Resources for 24 Hours of Prayer, Fasting, and Practical Compassion

Blow the trumpet in Zion, proclaim a fast, call an assembly, gather the people, and say, “Spare, O Lord, your people!”

Joel 2

RESOURCES

24 Hours of Prayer, Fasting & Practical Compassion June 28-29, 2025

SHCJ American Province & Friends

Saturday, June 28,

Sunday, June 29, 2025

Welcome & Introduction

Welcome-back & Re-focus

Blessing of Our Cyberspace

Blessing of Our Cyberspace

Opening Prayer

Opening Prayer

Invitation to Prayerfulness

Small Group Conversations

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Input by Mary Sullivan on addressing God as “you” from The Psalms by Walter Brueggemann Psalm 139

Quiet Reflection •

As I ponder the world around me, what feelings arise? how am I responding?

Invitation to Fasting — •

Input by Judy Talvacchia: Fast from whatever keeps us from being Spirit-led & mission-focused

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Sharing the fruit of the interim time

Invitation to Practical Compassion •

Input by Ann Durst: walking with immigrants

Large Group Conversation •

What hope, possibilities, practices have opened up for me during these 24 hours?

Quiet Reflection •

Harp Music by Steve Rees

Invitation to Hopefulness

Small Group Conversation

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Input by Mary Sullivan on the source of our hope

Large Group Conversation

Closing Prayer & Sending Forth

Suggestions, Resources for the Interim Invitation to Practical Compassion

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Dear friends, Here are some resources you may find helpful during the interim between the two Zoom calls, as a way to deepen your sense of God present and active in you and in our world. You may prefer to pray quietly on your own through the day, and/or to gather together with others for some prayer and conversation. Remember that we gather in solidarity with many people of faith and good will throughout the country and beyond. Let us ask the Spirit’s guidance for ourselves and one another:

+Come, Holy Spirit, Fill the hearts of your faithful,

Kindle in them the fire of your love.

Send forth your spirit and we shall be created and renew the face of the earth.+

RESOURCES June 28-29, 2025 PRAYER The Psalms & the Life of Faith — p.4-5 The ‘Dangerous Oddness’ of Walter Brueggemann — p.6-7 Psalm 139 — p.8-9 FASTING Examen: On Caring for Others — p.10 Fast on ... / Feast on ... — p.11 We need a 2nd Examination of Conscience — p.12-13 Scripture Quotes on Fasting / Feasting — p.14 PRACTICAL COMPASSION The Living Vein of Compassion — p.15 Discovering Joy in an Unlikely Source — p.16-18 Catholic Social Teaching ... U.S. Perspective — p.19-20 Art at the Border — p.21 Beloved God — p.22 https://issuu.com/shcjpublications/docs/resources_flipbook 3

THE PSALMS & THE LIFE OF FAITH

by Walter Brueggemann — excerpts

“The psalms are prayers addressed to a known, named, identifiable You. This is the most stunning and decisive factor in the prayers of the Psalter. Prayer is direct address to, and conversation and communion with, an agent known from a shared treasured past. This substance and quality of address immediately distinguish Israel’s prayers from three powerful seductions” — o …from other forms of spiritual activity such as meditation and religious speculation, that seek to be open but end up being vague, non-committal, and lacking in focus…. o …from the temptation of imperial religion – that is, the temptation to heap up titles regarding majesty and magnificence…. o …from all modern “turns to the subject.” ….our modern propensity is to imagine that it is in our self-announcement – in the utterance of “I” – that we live and have our being…. “….the utterance of “You” is to take a sabbatical from our arrogance, self-sufficiency, and autonomy, our pride, fatigue, and despair. We become aware that life is constituted for us but is not created by us; and we know the name of the one who constitutes life for us. In this tradition of speech, prayer is an alternative to our imagined autonomy.

Almost any psalm might be cited to illustrate the centrality of “You.” I cite Psalm 86 as a peculiarly clear example…. o You are my God (v.2) o For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on you. (v.5) o For you are great and do wonderous things; you alone are God. (v.10) o But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. (v.15) o Because you, Lord, have helped me and comforted me. (v.17)” “….Notice…that beyond “you” there are no other titles given to God except the proper name Yahweh…

There is no heaping up of rhetoric. Moreover, Yahweh is described or characterized by adjectives and verbs of relationship, expressing the particular ways in which Yahweh is known to have related to the speaker and the community of the speaker….

Israel’s prayer consists in the utterance of “You,” addressed to a named, known, addressable, reachable You. The purpose of such address is either to celebrate that God is this particular You and none other or to insist that God should now be this known You when God has seemed to grow careless about that identity and character. Israel’s life consists in the glad utterance of “You,” for in that utterance of “You,” the “I” of the speaking community (and indeed the whole world) takes on a particular character, derived from and responsive to this all-governing You.”

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“…. Martin Buber reiterates an old rabbinic prayer that is intended only to delight in the utterance:

Where I wander – You! Where I ponder – You! Only You, You again always You! You! You! You! When I am gladdened — You! When I am saddened—You! Only You, You again, always You! You! You! You! Sky is You! Earth is You! You above! You below!

In every trend, at every end, Only You, You again, always You! You! You! You!” “….No boundary…can catch or contain the power, wonder, awe, danger, threat, and gift of this You. This You is not an escape to which one flees, but is one to whom appeal is made out beyond all conventional hope and conventional control….”

Brueggemann, Walter. The Psalms & The Life of Faith. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, pp.34-39).

7 Give us Saturday Ears Sometimes it seems as though you have given us

eyes so that we cannot see,

and ears so that we cannot hear,

and hearts so tht we cannot know,

and we miss it.

Work on our ears today.

Clean them, circumcise them,

turn them so that they may tingle with the ways

in which you have turned loose among us the powers of death

and the forces of life.

Grant that we should not live in the safe middle ground,

on the surface,

but push us to the edge,

where the action is.

Your action, where you cause all those terrible Fridays

and all those amazing Sundays.

Give us Saturday ears for your tingling.

We pray in the name of your Saturday child. Amen.

Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003, p.58) 5

In Memoriam:

The ‘Dangerous Oddness’ of Walter Brueggemann

by Adam Russell Taylor — Sojourners, June 12, 2025

Last week we lost a theological giant: Walter Brueggemann passed away on June 5 at the age of 92.

It would be impossible for me to overstate the profound impact that Brueggemann had on justice-oriented Christians. Not only did he write more than 100 influential books of theology and biblical criticism over the course of his long career, he also wrote dozens of articles for Sojourners. There are very few theologians I can think of who taught me as much as Brueggemann did about how to read the Bible and what a deepened understanding of scripture reveals about God’s heart for justice and our ability to imagine a world beyond empire.

will challenge us, shaking us out of the despair that perpetuates an unjust status quo. The Spirit not only insists that a better world possible, but — as Brueggemann knew as well as anyone — also prompts us to embody active hope, co-laboring with God to bring that new world about.

Brueggemann’s most influential book is undoubtedly The Prophetic Imagination, which was published in 1978 and has sold more than a million copies. The book is frequently assigned in seminaries and is one

Brueggemann first wrote for Sojourners in November 1983, offering analysis of the lectionary texts for the first two Sundays in Advent. In speaking to the challenge of discarding a status quo from which all too many of us benefit, Brueggemann says: Many of us benefit from the marginality of the poor, and we do not want it to change. In the real commitments of our lives, we are deeply in conflict with the new reign. And we are without hope, meaning we do not want, expect, or welcome the new leader. In our moments of honesty, we crave our hopelessness because it lets us keep things as they are.

But the new sovereign comes on the wind—by the Spirit (Isaiah 11:2, Matthew 3:11, Romans 15:13). That means he cannot be stopped and will not be resisted. The Spirit works through us, among us, and even against us. The Spirit in these days would indeed work against our hopelessness to let us hope.

It’s an evocative statement that captures the despair many Americans felt in the context of Reagan-era consumerism. And as we look around in 2025, can we claim that American society and our relationship to economic inequality has meaningfully changed?

Yet while facing this difficult truth, Brueggemann offers a powerful and hopeful image of the Spirit on the wind: Sometimes even despite our best efforts, God

that I still recommend to our fellows or anyone who wants a justice-rooted exegesis of the prophets and Jesus. When I first read The Prophetic Imagination in 2004, I had just started at Sojourners as political director. I was struck by how Brueggemann roots discipleship in a radical commitment to act in solidarity with the disinherited, dismantling the evils of empire or, as he would have put it, the “royal consciousness.” Brueggemann pointed out that throughout the Bible, kings and military leaders embodied a way of thinking concerned with the acquisition of power or wealth, often at the expense of those most vulnerable in that society.

He noted that this “royal consciousness” was repeatedly rebuked by the prophets and ultimately, Jesus.

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Brueggemann writes: In both his teaching and his very presence, Jesus of Nazareth presented the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness. He has, in fact, dismantled the dominant culture and nullified its claims. The way of his ultimate criticism is his decisive solidarity with marginal people and the accompanying vulnerability required by that solidarity. The only solidarity worth affirming is solidarity characterized by the same helplessness they know and experience.

Bruggemann took this declaration of solidarity even further, exploring what it demands of us in one of the book’s most powerful moments, when he writes: We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought … the imagination must come before the implementation..”

We are living through a grave moment in our politics today, when Christian faith is being misused and abused to advance nationalism and autocracy. It makes what Brueggeman called God’s “preferred futures” seem farther away than ever. And that’s not accidental; as Brueggemann repeatedly pointed out, one of empire’s key projects is to shrink our imagination until the future we imagine doesn’t threaten its agenda.

I can’t help but wonder what prophetic words Brueggemann might offer as President Donald Trump co-opts the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army to celebrate his own birthday with a military parade. I suspect he would see this spectacle as an attempt to cement royal consciousness and shrink our ability to imagine and build a different world. I hope that U.S. voters of all political persuasions pay attention to this $45 million vanity project to parade weapons of war through downtown D.C. — weapons our taxpayer dollars fund through a bloated, nearly $1 trillion Pentagon budget.

READ MORE: Walter Brueggemann: Jesus Acted Out the Alternative To Empire In 2018, Walter was scheduled to give a speech at a leadership gathering Sojourners organized in Washington, D.C. He was unable to travel due to his health, so he presented his speech by pre-recorded video. I’ll admit I was skeptical a video would work out well. But the hundreds of people assembled in the auditorium were absolutely spellbound and as the speech ended, we all — myself included — gave the video a standing ovation. I have never seen something like that happen.

It was just that good.

In that speech (which you can read in full), Walter updates the language of a “royal consciousness” and describes empire as “an ideological totalism, that intends to contain all thinkable, imaginable, doable social possibilities.” He said that in opposition to that would-be all-encompassing force, the prophets represent “poetic voices that are dangerous and subversive…because they are voices that come from outside the totalism and that refuse to accept the totalism as normative.” He then charges all of us — as I would charge all of you who are reading his words in this column — with continuing that prophetic legacy in our time, today: So, the practice of prophetic imagination … requires energy, courage, and freedom, and the sense of being otherwise. And I have no doubt that we are now arriving at a moment when there is no more middle ground.

That we either sign on uncritically to the totalism, or we take on this task of dangerous oddness that exposes the contradictions and performs the alternatives.

Walter’s words here echo the concept of “creative maladjustment,” a turn of phrase from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. that I’ve often used to describe Sojourners’ mission. Re-reading Walter’s speech to us after his passing re-affirms my commitment to insist on a resilient hope for a better world, especially when it feels difficult to imagine outside Trump’s totalism.

As Walter now joins the great cloud of witnesses alongside other departed heroes like Vincent Harding and Dorothy Day, it’s a balm to trust that Walter will still be in our corner, cheering us on. Thanks to his legacy, we can keep prophetically imagining and relentlessly working to build a more just and peaceful world because of our faith in a liberative and redemptive God.

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PSALM 139 1 You have searched me, LORD, and you know me.

2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.

4 Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely.

5 You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

7 Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

13 For you created my1inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

17 How precious to me are your thoughts,

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18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand— when I awake, I am still with you.

19 If only you, God, would slay the wicked!

Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty!

20 They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name.

21 Do I not hate those who hate you, LORD, and abhor those who are in rebellion against you?

22 I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies.

23 Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.

24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

PSALM 139 SET TO MUSIC

O God, you search me and you know me — Bernadette Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XFodUeqGqU

O', God, you search me, and you know me All my thoughts lie open to your gaze When I walk or lie down, you are before me 'Ever the maker and keeper of my days You know my resting and my rising You discern my purpose from afar And with love everlasting, you besiege me In ev'ry moment of life or death, you are Before a word is on my tongue, Lord You have known its meaning through and through You are with me beyond my understanding God of my present, my past and future, too

Although your Spirit is upon me Still I search for shelter from your light There is nowhere on Earth I can escape you Even the darkness is radiant in your sight

For you created me and shaped me Gave me life within my mother's womb For the wonder of who I am, I praise you Safe in your hands, all creation is made new 9

Examen: On Caring for Others 1. What interactions with others were significant to me today?

2. Choose one on which to focus.

3. What was going on in me during this interaction?

4. Was I truly present? How well did I listen?

5. What care and compassion did I show?

6. How did this interaction affect me? The other person?

7. How has this interaction affected my relationship with God? 8. Have I done all that I can at this point in time?

9. What is God calling me to do tomorrow?

Prayer for Compassion Merciful God, you can open my heart and mind to be fully present to those I interact with throughout the day. You! You who listen to me, allow me to listen to others without passing judgment or hastening to solve what I cannot change. You! You give me patience and understanding with others; give me patience and understanding with my shortcomings. You! Be with me in times of fatigue and doubt; lift me up with the strength to offer your compassionate love to all those I meet. You! Amen.

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Fast from ... / Feast on ... f

Fast from judging others; feast on the Christ dwelling in them.

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Fast from emphasis on differences; feast on the unity of life.

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Fast from apparent darkness; feast on the reality of light.

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Fast from thoughts of illness; feast on the healing power of God.

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Fast from words that pollute; feast on phrases that purify.

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Fast from discontent; feast on gratitude.

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Fast from anger; feast on patience.

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Fast from pessimism; feast on optimism.

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Fast from worry; feast on divine order.

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Fast from complaining; feast on appreciation.

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Fast from negatives; feast on affirmatives.

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Fast from unrelenting pressures; feast on unceasing prayer.

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Fast from hostility; feast on non-resistance.

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Fast from bitterness; feast on forgiveness.

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Fast from self-concern; feast on compassion for others.

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Fast from personal anxiety; feast on eternal truth.

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Fast from discouragements; feast on hope.

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Fast from facts that depress; feast on verities that uplift.

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Fast from lethargy; feast on enthusiasm.

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Fast from thoughts that weaken; feast on promises that inspire.

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Fast from shadows of sorrow; feast on the sunlight of serenity.

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Fast from idle gossip; feast on purposeful silence.

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Fast from problems that overwhelm; feast on prayer that undergirds

William Arthur Ward (American author, teacher and pastor, 1921-1994) 11

We Need a 2nd Examination of Conscience: How are the people around me doing?

A Homily for the Third Sunday of Advent —Readings: Isaiah 35:1-6a, 10 James 5:7-10 Matthew 11:2-11

There is an old saying among priests—or a saying among old priests, I cannot remember which—that hearing a grandmother’s confession means listening to what everyone else has done wrong, how they have disappointed her. And, at least as grandmother tells it, she does have a point.

However, the conventional wisdom is that all of us need to focus on our own sins in our examinations of conscience. True enough, but the problem with sins is that they come wrapped in blindness. By nature, sin deceives. We often do not see our sins until they cause us harm.

Perhaps another approach might be a good supplement—a second, supplementary examination of conscience. It may even be more revealing than the traditional list of deeds done wrong. Turns out, Grandma may indeed be on to something in examining those around her. It is only her focus on their shortcomings that is off.

Look at the people with whom you live and work. How are they doing? Specifically, how are they because of your role in their lives? Do they seem to need you? Do they feel supported by you? Do they depend on you? Do they come to you when they are in need? Do they smile when they see you?

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These questions might reveal as much about your standing with the Lord as your list of sins. Ages ago, Aristotle taught that a moral life comes down to a flourishing, a flowering. Doing good leads to happiness.

Doing wrong drains it from life. Indeed, this was how the philosopher told us to distinguish one from the other. What makes us grow and flourish?

Three hundred years earlier, the prophet Isaiah described a life lived in God as a flowering.

The desert and the parched land will exult; the steppe will rejoice and bloom.

They will bloom with abundant flowers, and rejoice with joyful song (35:1-2).

Now consider Jesus and John the Baptist. Judged by the standards of the world, neither of them could have been regarded as successful men, leaders who flourished. Both lived in itinerant poverty; both were executed as enemies of the state before their movements could gain real momentum.

Yet according to St. Matthew, people flocked to the Baptist. Even his words of reproach seemed to give them new life. Had John made our second examination of conscience, he would have been confirmed in his vocation. He was indeed helping others to grow and to flourish.

And when Jesus employed this same examination of conscience, his effect on others, he saw a similar result.

He could say: Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them (Mt 11:4-5).

Aristotle and Isaiah are still quite right: To do good, to be graced, is to bloom and flower. But when you truly live your life for others, as Jesus and John did, that flourishing may be more apparent in the lives that surround yours than in your own. Put another way, the good Lord might be asking you to be more root or stock rather than blossom. The flourishing lies outside yourself, in those around you, though, as it comes from within you, it is your own, deep flowering.

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Scripture Quotes on Fasting / Feasting Luke 6 41 Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?

42 How can you say to your brother or sister, ‘Let me remove that splinter in your eye,’ when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother or sister’s eye.

Matthew 7 1 Stop judging, that you may not be judged.

2 For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.

Ephesians 4 1 I … urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, 3 striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace: 4 one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call; 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

1 Thessalonians 5 11 Therefore, encourage one another and build one another up, as indeed you do.

12 … be at peace among yourselves.

14 … cheer the fainthearted, support the weak, be patient with all.

15 See that no one returns evil for evil; rather, always seek what is good [both] for each other and for all.

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The Living Vein of Compassion

The Catholic Church & Immigration at This Moment by Bishop Mark Seitz Commonweal, May 27, 2025

Since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has taken aggressive and extensive actions to restrict migration and to target immigrants already living in our country.

These actions include the effective and total suspension of asylum and international protection at our border, the ending of U.S. commitment to refugees around the world, and the suspension of key areas of humanitarian assistance, both at the border and abroad, including aid intended to mitigate forced migration. These actions are accompanied by a disturbing rhetoric of criminality when speaking about immigrants in our country.

Consistent with campaign promises to enact the largest deportation in American history, the administration is laying down key infrastructure to make these promises a reality. The groundwork being laid for this campaign of forced removal is significant and should give us pause. We’ve seen the erection of an offshore detention site at the symbolically charged Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. We’ve also seen the agreement with El Salvador to imprison migrants without regard for essential due-process protections as well as a reckless willingness to test the limits of judicial authority.

immigration status—parole and temporary protected status—from hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, enlarging the pool of those potentially vulnerable to deportation.

There is also the reversal of the Sensitive Locations policy, which formerly represented a modest and humane measure of restraint in avoiding unnecessary enforcement actions in churches, schools, community centers, and hospitals. Because the law always permitted urgent enforcement actions in these places, more than anything else, the reversal of this policy is significant on the level of symbols and narrative, meant to deliver a message that even bedrock principles and norms that ensure the integrity of the polity, including deference to the sacred, the education of children, and the pursuit of health, will be sacrificed to the politics of immigration.

The speed with which these actions are being carried out, and the disregard for the rule of law and due process are without precedent.

In addition to the federal government, more and more states have enacted anti-immigrant laws over the past year, and many governors and mayors are Additional sites within the United States are being promising to collaborate with the Trump adminisplanned or are already under construction. In El tration on immigration enforcement. Punitive and Paso, for example, a contract has been signed with restrictive laws were passed last year in Iowa, Florida, a private vendor for a large immigrant-detention Oklahoma, West Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, center; the contract is for a sum of money that nearly Louisiana, and Tennessee. Leading the pack, however, equals ICE’s entire annual detention budget last is my home state of Texas, which has spent billions year. I also need to mention the deployment of the of taxpayer dollars to deploy the National Guard and military to the border and the preparation of orders state police to the border, has passed legislation to for the military to take control of the border, which criminalize migration, has constructed border walls, raise significant posse comitatus concerns. In addiand is readying still another bevy of troubling antition, the administration is actively taking away legal immigrnt bills in the current legislative session.

CLICK to read full article — https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/living-vein-compassion

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Closing remarks from a presentation by Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, DC (formerly of San Diego) to the Conference on Catholic Social Teaching offered by Jesuit Refugee Service USA & Center for Migration Studies, March 24, 2025.

Catholic Social Teaching and Solidarity with Refugees and Immigrants at a Time of Uncertainty: A U.S. Perspective Basing his reflection on the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) Cardinal McElroy concludes his remarks with these words: “…. If the message we are to give must focus on the Good Samaritan and the Good Immigrant, the audience that we need to reach most powerfully in heart and soul are the “priests” and the “Levites” – those who walk by with indifference or fear, both of whom are present at this moment. And we must understand they are present in our own hearts and institutions as well. We must struggle with this problem. We need to overcome indifference, face it for what it is, and move beyond it.

Jesus’ Core Message to Us and the Choices We Face That is my understanding of Jesus’ core message in this parable: If you truly wish to be my follower, Jesus is saying, you must in your heart and your soul have that love for the stranger which the Good Samaritan exhibited and take the risk that the Good Samaritan took for the stranger. If you are to be my disciple, truly in this world at this moment, this is what is required.

We are faced as a society with two different choices here (Fratelli Tutti, 69-70). This is partly the result of our immigration system which has been broken for so long. Both parties have been at fault for failing to reach an accord on immigration reform. Looking back, each of us can point to moments when substantial reform could have been realized if policymakers had taken the right step and not the partisan one. But that did not happen and now we face two different pathways.

The first path, which Catholic social teaching supports, is to change our laws so that they produce secure borders, dignified treatment of everyone at those borders, and generous asylum and refugee policies.

That is one pathway we as a nation can come toward – and I actually believe most Americans would favor that pathway.

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The other pathway is a crusade, which comes from the darkest parts of the American psyche, soul, and history. The crusade denigrates the undocumented. It labels them as defective. It castigates, characterizes, and encapsulates them as criminals. It refuses to see the human being that is there and the good that they have already accomplished in the society in which they have been living for so many years.

These are the two choices we have, and we as a nation will have to make one choice. The pathway of crusade and mass deportation cannot be followed in conscience by those who call themselves disciples of Jesus Christ. We must work to make sure this does not happen in this nation, which we love and care for so deeply. Thank you very much.”

CLICK to view the full presentation: https://www.jrsusa.org/event/virtual-conference-catholic-social-teachingand-work-with-migrants-and-refugees-at-a-time-of-uncertainty/

Who is my neighbor?

The pathway of crusade and mass deportation cannot be followed in conscience by those who call themselves discples of Jesus Christ.

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ART at the BORDER Rigoberto A. González Artist’s Statement: "The border is an area I am fascinated with and find rich with subject matter.

As a painter working primarily on largescale, mural-sized oil paintings, I have decided to make the border the focus of my work. It is a region where there is the confluence of two cultures, where the river not so much divides but unites. Most of my adult life I have spent in the Southwestern United States and Northeastern Mexico on the border. The theme running through my paintings is a merger of the visual vernacular of the Baroque and current border issues affecting Mexico and the United States – families whose lives that have been affected by socio-economic conflicts such as immigration policies and the war on drugs.

It is the dramatic lives and stories of everyday individuals from border communities whose narratives inspire me to capture their stories on canvas. For several years the news media have been reporting stories on the rising numbers of families, especially children, immigrating to the U.S., and the escalating violence on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. This is too big a story to report through raw journalism. It is important for me as an artist to address these contemporary concerns and create a visual record portraying these events with an artistic sensibility. I believe that painting can evoke an authentic aesthetic experience that conveys meaning in people's lives and work as a catalyst for change."

CLICK to see more of González’ work:

https://www.utrgv.edu/claa/exhibitions/rigoberto-gonzalez/ index.htm

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BELOVED GOD We give you thanks for your guidance and inspiration and The promise of hope in our time.

You call us to love in a time of indifference, to nonviolence in a time of injustice, and to life in a time of death.

You teach us not only how to live, but how to die; how to transform Not only the world but our own broken hearts, as well.

Your incarnation transcends all our dreams for a better world and Declares your reign here and now, at this very moment in human history.

In Jesus, we meet you, our beloved God. We see your true face.

From now on, we know that you are:

Not a God of despair but of HOPE Not a God of wrath but of MERCY Not a God of condemnation but of COMPASSION Not a God of imperial power but of SUFFERING Not a God of domination but of loving SERVICE Not a God of oppression but of LIBERATION Not a God who blesses injustice but the God of JUSTICE Not a God or war but of PEACE Not a God of violence but of NONVIOLENCE Not a God of death but of LIFE From now on, we know that we have been created to share in the Fullness of life, in your love and unending mercy.

We step forward into the future, supporting each other, building community.

Making peace, practicing nonviolence, creating justice, and reconciling with our enemies, come what may.

Jesus, you walk with us, summoning us to carry on the mission of justice, peace and practical compassion.

You have begun the transformation within us.

May we be changed forever!

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