In mid-March, four months after my father died, my son got married. My father had been in declining health for a few years, during which time my mother took on the role of full-time caretaker (as a lifelong partner might be expected to). Resisting entreaties to accept regular outside help, she also stubbornly and preemptively ruled out any kind of travel, even for a grandson’s wedding. That she was able to be present after all made everyone happy, including her. The ceremony was joyous, the reception a party for the ages: a happy marriage, if you will, of Russian-Jewish and Italian-Catholic tradition. But the reality of what allowed my mother to be in attendance—and the fact that she was attending on her own—was never far from the surface of things.  

“May his memory be a blessing,” my son’s soon-to-be in-laws said to me in the days and weeks following my father’s death, as together we helped plan the wedding. It’s hard to express the comfort that their words—the English translation of the traditional Hebrew zichrona livricha—brought me. “A Blessing too Good for Jews Alone,” as a headline at the Tablet once memorably put it, and I can now personally attest to that. “It wishes not only that when the living think about those who have died, they do so with warmth and joy,” the article’s author wrote. “It also [marks] the ways those lives have mattered and continue to matter in this world, even if they are no longer in it.” At the reception, when it came time for toasts, my son’s new mother-in-law asked guests to remember family members who’d recently died. She spoke of the “void” the departed leave in the lives of those still living. Until then, I’d experienced my father’s death more as an absence than a void—a difference of degree, not of category, but still a difference. Yet what, if not “void,” best describes that state when someone who was so much a part of this world is no longer in it?

By coincidence, the wedding took place in a part of New Jersey where I’d lived as a child. It’s a densely populated conglomeration of suburban towns and small cities linked by a network of highways, state roads, and commercial strips as tangled and complex as the circulatory system. I feel as if I spent most of that childhood in the car with my parents and brothers traveling these roads—trips to visit family and to see New York City; to gas stations and furniture outlets and appliance stores. Over the course of the wedding weekend’s mandated journeys—airport, bakery, reception hall, hotel—I got to relive some of those earlier drives. The roads still hew to their long-ago plotted routes. Even some of the old landmarks remain, stores and restaurants and malls that have withstood the passage of years.    

This includes a roadside diner we always used to pass without ever stopping to eat at. But once it offered a place of rest. Late on the night of Holy Thursday in 1982, I accompanied my father to our parish church to sit vigil before the stripped and barren altar, one shift in the long line that would carry on through the next afternoon. We stayed for our assigned hour until being relieved by the next parishioner. But our night wasn’t over. Out in the station wagon were boxes of donated food to deliver to a sister parish several towns away in time for Easter weekend. It was getting late by the time we arrived at that church and began to unpack the car. We left the boxes near a row of refrigerators beneath the basketball nets in the gym, as instructed by the parish priest. Then we began the ride home. At that hour traffic was light, but it still felt like a long drive. I’d been in school all day, and my father had been at work. Usually one to push all the way through, he uncharacteristically this night pulled off the road and into the parking lot of that diner we’d always sped right by. I thought he wanted coffee, but he said he just needed to sleep for a few minutes. I sat there watching people go in and out of the diner while my father dozed. The clock ticked past midnight into Good Friday, and a few minutes later, he was awake and ready to drive on.

I’ve often thought about that night, sitting by my father on a hard pew bench in the empty church and, later, in the car while he slept. But it wasn’t until the weekend of my son’s wedding that I actually saw that diner again. I was sixteen in 1982, a junior in high school. My father was forty-six: old to me then, enviably and unimaginably young from where I stand now. Other well-wishers in the months since he died have used the word “imprint” in describing a parent’s lasting, indelible mark on a child. This image, too, has caused me to think. Photos of me from the wedding capture a man bearing unmistakable and not entirely welcome resemblance to his late father—don’t we all want to escape such easy and reductive linkage, so obvious an “imprint”? And yet, beyond what’s visible within the borders of a photograph, there is other evidence of his imprint, perhaps known only to me, that I’m not always so hesitant to acknowledge.

“The mystery / that there is anything, anything at all, / let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, / rather than void,” Denise Levertov writes in her poem “Primary Wonder.” There are days that force us to contemplate the void more directly than we might like to. We cannot be sure that the emptiness will be filled; we understandably doubt the very possibility of it. But if a memory can bring blessings, and if we bear the imprint of those who preceded us, it’s a little easier to imagine emptiness becoming fullness, absence becoming abundance, life being renewed. It might even stir that joyful hope: that there is not just anything, but everything, rather than void.

On Thursday, February 15, a group of gay, lesbian, and transgender activists briefly hijacked a funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. They filled the front pews costumed in carefully chosen funeral garb: the skimpy, the glitzy, the gaudy, and the drag. One eulogist led the congregation in repeated chants of “Cecilia, Cecilia,” the deceased’s name; another celebrated her as “St. Cecilia, mother of all whores”; and one woman interrupted the “Ave Maria” by twirling down the aisle with the refrain of “Ave Cecilia.”

The subject of this sudden canonization was Cecilia Gentili, a transgender activist, former prostitute, and accomplished lobbyist for the rights of streetwalkers and the decriminalization of prostitution. She was a sometime actress and writer and an inveterate performer—in sum, a prominent member of the high-glamor wing of trans and queer New York society. (Her fullest obituary appeared in Vogue online, punctuated by Gucci ads.)

The St. Patrick’s funeral was a stellar example of what, in 1961, Daniel J. Boorstin, called a “pseudo-event.” For Boorstin, a conservative American historian and later Librarian of Congress, a pseudo-event is an event that might have the appearance of a genuine news event but is in fact staged and orchestrated mainly to generate publicity.

Provoking publicity may not have been the only objective behind the staging of the Gentili funeral, but it was surely a major one. The day before the funeral, a clearly alerted New York Times reporter called the archdiocese for comment on St. Patrick’s holding such a rite for a transgender activist. The Times story on the funeral ran for two columns, filled with colorful details, for example, about the “daring outfits—glittery miniskirts and halter tops, fishnet stockings, sumptuous fur stoles and at least one boa sewed from what appeared to be $100 bills.”

In line with the familiar culture-wars script for covering things Catholic, the story proposed that the funeral might be a landmark event. Was the notoriously repressive Catholic Church catching up to the enlightened, progressive worldview of, say, Vogue or the New York Times? Surely that possibility was worth two columns—the space that in my time as the Times’s senior religion reporter might have been allotted for a major papal decree.

The story pinged everywhere. Outrage duly followed. Some Catholics fell ill at the very thought of a priest blessing the casket and commending to God the soul of a transgender person. Others managed to blame Pope Francis. But the common, overriding reaction was indignation and pain at a sacred rite in a sacred space denatured into street theater—and reported as though this were an unambiguously positive thing.

That was certainly my initial reaction. It was magnified by disappointment in the paper where I had prized my own decade as a religion reporter and my two decades as a biweekly columnist. The Times story contrasted the present welcome for Gentili’s funeral with the December 10, 1989 ACT UP protest at Cardinal John O’Connor’s opposition to publicly supported, condom-based “same sex” programs, especially ones mandated for Catholic schools. The article accurately described the massive 1989 protest as “a touchstone in the city’s gay history.” It did not mention that the protest had involved the disruption of a liturgy and the desecration of a consecrated host—and was widely condemned by public officials, media editorials (including in the New York Times itself), and many in the LGBTQ community.

Most disappointing was that the Gentili funeral story, though written by a newly appointed metropolitan-area religion reporter, was religiously tone-deaf. That the event might have abused a religious ritual and setting was apparently not worth even a hint of attention.

My immediate mortification was quickly eased. Hadn’t Jesus warned his followers to anticipate abuse and persecution, indeed in forms far more severe than this? And hadn’t the cathedral been clearly ambushed—and hadn’t it acquitted itself well? The Times reported that the person requesting the funeral had kept Gentili’s transgender identity “under wraps.” One can understand a cathedral official not being aware of Gentili’s identity, whether gender or sexual or political or, for that matter, religious. (She was a self-proclaimed atheist with, it seems, a vague and perhaps growing openness to faith.) The cathedral later explained that it does not do “background checks” on those for whom a funeral was requested, though one wonders whether it will feel compelled to do so now. But Ms. Gentili’s gender status was not really the point. Indeed, when the Times reporter raised the question of that status in his call to the archdiocese before the funeral, Joe Zwilling, an archdiocesan spokesman, refused the bait. The funeral was routine: burying the dead “is one of the corporal works of mercy,” he said; it demonstrated the way “we should treat all others, as if they were Christ in disguise.”

That was the right answer. And once the funeral was scheduled, any backing off would have provoked more public controversy. Imagine refusing entrance to the garishly or inappropriately dressed, or censoring the petition for gender-affirming health care, or confiscating the “mother of whores” imagery, or cutting off the microphone when eulogies turned offensive, or ushering away the “Ave Cecilia” dancer. The event would have gone from provocation to eruption.

Days later, Cardinal Timothy Dolan said on the radio, “I think that our cathedral acted extraordinarily well.” He might want to modify that, at least a little. Are the cathedral’s procedures for accepting and overseeing funerals so bureaucratized or understaffed that the hijackers had free rein? Arrangements are apparently turned over to a funeral home chosen by the person requesting the funeral—in this case, one that had worked with LGBTQ groups. Indeed, what was scheduled appears to have been an actual funeral Mass, which would have raised still more fraught issues about the distribution and reception of Communion. Much like a quarterback switching a play at the line of scrimmage, the soundtrack of the service contains a last-minute “audible”—a cathedral official telling (or reminding) the celebrant to conduct only a funeral service without a Mass.

Then there were the eulogists. One of them, identified as Gentili’s longtime partner, was personal and genuine in his loss. The other two were deliberately provocative and disruptive. Were they vetted? Many dioceses have regulations regarding the always sensitive issue of family requests for “words of remembrance,” as they are properly called. In the Archdiocese of New York, certain standards are recommended while actual policies and practices are left to the discretion of parish pastors, admittedly often a delicate task. In this case, however, the cathedral parish can probably be faulted for being completely missing in action.

Still, having watched the entire film of the service days before the cardinal’s remarks, I had to agree with his basic conclusion. Despite everything, at the service for Cecilia Gentili, the Gospel was proclaimed and preached, the meaning of death explained, God’s love and mercy invoked. Rather than a defeat for Catholicism, it was a victory. 

Whether it was a victory or defeat for the memory and causes of Ms. Gentili is another question. A native of Argentina, she was sexually abused as a child and then trafficked. She came to the United States illegally, and survived homelessness and heroin addiction as a prostitute before advocating for people with HIV and becoming an effective organizer, fundraiser, and lobbyist. By all accounts, she was fiercely generous and dedicated to others in similarly marginalized or criminalized circumstances. True, much of this remarkable life story rests on the testimony of Ms. Gentili herself—a “born storyteller,” according to friends and admirers. Was it the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Enough is on the public record—her overcoming of obstacles, her gifts for friendship, her pursuit of housing and health care for those in need—to elicit compassion, awe, and gratitude despite deeds and convictions to which some might take grave exception.

At the funeral the celebrant wisely steered clear of all this. At moments he looked like an aging high school teacher bewildered by the hijinks of unruly students, but he soldiered on. He proclaimed the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. In words he had obviously spoken many times before, he preached the good news of dying and rising in Christ. He added a reflection from an Anglican woman priest about love of life, hatred of death, and hope of resurrection.

At the end of the service, he blessed the casket and commended Gentili to the “Father of mercies in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, she will rise with him on the last day…. Open the gates of paradise to your servant, and help us who remain to comfort one another with assurances of faith until we all meet in Christ and are with you and with our sister forever.”

Was such a prayer inappropriate or even blasphemous? Some may feel so. But to me it was profoundly moving, the triumph of our liturgy over provocation.

Of course, the hour-long film I watched kept the camera on the cathedral’s sanctuary, celebrant, cantor, lectors, petitioner, eulogists, and front pews. Was there snickering elsewhere? Or contempt? Or tears? Or boredom? I wasn’t there to know. When the camera followed the casket up and down the main aisle, glimpses of the congregation showed many dressed like ordinary funeral-goers. Seen and heard from afar, many also appeared unfamiliar with a Catholic rite; perhaps they could be forgiven for mistaking a Catholic service for more exuberant ones found elsewhere or for a rally or a theatrical memorial, where applause and cheering might have been appropriate. (The organizer of the funeral said that if St. Patrick’s had been unwilling, she would have sought a theater space.) At the same time, it was not hard to believe that a significant number of these mourners might have been deeply touched by the readings, the homily, and the prayers.

Responding to outrage at the spectacle, St. Patrick’s swiftly held a “Mass of Reparation,” and the Times promptly ran another story, suggesting that the Mass of Reparation represented backtracking on the cathedral’s willingness to host a funeral for a transgender person. Other media took the same tack. Nothing I read from archdiocesan officials suggested that they regretted allowing a service to be held for a transgender activist. Their distress, they said, was at the deception that preceded the service and, above all, at the conduct that accompanied it.

And now it was the turn of the funeral’s organizers to be outraged. The “community Ms. Gentili served,” they insisted, deserved “a public apology” from the archdiocese. Her right to the “full Catholic Mass that was agreed upon” had been violated because “she was an ex-sex worker.” The archdiocese had employed “painful and exclusionary language” in its criticism of the event, and the remarks of an archdiocesan official amounted to an incendiary “hate rant.” Then they played the inevitable sex-abuse card: “Did those priests that raped those young men get an honorable burial?”

Was this response utterly cynical, one more ploy in the orchestration of a pseudo-event? Many people, especially many Catholics, will see it that way. Because motives are always mixed, they would not be altogether wrong. Still, I see something else at work here, something sincere and for that reason all the more serious. It is a sense of entitlement common to the glossier sector of the LGBTQ world. It is the entitlement of victimhood—the entitlement of an identity that defines itself by its victimization.

“We still gonna show up as us!” said a trans eulogist at the funeral before whipping up the congregants into the initial chanting of “Cecilia, Cecilia.” Showing up “as us” seems to have meant not surrendering their identity to the Gothic arches and Catholic expectations of reverence for a rite at St. Patrick’s. Showing up “as us” meant: This is our space now, our time, and we proceed by our own norms. It meant parading one’s derision of traditional sexual or social codes and reveling in the transgressive as an expression of freedom and a path toward fulfillment. If the words “bitch” and “whore” are terms of endearment in certain trans settings, then they should be no less welcomed as part of queer culture in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as two authors argued in the National Catholic Reporter. If the Catholic Church employs the title “saint” in a very particular way and we don’t, then tough luck for the Catholic Church.

No matter that flaunting this defiant scorn for a religion and its norms both misrepresents most gay, lesbian, and transgender people and makes life harder for them. It has broader consequences as well. Is it really surprising, for instance, that so many Americans suspect the liberalism that defends and applauds Drag Queen Story Hour? Or that sympathy with pride flags and marches is fading? Or that questions about “gender-affirming” medical treatments for children, who gets to use which school bathrooms, and who can compete as male or female in athletics have escalated so quickly to the top of our cultural politics?

It would be wrong to think that the sense of entitled victimhood that rendered the organizers of the Gentili funeral insensible to the norms and feelings of millions of Catholics is in any way unique. On the contrary, variants of it are currently inflaming American life, from left to right. Everyone has an identity, and every identity is a victim of some other identity. Consequently, every identity is entitled to its own form of assertion. If that assertion is excessive or even a little false, so be it. We are, after all, the real victims, and we are entitled to fight fire with fire.

The “we” in this outlook is, of course, very flexible. The fundraising letter from the Republican National Committee in front of me warns of the “dismantling” of the foundations of “the American way of life we once knew.” Who is this victimized “we”? All of us? All Republicans? All who disagree with the “agenda” of “Joe Biden and his socialist allies” to “normalize gender-dysphoria, high-taxes, and…endless handouts to illegal immigrants and criminals”? This is nonsense of course, but it is part of the rhetoric of victimhood that seethes all around us. Not all versions of that rhetoric are equally plausible, not all claims of victimhood equally persuasive. But they all have a similar logic. Whenever we don’t like this kind of rhetoric, we call it self-pity and resentment; when we do, we use phrases like “showing up as us.”

For years, scholars have puzzled over the growing appeal of what is not so much sturdy conservatism as aggrieved anti-liberalism. Why does it flourish in the very small towns and rural areas that have benefitted from liberal government programs? Why do fanciful or unspecified MAGA promises (“I will fix it”) enjoy so much more trust than imperfect but solid liberal programs? Liberal pundits scratch their heads, parse the latest numbers on inflation and unemployment, and wonder why these economic factors get so little traction. In the wake of the president’s State of the Union address and its many claims about past economic achievements or future economic initiatives, the head-scratching may only redouble.

The answer might lie not in the economic factors at all but in cultural factors that create the distorting filter of distrust through which the economic factors are viewed. This is a very large topic. It could easily go back to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century making of middle-class progressivism and its two wings: the cultural and bohemian wing rebelling against the religious and sexual conventions of late-Victorian “genteel” America, and the socioeconomic wing combatting new monopoly powers, urban poverty, immigrant slums, frightful working conditions, and political corruption. The story might skip over the Roaring Twenties, when the cultural rebels were in the ascendancy, and take up with the New Deal and its economistic legacy in politics and social analysis. But its most accessible starting point might be the sixties and the profound shaking of taken-for-granted notions about race, sexuality, gender, religion, and the meaning of America.

In the ensuing “culture wars,” politicians, especially Democratic politicians, often waffled and dodged, but liberal and progressive thinkers and activists did not. They lined up on the side that viewed traditional values as obstacles to liberation and progress—and in many instances they were right. When they found themselves at a popular disadvantage, however, they went in several directions. With great success, they went to the courts. (This is now conveniently forgotten.) Or they turned to what might be called the “commanding heights of the culture”—higher education, movies, television, theater, professional organizations of everyone from doctors to teachers and librarians—to promote what remained unwinnable in legislatures. Or they hoped that the genuinely needed economic benefits of active government would soothe the pains of cultural shocks. Or they simply counted on time and demographics to win their battles for them in the long run. One thing they did not do was to treat cultural resistance as something to be engaged, conciliated, possibly learned from. Instead, all such resistance was assumed to be intransigent and unalterable—the atavistic remains of racism, sexism, homophobia, Evangelical nationalism, or xenophobia.

For many liberals and progressives, cultural factors—a.k.a.“social issues”—were to be understood as the tools that right-wing demagogues wielded on behalf of entrenched wealth to bring out backward people and fool them into voting against their own economic interests. Or, conversely, cultural issues were cheap diversions that neoliberal elites favored to distract voters from challenging corporate power. Either way, economic benefits and losses were where the political action was. The culture, at least traditional culture, was a sideshow.

It’s been over a month since the hijacking of St. Patrick’s. If any liberals have criticized it, their voices have been lost in the vast galaxy of opinion-makers. The event is already receding from view, and its details will soon be forgotten as it becomes in retrospect just one more drop in the drip, drip, drip feeding the impression that the leading edges of liberalism view Catholic convictions and customs in essentially negative terms, ranging from inexcusable ignorance and insensitivity to outright hostility.

But overstate this impression, and one sinks back into the quicksand of entitled victimization. No one was faster out of the blocks in denouncing the Gentili funeral than the MAGA-mouthpiece CatholicVote. Still, the point remains: those who would take the threat to liberal democracy seriously should lift their eyes from economic factors and register the impact of provocations like the St. Patrick’s funeral and the apparent inability of mainstream liberalism to view it as anything but a blow for inclusivity and progress. It’s a small but striking example of a large problem. 

Self-immolation as a form of political protest has a long tradition. Among the most famous examples is that of twenty-year-old Jan Palach, who, in 1969, set himself on fire to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Palach was part of an activist group that had chosen, at random, one of its members for this ultimate gesture. Despite the Catholic prohibition of suicide, Tomáš Halík, who later became a priest and famous theologian, helped organize a requiem for Palach. He and other Czech dissidents revere Palach to this day, claiming that his death planted a seed for the Velvet Revolution twenty years later. 

The tradition continues. In February, a twenty-five-year-old Air Force officer named Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. His motive was clear: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide [in Gaza],” he said on Twitch, a live-streaming service, before dousing himself in flammable liquid. He hoped his act would spur the consciences of his fellow citizens. 

Like Palach, Bushnell has inspired thousands of conversations and debates and has been celebrated as a hero by some activists. And as with Palach, a Christian thinker has come to Bushnell’s defense. Halík didn’t say so explicitly, but his admiration for Palach might be rooted in the words of Christ: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” In his memoir, Halík called Palach’s death “a sacrifice,” saying it “established a firewall in the conscience of many people in his generation.” Presidential candidate Cornel West, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, sees Bushnell’s action in similar terms: “Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell who died for truth and justice!” he wrote on X. “I pray for his precious loved ones! Let us rededicate ourselves to genuine solidarity with Palestinians undergoing genocidal attacks in real time!” 

Most other commentators have been critical of Bushnell’s actions. Some have assumed that Bushnell was mentally ill, and that it would therefore be irresponsible to praise his suicide. Bernie Sanders called it a “terrible tragedy” sparked by “despair.” The Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone, a trenchant critic of American foreign policy, praised Bushnell, but in carefully qualified terms. She would never do the same thing herself, she wrote, nor counsel others to do it, but Bushnell’s self-immolation was an act of “profound sincerity.” 

What Halík, West, and even Johnstone have failed to see is that a suicide can never be self-sacrificial in the Christian sense. Ambiguity is built into the act of self-immolation, no matter how noble the cause. Whoever dies fighting a just war or delivering aid to the suffering has sacrificed their life for justice and truth. Bushnell’s action, on the other hand, may have been physically courageous, but it was finally an act of self-directed violence that did nothing to stop the violence it was intended to protest. Immanuel Kant wrote that suicide entails a contradiction: suffering makes it difficult to live, so we seek relief from suffering in order to improve life—but you can’t improve life by ending it. In Bushnell’s case, the contradiction inherent in suicide also muddled his message: he tried to defend the dignity of Palestinians while violating his own. 

Heads of state might see themselves as lords of life and death, and it is right to protest this lie. But no human being is the lord of life and death, including one’s own life, one’s own death. To declare protest-by-suicide permissible, even heroic, is to declare that the prohibition against taking innocent human life does not apply to the taking of one’s own life. The best that can be said of Bushnell’s tragic self-immolation is that it briefly drew attention to a horrific war before adding to its body count.

The Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange is a 130-foot tall, five-level stack interchange near the Athens and Watts communities of Los Angeles It is considered one of the most complicated interchanges in the United States, with multiple entries and exits in all directions between the I-105 and the I-110. Returning to LAX from traveling, I always look forward to my husband driving me home through this interchange. It offers a breathtaking view of Los Angeles; you can see the city below and downtown in the distance. The Santa Monica Mountain Range serves as a backdrop. Some days the range looks more beautiful than others, depending on how clear the sky is. Then there are the palm trees (another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, in addition to the freeways). They stand out high above the rest of the city like tulips in a garden, and are a sign that I am home. Even where I grew up on Palmetto Ave., fifty miles from downtown, palm trees line both sides of the street. 

I’ve wondered on Palm Sunday what palm-waving feels like to those who don’t have this connection to the palm tree. As a child, I loved watching the palm trees sway in the Santa Ana winds. Palms are more like grass than hardwoods, so they bend easily in strong winds, even up to hurricane conditions. The palm fronds aren’t as resilient and blow down easily. As children, we felt lucky if we witnessed the moment a large frond fell from above. It was almost exhilarating. After high winds, the street and front yard would be covered in fronds. My father would spend a morning collecting the palm debris and the rest of the day complaining about it.

Though ubiquitous across southern California, most varieties of palm trees are not native to the state. Falling palm fronds can be dangerous to cars, pedestrians, and buildings. Improperly maintained palm trees can accumulate dead and dry fronds over time and become highly flammable, yet palm-tree trimming itself presents unique dangers to those who are tasked with their maintenance. Yet few think about this as they take in the sight of palm trees standing tall, silhouetted by the sun, or bending (but not breaking) in the winds.  

The liturgical Procession with Palms offers two Gospel reading options, Mark 11:1-10 or John 12:12-16. The community, gathered outside the church with palms in hand, will either hear Mark’s description: “Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields” (Mark 11:8). or John’s version of the great crowd that “took palm branches and went out to meet [Jesus]” (John 12:13). There is an important distinction here. Mark’s gospel speaks of leafy branches, while John’s specifically mentions palm branches. Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem in Luke’s Gospel doesn’t mention branches at all, while Matthew states, “The very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and strewed them on the road” (Matthew 21:8). Palm branches are mentioned only in John’s gospel, and yet they are the chosen liturgical sacramental. 

Signs and symbols are important to us. They remind us of a time, people, places, and feelings. John’s gospel differs from the synoptic gospels. It presents a more developed theology, employing symbolism to communicate it. The specificity of the palm branches in John’s gospel allowed his intended audience to easily infer the meaning of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Palms were a symbol of joy and victory in that time and place and for the people his Gospel was intended for. We don’t know for certain what kind of branches were used to welcome Jesus in Jerusalem (or if branches were used at all, based on Luke’s account). What matters most is that Jesus came home, and his return was a victory. 

The palms I wave on Palm Sunday are familiar to me. They have a symbolic meaning unique to my experience. The second Gospel reading every Palm Sunday retells Jesus’ road to crucifixion. Gathered in the worship area in our pews, we are still holding the palms we waved outside for the procession. As I listen to the Gospel account of Jesus’ crucifixion the palm branch in my hand reminds me that like the palm trees, Jesus was bent to great extremes—but I trust that he’ll stand tall among us, silhouetted by the sun on Easter.   

There are two difficulties with writing about Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. One is saying anything fresh about them. The other is seeing them at all. I don’t mean the task of hauling yourself all the way to the Vatican, getting tickets, standing in line, jostling with tourists, and straining your neck to squint at the paintings sixty-odd feet above you. That would be, to employ a common distinction, the task of looking at them, difficult enough in itself. Seeing them is a different, more interior thing. Seeing requires attending to the image as it discloses itself to you, not to what you assume you are seeing. This kind of seeing takes intentionality, discipline, self-reflection, contemplation, and, of course, lots of looking. The ubiquity of the chapel’s central panel, The Creation of Adam, in the Western cultural imagination renders it all but invisible to the twenty-first-century viewer. No other work of art, perhaps, is weighed down so heavily by pop-cultural pastiche, from E.T. to Arrested Development. If what a painting like this one means is inseparable from what Gadamer calls the “history of effect,” then seeing it involves self-consciously investigating that history along with the image itself.

It is this series of negotiations that Jeannie Marshall sets for herself in her book All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel. Not that she burdens herself with much phenomenological speculation. And that’s a welcome thing. A journalist based in Rome, Marshall took up the task of going to the Sistine Chapel again and again, looking at Michelangelo’s paintings until she could finally see them, and then writing about them in such a way that her readers might also come to see them anew. In this she mostly succeeds.

Marshall’s narrative of her attempts to see the Sistine Chapel is structured as a series of chapters corresponding to sections of Michelangelo’s grand series of paintings. She works outward from the central panels to the surrounding images, as one would tend to look if one were visiting the chapel. She ends, fittingly, with The Last Judgment, which Michelangelo painted on the altar wall in 1536, more than twenty years after he finished the ceiling. She works patiently and slowly, wrestling with each painting until it yields a blessing. And that means attending to the Sistine Chapel’s whole history of effect: not only theological, political, and historical, but also, more poignantly, personal and familial.

The strongest tension in Marshall’s book lies in the fact that Michelangelo’s paintings are Christian and she is not. She confronts the tension head on and, to her credit, with disarming honesty and self-awareness. “We don’t encounter art from a blank slate,” she says, and her own slate is typically modern and secular. “As a non-Christian,” she writes:

I felt that my interest in Christian art was irreverent, but now I see that believing the story of Christianity doesn’t really matter. A good piece of art touches the same spiritual need in me that it does in a devout Catholic. The intensity of religious art communicates itself even to the non-religious among us because it is about our shared urge to reach up and beyond the knowable world.

I found myself arguing with passages such as this one. Religious art certainly is about our shared urge to reach up and beyond the knowable world, but it is not just that. Michelangelo actually seems to have believed the things he painted—creation ex nihilo, the fall from grace, a universal flood, a final judgment, and all the other weird particulars of a very dogmatic Christianity—and he painted them at the behest of people who also believed those things. To transpose the particularities of the Church’s dogma into a key in which “the story of Christianity doesn’t matter” strikes me not as a natural expansion of Michelangelo’s vision but rather as a too-casual appropriation of his art by an alien ideology.

I dwell on this because it is a point of real disagreement: Marshall tends to think religious art is meaningful because it’s human, whereas Michelangelo believed (and Christians still believe) that we’re human because these things are meaningful. In the second half of the book, Marshall often expresses regret at the intolerant, moralistic direction the Church has taken, contrasting it with the more humane, expansive spirit of the Renaissance. Lord knows we could use a more humane, expansive spirit in this world. But the evacuation of real Christian dogma in favor of a vague aspirational notion of neo-Renaissance ideals seems like a poor trade.

Still, to insist on the fundamental incompatibility of these two perspectives and dismiss Marshall as a sort of apologist for secular modernity would be small-minded and churlish; it would also miss the point. Whether religious art is meaningful because it’s human or we’re human because it’s meaningful, there is plenty of meaning and plenty of humanity to go around. Marshall does not set up her unbelief as a barrier to encounter. Rather, she allows herself to be addressed by the paintings. She opens herself to them. Still finding belief unavailable to her, she attempts to assimilate the art into a perspective that makes sense to her but still welcomes the possibility of an always fuller disclosure of meaning. This is an attitude she brings to all things religious. “Every time I enter a church,” she says, “I feel the sense of mystery there, and I know that having faith is a more complex, even artful way of existing than I have wanted to believe.” Marshall is as much seeker as skeptic. It is this sense of humility and honesty before religious commitment that keeps things interesting.

Marshall’s spirit of receptivity turns out to be an opening into a deeper, more complex engagement with the vectors of belief and unbelief in modernity. It also provides some welcome thematic continuity to her sometimes meandering narrative. The book initially appears to be an account of a purely “secular” encounter with religious art, but it isn’t. Marshall’s family, we soon learn, is deeply entangled with the Catholic Church—though “in flight” from it—and the book’s origins lie in her investigation of her own past during a time of profound loss. Marshall tells us that during this time she found herself compelled to probe her deep-seated ambivalence toward the Sistine Chapel and the Catholicism it represents. Something about it both repelled and pulled at her, and she was not sure why. The name Michelangelo, she says, “vibrates for me like a string plucked long ago” and “has the ring of cultural memory blended with family history.” This sense of resonance, she eventually realized, goes back to memories of a thick cultural and religious heritage woven throughout her childhood: most notably, a grandmother who dreamed of seeing the chapel and Michelangelo’s brilliant works of art but never left her native Canada. But these memories come shot through with a sense of resistance: Marshall’s experience of Catholicism as a child was of a religion “obsessed with small rules of behaviour, of policing our lives for moral transgression.” This attitude was imparted to her by her mother, a lapsed Catholic who harbored deep resentment toward the Church. When her mother visits her in Rome later in life, Marshall learns that her mother’s resentment, which stemmed from an “unsanctioned” marital arrangement that alienated her from the Church, also left her with a terrible burden of guilt. Wishing her mother spiritual peace late in life, Marshall urges her to seek out a priest and make a confession. Marshall’s own spiritual journey is not, it turns out, the only one she is chronicling. Meanwhile, her teenage son, after looking at Signorelli’s The Preaching of the Antichrist in the Orvieto Cathedral’s Cappella Nuova, is unbothered by the threats and perils of traditional religion. He is, she writes, “incredulous that their fear of damnation was so great.”

On the one hand, then, is Marshall’s mother, wracked with guilt and unable to find peace outside a Church that shapes not only her loves but her hatreds as well. On the other hand is her son, “a true inheritor of the Enlightenment,” who finds all this religious art “familiar and meaningless.” In between is Marshall herself, pushed and pulled by what her fellow Canadian Charles Taylor calls the cross-pressures of our secular age. Her own confession, understandably, is more complicated: “I don’t know what to believe, or even if faith and belief are possible for me. I only know what I feel when looking at art, when thinking about a piece of art.”

The success of a book like this, one about the experience of art, the way it shapes and works on you, hinges partly on your visual experience of the book itself. And it is a lovely artifact: a crisp hardcover with Smyth-sewn binding, printed on glossy, full-color pages. On the cover, sloppy graffiti-like text overlays one of Michelangelo’s Sibyls, signaling that though this is a book about supposedly staid Renaissance art, it’s best if we don’t take ourselves too seriously. The text is liberally interspersed with reproductions of Michelangelo’s art, which helpfully complement Marshall’s descriptions. But there are also many uncaptioned photos of modern-day Rome, taken by the photographer and novelist Douglas Cooper. The photos are not simple illustrations of what’s in the text, but they provide an eloquent visual commentary on the narrative. The unidealized Rome they show us is ugly and commonplace, vulgar even. This is a side of the Eternal City that those who have never visited it in person will rarely see. The inclusion of these photos poses a pointed, if unspoken, question to the reader as we follow Marshall in her peregrinations: Where is the sacred in all this? What does Michelangelo’s art mean when it is not ensconced in abstracted Renaissance glory, but rather amid the trash and the poverty and the sprawl and, yes, the beauty of the modern world? If the invisible God is on brazen display in the Sistine Chapel, he quietly haunts the graffitied walls and broken glass of the modern city.

Perhaps that is as it should be. In the first chapter, focusing on the central panels of the Sistine Chapel, Marshall confesses that she finds it very difficult to see the images afresh, particularly The Creation of Adam, which has been overexposed and trivialized into a cliché. Speaking of this painting, she writes, “I once ate a plate of spaghetti atop this image on a disposable placemat.” In keeping with this observation, the most interesting passages in the chapter are not on the central panel but on The Deluge, Michelangelo’s depiction of the flood, where Marshall observes that “Michelangelo blends the sea and the sky at the horizon into a void, an unbearable emptiness.” This leads her into an insightful discussion of the sublime in art. Somehow nothingness is more compelling than God the Father. It’s possible the problem is not overexposure but the fact that the Father is exposed at all, and thus diminished. Even at the dazzling heights of Renaissance virtuosity, the stark, visible fact of a God circumscribed within the bounds of the frame somehow disappoints. “Some of the first people to see the Sistine Chapel didn’t recognize the figure of the old man as God,” she says, which is a telling little fact. God is all too visually present, a being among other beings, more Zeus than the I Am That I Am. Maybe that is something the evacuation of God from the modern world can teach us—that if God is present in the terrorizing immanence of contemporary reality, he is present not as one of us, not as something we can reach out and grasp or see with our eyes, but as a hint or a gesture, a negative presence that presses in against the edges of our experience. 

All Things Move
Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel
Jeannie Marshall
Biblioasis
$34.95 | 239 pp.

“Whoever loves his life loses it,
and whoever hates his life in this world
will preserve it for eternal life.” (John 12:25)

This verse in today’s Gospel brought my reading to a hard stop. Maybe I love my life too much to think about hating it. I know too many systems that too many times have used verses like this one to justify the creation of pueblos (peoples and places) they mark for death, so that others may dehumanize and abuse in order to rule this world (see verse 31). Powerful people too easily use verses like these to manipulate pueblos into hating their lives in this world for the sake of preserving eternal life. Guilt, blame, and shame are deployed in this manipulation. In a convoluted theology, the hatred of our lives means reducing ourselves to a state of total depravity, to nothing but sinful people—people who have missed the mark with God. Then those pueblos become part of the throwaway culture that Pope Francis denounces in Laudato si’. A great con has occurred. 

This reflection is actually the second I’ve written on a scripture passage that I know has been used to build theologies of colonization, oppression, and death. I wrote recently on Luke 18:14 in a short piece that engaged the text for dealing with these heartbreaking issues. When the request came to reflect on this Sunday’s reading, I yielded to what seemed a Spirit-filled call to direct me to further pondering. 

The hard stop in my reading made me notice something about myself. Many times when reading the gospels, I focus on the words coming from Jesus. However, others mentioned in today’s Gospel caught my attention: “Some Greeks,” Philip, and Andrew. The story enters so easily into the conversational level that one would think “some Greeks” or the people who approached Philip already knew him. Or that this group of people who were probably not ethnic Jews either stood out among the worshippers at the Passover feast or were demanding attention in some way. Otherwise, why would Philip pay any attention to them among what I imagine to be crowds of people? Maybe their presence was still questionable, so Philip sidebars with Andrew before going to Jesus. 

I now replay this scenario in my head as a group approaches Philip. Philip knows one or two or the entire group. Maybe he had conversed with them on another occasion. Philip then goes to Andrew to check whether this group is worth Jesus’ time. Andrew and Philip decide to return to the group of “some Greeks” and then, as my family would say, “Ahí va toda la bola”: the small mob makes their way to Jesus. The reader does not know the question posed to Jesus. It seems the question itself is not important. The people involved in the conversation are important.

The word “conversation” can be understood in many ways: to keep company with; to come together; to turn about together. We hear in John’s gospel today how Jesus takes the moment with la bola to converse with them. “Some Greeks” have some questions, and Jesus voices many different thoughts, including his own troubles. Somehow, Jesus thinks this information will convince la bola. But just in case the crowd is not convinced and their questions go unanswered, a voice from heaven is heard: “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” The voice from heaven delights in the unnamed “it.” Tied with the words of Jesus, “it” can be understood as all people or all things. 

I recently heard somewhere that very little failure, about 10 percent, should be assigned blame or guilt. Yet, when people were asked how often they felt blamed at work and in their families, they overwhelmingly said 70 to 90 percent of the time. As humans, we have evolved to fear failure because it helps us stay alive. The message of judgment in this passage is not about failure as blame, shame, and guilt in sin. Failure and sin should not be equated. Failure can be a tool by which humans can learn and change. “The ruler of this world will be driven out… when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself” (31-32).

Conversion, therefore, means turning together, rather than only focusing on a total depravity caused by individual sin. The message of today’s Gospel highlights the turning together of Jesus and the crowd, Philip, Andrew, the Greeks, and the voice from heaven all turn together to delight in all things, because the Son of Humanity will be glorified and all will be drawn into that glory, into that delight. May we spend the remaining days of this Lenten journey focusing on turning together (conjuntos)—away from doubt, blame, shame, and guilt, and toward delight.

Disappointment, dismay, and disillusionment were in the air following the release of the synthesis report of the Synod on Synodality’s October 2023 session. Many had high hopes for what the gathering might produce. Yet many came away with expectations unmet.

But there’s likely greater reason for optimism than what can be gleaned from a forty-page report. Church history has shown how the movement of the Spirit can linger long beyond the moment a council’s words hit the page. We have already seen new developments in the short time since the closing of last fall’s session, like the release of Fiducia supplicans, the papal document on blessings. And we still have the concluding session of the Synod coming this fall. This leads me to believe that we shouldn’t focus on immediate change—but rather on the possibilities the synod promises for tomorrow. 

I found that hope last fall in Rome while accompanying a young-adult delegation of Discerning Deacons for the opening of the session. We met with voting delegates, visited holy sites, and sat in sessions with other young adults from around the world during the “Together” pre-synodal events. Hailing from different countries and speaking different languages, each young adult was there to grapple with the question of how the Church is called to address the needs of the day. In the process, I gained a better understanding not only of the synodal process, but also of the Synod’s scope. Though Pope Francis has said many times that we are a synodal Church, being in Rome allowed me to see firsthand how the Church, seemingly for the first time, learns to become one. 

I began to get this sense when the group I was with convened at the Jesuit Curia in Rome, where we experienced “conversations in the Spirit,” the process used at the synodal gatherings. We were split into small groups that engaged in three rounds of sharing. In the first round, each person was given two minutes to share on a topic brought forth in the synthesis report; there was no discussion, only listening. This round was followed by a time of silence. In round two, we shared thoughts sparked by the first round. Again, there was no discussion—just listening. A period of prayer and silence followed. In the final round, we worked together, speaking with each other for the first time. We were then asked to give a synthesis of our shared insights, in a total of just three words. These three words were decided communally and then shared with the larger group. 

This seemingly simple process demonstrated how and where the Spirit could pull us, together. We weren’t just asked to listen; we were shown how to listen in new ways—not to respond, but to encounter, with structured moments of silence. This time for silence was, itself, destabilizing. It was the type of silence Pope Francis says that “we are no longer accustomed to,” because it “forces us to face God and ourselves.” To know that this same process was taking place in the synodal sessions between lay and clergy gave me an idea of how we can listen anew in the context of a hierarchical church model. And it forces us to acknowledge that we may all have something equal to contribute to the Body we love.

None of this is to say that the synodal process is necessarily easy. Indeed, at a panel we attended while at the Jesuit Curia, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, relator general of the synod, spoke of the challenges. “There will be tensions,” he said. “It’s inevitable. It’s normal. It’s human.” He spoke in hope that in bearing these tensions, “we do not see enemies in people who think differently from us.” But he also noted that we instead sit in hope that these “tensions will bear fruit.” In practicing “conversations in the spirit,” we realize the Spirit at work doesn’t meet tensions with easy answers. It instead issues challenges and reveals questions. It begs us to look at the thing we’ve most tried to avoid and invites new ways we can respond.

This type of dialogue proves that synodality is more than a moment; it’s a method—a method that can be hard to put into practice, as even delegates at the Synod discovered (with some storming out in anger during tense sessions). But for those who are willing, it offers a radical way of dealing with the polarization in our Church and world. This way of living the Gospel turns a divided world into a ground for mutual discernment. Not only does it sit in the questions, find comfort in silence, and wade into the tension, but it also never walks away from the chance to encounter the other—no matter how different they may be. This is the type of encounter that will be just as earth-shattering in ecumenical debate as it could be to the person we thought we knew beside us in the pew.

Some people may be skeptical, but I really believe this reflective silence and sincere listening can be powerful tools in a deafening and divided world. If we choose to live with the openness of the Spirit instead of the constraints of our prejudices and preconceptions, we become a place where we focus more on discernment than disagreement, a place we enter into not in protest, but in prayer. I dare to dream that this “methodology” could reach beyond the church doors to people in all areas of life: families in the midst of a divorce in heartbroken homes, children and parents affected by dysfunctional school and community systems, those impacted by unethical business practices, even those divided by our current politics. It could offer a truly revolutionary way to live, transforming the Church while healing the broken world we’ve come to know. It becomes a faith that doesn’t doubt that God can truly be at work everywhere—present in our words and speaking in the silence.

Though Francis made clear at last year’s World Youth Day that the Church is “for everyone, everyone, everyone,” it is no secret that many young-adult Catholics don’t experience it that way. In fact, for many, the institutional Church has become irrelevant, offering little in terms of how to live out their spirituality. Yet the Discerning Deacons delegation I traveled with embodied the “everyone” Francis was speaking of: there were men and women, lay and religious, college students and working professionals, parents and singles, people of color and those of the racial majority, straight and queer, devoted Catholics and Catholics on the peripheries of the Church. And the stories of their synodal journeys show how the invitational aspect of synodality can also be transformational—resuscitating what may seem like a dying Church. 

One of the delegates I spoke with was Rebecca MacMaster, director of parish life at St. Peter and Paul Jesuit in Detroit. She reflected on her work organizing synodal listening sessions in her diocese, stressing how the “importance and beauty of individual stories” continues to resonate with her. “The national and continental documents that came of that process were huge and groundbreaking, but nothing has felt quite the same as actually sitting down and listening to people,” she said. “I remember one particular story: a young woman stood up and said, ‘I love the Church but the Church doesn’t love me.’ I feel like that’s rattled around my brain ever since.” 

Unlike MacMaster, Aaron Sinner, a member of the Discerning Deacons young-adult delegation who works in health care in Minneapolis, has not played an organizing role in the synodal process. He is, however, a young father grappling with what it means to have daughters who might want to share their voice with the Church in ways that it has not yet found a place for. He is similarly invested in the Synod’s potential results. “There are perspectives beyond my own that see the things that I don’t see,” he told me. “I hope and pray that the same is true of the synodal gathering and that the listening truly does lead to the lifting up and elevation of perspectives that the Church does not always do a good job of listening to.” 

Allysa Van Allen, a respiratory therapist from Philadelphia, said the synodal pilgrimage gave her a new understanding of the Church, which she thought might help her reconnect to her Catholic identity. I asked her if she knew of others who felt the same, and whether more of the disaffiliated might get re-engaged. “I don’t know if it means they’d be present in this Church,” she answered.

But I think if they saw more of the passion and true belief that a lot of these people hold while still keeping that piece in the back of their minds of "yes, I know. This is difficult. I know. You know, there are troubles, and there are trials, and this is not easy." We’re talking about it, and we’re figuring it out together, because it’s complicated, and I don’t think the Church really ever will be perfect. The people in this group know that as well. I think we just have a sense of solidarity in coexisting with the imperfect. That solidarity, that connection, that togetherness that the people here understand and share.

Living within that tension was something I heard from others as well. Anna Robertson, director of distributed organizing at Discerning Deacons, thought the process can empower “all of the baptized to take responsibility for the life of the Church.” She thinks people saw for the first time how they could be called into what she termed an “active protagonism.” “I see a real shift in their sense of belonging in the Church,” she said. 

I think so many people leave the Church because they don’t feel that they have any power inside of it. They feel powerless. Like they’re just acted upon in it. That’s what I’ve heard over and over again from people in one-on-one conversations. And it’s true that many of us have been disempowered in the Church, but it’s not true that we don’t have power. We have this relational power and a responsibility to exercise it, and synodality is calling us, inviting us to practice that relational power together.

That relational power, it seems to me, is key in encouraging people who find the Church unable to deliver compelling answers to their lingering questions. It offers them the opportunity to raise topics they might think are taboo—rethinking women’s participation in the Church, how clericalism distances us from God rather than allows to be God’s vessel, how the Church has failed to respond to all the marginalized, those poor in spirit as well as the materially impoverished.  

I was particularly interested in the perspective of Becky McIntyre, an artist commissioned to be a visual note-taker for the listening sessions in Philadelphia. Her captivating drawings of synodal gatherings reflect a different kind of insight. She noted that she felt called to visually represent those on the margins of the Church, citing queer Catholics, women, young people, and “those who have left because of feeling angry or unheard or unseen” in particular. 

I think this trip has served as a reminder to show that we are the Church, we build and create the Church, and so yes, changes need to come from the top down, but also, we get to build from the bottom up and we get to imagine together, we get to create beloved communities together. And to decide what that looks like with our own imagination and creativity.

So, though we await the outcomes of the synod next October, we must keep in mind that it’s not the end. This multi-year synodal process could be just the bumpy, messy start of the transformation we’re seeking. If Vatican II is any indication, it may take sixty years or more to see how the effects of synodality reshape the Church—in the areas of participation, spiritual creativity, and the institution’s societal engagement. Just as there are now those who can’t imagine a time when Mass wasn’t said in the vernacular, there may come a day when synodality is a way of life. It may become a practice so ingrained in us that those will find synodality synonymous with the way we live as “the Church.” To do this, we must believe in a God that works in silence, a spirit still moving, even while we wait.

JoAnn Lopez, leader of faith formation at St. Basil’s Catholic Church in Toronto, expressed something similar. “Experiencing the synodal process revealed something deeper,” she said. “A sense of being connected to what has gone before. And then dreaming of the ones who will come after us. And how this is a moment…to become the church that we yearn for, and that God yearns for.”

The young adults I met show that synodality calls us to hold a mix of courage and humility. They need the courage to start conversations about the rising disaffiliation rates of the Catholic Church (particularly among young adults), the history of sexual abuse, the hypocrisy of preaching unity when we remain divided, the cries of the LGBTQ faithful to be recognized, and a Church that seems to fear these difficult questions more than it fears increasing irrelevancy. But this is where humility becomes necessary—humility to realize that there is something we will learn, even as we stumble forward. We will learn that our humility allows us to anchor to God, not our pride, as we have moments of life-changing encounters. We must be a Church that knows that it does not only have something to teach, but also something to learn. 

The Church is not simply embarking on a new practice. It’s embarking on a reimagining. In this reimagining, it’s not only the clergy who have a say in how we follow the Spirit. In this reimagined Church, the process is a transformation of the people who comprise it. Through the unprecedented participation of 120 laypeople, we have seen that the future is in the hands of all of the baptized. Each of us plays a role in the kingdom to come. 

In the end, we can become a Church (and world) where we’re less afraid of being with others than of being without them. In the end, those who most yearn for change and those who most fear it may find they both leave transformed. And if we allow ourselves to change, the Church and world will follow suit. Today, we can start by living in the tensions. We can invite the Spirit not simply to be the protagonist of the Synod, but to be the “protagonist of our lives.” We can begin to model a Church where we don’t come with ready answers, but rather with burning questions, asking God: Where do we go next?

Coming away from Rome, I couldn’t help but think of what Aaron Sinner told me as we spoke of the renewed hope spurred by the synodal beginnings. “Looking back decades from now,” he said, “I hope we'll see this was the starting point, when a way of being Church was born.”

It has been several months since the release of the Vatican’s new declaration on the blessing of same-sex couples. Considering the reception of this teaching and the reasoning of Fiducia supplicans itself, I regard it as an essential but awkward step forward. It gives LGBTQ Catholics much to celebrate. Prior to the new declaration, no same-sex couples could be blessed by any cleric in the Catholic Church under any circumstances. With this development, they can now receive blessings with the sanction of the highest authorities in the Church. This change is not merely an act of tolerance but of welcome, and that is a significant step forward.

In terms of doctrine, however, it is an awkward step forward, and a sudden one. It is sure to give the Church a bit of whiplash. This is due, at least in part, to confusion among Catholics about what has changed and what has not. What has not changed is the teaching of the Church on marriage and the morality of homosexual acts. The declaration itself insists upon this. Marriage is an exclusive and indissoluble union between a man and woman and “it is only in this context that sexual relations find their natural, proper, and fully human meaning.”

To account for what has changed is a bit more complicated. To begin with, there is a change at the level of method. The declaration does not simply arrive at a different conclusion from previous teachings on same-sex relationships. It approaches the issue in an entirely different way, operating with a different set of priorities. The evidence for this lies in the distinction the declaration makes between “certain doctrinal or disciplinary schemes” and “a more pastoral approach.” Fiducia supplicans unapologetically prioritizes the latter. It finds the practice of blessing same-sex couples valid not principally for doctrinal or theological reasons but rather for pastoral reasons. This prioritizing of pastoral care and accompaniment over doctrinal enforcement is a hallmark of Francis’s papacy. It has deep roots in his own experience as a priest and bishop in Latin America. Like Pope Francis’s earlier apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia, this new declaration makes room for the reality of persons who are on the road to holiness, refusing to let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Alongside a new practice, however, there must still be an appropriate development of doctrine. It is not true to say, in response to the declaration, that “nothing has changed” in Church teaching. To the contrary, the development of doctrine is a natural and indispensable process in the Church, a point that Pope Francis himself has clearly affirmed. And a change has indeed happened in Fiducia supplicans. The declaration is an explicit, if unwieldy, attempt to develop doctrine wisely in light of pastoral priorities. To understand what has taken place in terms of doctrine, one needs to go back to a previous Vatican statement on blessing same-sex couples and, perhaps briefly, to a twelfth-century theological insight. 

In 2021, the Vatican office that was then called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a Responsum ad dubium that categorically ruled out the possibility of blessing same-sex couples. It did this for two reasons, stated very clearly in the explanatory note. Both reasons were based on the notion that blessings are a kind of “sacramental.” In the Catholic tradition, a sacramental is a practice—or an item associated with a practice—that resembles the sacraments and functions therefore as a sacred sign. This includes blessings, rites, prayers, and devotional objects. Sacramentals are distinguished from the sacraments themselves insofar as they signify grace but do not cause grace. According to the great scholastic theologian Peter Lombard, it is in their power to cause grace that the seven sacraments are distinguishable from other sacred signs. Principal among these other signs, which are not sacraments themselves but are still sacramental in character, is the act of blessing.

Against this theological background, the Responsum provides its two lines of reasoning meant to preclude the blessing of same-sex couples. First, there is the argument about what blessings are supposed to signify. Since the purpose of any sacramental is to signify grace and dispose us to receive it, a blessing can be conferred only on that which is “ordered to receive and express grace.” And since same-sex relationships involve an objectively disordered element—sex between two people outside of marriage—they are not capable of receiving a blessing. In short, a blessing cannot signify grace when it is not there. This fact, according to the Responsum, is unaffected by the presence of other “positive elements” in the relationship.

Second, there is the argument about imitation of the sacraments. Since sacramentals by their nature are meant to imitate and resemble sacraments, care must be taken not to misrepresent the meaning of the sacraments themselves. A blessing of a same-sex couple would be dangerously similar to the nuptial blessing imparted during the sacrament of matrimony. It would, therefore, imply that same-sex relationships are analogous to marriage. To avoid such scandal, the Responsum insists that the Church and its ministers may not offer such blessings.

Fiducia supplicans presents itself as a direct follow-up to the Responsum, intended not to abrogate its doctrinal claims but rather to elaborate on them and integrate them with pastoral considerations. It proposes, in essence, a broadened and enriched theology of blessings in order to make space for blessing same-sex couples under certain conditions. The central claim of the declaration with respect to the Responsum is that the latter’s first line of reasoning applied only to blessings in a liturgical context. When the blessing of a couple has a formal, ritual structure, and especially when it is associated liturgically with the sacraments, the relationship in question must “correspond with God’s designs written in creation” by meeting certain moral prerequisites. However, the declaration argues, the meaning of blessings is broader than this, and it must not be reduced to this liturgical context. In a wider biblical, theological, and pastoral perspective, blessings are an “expression of God’s merciful embrace” in which faithful persons demonstrate awareness of their dependence upon God’s saving presence and, in response, the Church offers God’s gifts and unconditional love. A blessing in this sense is appropriate even in sinful or “irregular” situations, so long as those who seek the blessing do so with sincerity.

The new declaration shares the Responsum’s concern about misrepresentation, but proposes a solution. To avoid confusing the blessing of same-sex couples with nuptial blessings, the former must be reserved for spontaneous and informal situations. These blessings must be kept out of a directly liturgical context, and they must never be ritualized. What the Fiducia supplicans envisions, therefore, is a twofold understanding of blessings. Blessings that are formal, or performed liturgically, belong to one category. These can be offered only to couples in relationships that meet appropriate moral criteria. Blessings that are spontaneous in nature belong to a broader category, and these are not subject to the same restriction.

The strength of this solution lies in its appeal to pastoral prudence. The declaration opens a space for ministers of the Church to discern what is fitting in their communities and to respond to the people they serve with wisdom and compassion. It also places a great deal of confidence in the faithful to seek what is right in their relationships with God and one another.

Nevertheless, the reasoning behind this solution is awkward for two reasons. First, it effectively relegates same-sex couples to a lower category of blessing. Spontaneous blessings do possess their own integrity and value, but the fact remains that liturgical blessings, which are more proximate to the sacraments and are validated publicly before the People of God, are reserved for heterosexual couples only. Second, the solution offered by the declaration does not adequately address the Responsum’s central theological claim, which is what is most harmful to LGBTQ Catholics. The Responsum argued that it is not only inappropriate but actually impossible for the Church to bless same-sex couples because a blessing cannot signify grace in the context of a relationship that is not ordered to grace. Rather than revising this judgment, the declaration proposes a pastoral workaround. It limits the Responsum’s concern about misrepresentation only to liturgical blessings and suggests that, in the context of same-sex relationships, a personal attitude of sincerity and repentance is sufficient to merit another kind of blessing. No mention is made of the love between two people, their endurance and self-giving, the life and family they may have built together, or the joyful witness of their union to the Church. Neither is there any mention of the presence and action of God in these relationships. Once again, the relationship is reduced to sexual activity so that it cannot be acknowledged as a site of grace.

Some commentators have construed the distinction between liturgical and spontaneous blessings in terms of moral endorsement. Austen Ivereigh, for instance, argues that Fiducia supplicans distinguishes between blessings of a descending nature, which imply divine endorsement or approval, and blessings of an ascending nature, which express “supplicating trust.” On this view, the first category of blessings is liturgical, while the second category is spontaneous or pastoral. But the declaration itself does not make such a distinction. In fact, it points out that all blessings, including those available to same-sex couples, possess both a descending and an ascending dimension. Whether a blessing is official or not, it involves God’s grace as well as our trusting surrender to God. In my view, there is no real theological distinction here. The only distinction the declaration makes is between official and unofficial blessings, a distinction designed to preserve the Church from implying that same-sex relationships are morally acceptable.

The Church has taken a welcome step forward. But the magisterium still regards LGBTQ Catholics and their relationships as sinful—as incapable of carrying grace worthy of expressing through blessing. Of course, all human beings, living as we do in a fallen world, stand in need of God’s mercy. This is no less true of LGBTQ people. However, until the magisterium realizes that same-sex couples are in themselves a blessing to the Church, that their relationships are not reducible to sex, and that God is speaking in the life and love they share, then there is still work to be done. 

Fintan O’Toole is a terrific writer, and his We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland is a remarkable chronicle of the economic, political, cultural, and religious transformation of his native country over the six decades since his birth in 1958. O’Toole has been a prominent journalist, drama critic, and prolific author for years, and now splits his time between Dublin and Princeton University. Readers are lucky that he also writes—with an acute eye for the absurdist political theater of Donald J. Trump and his devoted followers—about American politics for the New York Review of Books.

In We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole examines the fitful way in which Ireland eventually embraced a secular liberal modernity. Over his lifetime, Ireland evolved from a rural agricultural economy to a modern industrialized and technological one. Educational institutions that were once controlled by the Church were eventually secularized. Meritocracy increasingly replaced hierarchy and tradition. Turning its eyes outward, Ireland first joined the European Economic Community and then the European Union. A nation whose principal export for centuries had been its own people became a land welcoming to immigrants.    

The sixty years O’Toole writes about were in many ways a period of disorienting, sometimes anarchic change, as well as a shocking amount of political and economic corruption. This period of rapid change culminated in the internationalization of Ireland’s economy and—after countless revelations of the sexual and physical abuse of children—the complete collapse of the Catholic Church’s moral authority. On that score, O’Toole is perhaps a bit too sanguine about the new nonjudgmental moral dispensation, which he claims rests on “the recognition by most of the faithful that they were in fact much holier than their preachers, and that they had a clearer sense of right and wrong, a more honest and intimate sense of love and compassion and decency.” To be sure, Ireland is a more tolerant and open society than it was in O’Toole’s youth, a development much to be praised. But his assessment of the laity’s virtues, now that they have thrown off the Church’s yoke, is hard to reconcile with his principal contention that the Irish have always knowingly participated in the hypocrisies of both Church and state. He describes that attitude as “a genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time.” 

Nevertheless, what O’Toole has to say about traditional Irish Catholicism, especially its puritanical attitude toward sex, rings all too true. “When all sex is wrong, no kind of sex can be more wrong than any other,” he writes. “Everything is beyond the pale of discourse. Everything is out of bounds—so therefore there are no boundaries. Everything is unspeakable, so nothing is speakable. This is what created a perpetual open season for sexual predation of children.”

He is even shrewder in his analysis of the relationship between the Church and a modernizing Ireland when he describes John Paul II’s much-heralded 1979 pilgrimage to the island. The Ireland of O’Toole’s youth was a confessional state that boasted of the close bond between Celticism and Catholicism. As O’Toole notes, two-thirds of the Irish populace attended one or another of the pope’s outdoor Masses, a seeming tribute to the enduring strength and vitality of the Church. But things are not always as they appear. He praises John Paul II’s denunciation of the IRA’s terrorist violence then convulsing Northern Ireland, but he’s more skeptical of the pope’s warnings about Ireland’s possible loss of Catholic identity. “What he was afraid of was money and modernity,” O’Toole perceived. “The pope did not say directly that Ireland’s faithfulness was linked to its relative poverty, that the country was much more religious than the rest of western Europe because it was less developed economically. But he strongly implied it in his warnings about the coming times.” 

O’Toole, a former altar boy, was in his early twenties during the pope’s visit, and like many of his contemporaries he was captivated by contemporary youth culture and its embrace of sexual freedom, much of it imported from America. During John Paul II’s visit, he celebrated a Mass for youth in Galway, where he was treated like a rock star. At one point, the youthful crowd cheered the pope for fourteen uninterrupted minutes, a demonstration O’Toole was initially confounded by. “He was trapped in a feedback loop of adoration where every movement he made to signal that he was about to continue his sermon was received as if he were conducting the crowd.” The cheering only subsided after the crowd was sternly told that “[t]he Holy Father has not finished his sermon.” It was only years later that O’Toole recognized what had brought about such fervent emotion. “The crowd was not reveling in piety. It was reveling in itself, in its own youth and energy and unbounded vigor. It was taking over, inserting itself into the event, insisting on its own anarchic presence. It did not know or care about what it was actually doing; shutting the pope up.” 

That might seem like a tough judgment, but given the subsequent de-churching of O’Toole’s generation, it’s probably a fair one. Across his pontificate, John Paul’s famous World Youth Days brought together millions of young people. Those “Catholic Woodstocks” were often heralded as harbingers of a rebirth of faith among alienated youth, a rebirth that now appears to have been a stillbirth. I remember the extraordinary hype given to World Youth Day in 1993 in Denver, where more than half a million pilgrims gathered to see and hear John Paul II. Even twenty-five years later, papal biographer George Weigel insisted on calling the event “a turning point in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States,” evident in what he judged to be “the living parts of the Church.” 

But as O’Toole notes, it is not always clear what motivates those in attendance at such events, or how they understand the experience. If he is right, the young people in Galway that day felt themselves to be at the edge of a wave of change that would carry them into a future very different from the past. By a similar measure, the turning point Weigel perceived seems to have set the U.S. Church in an unanticipated direction. One in every three Americans baptized as Catholics has left the Church. Vocations have plummeted. In many dioceses, parishes continue to close. Catholic liberals and Catholic conservatives have dueling explanations for this exodus; one pushes for more reform while the other preaches retrenchment. As a fellow baby boomer, I find O’Toole’s suggestion that the Galway crowd was “insisting on its own anarchic presence” to be persuasive. Much of the experience of coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s was anarchic, and often found expression in mass celebratory gatherings. Those events, however, rarely helped to revitalize institutions, like the family and religion, that have traditionally been the glue that held a society together. 

“The real effect of the loss of Church authority was that there was no deeply rooted civic morality to take its place,” O’Toole writes about the endemic political and economic corruption that has rocked Ireland in recent decades. “The Irish had been taught for generations to identify morality with religion, and a very narrow kind of religion at that. Morality was about what happened in bedrooms, not boardrooms. Now, instead of moving from one sphere to the other, it seemed to be lost somewhere in between.” This raises an awkward question: Now that we’ve given up on legislating morality in the bedroom, do we still have the ability to legislate it anywhere else? Our anarchic politics and the grotesque inequalities of our economic and legal systems seem to be telling us we don’t. The moral autonomy we now concede to the adulterer and the “ethically polyamorous” is becoming harder to deny to the avaricious billionaire. In addition to its rigorous sexual rules, the medieval Church also had sumptuary laws restricting extravagant spending and consumption. Needless to say, neither set of prohibitions was strictly observed. But perhaps these prohibitions expressed a keener understanding of human nature and social reality than the one that prevails in our emancipated age.  

On November 27, 1970, in front of a sparsely attended subcommittee hearing of the all-important Senate Committee on Appropriations, J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime head of the FBI, testified in support of his request for an extra $14.5 million in funding. Buried within his twenty-seven-minute statement, which painted a grim picture of an agency overwhelmed by domestic terrorist plots, was a key revelation that would send the press into a frenzy within hours. 

One of the most pressing threats, Hoover warned, came from a “militant group” of “Catholic priests and nuns, teachers, students, and former students” opposed to the war in Vietnam. He claimed they were committing “acts of violence” in protest. “The principal leaders of this group,” he continued, “are Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Catholic priests who are currently incarcerated…for their participation in the destruction of Selective Service Records in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1968.” According to Hoover, the Berrigans’ group was planning “to blow up electrical conduits and steam pipes serving the Washington, D.C. area,” and was also “concocting a scheme to kidnap a highly placed Government official.” 

After he concluded his testimony, Hoover’s aides distributed dozens of printed copies of his statement to congressional reporters. By then, he’d reigned over the FBI for nearly half a century, building it up from a nondescript, toothless government agency into a mammoth shadow institution, one that had infiltrated virtually every realm of civil society. Hoover masterfully worked the media for the Bureau’s ends—and on occasion, for his own personal agenda. The next morning, seemingly on cue, the New York Times ran a front-page story titled, “F.B.I. Reports Plot by Antiwar Group to Kidnap U.S. Aide.” Countless newspapers reported the story that day as the hysteria-fueled rumors about the possible target of the radical Catholics’ conspiracy. The morbid intrigue must have delighted Hoover, whose request for additional funds sailed through the approval process. 

Within months, the Berrigans’ “target” would be disclosed to the American public: Henry Kissinger. Then serving as President Nixon’s national security advisor, Kissinger—who died on November 29, 2023—had risen in just two years from an obscure, albeit respected foreign-policy academic advising Nelson Rockefeller’s floundering 1968 presidential campaign to one of the most powerful men in the country. And while the world wouldn’t learn the full scope of Kissinger’s unilateral authority for decades (we probably still don’t have a complete picture of it), it was well known that he exercised considerable autonomy in directing American violence in southeast Asia. 

Hoover’s announcement marked the start of an important—and now largely forgotten—episode that shaped the trajectory of both antiwar politics and twentieth-century Catholic politics for years to come. The Harrisburg Seven trial revealed the depth of the federal government’s commitment to suppressing the antiwar effort. But it also gave the Berrigans and their movement of nonviolent civil disobedience their most visible platform, introducing millions of Americans to their unique mode of political struggle. As American foreign-policy institutions progressively absorbed the ethos of permanent military adventurism, as symbolized by Kissinger, the Berrigans’ lessons never faded from relevance. Indeed, they’re arguably more important today than ever before.

The Berrigan brothers’ idiosyncratic engagement with the world bucked the norms of both the institutional Church and American society. In 1965, Daniel’s antiwar advocacy landed him in South America, where he had been sent for three months into quasi-exile by Cardinal Francis Spellman, who served as archbishop of New York from 1939 until his death in 1967. Politically, the Berrigans rejected the violent practices espoused by certain segments of the New Left, such as the Weather Underground, and opted instead for methods of nonviolent civil disobedience.

The Berrigans situated themselves in a long lineage of Catholic activists fighting injustice, a tradition dating back to Jesus Christ himself. Figures such as Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton served as more immediate inspirations, though the Berrigans’ willingness to break into draft-board offices and destroy draft files alienated some of the more orthodox pacifists affiliated with the Catholic Worker movement. Still, they all saw themselves as allies with the same purpose—halting the American-led slaughter of civilians in Southeast Asia.

The antiwar priests had been targets of the FBI since the mid-1960s—and especially since their first draft-board raid in 1967. The Baltimore Four, led by Philip that October, brought the national spotlight onto this insurgent strand of Catholic antiwar activism. They justified their call for an immediate end to American involvement in Vietnam by appealing to the gospels and to the life of Jesus Christ. In May of 1968, both brothers raided another draft-board office in Catonsville, Maryland. Their trials dragged on for nearly two years, and they were finally set to begin their sentences on April 9, 1970. But on that day, neither reported to prison. 

In the following weeks, hordes of FBI agents tried to track the priests down. Philip would be caught after twelve days, but his older brother Daniel continued to evade authorities for months. He would surface at antiwar rallies and meetings across the Northeast, occasionally even stopping by to deliver a sermon at a church with a sympathetic pastor. A vast network of antiwar advocates, student activists, academics, and clergy members sheltered him from FBI detection. On multiple occasions, federal agents narrowly missed Berrigan, sometimes by just a few minutes.

When he appeared in public, he would regularly mock the FBI for its incompetence. For its part, the FBI committed hundreds of agents to chase him down, even vaulting him into the Bureau’s list of the ten most-wanted fugitives. News of the priest’s daring bolstered the Berrigans’ notoriety—and, in the process, increased awareness of the Catholic antiwar cause. But to the famously thin-skinned Hoover, Daniel and his band of renegade Catholics were humiliating the FBI. Hoover, growing old and more paranoid than ever about his slipping power, felt he needed to take drastic action to reassert his authority.  

In his attempt to take down the Catholic Left, Hoover turned to a tried-and-true strategy: he deployed a network of informants to infiltrate and gather intel on the group, with the hopes of turning up incriminating information. Philip, who originally began his sentence in 1970 at a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, began smuggling letters in and out of the prison through another inmate named Boyd Douglas, who was allowed to exit the prison to take classes at Bucknell University. Unbeknownst to Philip, Boyd was cooperating with federal authorities, copying and forwarding every letter directly to the FBI.   

Most letters from Philip were innocuous love notes to a fellow Catholic activist, Sr. Elizabeth McAlister. Philip and Elizabeth had fallen in love and secretly deemed themselves married in 1969. (After the trial revealed their relationship, Philip left the priesthood and Elizabeth her religious community in order to start a family, while devoting their lives to social and political activism.) But in one letter to Philip, Elizabeth mentioned a plan “to kidnap—in our terminology make a citizen’s arrest—someone like Henry Kissinger.” Kissinger would be a perfect target given “his influence as a policy maker,” but the fact that he wasn’t an official cabinet member meant that he’d be less protected than others. Conveniently, he was a notorious playboy, who often eschewed security in his off hours. Kissinger was, in Elizabeth’s words, “anxious to have unguarded moments where he could carry on his private affairs—literally & figuratively.” The goal of a citizen’s arrest was simple: “To issue a set of demands, e.g. cessation of [the] use of B 52s over N. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, & release of political prisoners.”

Kissinger’s national prominence goes unmentioned in Elizabeth’s letter, but it’s critical for understanding his place in the imagination of the Catholic Left. In 1970, Kissinger wasn’t merely an influential policymaker or some anonymous D.C. bureaucrat. Within weeks of assuming his post in the Nixon administration, he graced the cover of Time magazine—where he’d appear fourteen more times before leaving the government. He vigorously cultivated relationships with journalists across the country, spinning stories at all hours of the day and night, charming pundits, and strategically leaking information to ensure his name remained in the news. His romantic exploits became regular tabloid fodder, so much so that by late 1970, Kissinger was virtually a household name.

For antiwar activists, Kissinger’s name was synonymous with the American-led destruction in Southeast Asia—and more broadly, with our nation’s imperial bloodlust. Many saw his ascent as having codified the U.S. government’s willingness to commit mass murder in pursuit of its “national interest.” A figure like Kissinger roused the consciences of the Catholic Left, which drew attention to the suffering of civilians in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—as well as to the poor in this country, whose needs were being neglected in favor of massive war investments.

Years later, Philip would write about Kissinger with searing judgment: “Kissinger strutted and fretted his bloody hour. No one could stop him. He wasn’t accountable to the American or Vietnamese people. He had no respect for international law, or the law of God. We were merely talking about one way to hold him accountable for his crimes against humanity.”

Hoover’s decision to disclose the Catholic activists’ plot at the appropriations subcommittee hearing incensed his subordinates. They knew that the federal government didn’t have enough evidence of a concrete conspiracy, but given Hoover’s reckless public announcement, they’d have no choice but to charge the group. On January 12, 1971, a month and a half after Hoover’s subcommittee testimony, Attorney General John Mitchell announced the indictment of six activists, including Philip and Elizabeth (Daniel was named as an unindicted coconspirator). In the coming months, two more activists would be added to the indictment, though one of them would soon be removed, leaving the final group at seven. 

The antiwar movement responded with force to the Harrisburg Seven indictment. It quickly became a cause célèbre of the American liberal left. The notion that a group of peaceful Catholic activists conspired to bomb government buildings and kidnap a member of the Nixon administration struck many Americans as absurd, even if they weren’t necessarily sympathetic to the antiwar effort. But the sensationalism of the charges made the Harrisburg Seven case a fixture across news programs and newspapers throughout the early 1970s. 

With little evidence of a firm conspiracy in hand, federal prosecutors embarked on a fishing expedition for additional proof to substantiate their charges, issuing subpoenas to anyone with the slightest connection to the Catholic resistance network. But these efforts would ultimately fall short: by the time the trial commenced in the spring of 1972, the Department of Justice couldn’t make a convincing case that the conspiracy existed in any real sense. The only evidence in their possession was the intercepted letter, coupled with the word of Boyd Douglas—and the latter quickly proved to be unreliable, as his testimony completely unraveled under the cross-examination of the defense team.

The trial ended in a hung jury on all major charges. Only Elizabeth and Philip received minor convictions for smuggling letters into and out of prison, but even those would be dropped upon appeal. All major news outlets covered the trial closely, but the press’s fascination with the Catholic resistance quickly fizzled out after the verdict was announced. Soon, the entire ordeal—particularly the absurd notion of “kidnapping Henry Kissinger”—became a punchline. Kissinger himself never seemed to take any threat to his safety seriously. Upon hearing about the plot, he remarked to the press that “sex-starved nuns” were after him, a comment for which he was later forced to apologize.

The Catholic Left never coalesced into any organization, nor did it ever enjoy much support from mainstream Catholic institutions. In its heyday, it boasted several thousand committed activists, a minuscule minority among the tens of millions of Catholic Americans, many of whom felt little sympathy for the subversive activities led by the Berrigans. But even if most Catholics didn’t approve of draft-board raids, no one could deny the courage and conviction of the Catholic Left. They compelled the nation to confront the violent inhumanity at the core of the U.S. campaign in Southeast Asia. They laid bare the real stakes—political, social, and theological—of America’s military adventurism.

But the Catholic Left’s gifts to the antiwar movement went beyond mere discourse and consciousness. Its practices of direct action inspired dozens of draft raids throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Together, these destroyed hundreds of thousands of draft files, sabotaging the bureaucratic administration of the war. Perhaps most significantly, the organizers of the 1971 Media, Pennsylvania, FBI burglary drew directly from the Berrigans and the Catholic Left. The group cited the Berrigans as an influence when they broke into an FBI office in Media and stole more than a thousand classified FBI files. The files would soon be published by the Washington Post, and divulged some of the Bureau’s most intensely guarded secrets, among them the infamous COINTELPRO program. The fallout of the Media burglary led to major reforms within the institution, and marked one of the most embarrassing and consequential episodes in FBI history.

Kissinger’s vision of America and its role in the world triumphed through the end of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. That vision gives our nation license to commit wanton violence in the name of “realpolitik,” no matter how many thousands of innocent civilians must be butchered for its ends. The right of the United States to kill people in faraway lands, often secretly, in pursuit of national security is a hallmark of Kissinger’s America, and it endures as a key principle of the American foreign-policy consensus today. 

The Berrigans’ Catholic Left understood this principle. They saw the ways in which both Democrats and Republicans reproduced war, and they saw that, in this sense, the American electoral system was largely immune to any mass political pressure. For them, nonviolent direct action became an important mode of democratic resistance, circumventing the institutions captured by the war machine and directly targeting the operational sources of the war. Even more, their resistance grounded itself in a mutually reinforcing relationship between faith and political action: faith supplies an inexhaustible reserve of conviction and hope, while political action puts central commitments of Christian faith into practice. 

Today, bombs rain down on a captive population in Gaza. At least twenty-five thousand Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children. Despite unprecedented demonstrations against the slaughter and an outpouring of public pressure on elected officials, Washington remains locked into its present course of action—defending and funding war crimes on a massive scale. Our nation’s foreign-policy decision-making, soaked in Kissingerian realism, seems to require this massacre of civilians, no matter our rhetorical commitments to human rights.

As millions mobilize against the ongoing bloodshed, they have turned to the methods the Berrigans and their allies used: nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. And activists have yoked their protests to Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faith traditions (among others) in powerful and fascinating ways. These antiwar protesters are contesting Kissinger’s false vision of America’s rightful place in the world. Even if most of them couldn’t tell you who the Berrigan brothers were, the Catholic Left’s shadow looms large in this struggle.