Pope Francis and the right wing Catholic media: The work of the devil

Maine Writer: Pope Francis is a Holy Man!

Echo report by Gerard O'Connell published in America Magazine

Bratislava, Slovakia: When a Jesuit in Slovakia asked Pope Francis “How are you?”, the pope stunned them with his answer: “Still alive, even though some people wanted me to die.”

Pope Francis in Cathedral of Saint Martin, in Bratislava, Slovakia

“There were even meetings between prelates who thought the pope’s condition was more serious than the official version. They were preparing for the conclave,” Pope Francis said.

That statement was not the only striking piece of information given by the pope during his conversation with 53 Jesuits from Slovakia. The group met at the nunciature in Bratislava on Sept. 12 during the pope’s visit to the country. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., the editor in chief of the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica,was present at the meeting and published the full transcript of the conversation today.

During the Q&A session, another Jesuit told Francis that in the Slovak church “some even see you as heterodox, while others idealize you. We Jesuits try to overcome this division.” He asked the pope, “How do you deal with people who look at you with suspicion?”

Pope Francis remarked, “There is, for example, a large Catholic television channel that has no hesitation in continually speaking ill of the pope.” He said: “I personally deserve attacks and insults because I am a sinner, but the church does not deserve them. They are the work of the devil. I have also said this to some of them.”

While Francis did not name the “large Catholic television channel” in his answer, his remark “I have also said this to some of them” offers a clue as to which station he was referring to. 

America has learned from three different Vatican officials, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak, that the Pope touched on this same topic on his flight from Rome to Baghdad on March 5, when he greeted each of the journalists on the flight.

On that occasion, when the pope reached EWTN’s reporter and cameraman, one of them told him they were praying for him. He responded that maybe Mother Angelica, EWTN’s founder, is in heaven praying for him, but that they—referring to the entire network—“should stop speaking badly about me.” He used the Italian word sparlare, which means “to bad-mouth,” “to say nasty things” or “to speak ill of.” America’s Vatican correspondent was on the papal flight and learned this immediately after the visit to Iraq.

EWTN and its associated publications, the National Catholic Register and Catholic News Agency, along with its more than 500 radio affiliates, have been highly critical of Pope Francis. The National Catholic Register was one of two outlets that published the former nuncio to the United States and QAnon conspiracy theorist Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s explosive 2018 “testimony” calling on the pope to resign. Raymond Arroyo, the host of EWTN’s “The World Over,” has interviewed many of Pope Francis’ most fervent critics, including Archbishop Viganò, Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Cardinal Raymond Burke.

But, Pope Francis told the Slovak Jesuits, it is not only a Catholic television channel that speaks badly about him. “There are also clerics who make nasty comments about me,” he said. “I sometimes lose patience, especially when they make judgments without entering into a real dialogue. I can’t do anything there. However, I go on without entering their world of ideas and fantasies. I don’t want to enter it, and that’s why I prefer to preach.”

Francis added, “Some people accuse me of not talking about holiness. They say I always talk about social issues and that I’m a Communist. Yet, I wrote an entire apostolic exhortation on holiness, ‘Gaudete et Exsultate'.”

Sanctuary inside the Cathedral of Saint Martin in Bratislava

Commenting on his decision to issue “Traditionis Custodes,” restricting the celebration of the Tridentine Latin Mass and liturgy, Pope Francis said, “I hope that with the decision to stop [allowing priests to automatically opt in to celebrating] the ancient rite, we can return to the true intentions of Benedict XVI and John Paul II,” who hoped to maintain church unity and heal schisms by approving celebrations of the pre-Vatican II Mass.

Pope Francis reiterated that his decision was “the result of a consultation with all the bishops of the world made last year,” which, he said in a note accompanying the decision, showed him that the opportunity to celebrate the Tridentine Mass, intended to foster unity, was instead “exploited” to increase divisions in the church.

Pope Francis responds to attacks from EWTN and other church critics: ‘They are the work of the devil.’

Speaking to the Slovak Jesuits, the Pope said, “From now on those who want to celebrate with the vetus ordo [the old form of the Mass]must ask permission from Rome, as is done with biritualism,” that is, permission to celebrate in two different rites, like the Byzantine and Roman rites.

“There are young people who after a month of ordination go to the bishop to ask for [permission to celebrate the Tridentine Mass],” the pope continued. “This is a phenomenon that indicates that we are going backward.”

He told the story of a cardinal who was visited by two newly ordained priests asking for permission to study Latin. “With a sense of humor, he replied, ‘But there are many Hispanics in the diocese! Study Spanish to be able to preach. Then, when you have studied Spanish, come back to me, and I’ll tell you how many Vietnamese there are in the diocese, and I’ll ask you to study Vietnamese. Then, when you have learned Vietnamese, I will give you permission to study Latin.’”

Francis said that the cardinal made the young priests “‘land’; he made them return to earth.”

“I go ahead, not because I want to start a revolution,” he said. “I do what I feel I must do. It takes a lot of patience, prayer and a lot of charity.”

Another Jesuit who had lived in both Slovakia and Switzerland told the pope that he had experienced “pastoral creativity” while the church was repressed under Communist rule in Slovakia, but that more recently he had seen “that many people want to go back or seek certainties in the past…. What vision of church can we follow?”

Pope Francis responded: “Life scares us…. Freedom scares us. In a world that is so conditioned by addictions and virtual experiences, it frightens us to be free.” He cited a passage from “The Grand Inquisitor” scene from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which the inquisitor approaches Christ and “reproaches Jesus for having given us freedom: a bit of bread would have been enough and nothing more.”

“That is why today we look back to the past: to seek security,” the Pope said. “It frightens us to celebrate [Mass] before the people of God who look us in the face and tell us the truth. It frightens us to go forward in pastoral experiences. I think of the work that was done—Father Spadaro was present—at the Synod on the Family to make it understood that couples in second unions are not already condemned to hell. It frightens us to accompany people with sexual diversity.”

The first Jesuit Pope concluded his answer, “Today, I believe that the Lord is asking the Society to be free in the areas of prayer and discernment. It is a fascinating time, a beautiful moment, even if it is that of the cross.”

Another Jesuit asked the Pope about his frequent references to “ideological colonization,” a term the pope has often tied to the idea that gender is separate from biological sex.

“Ideology always has a diabolical appeal, as you say, because it is not embodied,” the Pope said. “The ‘gender’ ideology of which you speak is dangerous, yes. As I understand it, it is so because it is abstract with respect to the concrete life of a person, as if a person could decide abstractly at will if and when to be a man or a woman. Abstraction is always a problem for me.”

The pope emphasized: “This has nothing to do with the homosexual issue, though. If there is a homosexual couple, we can do pastoral work with them, move forward in our encounter with Christ.”

Francis concluded, “When I talk about ideology, I’m talking about the idea, the abstraction in which everything is possible, not about the concrete life of people and their real situation.”

Let's write about "auld acquaintance"

This lovely essay might be a reflective update and positive spin on the ancient Chinese proverb, "May you live in interesting times."

"It's a Wonderful Life", 1946, George Bailey (James Stewart), Mary Bailey (Donna Reed), and their youngest daughter Zuzu (Karolyn Grimes) 

How the forgotten middle verses of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ reveal its deeper meaning on memory and gratitude

"This old song can tell us something significant about what it means to remember."
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/12/31/auld-lang-syne-meaning-239618

By Christian Lingler*, published in America, the Jesuit  the forgotten middle verses of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ reveal its deeper meaning on memory and gratitude

As I returned to my favorite holiday traditions over the last couple weeks, I fell again under the spell of “Auld Lang Syne.” (Robert Burns 1788). It has always seemed to me a perfect song, with words and melody bound together so tightly as to be inextricable, like soul and body.

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days of auld lang syne?”

The phrase from which the song draws its title, preserved in the lyrics’ original Scots language, is often translated as “long, long ago” or “old long since.” I completely approve of those who left the phrase “auld lang syne” untampered in the modern English version. The wooden English translations do violence to the phrase. Even at the phonetic level, the Scots “auld lang syne” seems to carry a vernacular charm, rolling off the tongue like fog from the highlands.
For anyone who thinks “Auld Lang Syne” was written specifically for the final cathartic minutes of the movies, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” however, these translations do provide a helpful entry point for understanding the song’s history and legacy.

Composed by the poet Robert Burns in the second half of the 18th century, the song rapidly gained popularity across the English speaking lands. It eventually took its place among standard New Year’s Eve festivities, encouraging eager party-goers to reflect upon the year coming to a close before celebrating the year to come.

The song goes on:
We two have run about the hills,
And picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot
Since auld lang syne.
We two have paddled in the stream,
From morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
Since auld lang syne.

As is so often the case with old songs, the middle verses bear the greater load of meaningful content (and are also, incidentally, the first forgotten.) The song’s first two stanzas, paired by a celebratory chorus, seem fit for a cheerful Scottish pub, where members of a merry chorus offer each other winks and drinks for the sake of the “good ol’ days.” Now the song seems to take an odd turn by offering two verses in which a childhood memory is followed up by the admission of some painful reality. This pairing could be taken to communicate a recognition of the balance between happy and sad elements of the past.

Robert Burns Scottish Poet (1759-1796)

I think it more likely, however, that the song intentionally moves from a positive note to the negative in order to emphasize how the passage of time often coincides with increased hardship. 

Indeed, these middle verses acknowledge the reality of sad memories, while insisting on an immediate return to the chorus and its famous affirmation of times “auld lang syne.”

This unflinching and abrupt transition from sad recollection to celebratory affirmation indicates that this old song can tell us something significant about what it means to remember.
By extension, it gives us a clue as to how we should make sense of our experiences more generally.

We are at the end of a year during which our mettle has been tested repeatedly by onslaughts of anxiety, loneliness, sickness and social upheaval. 

If you are like me, all of these things discourage reflection on the past. Because, I had never before experienced these kinds of difficulties for such a sustained period, I found examining the last nine months uniquely challenging.

Before this year, reflecting on the past usually amounted to taking an inventory of my happy, and sad moments, the ups and the downs, before moving on at the soonest opportunity to declare that “all in all, I have a lot to be grateful for".

I have nothing against maintaining a sense of gratitude. Insofar as we have experienced earthly blessings, it is right and good for us to be grateful for those gifts.

Nevertheless, if we limit our reflection to this sort of exercise, to focusing only on the good, I believe we place ourselves in a precarious position. Why? Suppose that the year on which we are reflecting has been as hard as this last one? What happens when our pain appears to outweigh our pleasure?

Furthermore, what are we to do when we realize that our difficulties carry right up to the present and seem far from abating? In each of these cases, we are forced to realize that if we fail to find meaning in both pleasurable and painful memories, we will not gain the solace we desire. When we are confronted with the pervasiveness of our pain, we realize that the type of reflection that amounts to placing pleasurable and painful experiences on a scale only proves helpful for those who don’t need help. If we only find value in pleasurable memories, then that can only help people whose experience is predominated by pleasurable memories.

Additionally, in troubled times, many of us fall back on the refrain: “Well, it could have been worse.” This is nothing but the sullen sister of the first “platitude of gratitude,” as it, too, relies on relative thinking. 

But, instead of weighing good against bad and coming to the conclusion that we have a lot to be thankful for, we are weighing one bad against another. Things are hard. They could have been harder.

Both statements leave us wanting. 

They imply that life is fundamentally a condition that is either bad or worse. This kind of thinking hardly promises the kind of positive affirmation of life that most of us are after, especially when we reflect on our past.

Yet, there is another approach. If we accept that our pleasurable and painful experiences do not comprise the totality of our lives, but are merely the setting within which our story has been playing out, then all of our experiences suddenly have the capacity to become meaningful. Life is pain, and life is joy, yes, but pain and joy contain a deeper meaning. Like the plot of land in Christ’s parable where a treasure has been buried, our experiences are precious when viewed in light of some underlying value. Our experiences are not what define meaning; they are merely the soil from which we can uncover meaning.

When our experiences are understood as the setting and not the entire story, when they no longer need to define our ultimate value, they are utterly transfigured. They take on an aspect indiscriminately lovely and to be cherished. As with the individual movements of a symphony, some dominated by confident major chords and others by questioning minor strains, so also, the strands of our life’s experiences can take on a persistent beauty when understood in light of a theme unifying them.

But what is this unifying theme? What is this dynamic meaning underlying our experiences both joyful and sorrowful? 

In the terms of the song, how can we celebrate “picking daisies fine” alongside wearisome wandering, or raise a glass to paddling streams together alongside our estrangement across broad seas? 

I believe Burns has something to say to this effect as well.

And there’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give me a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
For auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

After all is said and done, “Auld Lang Syne” points us to relationship as that alone which makes our memories worth celebrating. 

When our past experiences call to mind those with whom we have walked through thick and thin, these memories not only comfort us in isolation, but also draw us together.

I think Burns is entirely right on this score. 

Our supreme task and greatest joy lies in the vocation of friendship, which demands of us what we long for: a life of bearing one another’s burdens and sharing each other’s delights. 

Friendship is, quite simply, any relationship characterized by that beautiful word which stands out in the chorus like embossed print: kindness.

This season, we remember God’s ultimate act of kindness, when he revealed the self-sacrificial meaning of friendship by creating a way we can enter into relationship with him. 

Yet our relationship with God and our fellow humans is not only a responsibility, but also an opportunity--even one worth celebrating in song. Friendship is required of us only in the way life requires eating and drinking, for we have been made such that what we need is what we enjoy. That which sustains our life can become a feast. For we have been made by the One who desires we have life, and have it abundantly.

*Christian Lingner is a freelance writer from Branson, Missouri. He is a student of history, theology, and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Catholic Bishops must obey the law and Trump must concede

America the Jesuit Magazine opinion:

The U.S. Supreme Court, as most legal observers expected, has swiftly disposed of an unprecedented lawsuit filed by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton asking that the court invalidate the votes of tens of millions of Americans in four other states won in the November election by Joseph R. Biden, Jr. 

In a brief unsigned order, the court said that Texas had “not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest” in other states’ administration of elections. 

Prior to the court’s dismissal, a number of other states had filed a brief supporting the suit, as did more than one hundred Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Donald J. Trump also attempted to join the suit. Even more states and territories filed a brief opposing the suit, both because of the lack of standing for which the high court dismissed it and because it advanced claims of fraud already litigated and thrown out in many other courts.

In September, the editors of America warned that Trump’s “disregard for the system of laws and customs that establish the necessary conditions for debate, decision-making and public accountability in this republic” posed a unique threat to the American constitutional order. We are saddened but not surprised that Mr. Trump’s inability to accept his clear loss has proven our point repeatedly in the weeks since the election.

What is authentically shocking is that so many figures within the Republican Party have abetted Mr. Trump’s outlandish lies about “massive” election fraud, for which no one has provided any coherent evidence, and that they have cooperated with him in filing a swarm of clumsily drafted lawsuits for various courts to swat down over and over again. The country must be grateful for the professionalism and integrity of the judiciary, but its reliability as a backstop—this time—does not erase the danger of these attempts to overturn the will of the voters. Analogously, those sadly few Republican elected officials who have publicly accepted Mr. Biden’s victory likewise deserve praise, but their isolated courage cannot adequately substitute for their party’s near-total captivity to Mr. Trump’s delusional refusal to concede his objective loss.

To make matters worse—and bring them closer to the hearts of Catholics—some of those involved in these affronts against democratic norms are claiming the warrant of the Gospel, both praying for attempts to disenfranchise the populations of entire states to succeed and pretending that they are doing God’s will in supporting Mr. Trump’s assault on the integrity of American elections. That they have likely convinced themselves of the truth of Mr. Trump’s fabrications about the election being “stolen” from him does not reduce their culpability but instead underlines the degree to which their devotion to Mr. Trump has drawn them away from the facts that form the foundation of the truth.

The riches of the Gospel are being diverted into one of Mr. Trump’s bankruptcies.

The danger in such an idolatrous use of the Gospel for nakedly partisan ends is not primarily that it will succeed in overturning the U.S. election. At least at this juncture, the guardrails of the American republic seem to be holding. The danger, rather, is that the association of Christian faith with the corrupt project of installing Mr. Trump in a second term by any means necessary undermines the credibility of the whole church’s efforts to evangelize. The riches of the Gospel are being diverted into one of Mr. Trump’s bankruptcies.

Maine Writer- It was the Catholic bishops that are the same group that sinned when they broke the law by protecting sexually abusive priests by moving them around rather than demanding their resignations! For some bizarre reason, some of the Bishops are siding with Trump rather than support a law abiding  Roman Catholic President Elect Joe Biden.

As this editorial is being drafted, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of Tyler, Tex., is scheduled to speak by video at a rally after a march on Saturday in Washington, D.C., dedicated to “praying for the walls of corruption and election fraud to fall down.” 

Several other Catholic figures are scheduled to appear as well. Bishop Strickland’s choice to lend episcopal support to this effort brings disrepute upon his office. We hope and pray that his brother bishops may exercise a ministry of fraternal correction by publicly clarifying for the faithful that the American bishops as a whole have not taken sides against the will of the voters in our democracy.

Indeed, the Supreme Court's swift disposal of this latest cynical attempt to reverse Trump's electoral defeat means that the inauguration of the next president will proceed smoothly and on schedule, as it has throughout our nation's history. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court's prudence is no replacement for the civic virtue of elected representatives. Voters should remember those who have abandoned such virtue and hold them to account in the next election.

Maine Writer- Donald Trump must obey the law and concede. 

He lost the 2020 presidential election, plus he has not succeeded in demonstrating his fake call about voter fraud in multiple unsuccessful attempts to overturn the vote counts in key states. 

Pittsburgh Roman Catholics for Joe Biden #JoeBidenKamalaHarris2020: Remember #childrenincages

 Joe Biden "Law and Order" speech in Pittsbugh Pennsylvania 

When Vice President Joe Biden chose Pittsburgh, Pa., on Aug. 31 to deliver a key address in his presidential campaign, it was in part to target Catholic voters like Kevin Hayes.

This summer, Mr. Hayes helped found Pittsburgh Catholics4Biden, a group of 700-some Western Pennsylvania Catholics working to defeat Donald Trump in a key swing state. (The Biden campaign has scheduled the virtual launch of the national Catholics for Biden for Sept. 3.)

Both parties are making extensive efforts to win the Catholic vote in 2020. And there is logic to chasing Catholic swing voters because they may actually swing. Though other statisticians report that the Catholic vote was evenly split in 2016, according to exit poll data compiled by the Pew Research Center, Catholics voted for Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton, 52 percent to 45 percent.

In the previous election they swung for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, 50 percent to 48 percent. Exit polls suggest that Catholics have almost exactly mirrored the overall electorate in every election this century.

Groups like Mr. Hayes’s could prove decisive to a winning Biden coalition, particularly because Mr. Hayes says that the former vice president is generating more enthusiasm among its members than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Catholics4Biden includes people who voted for President Trump in 2016 as well as, perhaps surprisingly, many who say that the Democratic Party can earn their support by framing its position on abortion in a way they like.

In 2008, Obama and Biden talked about reducing the number of abortions,” which helped them win the Catholic vote, said Mr. Hayes, an architect who lives in the Pittsburgh suburb of Mount Lebanon. “In 2016, the Clinton-Kaine campaign did not make as good of an effort to engage faith communities, nor did they do as well in articulating the need to reduce the number of abortions, as they did emphasizing a woman’s right to choose.”

In his speech on Monday afternoon, Mr. Biden denounced the president for forfeiting “moral leadership” and declared that “all men and women are created equal, and they deserve to be treated equally.”

While the rhetoric addressed the violence in the past week in Kenosha, Wis., the choice of locale was firmly strategic and political. 

 In fact, Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania by only 44,292 votes out of over six million cast in 2016.

Along with Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and a few others, it is one of the states that may determine the outcome of the 2020 election.

And crucial in all those states: Catholics. In Pennsylvania, for example, they make up a quarter of the electorate.

Both parties invited prominent Catholics to speak at their national conventions: James Martin, S.J., at the Democratic event and Cardinal Timothy Dolan at the Republican one.

As theologians, bishops and writers argue about whether abortion should determine a Catholic’s vote, the ground battle for turnout and votes is ramping up. The fight is particularly active in Pittsburgh, with its large inheritance of European immigrants and union-supporting Catholic Democrats.

On Sunday night, the day before Mr. Biden spoke, Pittsburgh Catholics4Biden held its first event in a bucolic family park in the suburb of Sewickley, northwest of the city.

The event was co-sponsored with a group called Vote Common Good, an organization of Christians founded in 2018 whose purpose is to “reach out to white evangelicals and Catholics,” said founder Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor.

“There’s been a lot of work put into keeping people inside the GOP machine, and we’re trying to put a lot of work into giving them another alternative.”

An estimated 5 to 15 percent of Trump-supporting Christians are up for grabs. Mr. Pagitt’s tour bus, stationed in the parking lot, will travel with its team of organizers and performers to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida during the campaign.

The prospect of reaching out to Catholics was appealing enough to attract as keynote speaker one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars, Rep. Conor Lamb, a Catholic who won in a Trump-supporting Pennsylvania district in 2018 partly with a more moderate stance on abortion and gun rights.

The meeting also got the attention of Betsy Radcliffe, a Trump supporter and a leader in a group of suburban anti-abortion activists. “We heard about this in the last 48 hours,” she said. “We had to come because we believe the Republican platform stands for life, and the Biden-Harris position threatens the sanctity of life.” (Maine Writer: This is a false narrative because Donald Trump has contributed to the loss of over 185,000 coronavirus deaths because of gross pandemic mismanagement.)

Was there any hope for common ground with Catholic Democrats? “Well, we pray for Catholics and people who say they’re Catholics, but they are complicit in the murder of children.”

At the event, Ms. Ratcliffe stood with a cluster of anti-abortion activists praying the rosary and holding up signs and plastic fetuses and babies. (Another way of telling Catholic Republicans and Democrats apart: Few of the anti-abortion protesters wore face masks to reduce the risk of transmitting the coronavirus, while almost everybody in the Pittsburgh Catholics4Biden group did.) Although most of the anti-abortion activists described themselves as (wrong-minded!) single-issue voters (ugh !), their signs suggested opinions on a range of issues, including opposition to socialism and anger at Kamala Harris’s questioning of a judicial appointee’s membership in the Knights of Columbus.

When Mr. Lamb started speaking, the group heckled him.

“You’re an apostate!” yelled a man.

“Heretic!” the man’s wife added for good measure. Both declined to disclose their names. Mr. Lamb has said he personally opposes abortion while defending its legal availability.

Mr. Pagitt of Vote Common Good walked over to the anti-abortion activists. “We welcome you, but we ask you to be kind and respect our speakers,” he said to the group. It is an approach he has used before, he said, and it worked: The group quieted down.

The speech was well received by a crowd of 50 or so dominated by middle-aged suburban women. “I wanted to come here to see that I’m not alone,” said Karen Florian, a nurse. “I care about abortion, but it’s not the only issue. I care about children in cages and health care too.”

Mr. Lamb said that it was rare for him to be heckled, even by Catholic groups when he visits churches, which he said he does frequently. But it is to be expected as the 2020 campaign ramps up, and it is important to keep cool, he said. “They were saying ‘heretic’,” he said. “Well, people yelled that at Jesus.”

The country, he added, “doesn’t need one more person who’s angry.”

Holding a Bible does not give Donald Trump the moral authority to bully Americans or to reverse DACA

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals- Donald Trump's evil policy to refuse more DACA applications is a terrible act of injustice to innocent, and hard working Americans who live, and work in our nation and deserve earning a path to US citizenship.

When Donald Trump made a fool of himself by hypocritically posing with a Bible as though the emtpy gesture justified assaulting peaceful protestors with tear gas, he obviously had never taken any time to read the Scriptures printed within the covers.  

"Blessed by the peacemakers...." Beatitude, any of the blessings said by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as told in the biblical New Testament in Matthew 5:3–12 and in the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6:20–23.

Echo opinion published in America the Jesuit magazine, reported by Carol Zimmerman

Faith leaders are right to criticize Trump’s plan to reject new DACA applicants

Donald Trump is hypocritical with a Bible because he has no idea what is written in the Scriptures, inside the binding.

WASHINGTON (Catholic News Service) — Faith leaders and immigrant advocates have denounced the Trump administration’s plan to reject first-time applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, and limit DACA renewals to one-year extensions instead of two.

Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento, California, said the administration’s action, announced July 28 in a memo issued by the Department of Homeland Security, was “irresponsible and recalcitrant.”

The memo was written by Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and issued more than a month after the Supreme Court ruled against efforts by the Trump administration to end DACA.

When the administration failed to move on DACA after this ruling, a federal judge in Maryland July 24 said it had to publicly clarify the status of the DACA program within 30 days.

DACA, a program that was started in 2012 by President Barack Obama with an executive order, has enabled about 700,000 qualifying young people, described as “Dreamers,” to work, go to college, get health insurance, a driver’s license and not face deportation. These young adults were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents without legal documentation.

Wolf said the administration may try to end DACA by looking at it as a law enforcement issue potentially contributing to illegal immigration. He said the current measure is a temporary change while the federal government takes time to review future actions.

In the memo, Wolf said: “DACA makes clear that, for certain large classes of individuals, DHS will at least tolerate, if not affirmatively sanction, their ongoing violation of the immigration laws.”

For now, the biggest impact will be on those who would have been new applicants. Attorneys for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, known as CLINIC, have said that about 60,000 young people now over age 15 would now qualify for DACA status and had been urging young people to get their paperwork together and to seek legal advice about the program since the Supreme Court ruled in June that DACA would remain in place.

Under the new plan for DACA spelled out in the memo, the government also will deny requests by DACA recipients to visit their home countries except under “exceptional circumstances.”

Bishop Soto, chairman of the board of CLINIC, criticized the decision’s timing, in the middle of a pandemic, and said it signified a return “to the same callous posture, against which the court has already decided.” He also said the move will “aggravate the afflictions of many DACA recipients and aspirants, a significant portion of whom are essential workers” who are keeping vital parts of the economy running during the pandemic.

The bishop went on to say, in a statement, the directives “make no moral or practical sense” and will “only further cripple the recovery, especially for the vulnerable.”

“DACA recipients are vital to their families and to our country, which has become their home. They are our neighbors.” He urged the administration not to end DACA and work with Congress to create a path to citizenship for the program’s beneficiaries.

Hope Border Institute tweeted July 28 the administration’s action, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision and federal rulings, “touches upon fundamental issues of rule of law and separation of powers. DHS and the President are not above the law.”

The Rev. Jennifer Butler, CEO of Faith in Public Life Action Fund, criticized Trump for “using the real lives of young immigrants as bait to lure racist support for his reelection. He should be ashamed. Congress cannot let him get away with this cruel act. They must pass the Dream and Promise Act right now for DACA recipients and others who live in fear of deportation.”

And Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said the administration’s action is “flouting immigration-related court orders left and right.”

She called on Americans to take action in defense of DACA recipients, acknowledging they are “every bit as American as us, and it is well past time we enshrine in law that their home is here.”

During a July 28 news briefing, the Donald Trump said: “We’re going to work with a lot of people on DACA.”

Without giving any details, he added: “We are going to make DACA happy and the DACA people and representatives happy, and we’re also going to end up with a fantastic merit-based immigration system.”

Maine Writer - As usual, the hypocritical Donald Trump changed his mind about DACA and he is moving forward with administrative policies to block new applications. #voteblue

Addressing the evil of racism - Catholic Bishops

“The church offers much to embrace in its history of being proactive in race relations, as well as some sad and harmful actions from the past to reject,” Bishop Shelton J. Fabre of Houma-Thibodaux, Louisiana., who chairs the committee, told America.

“Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love, A Pastoral Letter Against Racism" approved by US Catholic Bishops

Racism is an evil which endures in our society and in our Church. (It must be eliminated!)

BALTIMORE_MD— The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) approved, during its November 2018, General Assembly, the formal statement, “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love, A Pastoral Letter Against Racism." 

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/11/14/us-bishops-adopt-new-anti-racism-letter-first-almost-40-years

The full body of bishops approved it by a two-thirds majority vote of 241 to 3 with 1 abstention.

The USCCB Cultural Diversity in the Church Committee, chaired by Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller, MSpS, of San Antonio, Texas, spearheaded the letter’s drafting and guided it through the voting process. Bishop Shelton J. Fabre, of Houma-Thibodaux, Chairman of U.S. Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism and Chair of the Sub-committee on African American Affairs within the Cultural Diversity Committee, issued the following statement:

“The entire body of bishops felt the need to address the topic of racism, once again, after witnessing the deterioration of the public discourse, and episodes of violence and animosity with racial and xenophobic overtones, that have re-emerged in American society in the last few years. 

Pastoral letters from the full body of bishops are rare, few and far between. But at key moments in history the bishops have come together for important pronouncements, paying attention to a particular issue and with the intention of offering a Christian response, full of hope, to the problems of our time. This is such a time.”

Initiated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in August 2017, the Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism was created to address the evil of racism in our society and Church, to address the urgent need to come together as a society to find solutions, and to support the implementation of the bishops’ pastoral letter on racism.

“Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love,” is a Pastoral Letter from the full body of bishops to the lay faithful and all people of goodwill addressing the evil of racism.

The pastoral letter asks us to recall that we are all brothers and sisters, all equally made in the image of God. Because we all bear the image of God, racism is above all a moral and theological problem that manifests institutionally and systematically. Only a deep individual conversion of heart, which then multiplies, will compel change and reform in our institutions and society. It is imperative to confront racism’s root causes and the injustice it produces. The love of God binds us together. This same love should overflow into our relationships with all people. The conversions needed to overcome racism require a deep encounter with the living God in the person of Christ who can heal all division.

"Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love," is not the first time the U.S. Bishops have spoken as a collectively on race issues in the United States, but it is the first time in almost 40 years.

In 1979, they approved "Brothers and Sisters to Us: A Pastoral Letter on Racism in Our Day." Among the many things, they discussed was the fact that "Racism is a sin: a sin that divides the human family, blots out the image of God among specific members of that family, and violates the fundamental human dignity of those called to be children of the same Father." The newly approved “Open Wide Our Hearts” continues the message that “Brothers and Sisters to Us” sought to convey.

The full text, as well as many accompanying pastoral resources, will be posted at http://www.usccb.org/racism. 

Resources will include a bulletin insert, homily help, prayer materials, background information on systemic racism, and activities for primary, secondary, and higher education classroom settings.

Letter from Dorothy Day is her meaningful life review

Dorothy Day....  "In 1927, following years of doubt and indecision, she joined the Roman Catholic Church...."

"We Catholics know, with a supernatural knowledge, the existence of God and love Him with our will, which is a power of our souls." - Dorothy Day (1897-1980)

Dorothy Day "Letter to an Agnostic" was written in 1934, but it's also an autobiographical review describing her spiritual growth.

In 1934, Dorothy Day wrote this letter. This autobiographical review described her dedication to religion. Reading it today is a refreshing review of her spiritual journey from agnostic, to Catholic and advocate for the poor and they are evident in her insightful narrative.

I found this letter titled "Letter to an Agnostic", published in America Magazine, while researching the information written in an essay by Sandra Yocum, published in The Conversation. 

Reading the eighth chapter of St. Teresa's autobiography* recalled to me your objection to religion as being morbid, wrote Day.

This is quite a natural feeling on your part and it is a very common attitude toward religion. If those who spend several hours a day in prayer, and hours more in spiritual reading, as she did, in a willful search for God, had these feelings, these struggles—how much more those who are scarcely touched by faith or hope?

You know the reaction of my friends to religion, that it is a deliberate turning away from life. We Catholics know, with a supernatural knowledge, not with a worldly knowledge, that this is not so, just as we know the existence of God and love Him with our will, which is a power of our souls.

St. Teresa struggled for twenty years, she said, to avoid the occasions of sin. To know what she was talking about, what she meant by sin, it is necessary to understand the situation she was in.

She had entered the convent at the age of eighteen. The Carmelite convent was a large one, containing so many nuns that it was difficult to feed them all. It was the custom of the day to send unmarried daughters, widows, ladies who wished to retire from the world to the convent, and yet they did not retire from the world. There were a great many visitors. St. Teresa herself said that one of the reasons so many visitors came was to bring food to the nuns, and they received their callers because there was so little food in the convent that they needed to eke out their resources in that way. Later when St. Teresa was making her foundations of the reformed Carmelites, she saw to it that her nuns had enough to eat.

St. Teresa knew that she was far from leading the life she wished to lead when she entered the convent. She wished to give herself up wholly to God. She wished everything she did, every word she said, to tend to that end. But she was a gay creature. The story is that she went to be received in the convent in a bright red dress. She was full of vitality, life. She wished to live abundantly. The very qualities in her which urged her to give herself to God, drew her to her fellows. She had an abundant love for them, an interest in them, and there was much time spent in conversations.

The more her life was involved with her fellows, the more she was drawn to them, the more she felt she was drawing away from God.

She was making little account of venial sins, she said; she was not avoiding the occasions of them. She felt that she was a sinful creature and said so many times in her autobiography. This does not mean anything scandalous—that the convent ladies sat around and received unseemly visits, ate or drank to excess (as the monks were accused of doing), or indulged in vicious talk or gossip.

But St. Teresa had so great a desire for perfection that any time engaged in idle talk (the most innocent idle talk) seemed to her to be deliberately stolen from God. She knew what she wanted, she knew that there was a better life for her, but she had a struggle to attain it.

She tells in this eighth chapter how she was kept from prayer:

The sadness I felt on entering the oratory was so great that it required all the courage I had to force myself in. They say of me that my courage is not slight, and it is known that God has given me a courage beyond that of a woman; but I have made a bad use of it.

She told, too, of watching the hour glass, of how she was filled with distractions, of what a constant hard struggle it was to force herself to prayer and spiritual reading.

And these struggles went on for twenty years!

"I wished to live," she wrote, "but I saw clearly that I was not living, but rather wrestling with the shadow of death; there was no one to give me life, and I was not able to take it."

This is the morbidness that you mean, I know.

If St. Teresa, with her knowledge and insight and the graces God gave her to go on struggling, felt that she was wrestling with the shadow of death, how one who knows nothing of religion must shy off from it every time the matter enters his consciousness!

The shadow of death she was talking of was the life she was leading, purposeless, disordered, a constant succumbing to second-best, to the less-than-perfect which she desired. But human nature will try to persuade us that the life of prayer is death, is a turning away from life.

As a convert I can say these things, knowing how many times I turned away, almost in disgust, from the idea of God and giving myself up to Him.

I know the feeling of uneasiness, of weariness, the feeling of strain put upon the soul from driving it, instead of abandoning it to God.

And how any one can persist in the search for God without the assistance of the Church and the advice of her confessors, with the experience of generations behind them, I do not know.

The thing you do not understand is the elemental fact that our beginning and our last end is God. Once that fact is accepted, half the struggle is won. If we wish to go on struggling, not to be content with the minimum of virtue, of duty done, of "just getting by," then we should account it a great honor that God has given us these desires, to serve Him and to use ourselves completely in His service.

You do not see this, you do not believe it. Every now and then, when you think of religion in your busy life, you end by turning from it with aversion.

You are very young, scarcely twenty-one, and you have not yet really felt the need, the yearning toward God. You have not been in such agony and misery that you turned to One whom you knew not and said: "God help me!" Or if you did, you were ashamed of doing it afterward, feeling it to be cowardice to turn in misery to a God in whom you did not believe.

I felt this despair when I lay in jail for fifteen days (after demonstrating for the rights of political prisoners), contemplating the fundamental misery of human existence, a misery which would remain even if social justice were achieved and a state of Utopia prevailed. For you cannot pace the floor of a barred cell, or lie on your back on a hard cot watching a gleam of sunlight travel slowly, oh, so slowly, across the room, without coming to the realization that until the heart and soul of man is changed, there is no hope of happiness for him.

On the other hand, you have not felt the ecstacy, the thankfulness, the joy, which caused the Psalmist to cry out, "My heart and my flesh rejoice for the living God." "My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord."

St. John of the Cross, who lived at the same time as St. Teresa and was her good friend, tells about the different stages of prayer and how the first state is the purgative state. He explains how though we feel this joy and this longing of God, a joy which is so sweet that even the remembrance of it is a constant spur to us, still our own imperfections give us constant suffering and unease, and the struggle for the spiritual life is a wearisome one, and that we must not expect to find ease in prayer.

He makes us understand this distaste, this recoil from religion. This lethargy comes from a consciousness of the immanence of the struggle, the fact that it is unceasing and will go on to death, and we often think that sheer thoughtless paganism would be a relief.

You do not know how long I struggled. How I turned to God, and turned from Him, again and again; I, too, felt that distaste, I, too, felt that religion had a morbid quality.

It is the struggle of the flesh against the spirit. It is the struggle of the natural man against that in him that is Divine. (I am going to write you later about the flesh and the spirit, the sensual and the spiritual, for you have an entirely wrong idea as to what Karl Adam calls "the antitheses with which Christianity is concerned.")

I can understand what you mean by morbid, and can understand how no matter how often you are drawn you are also repelled. If you only knew, and could in intellectual humility submit yourself to the rule which makes all so plain and clear!

We have "a rule of life" which is easy to follow, provided we listen to the wise counsels of such people as St. Teresa, St. Francis de Sales, de Caussade, Father Considine. I mention these names because they are the first ones that come to mind who have been of help this past year.

St. Teresa understood that weariness of the soul; St. Francis tells us to be gentle with ourselves; de Caussade tells us to abandon ourselves to Divine Providence, and Father Considine tells us to have more faith in God asa kind Father who is so above our Earthly fathers that he wil forgive us all our sins, even the greatest, who will not give us a stone when we ask for bread.

We are taught that our souls never exercise just as our body does, otherwise it will never be healthy and well, and if it is not in a healthy state, of course we feel morbid. And prayer is that exercise for the soul, just as bending and stretching is the exercise of the body. It is intellectual pride, the arrogance of youth which makes the physical act of prayer difficult.

You submit yourself to the dogma of Communism, you accept the authority of Karl Marx and Lenin, you accept the philosophy of Communism and know while you accept it that you are accepting a "hard saying," that in all likelihood you will be persecuted for this acceptance.

Perhaps the main trouble is that to you Christianity is too simple. To you Christianity is the accepted thing, so you rebel, and knowing that your rebellion deprives your soul of life, you turn on religion and call it morbid.

*Therese died when she was 24, after having lived as cloistered Carmelite for less than ten years. She never went on missions, never founded a religious order, never performed great works. The only book of hers, published after her death, was an brief edited version of her journal called "Story of a Soul." (Collections of her letters and restored versions of her journals have been published recently.) But within 28 years of her death, the public demand was so great that she was canonized.

Dorothy Day: "Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul."

An essay published in The Conversation

"...for Dorothy Day (1897-1980), Jesus Christ appeared in every poor person who came to share a meal at a house of hospitality."

Sandra Yocum - Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Dayton (Photo credit "America Magazine")

Servant of God Dorothy Day was an American Catholic activist and founded the Catholic Worker movement, establishing houses of hospitality and advocating pacifism.

Dorothy Day died 38 years ago. Her life followed an unorthodox path – moving from rejecting religion in favor of activism to embracing Catholicism and integrating it with social action through the Catholic Worker Movement.

A hero of the Catholic left, Day found an unlikely champion for her canonization in New York’s conservative archbishop, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, who hailed her as “the saint for our times.”

At their November 2012 meeting, the U.S. bishops unanimously supported her cause, and the Vatican accepted the recommendation, naming her “Servant of God.” If an investigation proves her life to be exceptionally virtuous, she will be declared “venerable.”

However, to declare her a saint, two miracles through her intercession will need to be proven. The process is long and complex, and only three other American-born Catholics, all women, have been canonized. The Catholic Church remembers the life of saints at daily Mass on their feast day, usually the day of death.

What most appeals to me, as a scholar of Dorothy Day, is her ability to discern beauty in the midst of her harsh and demanding life. In that, she has a lesson for the times we live in.

An early radical life

The arc of her early life followed an unconventional path. In her 1952 autobiography, “The Long Loneliness,” Day reveals her lifelong attraction to the radical life among anarchists, socialists and communists.

Dropping out of the University of Illinois in 1916, she followed her family to New York City and found work as a journalist and freelance writer. 

Living on her own, she spent much of her time among radicals like Max Eastman, editor of socialist newspaper “The Masses” and communist. As a journalist, she took up the cause of striking workers. She loved to read in her spare time and found especially inspiring the work of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.

She was also an activist. In 1917, Day joined a friend in a suffragette protest which led to their arrest and incarceration at the notorious Occoquan work farm in Virginia. Day describes in vivid detail the guards’ brutality, grabbing her and dragging her to her cell.

She subsequently participated in a hunger strike with her companions to protest against such treatment.

After her release, she returned to New York, working odd jobs and drinking until dawn with an assortment of friends in a bar nicknamed “Hell Hole.” She recalls with fondness the playwright Eugene O'Neill reciting Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven.” As she wrote in her biography, the hound’s relentless pursuit fascinated her and caused her to wonder about her own life’s ultimate end.

She went through times of deep personal sorrow. Her granddaughter, Kate Hennessy, reveals in “Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty” Dorothy’s heartache of failed love affairs, including procuring an illegal abortion. The trauma contributed to her strong opposition to abortion after becoming Catholic.

The highs and lows of this life left Day unsettled, and she recalls slipping into the back of St. Joseph’s Church, on Sixth Avenue, taking solace in watching Mass as dawn broke over the cityscape.

Becoming a Catholic

Then, in 1925, Dorothy Day fell in love with Forster Batterham, the brother of a friend’s wife, a transplanted southerner, a lover of nature and, like Day, of opera. They shared her Staten Island cottage and conceived a child, Tamar Therese, born in 1926.

She describes in loving detail her life with Forster, “walking on the beach, resting on the pier beside him while he fished, rowing with him in the calm of bay, walking through fields and woods.”

It was the birth of her daughter that connected her to the beauty of the divine in a deeply personal way. She wrote,

“The final object of this love and gratitude is God.”

She was moved to worship God with others. Even though the man she loved rejected all institutions, especially religious, Day had her daughter baptized a Catholic and herself less than six months later.

This ended her common law marriage, though in her memoir, her granddaughter, Hennessy, makes abundantly clear that her grandfather, Forster, remained a constant presence throughout her grandmother’s life.

About five years later, Day met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant who taught her about Catholic radicalism. They founded the Catholic Worker Movement and began publishing a newspaper by the same name in May 1933 to disseminate their radical Catholic vision as a counter to Communism.

That same summer a Catholic Worker Movement community formed and lived in what Maurin called a “house of hospitality,” a place of welcome to every person, especially the poor. Day explains the gospel inspiration for these houses of hospitality.

“The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him. It is the only way of knowing and believing in our love.”

The Catholic Worker Movement continues to thrive through its newspapers and houses of hospitality.

Saving beauty

For Day, beauty appeared wherever God was present. This meant Day came to see beauty everywhere and in everything.

She believed Christ’s saving beauty appeared not only on the altar at Mass but also around every Catholic Worker Movement table. Jesus identified with the least, and so, for Day, Christ appeared in every poor person who came to share a meal at a house of hospitality.

Her writings make clear that she never wavered in this conviction.

This attentiveness to beauty translated to everything commonplace in her daily life. Another Day scholar told me of his vivid memory of an elderly Dorothy gazing intently at a jar of unkempt wild flowers that were quite unremarkable in their abundance and fleeting in their beauty.

Day’s keen sense of wonder at commonplace beauty remained a hallmark of being a witness to God’s love. Three years before her death, she wrote:

What samples of His love in creation all around us! Even in the city, the changing sky, the trees, frail though they be, which prisoners grow on Riker’s Island to be planted around the city, bear witness. People – all humankind, in some way.“

In sharing with her readers the view from her Staten Island cottage, she wrote:

"the bay, the gulls, the ‘paths in the sea,’ the tiny ripples stirring a patch of water here and there, the reflections of the cloud on the surface – how beautiful it all is.”

Dorothy Day surrounded herself in the beauty of a loving God made manifest in the least – something contemporary culture could learn from.

Clarion Calls from gun violence victims

Not One More ~ Simple but powerful words have become the rallying cry for Americans who refuse to accept the toll gun violence.

Sandy Hook Promise ~ Mission is to prevent gun-related deaths due to crime, suicide and accidental discharge so that no other parent experiences the senseless, horrific loss of their child. We will achieve this by educating and empowering parents, schools and communities on mental health & wellness programs that identify, intervene and help at-risk individuals and gun safety practices that ensure that firearms are kept safe and secure.

SHP Action Fund’s mission is to enact sensible gun violence prevention laws, policy and regulations at a state and federal level, in the areas of mental health & wellness and gun safety that result in the reduction of gun-related death and injury. We will achieve this by engaging, organizing and mobilizing our national base of Promise Makers and Leaders at a state and federal level.

Florida shooting: 'Enough is enough'

Busloads of students from the Florida high school in Broward County that saw a mass shooting on February 14, 2018, arrived in Florida's capital, Tallahassee, to lobby for tighter gun control measures.  It is the first planned rally for their new movement, NeverAgain.

This isn't about Democrats. This isn't about Republicans. This is about us demanding change, and this is about the fact that we have already won, it's just a matter of when," yelled a student standing atop a car, firing up the group before they hit the road.

(Shamefully perpetrating the evil of supporting guns rather than the lives of children.....),,,,,But just as the students started rolling north on their journey for justice, the stupid Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee voted down a measure to ban purchases of murderous assault rifles, like the one 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz used in his attack that killed 17 students and school staff members in Parkland.

With a 71-36 vote,  Republican Florida lawmakers defeated the assault-rifle bill that would have also banned the purchases of large-capacity magazines statewide.

Father James Martin, Jesuit editor of America Magazine:

"The well-funded resistance to the sensible regulation of handguns, the easy availability of semi-automatic weapons and the resistance to preventing people with mental health issues from obtaining them, is a clear participation in evil. This is a life issue."

"Gun control is about the defense of life. Those who consider themselves religious or pro-life must see that the desire to prevent gun-related deaths is part of the religious defense of the dignity of all life."

America's labor shortage and help for farmers

Republicans are averse to investing in education and they also don't want farmers to have access to labor. There is no international company that wants to invest in helping Donald Trump when his only ambition is to make the rich more wealthy while farmers and middle class workers struggle.

Donald Trump was making a plea to the rich who gathered in Davos Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, because he wanted their money invested in the United States. 

Unfortunately, the rich people who can afford to attend the World Economic Forum (WEF) won't be enticed to help Donald Trump to bolster the American economy. Anybody who believes otherwise is delusional. Those rich who gathered in Davos were looking for economic prosperity, to feather their own philanthropist or governmental nests.

Nevertheless, in Donald Trump's "straight jacket" teleprompter speech delivered to the attendees who bothered to listen (to quote the description of his delivery style, reported by Peggy Noonan on Morning Joe).....he said "America is open for business".

Unfortunately, what Trump forgot to tell the audience was that the US labor shortage is acute. In fact, it's been worsened by Republican cuts to education that have made it difficult for potential workers to access the training needed to meet the needs of many employers.  

Rich people are looking for places to invest where highly skilled laborers are affordable for their purposes. That's not here in America, because Republicans have taken away the tax revenues that would be available to invest in growing our nation's workforce. In other words, if you want to open a business in America, the company must train the workers on their own payroll, plus pay for their health care.  Again, anybody who believes rich international investors want to make this deal with Donald Trump, must be delusional, especially when China and India have the infrastructure to make their businesses profitable.

Yet, American farmers need the help of unskilled laborers and Republicans are preventing them from hiring the people who will work in the harvests.  

Here is the opinion on this under-reported subject described in an editorial "echo", published in America Magazine.  

What we owe America's farmworkers

U.S. agriculture is facing a silent crisis. 

The Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants has sown fear among farmworker communities, making workers harder to find than ever. 

Farm owners across the country are anxious about meeting their labor needs. Millions of dollars worth of crops are at the risk of rotting.

The present labor shortage reveals U.S. society’s dependence on farmworkers. The hands that pick what Americans eat are hands the country relies on. And with almost no native-born Americans willing to do the job, Latino immigrants have become indispensable. Even in the midst of the severe fires in California, farmworkers could not stop working lest harvests be lost.
Yet the nation’s collective reliance on farmworkers is not reflected in the way they are treated. In California, which produces two-thirds of the nation’s fruits, rates of food insecurity for farmworkers and their families range from 40 percent to 70 percent. Farmworkers’ low wages directly contribute to growers’ profit, but farmworkers regularly cannot afford to buy the food they pick.

Working conditions for farmworkers can be (and are often) harsh. 

Even under the best conditions, a day of work is one of hard manual labor, with long hours and often high temperatures. The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has approved the use of a pesticide known to be harmful to human beings. Farmworkers have already gotten sick on the job as a result.

Society’s failures toward farmworkers extend beyond poor working conditions. The children of migrant farmworkers endure seasonal displacement that can make staying in school difficult. 

Social mobility is weak for those born into farmworker communities, creating a generational cycle of poverty. State and local governments resist attempts by farmworkers to organize for greater protections. And despite being dependent on farmworker labor, many local communities are openly hostile to migrant workers.

It does not have to be this way. 

In 2016, California recognized the right of farmworkers to equal overtime pay. In Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers secured commitments from fast-food chains to buy only from agricultural sources that meet improved standards on pay and work conditions. That model of direct pressure on major companies is spreading. In Vermont, immigrant dairy workers just claimed victory in an agreement with the ice cream maker Ben and Jerry’s.

It is curious that so many Americans care about eating ethically (vegan, vegetarian, organic or free range) but do not think as much about the poverty and exploitation among the largely Latino farmworkers who are making their meals possible. 

Labeling programs, including the Equitable Food Initiative label, the Food Justice Certified label and the United Farm Workers Union label, support the fair treatment of farmworkers, but there is little indication that products carrying those labels are sought out by consumers.

The United States must do more to treat farmworkers with justice. A huge step would be to lift the threat of deportation that looms over many farmworkers by passing comprehensive immigration reform that recognizes both the need for labor in the United States and those laborers’ right to dignity and opportunity. Rectifying the injustice of the 1930s—when farmworkers were excluded from new federal labor standards—and finally offering farmworkers the same labor protections as other workers is also necessary. Farmwork, like all work, carries an inherent dignity and should be a viable path for immigrant families into the American middle class.

The common thread in all the challenges farmworkers face is a lack of urgency. Perhaps every time Americans say grace before a meal, they could spare a moment to remember those who make that meal possible.