forward—form alumni giving circles or commit to recurring donations. Start with your next financial planning session; help ensure today’s students have the same opportunities you did.

For all Catholics, it means refusing to treat tuition prices as simply the inevitable result of market forces — as if the mission of Catholic education were indistinguishable from that of an elite prep school.

The mission is different. The price structure must eventually reflect that difference.

“I have come to think that care of the soul requires a high degree of resistance to the culture around us, simply because that culture is dedicated to values that have no concern for the soul.” ~ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Be A Mensch. Act for the Greater Good. Think Eudaimonia

A reflection on standing together in a fractured world: Thinking of the Lazarus Story and the Beatitudes.

SEE

The world as it is

We live in a time of deep fractures — political, cultural, and even spiritual. Loneliness has become an epidemic. Despite our constant connection through technology, many people still feel profoundly unseen and unheard. When tragedy strikes — in our neighborhoods, our nation, or across the globe — we often mourn privately, each person isolated in their own grief.

And yet, if we look carefully, we can also see something else: moments when people come together with remarkable tenderness. Neighbors bring food to the bereaved. Strangers marching side by side for justice. Communities sending aid to those they have never met. These moments remind us that mourning was never meant to be solitary. It is something we are called to share.

JUDGE

What faith reveals

Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes shed light on this truth:

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” — Matthew 5:4

Notice how this promise is not singular. It is those who mourn; they will be comforted. The grammar itself in the Greek-speaking community spells this out. Jesus invites us to see mourning not as private despair, but as shared compassion — a communal act rather than a solitary burden.

We see this lived out vividly in the story of Lazarus. When he died, think about that story as you heard it last Sunday; it was not just one family’s sorrow. Friends gathered. Neighbors came to offer comfort. And Jesus himself entered that circle of grief — not as a detached miracle worker, but as one who cried alongside others. Think about it, Jesus cried! Why did Jesus cry? His tears were not only for Lazarus; they were shed with an entire community in pain. And in that act of shared mourning, resurrection became possible.

The Beatitudes, then, are not simply promises of personal reward. They are invitations to solidarity — to help build a world where no one suffers alone, and where comfort rises from community rather than descending from above.

ACT

What we can do

To live in solidarity today means turning shared mourning into shared action. That might look like this:

Listen deeply to those who suffer, rather than rushing to offer quick fixes or slogans. YOUR Presence is often more powerful than advice or words.

Build communities of accompaniment — in parishes, neighborhoods, workplaces, and online spaces — where people feel safe bringing both their grief and their hope.

Stand with those whose mourning is ignored: refugees, people with low incomes, victims of violence, and those who have lost their dignity through systemic injustice.

When we act in solidarity, we embody the Beatitudes from the inside out — blessings rooted in WE, not just I. Our mourning becomes the soil in which compassion grows.

Our shared compassion becomes the place where divine comfort takes root.

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

1 When was the last time you allowed someone else into your grief, rather than carrying it alone? What made that feel safe — or difficult?

2 Who in your community is mourning in ways that go unacknowledged — and what would it look like to step into that circle with them?

3 The Beatitudes are written in the plural. How does reading them as a community, rather than a personal promise, change their meaning for you?

4 Where is the line between genuine solidarity and simply feeling bad from a safe distance — and how do we cross it?

24 March and the Argentine Dirty War Through Catholic Social Teaching

See–Judge–Act Method

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As a Historian, We See ~ Discern, and We ACT!

Argentina’s National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice (Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia), observed each 24th of March, is more than a political commemoration — it is a profoundly moral act. It marks the anniversary of the 1976 military coup, the beginning of what Argentines call the Dirty War (Guerra Sucia), and it invites people of faith everywhere to reckon honestly with history.

This reflection of mine, uses the See–Judge–Act method, the foundational pastoral approach of Catholic Social Teaching. Developed in the 1920s by Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn, founder of the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement, See–Judge–Act was formally incorporated into the Church’s social teaching by Pope John XXIII in his 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra (¶236). It asks believers first to observe reality clearly, then to evaluate what they see in light of Gospel values and Church teaching, and finally to commit to concrete moral action. The key here is MORAL ACTION. Pope Francis — himself Argentine — continued to draw on this method throughout his pontificate. We see Pope Leo XIV doing the same.

SEE (the historical record), JUDGE (the principles of Catholic Social Teaching), and ACT (the demands those principles place on conscience today).

SEE — What Happened

The Coup of 24 March, 1976

On 24 March, 1976, a military junta led by Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Brigadier General Orlando Ramón Agosti overthrew the constitutional government of President Isabel Perón. The junta named itself the National Reorganization Process (Proceso de Reorganización Nacional). Congress was suspended, political parties were banned, civil rights were curtailed, and free-market economic policies were introduced.

The coup had been planned since at least October 1975. Declassified U.S. government documents, released beginning in the late 1990s under pressure from Argentine human rights groups, confirm that American officials — including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — had advance knowledge of the coup and privately assured junta leaders of U.S. support. Kissinger urged the generals to eliminate their opponents quickly, before international outcry over human rights abuses could grow.

The junta was not the first authoritarian interruption in Argentine history — the country had experienced military coups in 1930, 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, and 1975 — but it would prove the most violent.

(Sources: National Security Archive, George Washington University (nsarchive.gwu.edu); Wikipedia: 1976 Argentine coup d’état; Dirty War — Britannica)

The Dirty War: Scale, Methods, and Victims

The junta launched a systematic campaign of state terror that it called the Dirty War. Its targets were not limited to armed guerrilla groups such as the Montoneros or the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP). Repression extended to trade unionists, university students, professors, journalists, artists, lawyers, clergy, and the relatives of those already disappeared.

The official truth commission (CONADEP) formally documented 8,961 forced disappearances, while acknowledging the actual number was certainly higher. Human rights organizations consistently place the total at approximately 30,000. Approximately 30% of the disappeared were women. As many as 500 newborns and young children were taken from imprisoned mothers — who were kept alive until they gave birth and then killed — and given, with their identities erased, to military families and regime supporters.

At least 340 clandestine detention centers operated across the country, the most notorious being the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, where an estimated 3,000 people were killed. Victims were subjected to systematic torture. In the regime’s most infamous practice, drugged prisoners were loaded onto military aircraft and dropped alive into the Río de la Plata or the South Atlantic Ocean — what became known as death flights.

The dictatorship had support not only from sectors of the military but from parts of civil society, business interests, and, shamefully, elements within the Catholic Church hierarchy itself. A Catholic priest and former police chaplain, Father Christian von Wernich, was convicted of participating in the torture of political prisoners and sentenced to life in prison in 2007.

Sources: Holocaust Museum Houston; CONADEP, Nunca Más (1984); Wikipedia: National Reorganization Process; Britannica: Dirty War

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

Beginning in April 1977 — barely a year after the coup, at the height of the repression — a group of fourteen mothers whose children had been disappeared gathered for the first time at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, directly in front of the Casa Rosada presidential palace. The initiative came from Azucena Villaflor de De Vincenti, who urged the mothers to act collectively rather than alone.

Because the military regime had suspended the constitutional right of assembly, police would order anyone who stopped to move on. The mothers responded by walking in circles, around and around the central Pirámide de Mayo. Their movement was literally born of a police prohibition. What began as fourteen women became hundreds, then thousands.

They wore white headscarves — originally fashioned from their children’s cloth diapers — embroidered with the names of the disappeared. They carried photographs. The regime dismissed them as las locas, the madwomen, believing motherhood would protect them from repression. It did not. In December 1977, Azucena Villaflor herself was kidnapped, tortured, and killed — her body dumped from a death flight into the sea. She was later identified through DNA analysis, and her ashes were interred in the Plaza de Mayo.

Two French nuns who supported the movement, Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, were also disappeared and killed. Several other founding members were abducted. But the Mothers refused to stop. Their Thursday marches continued every week for thirty years.

The Mothers also helped form a related group, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo), dedicated specifically to finding children who had been stolen and given to military families. As of 2017, the Grandmothers had recovered their 127th grandchild through DNA testing.

Sources: Wikipedia: Mothers of Plaza de Mayo; Gariwo.net: Azucena Villaflor biography; CIPDH–UNESCO; Buenos Aires Herald; openDemocracy

The Return to Democracy and the Pursuit of Justice

By the early 1980s, the combination of economic collapse, domestic resistance, and the junta’s catastrophic military defeat in the Falklands War (1982) brought the dictatorship to an end. Raúl Alfonsín was democratically elected and took office on December 10, 1983.

Alfonsín immediately created the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), chaired by the writer Ernesto Sábato. Over nine months, CONADEP took testimony from survivors, relatives, and witnesses; inspected clandestine detention centers; and documented the systematic nature of the crimes. Its report, Nunca Más (Never Again), was published in November 1984 and became an immediate bestseller — 190,000 copies sold in its first four months alone. It was translated into English, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Portuguese.

The Nunca Más report became the evidentiary foundation for the landmark 1985 Trial of the Juntas, in which five former generals and admirals were convicted of crimes against humanity — an unprecedented accountability moment in global transitional justice. Videla and Massera received life sentences.

Argentina’s path to justice was not linear. President Carlos Menem issued pardons in 1989 and 1990 that freed those convicted. But in 2003, Argentina’s Congress repealed the amnesty laws as unconstitutional, a decision affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2005. Prosecutions resumed. By the mid-2010s, federal courts had issued hundreds of convictions for crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship. Videla died in prison in 2013.

The Nunca Más report and Argentina’s transitional justice process are widely considered pioneering models for truth commissions worldwide.

Sources: Wikipedia: CONADEP; U.S. Institute of Peace: Truth Commission Argentina; ICTJ Briefing: Criminal Prosecutions in Argentina; Leuven Transitional Justice Blog

A Note on Numbers

The exact number of the disappeared remains contested. CONADEP’s official figure is 8,961 verified cases, with the commission explicitly noting that the true number was higher. Human rights organizations, including the Mothers and Grandmothers, consistently cite 30,000 — a figure based on broader evidence and estimates. This dispute is not merely academic: Argentina’s current vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has publicly challenged the 30,000 figure as part of a broader political effort to revise the historical narrative of the dictatorship. The Mothers and many scholars see such revisionism as a second attack on the disappeared — an attempt to diminish the scale of what was done.

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JUDGE — Reading History Through Catholic Social Teaching

Catholic Social Teaching (CST) is the body of moral and social doctrine developed by the Church over more than a century, from Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) to the present. It is grounded in Scripture and the natural law tradition, and it addresses the social, economic, and political conditions of human life. What follows applies five of its core principles to the history of 24 March.

1. The Dignity of the Human Person

The foundational principle of all Catholic Social Teaching is that every human being, made in the image and likeness of God (imago Dei), possesses an inherent dignity that no state, ideology, or utilitarian calculation can override. This dignity is not earned; it cannot be revoked.

A regime that ‘disappears’ its people does more than kill them. It attempts to erase them from language, from record, from history. Torture, secret detention, death flights, and the theft of infants are not merely crimes against persons — they are assaults on the divine image in creation. The deliberate destruction of identity — giving stolen babies new names, new families, new histories — represents a particularly radical violation of this principle.

To remember the disappeared is therefore a theological act: an insistence that no power can erase the image of God from a human face.

2. Solidarity

Solidarity, as articulated especially in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), is not sentiment but a moral commitment: the recognition that we are responsible for and to one another across all divisions of class, nationality, and history.

During the Cold War, the United States government actively supported the Argentine junta. Declassified documents show that Plan Condor — a coordinated assassination program linking the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay — was organized with U.S. assistance. Secretary of State Kissinger privately assured the junta of full American support. Only when President Jimmy Carter took office in January 1977 did the U.S. begin to condition its support on human rights improvements.

Solidarity does not permit the response: ‘That was their tragedy, not ours.’ It demands instead: ‘We are implicated in one another’s history.’ For American Catholics in particular, March 24 is not simply a foreign commemoration. It is an invitation to a national examination of conscience.

3. The Preferential Option for the Poor and Vulnerable

Catholic Social Teaching, drawing on the prophetic tradition and the Gospels, insists that a society’s moral quality is measured by how it treats those who are weakest and least powerful. This is not a partisan preference but a hermeneutical principle: God’s perspective in history is often found among the poor and the marginalized.

Those who disappeared in Argentina were overwhelmingly students, workers, trade union leaders, journalists, teachers, and human rights lawyers — those who dared to challenge injustice. Some were clergy, including priests and nuns who worked in poor communities. Many were young. Authoritarian systems, in Argentina and elsewhere, consistently target the vulnerable first: those who organize, those who question, those who bear witness.

The question this principle poses is not only historical. It asks: Who today is being socially ‘disappeared’ — whose suffering is rendered invisible, whose voices are systematically silenced or ignored?

4. Subsidiarity and the Abuse of State Power

Subsidiarity holds that decisions and authority should be exercised at the most local level capable of addressing a problem effectively, and that higher authorities should support — not supplant — lower ones. Its corollary is a firm warning against the idolatry of state power.

The Argentine junta systematically dismantled civil society: banning political parties, abolishing trade unions, imposing press censorship, and replacing the rule of law with the rule of fear. The state did not serve the person; it consumed the person. It made human beings expendable in the name of national security.

Catholic Social Teaching reminds us that authority exists to serve human dignity, not to dominate it. When a state claims absolute sovereignty over conscience, life, and identity, it has become not merely corrupt but idolatrous. Democracy is not self-sustaining: it depends on a moral culture of truth, participation, and subsidiarity.

5. The Right to Truth and Justice

Argentina’s transitional justice process — the CONADEP commission, the Nunca Más report, and the subsequent trials — embodies something deeply biblical: justice that heals rather than merely punishes. The Hebrew concept of tzedakah(righteousness/justice) and the restoration theology of prophets like Ezekiel point toward a justice that repairs the social fabric torn by violence and lies.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, many of whom entered activism with no prior political experience, understood this intuitively. Their march was not primarily a demand for vengeance. It was a demand for truth — for acknowledgment, for naming, for presence. Their circular march around the pyramid enacted liturgically what they believed morally: that the disappeared were not absent. They were present wherever someone refused to cooperate with the lie.

Memory is sacramental — an outward sign of inward repentance. Truth-telling itself becomes an act of restoration.

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ACT — Demands on Conscience Today

The See–Judge–Act method does not conclude with analysis. It demands movement — a change in disposition, practice, or commitment. What does the history of 24 March ask of us?

A Reflection in the Voice of Thomas Merton

The following is a meditation written in the spirit of Thomas Merton (1915–1968), the Trappist monk, writer, and social critic, whose contemplative theology consistently connected inner transformation with the struggle for justice.

We live in an age that mistakes forgetting for peace. But forgetting is not peace. Forgetting is anesthesia.

The disappeared of Argentina were not only taken from their homes; they were taken from language, from record, from history. Silence became a second burial.

And yet the mothers walked. They walked in circles in the plaza, carrying photographs like icons. They became contemplatives in public space — practitioners of what I would call a dangerous prayer: the refusal to cooperate with lies.

The modern state is capable of immense violence — but even more capable of abstraction. It can make suffering invisible, turning sons and daughters into statistics, turning persons into threats, and turning the image of God into a security problem.

The United States is not outside this story. No nation is innocent in a world organized around fear and power. When security becomes absolute, the human person becomes expendable. This is the temptation not of monsters but of ordinary bureaucrats, ordinary officials, ordinary believers who said nothing.

The root of political violence is spiritual emptiness — the loss of reverence for the sacredness of every human face.

The work of remembrance is contemplative. It means standing before history without illusion — refusing both hatred and amnesia. To say Nunca Más is not only a political slogan. It is a vow of conscience:

I will not allow my comfort to depend on someone else’s erasure.

I will not let fear silence truth.

I will not call cruelty necessary.

The disappeared are not absent. They are present wherever we choose truth over denial.

And the question before every nation — Argentina, America, Ours ~ is not only ‘What happened then?’

Think: What forms of disappearance are we tolerating now? And who among us is willing to walk in circles until the truth is named?

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Concrete Steps for Reflection and Action

The See–Judge–Act method calls for concrete commitments. Here are some possibilities:

• Learn: Read the Nunca Más report, or the English translation published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1986). Follow the ongoing work of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (abuelas.org.ar).

• Pray: On March 24 and throughout the year, pray by name for the disappeared, and for the mothers and grandmothers who refused to let them be forgotten.

• Examine national conscience: Engage honestly with the history of U.S. involvement in Latin American dictatorships using resources such as the National Security Archive (nsarchive.gwu.edu).

• Apply the question locally: Ask who in your own community is rendered invisible — whose suffering goes unnamed, whose humanity is denied by systems of power.

• Support transitional justice: Advocate for truth commissions, human rights documentation, and the right of victims’ families to know what happened to their loved ones.

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My Principal Sources and Your Further Reading~I tried to make the sources easily accessible because I believe the patterns of history recur across all societies.

Be A Mensch. Act for the Greater Good. Think Eudaimonia

Argentina’s Dirty War — Encyclopaedia Britannica (britannica.com/event/Dirty-War-Argentina)

National Reorganization Process — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reorganization_Process)

1976 Argentine Coup d’État — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Argentine_coup_d’état)

Mothers of Plaza de Mayo — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_Plaza_de_Mayo)

The March of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo — CIPDH–UNESCO (cipdh.gob.ar)

Azucena Villaflor biography — Gariwo (en.gariwo.net)

Argentina’s Military Coup — What the U.S. Knew — National Security Archive (nsarchive.gwu.edu)

Truth, Justice and Declassification — The Conversation (theconversation.com)

Argentina, 1976–1983 — Holocaust Museum Houston (hmh.org)

CONADEP / Nunca Más — Wikipedia; U.S. Institute of Peace (usip.org)

Criminal Prosecutions in Argentina — ICTJ Briefing (ictj.org)

35th Anniversary of Nunca Más — Leuven Transitional Justice Blog (law.kuleuven.be)

On Anniversary of 1976 Coup — Christian Science Monitor (csmonitor.com, March 24, 2024)

See, Judge, Act — Cardijn Community International (cardijn.info); Caritas (grassroots.caritas.eu)

Mater et Magistra, ¶236 — Pope John XXIII (1961)

Sollicitudo Rei Socialis — Pope John Paul II (1987)

See, Judge, Act: Catholic Social Teaching and Service Learning — Erin Brigham (Anselm Academic) (One of my favorites, along with others )

Begin to read the writings of Thomas Merton. For more information on Thomas Merton, visit merton.org

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Characterised by errors of geography and continuity, the Johannine account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead is a somewhat peculiar text. Many commentators suggest that it was a later addition, by a scribe unfamiliar with the geography of Jerusalem and its surrounds, as well as the narrative sequence of the fourth Gospel. The event of raising Lazarus from the dead is referred to as a ‘sign’ rather than a ‘miracle’ by the author. It is the last of seven such ‘signs’ found in John’s Gospel. The others are: the wedding at Cana - changing water into wine (2:1–11), healing the official’s son (4:46–54), healing the paralytic at Bethesda (5:1–15), feeding the 5,000 (6:5–14), walking on water (6:16–24) and healing the man born blind (9:1–7)

The text wrestles with the concept of resurrection, drawing together three strands. First, the Jewish expectation that the dead will rise on the last day, second, the notion that Jesus has the power to raise the dead and third, a foreshadowing of Jesus’ own resurrection. The ‘sign’ of raising Lazarus points to the glory of God, manifest in Jesus and the power to overcome all things, even death.

The setting of the story is the town of Bethany, close to the city of Jerusalem. The word ‘Bethany’ means place, or house, of the poor. Lazarus is a figure unique to this story in John’s Gospel, he is conspicuously absent in the synoptic Gospel stories of the household of Martha and Mary in Bethany and is not mentioned elsewhere in the Gospel of John. The name ‘Lazarus’ means God is my help.

The motifs of belief and hope are threaded through the text with six explicit occurrences and a constant undertone evident in the actions of Jesus as well of those of Mary and Martha. As with many other Gospel texts, the texts culminates with those present being moved to believe in Jesus.

Gospel text: John 11:1-45

There was a man named Lazarus who lived in the village of Bethany with the two sisters, Mary and Martha, and he was ill. It was the same Mary, the sister of the sick man Lazarus, who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair. The sisters sent this message to Jesus, ‘Lord, the man you love is ill.’ On receiving the message, Jesus said, ‘This sickness will end not in death but in God’s glory, and through it the Son of God will be glorified.’

Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, yet when he heard that Lazarus was ill he stayed where he was for two more days before saying to the disciples, ‘Let us go to Judaea.’ The disciples said, ‘Rabbi, it is not long since the Jews wanted to stone you; are you going back again?’ Jesus replied:

‘Are there not twelve hours in the day?

A man can walk in the daytime without stumbling

because he has the light of this world to see by;

but if he walks at night he stumbles,

because there is no light to guide him.’

He said that and then added, ‘Our friend Lazarus is resting, I am going to wake him.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he is able to rest he is sure to get better.’ The phrase Jesus used referred to the death of Lazarus, but they thought that by ‘rest’ he meant ‘sleep’, so Jesus put it plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead; and for your sake I am glad I was not there because now you will believe. But let us go to him.’ Then Thomas – known as the Twin – said to the other disciples, ‘Let us go too, and die with him.’

On arriving, Jesus found that Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days already. Bethany is only about two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to sympathise with them over their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus had come she went to meet him. Mary remained sitting in the house. Martha said to Jesus, ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died, but I know that, even now, whatever you ask of God, he will grant you.’ ‘Your brother’ said Jesus to her ‘will rise again.’ Martha said, ‘I know he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day.’ Jesus said:

‘I am the resurrection and the life.

If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live,

and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.

Do you believe this?’

‘Yes, Lord,’ she said ‘I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was to come into this world.’

When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in a low voice, ‘The Master is here and wants to see you.’ Hearing this, Mary got up quickly and went to him. Jesus had not yet come into the village; he was still at the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who were in the house sympathising with Mary saw her get up so quickly and go out, they followed her, thinking that she was going to the tomb to weep there.

Mary went to Jesus, and as soon as she saw him she threw herself at his feet, saying, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ At the sight of her tears, and those of the Jews who followed her, Jesus said in great distress, with a sigh that came straight from the heart, ‘Where have you put him?’ They said, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus wept; and the Jews said, ‘See how much he loved him!’ But there were some who remarked, ‘He opened the eyes of the blind man, could he not have prevented this man’s death?’ Still sighing, Jesus reached the tomb: it was a cave with a stone to close the opening. Jesus said, ‘Take the stone away.’ Martha said to him, ‘Lord, by now he will smell; this is the fourth day.’ Jesus replied, ‘Have I not told you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?’ So they took away the stone. Then Jesus lifted up his eyes and said:

‘Father, I thank you for hearing my prayer.

I knew indeed that you always hear me,

but I speak for the sake of all these who stand round me,

so that they may believe it was you who sent me.’

When he had said this, he cried in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, here! Come out!’ The dead man came out, his feet and hands bound with bands of stuff and a cloth round his face. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, let him go free.’

Many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary and had seen what he did believed in him

See

Which characters in the story are shown as believing in Jesus?

Which characters in the story have an evident lack of belief?

How does hope influence the actions of Mary and Martha in this story?

Judge

Belief is often closely related to hope. Where is there need for hope in our world today?

In the Gospel account the actions of Jesus, Mary and Martha are important elements of their belief. What do these actions show?

The situation confronting Mary and Martha would often lead to despair. What can we learn from their response to this situation?

Act

What things can I do, to strengthen my own belief?

What can I do to help strengthen the belief of others?

What steps can I take to provide hope when it is needed?

Image: John 11: 3-7,17,20-27,33-45 (2023) | CHRISTIAN ART | Gospel Reading & Art Reflection

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/

There’s a quiet revolution happening in the Catholic Church, and it’s being planned around kitchen tables.

In March 2026, just the other day, Pope Leo XIV announced something unexpected: he’s calling the presidents of every bishops’ conference in the world to Rome this October for a summit dedicated entirely to families. Not clergy formation. Not doctrinal disputes. Families. The announcement explicitly roots the gathering in Amoris Laetitia — Pope Francis’s landmark 2016 apostolic exhortation on love, marriage, and family life — and calls for “mutual listening” and “synodal discernment” regarding how the Church proclaims the Gospel to families in a world changing faster than ever.

That’s a remarkable thing to say out loud. And it opens a door worth walking through.

A Vision That Arrived Early

When Amoris Laetitia (”The Joy of Love”) was published in 2016, it followed an unusually transparent two-year process: two synods of bishops, a worldwide listening survey, and more public debate about Catholic teaching than most people had seen in decades. What emerged was not a document of dry theology but something warmer — a pastoral vision that insisted families are not a problem the Church needs to fix, but “first and foremost an opportunity,” and that the health of the family is decisive “for the future of the world and that of the Church.”

It affirmed the vocation of married couples. It spoke of gradual growth, the dignity of individual conscience, and the need to accompany people in messy, real situations rather than simply handing them a rulebook. For many Catholics — especially those working in family ministry — it felt like the Church was finally catching up with what they had known in their living rooms for years.

Now, a decade later, Pope Leo XIV is saying: “ We need to go further. The world has kept moving. Families are under new and compounding pressures. The October 2026 summit is meant to ask, honestly, what it looks like to walk with families today.

An Old Method for a New Moment

Here’s where history becomes surprisingly relevant.

In the early 20th century, a Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn founded the Young Christian Workers (Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, or JOC) and developed a deceptively simple method for forming lay people as genuine agents of the Church’s mission — not passive recipients of pastoral care, but protagonists. He called it See – Judge – Act.

The idea was straightforward: see your actual situation clearly. Judge it in the light of the Gospel and Catholic social teaching. Then act — concretely, in the real world. Cardijn insisted this was not just a classroom technique. It was a spirituality. It was how lay Christians could read the “signs of the times” with the eyes of faith and respond in the environments where they actually lived: factories, neighborhoods, and families.

The influence of what became known as the “Jocist method” spread remarkably far. It shaped Catholic Action movements across multiple continents. It also formed networks of bishops and theologians who brought its instincts directly into Vatican II. One place it took on a distinctly family-centered expression was in a movement that began in Chicago in 1943.

The Christian Family Movement: Already Living This

The Christian Family Movement (CFM) was founded by Pat and Patty Crowley, a Chicago couple. It grew rapidly in the postwar decades into a genuinely international network of married couples. From the beginning, CFM adopted the See–Judge–Act framework and applied it to family life. Couples gathered in small groups, looked honestly at the realities of their marriages and households, read those realities in light of the Gospel, and then took concrete action. They did this in their homes, their parishes, and their wider communities.

What made CFM distinctive was that it never settled for discussion alone. Its “social inquiry” programs pushed couples toward action on real issues: international affairs, housing, racial justice, and the shape of neighborhood life. In doing so, it quietly anticipated many of the themes that Amoris Laetitia would later develop — accompaniment, the gradual journey of growth in grace, the dignity of conscience, and the conviction that families themselves are “domestic churches” with a genuine missionary vocation.

CFM didn’t claim to be doing theology. It was living out faith. And that’s what the Church now says it needs more of.

What This Summit Could Actually Be

Pope Leo XIV’s framing for October 2026 is striking. He notes that in many places, “the Church can become the salt of the earth only through the lay faithful and, in particular, through families.” That is not a throw-away line. It is an acknowledgment that institutional structures and clergy alone cannot reach where families live. The future of the Church’s mission depends on forming laypeople who know how to carry it out.

Amoris Laetitia called for new forms of “missionary creativity.” It urged the Church to move beyond simply repeating doctrine and to actively strengthen marital love “under the impulse of grace.” Cardijn’s See–Judge–Act offers a tested, grassroots method for doing that. CFM provides over eighty years of practical experience using this method with real couples in real circumstances.

The convergence feels significant. It is not manufactured, but genuinely available — if the bishops’ summit is willing to listen not just to each other but also to the families who have been doing this work quietly for generations.

Between Now and October

If the summit is to be more than bishops talking about families, it needs families talking to bishops. That means the work starts locally, now.

Between now and October 2026, parishes and lay movements have a real opportunity:

Gather families in small groups to work through key passages of Amoris Laetitia using the See–Judge–Act framework. Name the real pressures on marriages, parenting, and intergenerational relationships. Discern what a faithful, creative response looks like.

Invite CFM-style teams to articulate in concrete and honest terms what accompaniment looks like in their communities. This includes accompaniment of couples in irregular situations, families living with addiction or mental illness, and young adults who have drifted from the faith.

Bring the results of that discernment to their bishops — not as a policy wish list, but as lived testimony. Share stories of struggle and hope, of what has helped and what has failed, and of where the grace of the sacrament has surprised people.

The deepest convergence of Amoris Laetitia, Cardijn’s legacy, the Christian Family Movement, and the 2026 summit is this: the future of the Church’s mission runs through living rooms and kitchen tables. Families who learn to see clearly, judge faithfully, and act courageously are not the recipients of the Church’s pastoral care. They are its frontline.

The bishops are gathering in October. The question is whether ordinary families will have already done the hard, hopeful work of giving them something worth hearing.

Questions to Sit With

In your own marriage or family, what would it look like to honestly see the pressures and graces of your life right now — not the ideal version, but the real one?

Does your parish treat families as participants in the Church’s mission, or primarily as recipients of services? What would need to change?

The See–Judge–Act method is nearly a century old. Why do you think it still resonates — and where might it need to be updated for families navigating digital life, economic precarity, or religious pluralism in the home?

Pope Leo XIV says the Church can only reach the world “through families” in many contexts. Do you believe that? And if so, what formation are families actually receiving to take on that role?

What would you want your bishop to know about family life today — the part that doesn’t usually make it into pastoral letters or synod reports?

The See-Judge-Act method was created by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn and draws on Thomas Aquinas’s description of the intellectual virtue of prudence. Cardijn originally designed it for young industrial workers: to help them see the problem of their temporal and eternal destiny, judge the present situation and its contradictions, and act with a view to transforming it. Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI formally incorporated it into Catholic social teaching, and Pope Francis has continued in that same tradition, insisting that “realities are more important than ideas.”

It is fitting, then, that Pope Leo XIV has framed his papacy in explicitly social terms, invoking Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum in response to artificial intelligence. The See-Judge-Act method offers us a precise and honest way to engage his call.

“I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great Industrial Revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” — Pope Leo XIV, Address to the College of Cardinals, May 10, 2025

(This address is collected in “Peace Be With You: My Words to the Church and to the World*, published by HarperOne, February 2026.)*

SEE & Observe: What Is Actually Happening?

The first step of seeing entails social analysis — working to get a complete picture of the situation, historically and structurally, by exploring how it has developed over time and what political, economic, social, and cultural forces are shaping it.

We are living through a second great labor disruption. The first, addressed by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891), was the Industrial Revolution — the replacement of craft and agricultural work by machine production in factories. The human cost was enormous: unsafe conditions, child labor, poverty wages, and the stripping of dignity from work itself. Leo XIII’s response was to insist that workers were persons, not instruments, and that economic systems must be judged by whether they serve human flourishing.

Today’s disruption is subtler but no less far-reaching. AI systems are not merely automating physical labor; they are encroaching on cognitive and creative work — writing, diagnosis, legal analysis, financial advice, and education. Algorithms now screen job applicants, assess creditworthiness, set prices, recommend medical treatments, and curate the information environments in which people form their beliefs and identities. In many cases, the people most affected by these systems have no knowledge of how they work, no access to appeal, and no name attached to the decision.

This is not a distant possibility. It is the present situation.

Thomas Merton was watching an earlier version of this same dynamic in the 1960s. In “The Triple Revolution,” an open memorandum sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964, Merton’s close friend and correspondent W.H. “Ping” Ferry — the document’s chief organizer — argued that automation was already breaking the traditional link between work and income, and that society needed a fundamental re-examination of its values. Though Merton was not among the 35 signatories (as a cloistered monk, he could not formally participate in political declarations), he engaged deeply with the document’s ideas. He predicted the emergence of what he called a “collectivist, cybernated” society in which human beings would be managed rather than known.

What does this look like now? A worker is scored by a productivity algorithm that tracks keystrokes. A student’s essay is evaluated by AI before a teacher reads it. A patient receives a treatment recommendation generated by a model whose reasoning no physician can fully explain. In each case, a human being is present — but their personhood is not quite the point. The data point is the point.

That is what we see.

JUDGE/Discern: What Does Faith and Human Wisdom Say About This?

The second step — judging — asks: what do Scripture and Catholic Social Teaching say about this issue? What key principles apply? Among those principles are human dignity, the common good, human rights, and the option for people with low incomes.

The judgment here is not primarily technical. It is theological and moral.

On Human Dignity

Leo XIV’s invocation of Rerum Novarum is not nostalgic — it is diagnostic. Leo XIII’s central claim was that workers possess an inherent dignity that no economic arrangement can legitimately override. That dignity is not earned by productivity; it is given. It precedes the market. This is the same claim Leo XIV now brings to AI: that the person cannot be reduced to their data profile, their algorithmic score, or their economic utility.

Merton made the same argument from a contemplative angle. In New Seeds of Contemplation, he drew a sharp distinction between the “True Self” — the person as known and loved by God — and the “False Self,” the identity constructed by social performance, consumption, and external validation. His warning was that industrial modernity systematically cultivated the False Self by defining human beings in terms of roles and outputs rather than their irreducible depth. AI intensifies this pressure. When your value to a system is determined by what you produce, click, buy, or say, the True Self is not merely ignored — it is declared irrelevant.

On Justice and the Technological Society

Merton’s engagement with the French philosopher Jacques Ellul gave him a framework for understanding why this happens structurally, not just individually. Ellul argued that “technique” — the drive toward maximum efficiency in every domain of life — eventually becomes self-perpetuating. Once efficiency is established as the highest value, moral questions are reframed as inefficiencies. Justice is slow. Compassion is unpredictable. Forgiveness cannot be optimized. Contemplation produces no measurable output.

The judgment here is clear: a society that allows algorithmic efficiency to displace moral reasoning has not merely made a technical error. It has made a spiritual one.

On Labor and Peace

Rerum Novarum argued that economic justice is a precondition of genuine peace. Merton extended this: peace also requires what he called spiritual autonomy — the freedom to be a full person rather than a function of a system. If AI and automation lead to mass displacement of workers, or to the degradation of the labor that remains, the result is not merely unemployment. It is the erosion of the social fabric — what Merton called “a world of strangers” rather than a community of persons. And a world of strangers is not a peaceful world.

One of Merton’s most prophetic observations, developed across his writings and talks on technology in the 1960s, was that technology eventually becomes invisible. We stop noticing how it shapes our choices, our language, our relationships, and our inner life. “Rain and the Rhinoceros” (1965), one of his most accessible essays, makes this case through a meditation on solitude and noise: the fabricated world is so loud and so pervasive that people lose the silence necessary to hear themselves think, let alone to hear God. To defend the human spirit, Merton argued, we must first make technology visible again — so that we can evaluate it honestly through the lens of faith and human agency.

That is the judgment: the AI revolution is not ethically neutral, and efficiency is not a sufficient moral framework for evaluating it.

ACT/Do Something: What Can and Should Be Done?

The third step — acting — follows from seeing and judging. It asks what, in these specific circumstances, can and should be done to put principles into practice and address root causes. Importantly, See-Judge-Act is not a one-time exercise but a continuous cycle: after completing the Act step, participants return to See, observing new realities, making new judgments, and finding new ways to respond.

Leo XIV has not issued a detailed policy program — that is not the primary role of a papal address. But the direction he has set points clearly toward several obligations, which Merton’s thought helps specify.

Make technology visible. The first act is consciousness. Merton’s insight that technology becomes invisible is an invitation — and a challenge — to pay attention. This means reading the terms of service. It means asking what happens to your data. It means noticing when a decision affecting your life was made by a process you cannot see or contest. Communities of faith are particularly well placed to cultivate this kind of reflective attention because they already have practices — prayer, sabbath, silence, community discernment — that create space outside the logic of productivity.

Insist on the person behind the data point. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum insisted that the dignity of the worker was not negotiable. That same insistence must be applied now to the design and deployment of AI systems — in hiring, in healthcare, in education, in criminal justice. Systems that make consequential decisions about people’s lives must be explainable, contestable, and accountable. This is not a technical wish; it is a moral demand.

Decouple dignity from productivity. The “Triple Revolution” document of 1964 raised a question that is now unavoidable: if machines can do much of what humans do, what becomes of the human beings displaced? The answer cannot simply be “retraining.” It must engage the deeper question of what work means, and what we owe one another when the market no longer needs us. Catholic Social Teaching’s insistence on the common good and the option for the poor provides a framework: the benefits of automation cannot accrue solely to capital. They must be shared.

Cultivate the interior life as resistance. This is Merton’s most distinctive contribution. Contemplation — the practice of attentiveness, silence, and genuine presence to God and to others — is not a retreat from the world. It is, in his view, the only durable form of resistance to a system that wants to reduce human beings to their outputs. A person who knows how to be still, how to listen, how to sit with another person in their full complexity — that person cannot be fully captured by an algorithm. The interior life is not a luxury. It is, in this moment, a form of social action.

Conclusion: The Cycle Continues

The See-Judge-Act method is not a formula that produces a final answer. It is a practice — a cycle continually repeated, in which participants return to observation, form new judgments, and find new ways to act in response to changing realities. Leo XIV has placed the Church firmly within this cycle by naming the AI revolution as a social question of the first order. Thomas Merton, writing sixty years ago from a monastery in Kentucky, gave us tools for the seeing and the judging that the moment demands.

The acting remains, as it always does, with us.

Key sources: Pope Leo XIV, Address to the College of Cardinals (May 10, 2025), collected in Peace Be With You (HarperOne, 2026); Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) and “Rain and the Rhinoceros” (1965); W.H. Ferry et al., “The Triple Revolution” (1964); Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891); Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (1961).

Thomas Merton wrote those words decades ago. He was a Trappist monk, a mystic, philosopher, and one of the most penetrating Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. He was not writing about cable news or social media algorithms. And yet, if you read that passage today, you might assume he had a television on in the background of his hermitage, and a browser tab open on his “typewriter.”

Christian Nationalism — the ideology that fuses American national identity with a particular narrow brand of Christianity, demanding that the nation’s laws, culture, and government conform to it — has metastasized from fringe theology into mainstream political currency. Media, as its primary amplifier, has been its most faithful deacon, widely spreading and reinforcing these ideas.

What Merton saw — and what we keep refusing to see

Merton’s warning was not a general criticism of religious fervor. It was a precise diagnosis of a specific pathology: sincere religious devotion being hijacked, twisted, and weaponized into something that Jesus of Nazareth would have found unrecognizable — or worse, horrifying.

The ‘ardent Christians’ he describes are sincere believers, which should inspire empathy and a desire to address genuine devotion fueling the danger.

Christian Nationalism today carries all the markers Merton identified: the racial anxiety dressed in the language of heritage; the ‘quasi-Fascist’ admiration for strongman leadership draped in providential imagery; the pressure groups and political action committees that weaponize scripture to oppose the equality of women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and religious minorities. The theological window dressing has grown more sophisticated, but at its core remains a ‘fanatical hate cult’marching under a cross, threatening the integrity of faith and social cohesion.

Media as the movement’s megaphone

Merton understood that fear and outrage spread faster than reason, making the audience feel alarmed about the media’s power to manipulate faith and identity.

Christian Nationalist media is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. It includes television networks, radio empires, podcast networks, YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, and a social media apparatus that is extraordinarily adept at viral content. The messaging is consistent and relentless: Christianity is under attack. Western civilization is under attack. White Christian America is under attack. The enemies are named — Democrats, liberals, immigrants, academics, LGBTQ people, “globalists” — and the faithful are called to political warfare.

This is not incidental to the movement. It is the movement’s engine. The media creates the sense of siege; the siege justifies political aggression; and the political aggression — wins, losses, and outrages alike — feeds the media cycle. It is a closed-loop, profitable, and self-perpetuating system.

Meanwhile, mainstream media — chasing balance, afraid of accusations of anti-Christian bias — often covers Christian Nationalist politicians and movements with a gentle curiosity that it would never extend to comparable movements rooted in other religions. The asymmetry is itself a form of amplification.

The theological problem at the center

Merton’s critique was ultimately theological. His entire life’s work was a sustained argument that authentic Christianity demanded contemplation, poverty of spirit, radical love of neighbor, and — above all — a ruthless suspicion of one’s own certainty. The mystic tradition he inhabited understood that the soul most convinced of its own righteousness was the soul most in danger.

Christian Nationalism, by contrast, is theologically allergic to doubt. It trades in absolute certainty — about who belongs, who threatens, who deserves power, and who does not. It has no room for the Sermon on the Mount’s peculiar insistence that the blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the peacemakers, and those who hunger for justice rather than those who seize it by political force.

Many Christians — across Catholic, mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, and evangelical traditions — recognize this. They have watched a political movement appropriate their faith, drape it in nationalist imagery, and use it as a cudgel. Their voices are real, they are growing, and they deserve far more attention than they receive.

What faithful resistance looks like

Merton himself pointed toward the answer in the very book from which this quote is drawn: nonviolent resistance. Not passive acceptance, but active, principled, costly refusal to cooperate with what one believes to be evil. He believed — drawing on Gandhi, King, and the deepest currents of Christian tradition — that the willingness to absorb suffering rather than inflict it was not weakness but the most radical form of power available to a person of faith.

This means Christians who reject nationalism must be willing to say so — loudly, repeatedly, and at real cost to their social and professional comfort. It is essential to support journalism that covers religious extremism with the same rigor as other threats and to oppose media that profits from outrage actively. Show up at school boards, state legislatures, and ballot boxes not as a Christian army but as citizens committed to the constitutional principle that no religion should govern those who do not share it.

Merton saw clearly that the “irrational parades” he described were not a sign of Christian strength, but of Christian failure. The cross, in early Christian tradition, was not a banner of conquest. It was a symbol of what happens to those who refuse to conquer.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

If Thomas Merton were alive today and scrolling through your social media feed — the content you share, the voices you amplify, the outrage you engage — would he recognize what you practice as the faith you profess?

Introduction

The Gospel featured in this enquiry is used in the celebration of the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A. The Second Scrutiny ritual draws on the miracle of the healing of the man born blind as the prompt to pray that the Elect be freed from slavery to sin, that the desire for good to be stirred within them and that they become “staunch and fearless witnesses to the faith.” This will happen through Christ our Lord.

It is a timely lesson to be learnt, that all good comes from God and in God’s good time. It might seem trite to say that we are creatures of habit, but it is true nonetheless. Just as Google might suggest common ways of stating the obvious, we tend to develop patterns of behaviour that keep us safe, or promise short-term rewards. In this case, the man had grown up being blind and had learned ways of dealing with his blindness. He did not ask to be healed of his blindness. God’s gifts are gratuitous.

Being creatures of habit, we tend to resist anything that threatens to take us out of our comfort zone … unless we are courageous enough to entertain the thought that such change might prove to be beneficial. Miracles do happen. We can change. Conversion is possible … in God’s good time.

The Gospel

As Jesus went along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, for him to have been born blind?’

‘Neither he nor his parents sinned,’ Jesus answered ‘he was born blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as the day lasts I must carry out the work of the one who sent me; the night will soon be here when no one can work. As long as I am in the world I am the light of the world.’

Having said this, he spat on the ground, made a paste with the spittle, put this over the eyes of the blind man, and said to him, ‘Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam’ (a name that means ‘sent’). So the blind man went off and washed himself, and came away with his sight restored.

His neighbours and people who earlier had seen him begging said, ‘Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg?’ Some said, ‘Yes, it is the same one.’ Others said, ‘No, he only looks like him.’ The man himself said, ‘I am the man.’ So they said to him, ‘Then how do your eyes come to be open?’ ‘The man called Jesus’ he answered ‘made a paste, daubed my eyes with it and said to me, “Go and wash at Siloam”; so I went, and when I washed I could see.’ They asked, ‘Where is he?’ ‘I don’t know’ he answered.

They brought the man who had been blind to the Pharisees. It had been a sabbath day when Jesus made the paste and opened the man’s eyes, so when the Pharisees asked him how he had come to see, he said, ‘He put a paste on my eyes, and I washed, and I can see.’ Then some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man cannot be from God: he does not keep the sabbath.’ Others said, ‘How could a sinner produce signs like this?’ And there was disagreement among them. So they spoke to the blind man again, ‘What have you to say about him yourself, now that he has opened your eyes?’ ‘He is a prophet’ replied the man. However, the Jews would not believe that the man had been blind and had gained his sight, without first sending for his parents and asking them, ‘Is this man really your son who you say was born blind? If so, how is it that he is now able to see?’ His parents answered, ‘We know he is our son and we know he was born blind, but we do not know how it is that he can see now, or who opened his eyes. He is old enough: let him speak for himself.’ His parents spoke like this out of fear of the Jews, who had already agreed to expel from the synagogue anyone who should acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. This was why his parents said, ‘He is old enough; ask him.’

So the Jews again sent for the man and said to him, ‘Give glory to God! For our part, we know that this man is a sinner.’ The man answered, ‘I don’t know if he is a sinner; I only know that I was blind and now I can see.’ They said to him, ‘What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?’ He replied, ‘I have told you once and you wouldn’t listen. Why do you want to hear it all again? Do you want to become his disciples too?’ At this they hurled abuse at him: ‘You can be his disciple,’ they said ‘we are disciples of Moses: we know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.’ The man replied, ‘Now here is an astonishing thing! He has opened my eyes, and you don’t know where he comes from! We know that God doesn’t listen to sinners, but God does listen to men who are devout and do his will. Ever since the world began it is unheard of for anyone to open the eyes of a man who was born blind; if this man were not from God, he couldn’t do a thing.’ ‘Are you trying to teach us,’ they replied ‘and you a sinner through and through, since you were born!’ And they drove him away.

Jesus heard they had driven him away, and when he found him he said to him, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ ‘Sir,’ the man replied ‘tell me who he is so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said, ‘You are looking at him; he is speaking to you.’ The man said, ‘Lord, I believe’, and worshipped him.

Jesus said: ‘It is for judgement that I have come into this world, so that those without sight may see and those with sight turn blind.’

Hearing this, some Pharisees who were present said to him, ‘We are not blind, surely?’ Jesus replied: ‘Blind? If you were, you would not be guilty, but since you say, “We see,” your guilt remains.’ (John 9:1-41)

The Enquiry

See

• Cardijn refers to the Truth of Faith in conflict with the Truth of Experience. Use these categories to analyse this Gospel event. If you are unsure about the meaning of these terms, then read the opening section of Fr Joseph Cardijn’s lecture on the Three Truths.

• Examine the impact of Jesus’ act of healing the man’s blindness. Consider in turn, the man, his parents, the Pharisees, and you.

• Why do the Pharisees refuse to see the miracle as a sign of God’s presence and power in their midst?

Judge

• What do you think about the understanding of faith represented by the Pharisees? Does Jesus’ act of healing the blind man on the Sabbath represent a new spirituality?

• Where would you place yourself in this Gospel? Are you one of the many who witnessed Jesus healing the blind man? Are you one of the Pharisees and you refuse to recognise the work of God in the healing of the man’s blindness? Have you been healed of blindness?

• What is the Christian principle that is illustrated by this story? How would your life change if you lived by this principle?

Act

• So, having reflected on this story, what are you being called to change in the world and in yourself?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to the change God is calling you to make?

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

Image Source: juan50300 (Creator), La curation del cie go de nacimiento 2017, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0