Donald Trump ugly memes might be his audition for a future career

Echo opinion published in the Florida Sun Sentinel

Bedeviled by the pope | Pat Beall

Pat Beall is an editorial writer and columnist for the Sun Sentinel, focusing mainly on Palm Beach County issues.

I imagine what would happen if Pope Leo took my calls❓☎️

He’d be a nice guy, of course. Too polite to point out that I am likely just one more heathen, bound to spend eternity as smoldering charcoal.

“My child,” he’d say, “I understand you have questions about the Antichrist. You are not alone, I assure you."

Oh, I know. A world leader posting an image of himself as Jesus Christ laying hands on what appears to be either Jon Stewart or Jeffrey Epstein is not automatically horn-and-tails material.

Or is it❓

“I thought it was me as a doctor,” Trump said about the ugly picture in his hideous post.

Doctors❓ Only with bombs bursting in air, twin eagles threatening, soldiers flying, a cloaked Trump healing, handfuls of white light and the miracle of thick hair no longer in need of a combover.

Well. That explains the robed surgeons. The winged proctologists.

“All this is giving off Antichrist-adjacent vibes,” I’d fret.

And so I’d lay it out for the pontiff. The Great Deceiver will have one great secret which he will tell no one. (Epstein Files.) He tricks good people who should know better. (The 77 million people who voted for him.)

He will seem to have a mortal ear wound, but lo, it was healed, and the whole earth wondered at this. (Massive cotton wad on ear.)

But mostly, I worry, the big evidence is that every devil comes with their own imp.  I speak now of JD Vance.  (Yes, the Hillbilly.)

“Pope Leo XIV should be careful when he talks about theology,” warned the newbie Catholic convert, threatening the 267th pope in a religion that dates to 30 A.D.  (Maine Writer:  This quote from Hillbilly Vance gets a "dummy" of the year award.)

And this, we should note, is not the first time Vance has tussled with a pope. Back in April 2025, he traveled to Rome to meet with Pope Francis, a fierce critic of Trump’s snatch, imprison and sort it out later immigration policy.

Vance smiled and nodded and held to his belief that ordor amoris, the “order of love,” requires that citizens must prioritize their families and those closest to them. Maybe other people, maybe later on.

He told the pope he would pray for his health. The pope died the next day.

Trump mourned his passing by posting an image of himself as the next pope.

Vance said he embraced Catholicism seven years ago because he was fed up with “a society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure.” Like massive ballrooms with grand stairs leading absolutely nowhere. Or a skimpily clad lady in a gigantic martini glass on the lawn of Mar-a-Lago. Or a 💲300,000, two-story high golden statue of yourself at your Doral golf club.

Vance looked at this bright shiny basket of iniquities and announced: “That’s my guy❗”🙄

So too did Trump spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain, who compared the president’s torments to those of Jesus. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused,” she mourned. Also? “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”

Then, because Trump cannot help himself, and also because White-Cain told people not to say no, the president followed up with another bit of blasphemy: an image of Jesus with his arm around him, haloed in soft light.

To further prove his spiritual bonafides and teensy-tiny soul, he stripped Catholic Charities of $11 million to house children.

“A lot of people weren’t understanding his humor,” explained Vance of Trump’s holier-than-thou postings.

“Actually, a lot of people were,” the endlessly likeable Leo would tell me on our phone call.

“He is bedeviling us all,” I’d say. “And I’m beginning to think those big ankles are really hooves in hosiery.”

So, is he, or isn’t he❓

“No, Trump is not the devil,” the pope would assure me.

He’s just auditioning for the part.

Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.

Vladimir Putin may have been a formidable spy but proving to be inept as a military strategist- Ukraine Resists!

Maine Wroter: Donald Trump hardly mentioned the Ukraine during his long and boring "State of Delusion" speech to Congress on February 24, 2026. *See my note below.

Maybe a literate person in the White House can read this excellent essay to Donald Trump and also explain who Winston Churchill was.....just sayin'.:😟😧😠  "A Bitter Winter in Ukraine" by Tom Judah published in The New York Review of Books.

In August 2014, I went to see the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov in Kyiv. Ukraine was emerging from the pro-Europe Maidan Revolution the previous winter; Russia had seized Crimea and was aiding and abetting pro-Russian rebels in the east of the country. Kurkov had just published Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev,
in which he imagined digging up potatoes at his country house in September, “regardless of the military situation,” and asked:

Where will I be❓ Where will my wife and children be in September❓ I want to believe we will be at home in Kiev, going to our country house every weekend like we usually do—grilling shashlik, gathering the harvest, making apple jam and spending the evenings in the summerhouse with a glass of wine, talking about the future.

He added, “It’s funny, but the future we talk about never seems to come.”

On the night of February 23, 2022, Kurkov invited me to dinner with friends at home in Kyiv. “I will cook borscht,” he said. The atmosphere was febrile. We made toasts “to victory” but had no idea of what was about to happen. A few hours later the Russians began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

For a while Kurkov set aside fiction. He wrote essays about the war, and last year he published Three Years on Fire: The Destruction of Ukraine, his fourth nonfiction book chronicling the revolution and then the war. The essays in Three Years on Fire accurately reflect the atmosphere of the Ukraine I know and have been reporting from for many years. In one he writes about a soldier who campaigned against the country’s predatory gambling industry—in the last few years gambling addiction has become a serious problem among soldiers who place bets on their phones—until he was killed in battle. In another essay we learn about the owner of the tropical fruit farm close to Kyiv who developed miniature banana trees that Ukrainians have been buying. At the beginning of the war, shelling cut the gas and electricity that kept his greenhouses warm, but he found that the trees were frost-resistant. Kurkov comments, “You could say the astonishing survival of these trees mirrors the unexpected staunchness with which Ukrainians are facing adversity.”

In January I was back in Kyiv. Kurkov and his wife had just returned from their country house. “Does the future still not come❓” I asked. Well, he said, reflecting a common feeling of resignation, “the future is just too far away. We live every day only in reality and we wait for the next morning and then we take that as reality.”

In the first part of the war in 2014–2015, it was easy for people in Kyiv to think of the fighting in the east as very far away, but four years into this second part it is anything but. In 2022 the Russians reached the outskirts of Kyiv before being driven back. 

Now Vladimir Putin and the Russians are trying to freeze Ukrainians into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid. For much of the day there is no electricity in Kyiv or most of the rest of the country. Some 60 percent of Ukrainians get their heat and hot water from power stations, which have also been under attack. Kurkov’s radiators were cold, but he said his apartment was still warm because the building was old and took a long time to cool down. However, in many districts radiators are only lukewarm even when they are on.

When Russia began the full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians at first could not believe that it was launching a war to conquer the entire country rather than a more limited operation in the Donbas region in the east. Then came fear, followed by euphoria, as the Russians were driven back that summer and winter. Many in the West admired the Ukrainians’ resilience—so many volunteered to fight that the armed forces had to turn people away, and civilians mobilized in huge numbers to help their soldiers and refugees. Later came admiration for the drone technology Ukrainians have developed, which has transformed warfare. Now things are different again. “People are changing,” said Kurkov. “Attitudes are changing, dreams and hopes are changing.”

In Kyiv it was −17 degrees Celsius (roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit), and the trees, with their bare branches coated in glistening ice, looked as if they had been turned to glass. 

Streetlights were on in some places, but others were completely dark. Kurkov described the mood as “like when you get an overdose of bad news. You stop reacting, you just accept it.” He said he had stopped counting the children of friends who had been killed in the fighting and people he knew who had died after they had stopped seeking care when they were ill, “because they think that doctors should be paying attention to wounded soldiers, not to civilians.” The nation, he said, was living through amassive nervous breakdown because people don’t see the exit from this situation. People don’t understand how it can end. And they can imagine only a very bad ending to this story, because you cannot stop the war. I mean that is not up to Ukraine.

One night, in the southeastern city of Dnipro, I was in bed working on my laptop when I heard explosions. At first I ignored them, and then I sent a WhatsApp message to my Ukrainian colleague Taras Semenyuk: “Did you hear that❓❗” He replied:

Yes- News reporting about Shaheds
It’s a massive attack going on

Shaheds are Iranian-designed drones that are now produced in Russia and are much more sophisticated, powerful, and destructive than earlier models. I checked local Dnipro channels that report where drones are and where they are heading and replied:

Yes, I can see on Telegram.  Strange my air alert did not go off.

And that was it. I went on working. For the first two years of the full-scale war Semenyuk, like many Ukrainians, was extremely anxious and always went to a shelter when there was an attack. That was not surprising. In the first weeks of the war, his apartment in Kyiv had been destroyed by a missile aimed at a nearby heating plant. It was only by chance that he was not there, and his wife and child had already left for Poland. But now, like millions of others, he just shrugs. This is not to say that people are not frightened by major drone, cruise, and ballistic missile attacks but simply that the chance of being killed or injured in one is actually quite small. According to the UN, in government-controlled territory in 2025, 2,395 civilians were killed and 11,751 injured, but 63 percent of all civilian casualties on both sides were in frontline areas. The attacks in Dnipro that night were aimed at energy facilities, and the next day there was no electricity in the city.

Russian drones and missiles are often inaccurate, says the military analyst Ivan Stupak. Between 60 and 80 percent of them are shot down, though falling debris from them also causes damage, as do Ukrainian antiaircraft misfires. For civilians it is often hard to know what hit their building. Stupak says it is possible that 10 percent of attacks target residential blocks in order to strike terror, which has the intended effect. “I don’t want to pretend we are all Rambos❗”

From Dnipro, Semenyuk and I went to Zaporizhzhia, a major industrial city on the Dnieper River. In 2022 the Russians seized roughly 75 percent of Zaporizhzhia province, including its nuclear power plant, which is the largest in Europe. It used to supply about one fifth of Ukraine’s electricity and is now shut down. The Russians failed, however, to take the city of Zaporizhzhia. Many of its people fled, but they were replaced by refugees from occupied areas. Like all big cities it has been subjected to missile and Shahed attacks, and now the Russians are creeping closer from the south. In November a southern district of the city was hit by its first FPV (first-person-view) drone attack. These are short-range drones with a video feed that are controlled by a pilot using a screen or goggles and that can chase and target individuals, unlike Shaheds and other long-range drones whose target is preset.

The telltale sign that you are within range of FPVs is netting, which snarls drones that fly into it. We drove to the village of Balabyne, a few minutes south of the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia, and found that a net tunnel had been erected to protect the entire main street. People were beginning to leave, we were told by Tetiana, who works in a local shop. The drones attack civilians and their cars for no reason, she said. There is a reason, of course: to terrorize. On social media there are endless films from FPV drones released by both Russian and Ukrainian military units that like to show off their prowess. You see the drones carefully maneuvering through windows and buildings and zeroing in on soldiers who see them and run or try to bat them off. The last image is someone’s face a split second before the drone explodes and kills them.

In towns in the east of Ukraine from which I have reported, FPV drones are an increasing menace. In Kramatorsk, which was held by pro-Russian rebels in 2014 for almost three months, people have begun to leave because of them. After Bakhmut fell in 2023 and then Avdiivka nine months later, then Pokrovsk was next. As the Russians crept closer the drones made ordinary life impossible, and now it has all but fallen. Kostyantynivka, another town I have reported from but did not name because the unit I was with did not want me to identify their location, has now become part of the drone-terrorized zone and is gradually being reduced to rubble.

Anti-drone netting protecting the main road from the Kharkiv provincial border to Sloviansk, Ukraine on January 6, 2026.

The center of Izium, southeast of Kharkiv, has also been netted up to protect people. Much of the twenty-eight miles of road from the Kharkiv provincial border southeast to Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk has been turned into a net tunnel.

It is wise to take other precautions as well. Just over a year ago I wrote about traveling with soldiers with a drone detector.
That was the first time I had seen one. Now they are commonplace. The Journalists’ Solidarity Center of Kharkiv, organized by Ukraine’s journalists’ union, loaned us one. It was handheld and the screen fizzed like an old-fashioned television with no reception. If it suddenly came to life with a picture, though, that meant it had locked on to a nearby drone and we could see what its pilot was seeing. It could, of course, be flying somewhere else, but if it was flying toward us, we would have just a minute or two to find cover. At the checkpoint-cum-junction where the net tunnel between Izium and Sloviansk begins, some cars, like ours, drove straight on while others, including delivery trucks, turned off to take a detour out of Russian FPV drone range.

All these towns, except for Izium and Kharkiv, are in the Donbas, which has become a major point of contention in the peace talks among Ukraine, the US, and Russia. Vladimir Putin wants this entire rust belt region, which consists of the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. In the military campaigns of 2014–2015 and 2022, Russia took 99 percent of Luhansk, and it now occupies about 75 percent of Donetsk. Taking the rest is Putin’s “minimum plan,” said Major Viacheslav Shutenko, the commander of the Legion North drone battalion of Ukraine’s 44th Mechanized Brigade, as he showed me the massive fortifications of razor wire, anti-infantry wire, and anti-tank ditches and berms that snake as far as the eye can see around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Putin desperately needs an achievement to show off to Russians, he said. After all, in the time it took the Soviet Union to recover from its initial defeats by the Germans in World War II and its men to raise their flag above the Reichstag in Berlin, Putin’s troops have failed to retake even little Kramatorsk.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has resisted ceding this territory to Russia, and there has been vague talk of turning it into a “free economic zone” and of “demilitarization.” Since the biggest local industries have always been mining and old-fashioned heavy manufacturing, it is hard from here to see why anyone would invest in the Donbas in the future, although clearly things look different from Mar-a-Lago. Yet it is obvious why handing it over to the Russians or demilitarizing it without rock-solid security guarantees is a trap. Major Shutenko and I stood on the crest of a hill from which, beyond this so-called fortress belt, Ukraine is as flat as a pancake for more than six hundred miles, all the way to the Polish border. The Dnieper, which flows from the north down to the Black Sea, divides all of Ukraine, including Kyiv, into two parts and is the only natural barrier after these soft, rolling hills.

No one I have met in Ukraine believes that a cease-fire will come this year or would be anything other than a limited truce, as the one in 2015 was, rather than part of a full peace deal. If Ukraine were forced to accept a truce that included handing over to Russia the last bit of the Donbas that Ukraine controls, which is what the US has been reported to have demanded, it would be akin to Czechoslovakia being forced by France and Britain to hand over the Sudetenland to Germany in 1938, despite the fortifications it had built in those border areas. As a result the Czechoslovaks could not defend themselves when Hitler proceeded to take over the rest of the country a few months later. Yevhen Hlibovytsky, the director of the Frontier Institute, says, “Russia won’t want a deal unless it becomes really vulnerable, and if it does, then Ukraine won’t want one.”

Hlibovytsky may be right, but Ukrainians are struggling to survive the slow erosion of their economic and military capabilities. They lack men, they lack energy, and their economy is being ground down. The Russians are advancing very slowly and tens of thousands of them are dying in the process, but there is no evidence that Putin cares. Apart from the energy grid, says Stupak, the Russians are now choosing high-value targets like ballistic and cruise missile plants rather than trying to take out the hundreds of small drone companies. Although such matters are a tightly guarded secret, it is likely that the Russians have caused significant damage to military production, but thus far he has not heard of any disruption of drone and ammunition deliveries to the front. And the Russians have not broken Ukrainian morale.

At the front both Ukraine and Russia have been making up for flagging numbers by recruiting thousands of foreigners. Ukraine does this because its mobilization system is inefficient, nontransparent, and sometimes corrupt. Clips on social media of men being chased, caught, and bundled into vans by recruitment officers are a boon for Russian propaganda, and grabbing people off the streets who don’t want to fight is a poor way of replenishing the ranks. Putin, meanwhile, does not want to risk unpopularity by drafting people rather than offering recruits huge salaries compared with what they can earn in their often far-flung and poor provincial regions. Today 30 percent of Russian troops captured or surrendering to Ukrainian forces may be Africans and other foreigners, depending on the location. On the Ukrainian side, one of the largest contingents of foreigners fighting for money is from Colombia.

Ugandans and other Africans, who are derided on social media as “disposables” by Russians filming them, are unlikely to change the course of the war, though North Koreans did help eject the Ukrainians from Russia’s Kursk region, which they had briefly occupied in the summer of 2024. In any case, Putin now seems to be counting on the winter to swing things in his favor, just as it helped Russia defeat Hitler and Napoleon before him. But Ukrainians are used to winter combat, so the result may be different this time.

Just before the full-scale invasion started, Ukraine had 33.7 gigawatts of electrical generation capacity; in early January it had only fourteen gigawatts, and if the winter remains as exceptionally cold as it has been, it will need seventeen gigawatts to keep electricity flowing 24/7. Not all the loss of generation capacity can be attributed to destruction. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been another point of dispute in the peace talks, used to provide six gigawatts and could again.

In the past Ukraine produced more electricity than it needed and even exported some. Now its surplus capacity has been destroyed, and its energy officials are scouring the rest of Europe and farther afield for replacement equipment. Russia, meanwhile, is changing its tactics. Previously it concentrated its attacks on large power plants that had relatively good air defenses. Now it has switched to targeting some 3,500 smaller substations that are the essential links between the power plants and consumers.

From the news coverage, one might have the impression that all Ukrainians are hapless victims freezing in the dark. In fact, extremely difficult though this winter is proving to be, four years into the war most Ukrainians have made some sort of preparations to help them get through power outages, especially if they have some money. Power companies publish schedules showing when districts will have power, which allows people to plan their days, although in mid-January this system broke down in Kyiv, and on January 20 many in the capital woke up to find that temporarily they had no water either.

Shops have generators, small industries have invested in battery capacity, and larger companies have installed their own electricity production facilities using natural gas. Everyone has power banks, rechargeable lamps are common, and those who can afford them have bought large portable batteries commonly known as EcoFlows, after the best-known brand. In apartment buildings residents have often joined together to buy generators to keep elevators and heat pumps working. Getting stuck on higher floors is a real problem for the elderly and families with small children.

“We are holding on, but people are getting angrier and angrier,” said Valentina, a kindergarten teacher I met, along with her five-year-old daughter, as she was charging her phone and power banks in a well-heated orange tent erected by the emergency services in Rusanivka, a neighborhood of Kyiv. In the next tent I met a couple of cheerful pensioners who told me it was only 13 degrees Celsius (around 55 degrees Fahrenheit) in their apartments. When I asked why there were not many people in the tents trying to keep warm, they said it was not necessary because everyone in the area had gas stoves and if you kept them on then you could at least keep your kitchen warm.

Ukrainians might be resilient, but attacks on the energy system and other targets are harming the economy. According to Andrii Dligach, who heads a coalition of business associations, attacks and power outages shaved 0.6 percent off Ukraine’s GDP in the last quarter of 2025. When sirens sound in the center of Kyiv, for example, McDonald’s loses business, as does the Globus Mall next door, because its scores of shops and cafés close. Many other shops and restaurants stay open, though. The McDonald’s at the Lukianivska metro station opposite the Artem defense complex, which has been targeted several times, has installed shatterproof windows. The plate glass windows of the metro, long since blown out, have just been boarded up. Dmytro, the owner of a chain of shoe shops, said that all his colleagues agree that the last few months have been the hardest since the full-scale invasion began: “When it is cold at home and when you have no power, you are just not in the mood to go shopping.”

Some are also not in the mood to stay in the country. Dmytro said that in the last few weeks two of his shop assistants had decided to leave. One was going because her entire family was already abroad, and another was taking her twenty-two-year-old son out of Ukraine. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion men age eighteen to sixty have not been allowed to travel abroad without an exemption. In August the lower limit was changed to twenty-three. Men can be mobilized at the age of twenty-five. While I was writing this in Lviv, in Ukraine’s west, I was asked to give a talk to journalism students at the city’s Ukrainian Catholic University. Journalism courses have always attracted more girls than boys there, I was told, but among the twenty students in the room, there was not a single boy. The last few had left when the travel age limit changed. Tens of thousands of young men are estimated to have gone since August.

An opinion poll published at the end of January found that 65 percent of Ukrainians were willing “to endure the war” for “as long as it takes.” But Ukraine cannot fight alone. The US is no longer supplying much equipment directly; instead it is selling it to NATO countries, which then pass it on to Ukraine. “The war costs us nothing,” boasted Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times in early January. “We make money with the war now.” What the US does continue to supply, though, is satellite military intelligence. It is crucial for the guidance of Ukraine’s deep-strike drones, which are inflicting heavy damage on Russia’s oil installations.

Still, Ukraine could become collateral damage from utterly unrelated events. On January 9 Trump provoked the worst crisis in transatlantic relations in our time by insisting that if the US could not acquire Greenland “the easy way,” it would have to get it “the hard way.” On January 21 he said he would not use force, but his demands helped accelerate the loss of the Europeans’ trust in the US as an ally. In the preceding weeks Britain and France thought they had received assurances from Washington that it would participate in security guarantees for Ukraine in the event of a cease-fire, though it would not send troops. Kurkov remarked of Trump that “nobody believes he is willing to do anything” about Ukraine because he was trying to “copycat [Putin] by going into Venezuela and with his desire to take over Greenland.”

After the Greenland crisis erupted, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, (in a not so well veiled threat).... “The European leaders will come around…. What would happen in Ukraine if the US pulled its support out❓ The whole thing would collapse.” 

No. In fact, Ukraine would probably not collapse, but defending it and shoring up its economy, military, and morale would certainly become harder, and anti-Western sentiment there would grow if defeats were ascribed to a stab in the back by the US and weak Europeans.

As the Arctic crisis unfolded, the glee in the Russian press about Trump’s demands and the damage done to NATO could hardly be contained. But Hlibovytsky said that Ukrainians do not have the luxury of worrying about all that: “We accept these things the same way we accept the weather.” Then he cautioned:

There is an error in the calculus of many Western politicians that the alternative to not helping Ukraine is the status quo and that if they don’t help then everything stays the same. No, it doesn’t. If they don’t help Ukraine, the hidden cost that they will have to face is so tremendous that if their societies would be aware of that cost, they would probably wish that the governments of the Western countries did more.

Those hidden costs could include, for example, open Russian attacks on NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries such as the Baltics and Poland.

In gas stations across Ukraine you can buy the Ukrainian translation of former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s biography of Winston Churchill. It does not take much imagination to connect the historical dots. After the Czechoslovaks were betrayed in 1938, Churchill famously told Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” When you stand on a hill in the Donbas it is very easy to see that, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

—February 11, 2026

*Pope Leo XIV sent 80 generators to Ukraine to help citizens battle the freezing temperatures, according to Vatican News. The Pope responded to appeals from several bishops, with temperatures dropping to -15C and some families having to find warmth in heated shelters with the help of generators. Feb 13, 2026

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must allow Pastoral clergy to give Roman Catholic Sacraments to migrants in ICE prisons

BREAKING: In response to ICE's refusal to allow detained migrants to receive the Eucharist, Pope Leo XIV calls on Donald Trump and JD Vance to respect the dignity and religious liberty of migrants in the United States. “The authorities must allow pastoral workers to assist with the needs of these people. Many times they have been separated from their families and no one knows what happens,” said Pope Leo.

Echo essay published in the Daily Beast by Michael Daley

How This 91-Year-Old Nun’s Battle With ICE Shamed ‘Catholic’ JD Vance

An Eucharistic procession to the Broadview ICE center in Illinois, advocating for religious access for detained migrants.

As he presses his wife, Usha Vance, to convert from her native Hinduism, Vice President JD Vance might try better adhering to his newly adopted faith.

One timely and lively example for him to follow would be Sister JoAnn Persch, a 91-year-old nun who has been regularly visiting the Broadview ICE facility in suburban Chicago for two decades. 

She was among 2,000 of the faithful who gathered for Mass at a makeshift altar across from the facility on November 1.

“All Saints Day on November 1 is a sacred feast day in the Catholic tradition and we wish to include them in a religious service by offering them holy communion on this day,” her group had noted in a written request that ICE said it required at least a week beforehand. “We will be gathering that day for an outdoor Catholic Mass 🕇🕈and our request is for a small delegation of eight religious ministers to provide Holy Communion during the Mass while our gathering remains outside of the ICE facility in peaceful prayer.”

When time at the Mass for communion, Persch and Chicago Auxiliary Bishop José María Garcia-Maldonado and six others carried the Host the 100 yards from the altar to a checkpoint the Illinois State Police established outside the ICE building. An officer relayed by telephone the group’s request to come in. ICE denied them entrance for safety reasons.

“Now, I want to know whose safety?” Persch later told the Daily Beast. “Are we going to attack the immigrants? Are they going to attack me? I don’t think so.”

She noted that she had been visiting ICE prisoners in local jails for years and nobody had tried to harm her. That left only the ICE agents.

“Do they think coming with the Blessed Sacrament of the Catholic Church that we were going to attack them” she asked.

Persch walked back to the gathering and asked them to remain silent after she announced ICE’s decision, no matter how they felt.

She stood before the faithful and made the anticipatory request for silence. She then reported what might have been expected to trigger boos and angry shouts.

”The answer was ‘no’.”

The response surprised her. It was a testament to the power of moral authority possessed by someone who actively lives the gospel every day, as taught by the Roman Catholic Church that Vance says he embraces.

“I was amazed, 2,000 people, it was dead silent.” Persch told The Daily Beast. “There were tears, but for several minutes, they were so respectful of that moment, which was a very sacred moment.”

Should Persch ever be a candidate for sainthood, the total hush could go down as a possible miracle.

After that remarkable moment of silence among those gathered for an outdoor Mass in Broadview came a challenge to the faithful everywhere to speak out. Pope Leo XIV reacted by citing a principle by which Persch and other true Catholics guide their lives.

“Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, ‘How did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not?’” the pontiff told the press. “Many people who’ve lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what’s going on right now… Many times they have been separated from their families and no one knows what happens…I would certainly invite the authorities to allow pastoral workers to attend to the needs of those people.”

As reported by the Substack “Letters From Leo” by Christopher Hale, a White House spokesman responded to a request for comment by saying, “The pope doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Vance reached out to Hale on X, asking, “Hey Chris, which WH spokesperson gave you this comment❓”

But, Vance maintained a less-than-holy silence about ICE preventing detainees from receiving Holy communion. 

Incompetene Pete Hegseth is Donald Trump maga Republican puppet! Wrong to give military medals to 7th Cavalry that massacred at Wounded Knee

Published in Substack Letters from Leo by Christopher Hale:

Wounded Knee Memorial: Massacre Site (December 29, 1890) is located in southwestern South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation at the village of Wounded Knee, SD.

Pope Leo Rebuked Him. Now BishopPops Are Slamming Hegseth’s Wounded Knee Decision:  It’s the second time in a month Hegseth’s drawn fire from the Catholic Church. This time, they say his decision glorifies genocide. By Christopher Hale

In Rapid City, South Dakota, Bishop Scott Bullock and a group of Jesuit priests delivered a scathing rebuke of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to let soldiers who massacred Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee keep their Medals of Honor.

“On that day, U.S. Army soldiers massacred nearly 300 Lakota women, children, and unarmed men. This was not a battle. To recognize these acts as honorable is to distort history itself,” the Catholic leaders wrote in a joint statement.

They stressed that those who died at Wounded Knee “are sacred” — and even the perpetrators, while also children of God, committed “grave evils” that “cannot be honored.”

Hegseth announced in late September that the 20 soldiers awarded Medals of Honor for Wounded Knee would retain them, deriding critics as “politically correct” and insisting the men “deserve those medals.

The Catholic response was swift. The bishop and Jesuits rejected Hegseth’s revisionism as not about politics at all, but about conscience.

Their stance is rooted in what they call “prayerful correctness, grounded in truth, conscience, and compassion,” 💙🙏not partisan agendas.

“We reject any narrative that erases the humanity of the victims or glorifies acts of violence,” the letter declared, urging America to face its painful past honestly.

Now Hegseth has drawn the Church’s ire yet again — and bishops and priests are doubling down.

The Wounded Knee dispute isn’t just an isolated historical argument; it’s a microcosm of the moral divide between Trump’s (Fake💢😡) “greatness”-obsessed vision and Leo’s 🕇Gospel-centered ethic.

In Pope Leo’s view, true greatness means repentance and solidarity with the oppressed, not whitewashing atrocities.

As the bishop wrote, “If we deny our part in history, we deepen the harm… We bear a moral responsibility to remember and speak the truth.”

By standing with Native Americans seeking justice for Wounded Knee, Leo’s Church is effectively telling Washington that no political calculus can justify celebrating an injustice.

In the face of power, Pope Leo and his bishops are choosing moral truth over “historical pride.” And they’re reminding America that some honors stain the nation’s soul until they are revoked.

Even the Republican-controlled South Dakota Senate recently agreed, voting 32-1, that honoring the Seventh Cavalry for Wounded Knee only “dishonors” the Medal of Honor and implies complicity in genocide.

In other words, truth and justice demand rescinding those medals — not celebrating them.
Pope Leo’s Showdown with Trump’s Agenda

For Pope Leo XIV, this controversy is part of a wider clash with the ethos of the Trump administration.

On September 30, 2025, Leo publicly warned that Hegseth’s hawkish talk of war was “worrying”, critiquing the newly minted “Secretary of War” for framing U.S. power in terms of “lethality.”

“This way of speaking is worrying… One must always work for peace,” Leo admonished, after Donald Trump signaled a shift from a Department of “Defense” to a Department of “War.”

It was a rare papal rebuke of a sitting U.S. official, and it underscored Leo’s fundamental point: Christian conscience cannot be subjugated to militant nationalism.

Pope Leo Rebukes Hegseth’s ‘Secretary of War’ Title Change & War Hawk Rhetoric

Hegseth has drawn the Church’s ire and bishops and priests are doubling down.

As the bishop wrote, “If we deny our part in history, we deepen the harm… We bear a moral responsibility to remember and speak the truth.”

By standing with Native Americans seeking justice for Wounded Knee, Leo’s Church is effectively telling Washington that no political calculus can justify celebrating an injustice.

In the face of power, Pope Leo and his bishops are choosing moral truth over “historical pride.” And they’re reminding America that some honors stain the nation’s soul until they are revoked.

Donald Trump and Republicans continue to divide Americans with fear and Democrats cannot remain silent

Sunday Paper echo essay by Maria Shriver:  Beautiful essay!

Elon Musk went off the rails this week, but I’ve got to admit that I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’ve been waiting for this moment.

That said, I can’t believe how embarrassing and depressing it was to watch the fighting that unfolded between him and Trump.

I know many people are laughing at their back-and-forth, but make no mistake: it’s serious when someone starts to unravel in the public square.

This president has somewhat normalized insane tweets—the kind people laugh at and share—but to me there is nothing funny about this...

That said, I can’t believe how embarrassing and depressing it was to watch the fighting that unfolded between Musk and Trump. I know many people are laughing at their back-and-forth, but make no mistake: it’s serious when someone starts to unravel in the public square.

"....but make no mistake: it’s serious when someone like Musk goes off in the public square and then the president jumps in."

This president has somewhat normalized insane tweets—the kind people laugh at and share—but to me there is nothing funny about this...between Musk and Trump. 

Governing is really serious business, especially at this moment. The economy is fragile. People are struggling as they try to make decisions for their families and their businesses. There are multiple wars going on. Chaos isn’t good for the business of running our country, and our leadership is chaotic right now. That hurts us at home and abroad.

While many are obsessing over this spectacle, fear is quietly taking over our lives. And for some, it’s not quiet at all.

Here in Los Angeles this weekend, fear is front and center as federal immigration agents clashed with hundreds of people protesting a recent series of raids in the city. 

So many of our country’s immigrants, our friends and neighbors, are living in daily fear that they or someone they love will be swept up in a raid and separated from their families. 

As of Saturday evening, the White House announced Donald Trump is ordering 2,000 National Guards to be deployed in Los Angeles County, which will undoubtedly stir up even more fear.

Fear seems to be everywhere I look. This week, it was another headline that really stopped me in my tracks. It said “Jews Are Afraid Right Now."

I stared at it for the longest time. Then I closed my eyes. I have so many friends who are Jewish and I wanted to take a moment to pray for each of them. In fact, I wanted to pray for everyone of Jewish faith.

I know many say thoughts and prayers do nothing, but I don’t agree. I know they’re not the only solution to our problems, but I do think they are essential parts of our toolbox. They’re by no means the only tools, but they are two important ones in my life. This I know to be true.

Another important action I believe in is condemning violence, like what we witnessed in Boulder and what happened to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. His op-ed after a targeted attack on his home and family (you can read it here in case you missed it) still resonates. It’s a call to each of us to rise up, call out hate, and tap into our better angels, because now is a time when we need to collectively do better and be better.

Together, we have to start using our voices to speak up instead of allowing fear to stop us from taking action. We have to let others know where we stand and what we believe. Jews are afraid, yes, and that’s wrong. It actually turns my stomach, fuels my anger, and breaks my heart. It also breaks my heart that people in Gaza continue to face death and starvation amid a terrifying war.

Fear is in every conversation I have. In fact, this week when I traveled to Cleveland for our forum on women’s health and research, fear came up several times in people’s questions.

People are often afraid to question doctors and advocate for themselves. 

But you often have to push for a second opinion. You always need to speak up in the doctor’s office and believe in your own instincts, because often times your life depends on it.

Speaking of one’s life last week, I posed a question about bravery and a reader responded with her own heartbreaking but powerful story, which you can read here. This is a headline that will stop you cold as well. In "This Is What Being Brave Means for Me," this Sunday Paper reader writes that after being a victim of assault, she is still fighting for justice—not just for herself, but for other women. That’s courage. That’s pushing through fear.

It’s also brave to tell the truth, as Molly Jong-Fast has done in her new memoir How to Lose Your Mother. In the book, she writes how she inherited a world of complexity from her famous mother, and finally decided to tell her side of the story. In doing so, she embraced her grief and found grace.

That’s what bravery looks like in real time. That’s what fear transformed into power can do.

The other night, two longtime friends (who just happen to be Jewish) came to dinner. We started talking about fear in our political dialogue, and somehow the topic turned to women. We started talking about how the fear women face isn’t just in health care or religion—it’s everywhere. That’s when my son Christopher spoke up in the conversation and said, “Men are scared too.”

“In fact, do you all know that the number one predictor of suicide today is just being a man?” he said.

Men are taking their lives in record numbers. They are lonelier than ever. They are losing jobs to AI. And when a man loses his provider role, he often spirals into depression, addiction, despair, and suicide. I listened as my beautiful, strong, tender-hearted son spoke about the challenges men face in today’s society. My heart cracked.

Jews are scared. Women feel afraid. Men are hurting. Gays are worried. Scientists and researchers are in panic mode. Journalists speak about the challenges our profession faces. Even CBS, the one-time “Tiffany Network of News,” is afraid to fight a lawsuit by a sitting president—so afraid that they’re discussing folding, much like another network already did. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Fear is everywhere. The synagogues in my city look like armed military establishments. So do schools. People are afraid to walk down the street, live in our neighborhoods, or post on social media. What in God’s name is happening to us?

All the while, millions of podcasts and newsletters and TikTok accounts pop up daily, telling us how to draw boundaries with our parents, how to deal with toxic relationships, how to breathe, emotionally regulate, jump in cold plunges, dress to feel young, exercise to ward off aging, and build our brands so we can compete in this brand-obsessed society we are all players in.

My friends, that is not going to dissolve our fear. That is not going to ease our heartbreak, our pain, our fear of one another, our fear of retribution if we speak our minds.

So then what will?

Dare I suggest… love? 💖💙💛Dare I suggest compassion? 

Dare I suggest community? Dare I suggest friendship? Dare I suggest prioritizing our own healing so that we can step forward without taking out our fear, anger, or rage on one another?

Fear is going to back us further and further into our collective corners. Fear is going to make us silent at a time when our voices are our most powerful weapons. Fear is paralyzing.

I’ve felt its effects in my life. I’m not proud to say it, but there have been times in my own life when my fear got the better of me. When I didn’t act. Didn’t use my voice.

But over time I found that every time I was scared and acted anyway, I gained strength. I gained courage. I found my footing—often on behalf of others, then eventually on behalf of myself. I gained courage by watching others. I gained strength by feeling their friendship, their love, and their support.

Love is expensive. Courage comes from recognizing our fear and then using our voices anyway. It comes from reaching out anyway and standing with others who may be afraid in order to ease their fear.

Standing with one group doesn’t mean you can’t stand with another one. People who stand with Jews can stand with Palestinians who are afraid for their lives. Women can stand with men. And vice versa.

My circle is broad and diverse. I want to be able to stand with men and women, with the LGBTQIA* community, and with Jews and Black Americans. I have friends who immigrated here from Ukraine, from Russia, from Iran, from Israel and Palestine. I’m a Catholic who has friends from different faiths.

The Pope inspires me, and so do my other fellow Catholics including Father James Martin, Father Richard Rohr, Father Greg Boyle, and Sister Joan Chittister. But so too do Rabbi Steve Leder, Pastor Ed Bacon, and Pastor Sarah Jakes Roberts and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde.

My father, Sargent Shriver, Jr. (1915-2011), was an ardent Catholic, was the first person who spoke to me about the dangers of Hitler and the power of Jesus Christ’s message of love, forgiveness and peace.

My parents introduced me to the Berrigan brothers, who spoke out fiercely against the war; Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement and spoke out against poverty; Cesar Chavez, who fought the establishment for workers’ rights; Rosa Parks, who said, “No, I will not get off the bus”; Fred Guttenberg, who has turned his own pain into purpose by speaking out against gun violence, hoping to spare another parent what he and his family have gone through. The list goes on.

These were the days before social media could scare you into a corner. Before the days when the leader of the free world called people derogatory nicknames in the public square.

Maybe it’s time for us all to look back and remind ourselves that there have been many fearless people throughout the ages who used their voices to stand up and stand alongside their neighbors—and often total strangers. Human beings who felt afraid due to their faith, the color of their skin, or their gender, but who spoke up anyway.

There will always be people who are afraid. May we believe there will also always be people needed who will stand up straight alongside them. Otherwise, fear will win, and we will all lose everything worth caring about.

That’s what this moment is asking of us: to recognize our fear, and the fear of our fellow humans, and turn toward them instead of away.

Perhaps turning towards one another looks like this:
T.U.R.N.

• Talk - Have one honest conversation this week with someone who might be afraid.
• Unite - Stand with at least one group or person facing fear (even if it's outside your usual circle).
• Reach out - Contact a friend, neighbor, or community member who might feel isolated.
• Name it - Speak up against hate or fear-mongering when you see it, even in small ways.

May we rise up collectively in friendship, in love, and in community. This moment demands that of us. There’s no doubt about that.

*lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual