“I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.”
–Lee Greenwood.
Ford left early this morning, flying out of Dulles Airport, back to Texas. He seemed to enjoy his time in Northern Virginia. We would be happy to welcome him back for another visit.
Dudley particularly liked Ford. Ford paid him lots of attention. Dudley loves that.
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The Epistle is from the First Epistle General of S. Peter. We might recall that this epistle was written to the various Roman provinces in Asia Minor. That is, it was written to the Christian Church at large, and not to any specific congregation to address a specific concern.
In our Epistle, S. Peter quotes from the Psalter: What man is he that lusteth to live, * and would fain see good days? Keep thy tongue from evil, * and thy lips, that they speak no guile. Eschew evil, and do good; * seek peace, and ensue it. The eyes of the LORD are over the righteous, * and his ears are open unto their prayers. The countenance of the LORD is against them that do evil. (Ps 34.12-16) Reading this, we might get the idea that S. Peter is like a modern-day televangelist, explaining how we might be able to live the “good life.”
While it is true, as the Psalmist says, that God promises blessings on those who live a godly life, our primary focus should not be on any temporal rewards we might receive in this life. Of ultimate value are the eternal verities. While it is certainly true that everything God created is good and meant to be enjoyed, we are not to let any temporal pleasures take our eyes off our final destiny.
God has brought each one of us into this world, not to seek its creaturely comforts such as wealth, power or security. Rather, He has given us life so that in the course of our lives we can discover our true purpose and end. We are meant to share eternity with God by learning how, in this life, to open ourselves to His presence.
God has given us all that we need to accomplish our purpose. Through Holy Baptism we receive the gift of His Spirit, which is then confirmed in the sacrament of Holy Confirmation. The grace of the Mass, and of the other sacraments, transforms us into our true selves. The more Christ-like we become, the more we substantially become our authentic self.
S. Peter then gives us some guidance how we might find our true end: expect to suffer for your faith. Suffering perfects our character and is not to be shunned. In fact, we are to be thankful for the opportunity to enter into Christ’s sufferings. Suffering ought to reveal an inner joy that can never be diminished by exterior circumstances. Think of all the Saints who have demonstrated this truth by their witness!
Finally, S. Peter instructs us to sanctify the Lord in your hearts. We are to maintain a reverence for Our Lord within our hearts. This means having an awareness of His presence and maintaining an on-going conversation with Him. We should be ever mindful of how Our Lord would approach any given challenge that we face and act accordingly.
As I have often said, it’s easy to become a Christian. All one need do is be baptized. However, it’s not so easy to live as a Christian. With the pull of our baser passions and the enticement of worldly goods, we fail routinely to live as we ought. But as we practice the presence of God in our lives, we will soon find ourselves in the process of being transformed into what we were created to be from the beginning.
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The brutal excommunication of the Society of Saint Pius X
BY: Jane Stannus, The Spectator (July 2, 2026).
On Wednesday, the largest traditional Catholic order of priests in the world, the Society of Saint Pius X, consecrated four bishops without a papal mandate.
The Vatican’s response was swift and brutal. Today, it announced that not only have the four new bishops and the two consecrators been excommunicated but, shockingly, so will all the priests and faithful who continue to adhere to the Society’s work – an edict that will likely affect more than a million Catholics worldwide.
Over a million traditional Catholics could now be cut off from the Church for the crime of wanting to practice the faith as it was before the Second Vatican Council
This comes across as startlingly harsh, especially as the penalty of excommunication for consecrating bishops without a mandate has only existed since 1951. Pius XII established it to prevent the Chinese Communist party from appointing bishops loyal to Beijing.
Ironically, today the CCP appoints bishops without a mandate for the explicit purpose of guaranteeing loyalty to communism and receives the Vatican’s automatic blessing. By contrast, over a million traditional Catholics have now been cut off from the Church for the crime of wanting to practice the faith as it was before the Second Vatican Council.
The morning sun was shining when the consecration began at the seminary of Econe, Switzerland, in the presence of 16,600 adult faithful and too many children to count. But a burst of heavy rain struck just before Communion was to be distributed. Outside the ceremonial tent, the drenched crowds sang “Ave Marias” and prayed the rosary in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, until the downpour lightened enough to continue (by the end all was sunshine, organ and pealing bells).
It was a symbolic moment for the Society. It has particularly championed the Blessed Virgin since November, when the Vatican issued a document downplaying her role in salvation. The Society cited this document as influential in their decision to proceed with the consecrations.
Excommunication is the most severe punishment the Catholic Church can carry out. But the Society insists that canon law makes provision for the extraordinary consecration of bishops at times of crisis.
They uphold the Pope’s authority as Vicar of Christ and pray for him at Mass. But they say that even the Pope (who, as the old adage has it, is the vicar of Christ, not His successor) has no right to cut off the faithful from the traditional Catholic liturgy, doctrine and sacraments.
The traditional Mass is, with severe restrictions, available within the mainstream Church. But the Society of Saint Pius X and its affiliates are the only formal groups who offer exclusively traditional Catholic doctrine and liturgy as they were before the Second Vatican Council. Without bishops, their work will eventually end, and the faithful who want to practice Catholicism in its pre-conciliar form will have nowhere to turn.
This would undoubtedly be the Vatican’s preferred outcome. What makes things awkward for Rome is that the Church has always claimed to be the guardian of an unchangeable truth. More can be learned about the truth, but what was already known can never be contradicted. For this reason Rome cannot condemn the Society’s members as heretics for practicing the pre-conciliar Catholic faith (though, as Pope Leo admitted to journalists a couple of weeks ago, the changes of Vatican II are the fundamental issues at stake).
This isn’t the first time the Society has been sanctioned by the Church. In 1988, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of Saint Pius X, after engaging in endless, fruitless negotiations to obtain a bishop, realized he would soon die, and decided that the preservation of the pre-conciliar faith justified an extraordinary action. He consecrated four bishops, without jurisdiction, whose sole purpose was to provide for the sacramental life of the faithful.
Excommunication followed and the Society was called schismatic, though it steadfastly denied the charge. Although the Society did not recant, Pope Benedict lifted the excommunication in 2008 and Pope Francis, who respected the Society for its work with the poor in Buenos Aires, allowed it to hear confessions and perform marriages.
An odd kind of schism, if it even was one. And now, without having changed its position one iota since 1988, the Society has been excommunicated and declared schismatic again. In a move that is particularly cruel for the faithful, the Vatican has explicitly removed the faculties for marriages and confessions granted by Pope Francis.
Those who have watched the Society’s recent documentary Traditio about its apostolate, have in many cases been profoundly moved by the matter-of-fact way in which the Society’s priests go about the world, working themselves to the bone, doing what the Catholic Church has always done: teaching, baptizing, absolving, marrying, burying, and praying for the souls of others.
They acknowledge the authority of the Pope in all that is not sin. But they think that to wash their hands like Pilate, to stand back and let the Church’s pre-conciliar faith die out, would be a sin.
Their sincerity is clear – and the harshness of Pope Leo unconscionable. He has excommunicated an entire loyal branch of the Church after steadfastly refusing to let them come to him to explain their position. Since his election they have tried to approach him for an audience; in vain. Instead, they were offered dialogue that explicitly excluded the consecration of bishops and the points of disagreement with the Second Vatican Council.
But these were the only things that needed to be discussed.
The Catholic faithful have been forced to uphold Vatican II for too long. It is time for the Church to allow Catholics to practice the old faith.
The Pope meets with soccer players and pop stars; he speaks up for migrants and blesses a block of ice to show his love for the earth. But the children of his house are excommunicated, attacked as schismatic, starved of the traditional sacraments and punished for wanting what the Church has always given. The injustice of it cries out to heaven.
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Socialism clashes with Christian teaching despite Pope Leo’s claims
Christians are not obligated to heed leader’s call for ‘equitable distribution’
BY: Everett Piper, The Washington Times (June 28, 2026).
Here is this weekend’s quiz: Who recently said the following?
“Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are immersed in extreme poverty. Yet disproportionate wealth remains in the hands of a few. It is an unjust scenario, in the face of which we cannot fail to question ourselves and commit to change things. There is no lack of resources at the root of disparities, but the need to address solvable problems related to more equitable distribution of wealth, to be achieved with moral sense and honesty.”
If you are thinking this must be a quote from liberal Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former New York barmaid, or New York City’s new neo-Marxist Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani, you would be wrong.
Nope, this ode to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels does not hail from any of these in-vogue champions of the up-and-coming Democratic Socialists of America. The correct answer is — wait for it —Pope Leo XIV.
Yes, that’s right. The author of this overt homage to socialism is the Holy See’s current pontiff, who proudly posted these comments on X in April.
How should the faithful (and even those who are not) respond to what surely appears to be papal support for the soft communism of what is otherwise known as liberation theology and the communal control of all economic resources? Is Pope Leo’s affinity for the Marcusean redistribution of wealth what the church actually teaches?
Is this even what the pope’s own predecessors have advocated historically? Are Christians — or even socially sensitive non-Christians, for that matter — obligated to embrace this soft Marxism, or perhaps even the full Monty, over capitalism, free enterprise and constitutional liberty?
The answer is no.
Any quick review of history shows that even Pope Leo’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, acknowledged as much.
In 1891, this bishop of Rome flatly rejected socialism in his encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” and he did not mince words: “Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom, it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal.”
Pope Pius XI was equally outspoken. In 1937, he issued his encyclical, “Divini Redemptoris,” which condemned Marxist socialism as incompatible with the Catholic faith, saying that such systems are based on a materialistic worldview that undermines human dignity and the rights of God.
He went further, rejecting the atheistic principles underlying all this, asserting that a socialistic worldview poses a significant threat to the Christian social order and human dignity.
In 1949, the Catholic Church, under the auspices of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office and approved by Pope Pius XII, issued a similar document that declared all Catholics who professed Marxist-socialist doctrine should be excommunicated as apostates from the Christian faith.
Finally, as we leave the past few decades of the 20th century and move further into the 21st, papal condemnations of socialism’s inhumanity continued. John Paul II and Benedict XVI (who each had firsthand experience with the evils of overreaching governments and totalitarian regimes) explicitly condemned economic collectivism, particularly in its current Marxist form.
John Paul described socialism as a “simple and radical solution” that dehumanizes individuals by subordinating them to the economic machine, and Benedict warned against a leviathan state that controls everything.
From the beginning, the church has condemned neo-Marxist socialism and rightly recognized it as the cause of extreme poverty, not the solution. Before the ink had even dried on “Das Kapital,” Christian leaders were sounding the alarm. Why? Because they understood that the very premise of this evil worldview was diametrically opposed to the basics of Christian morality, personal responsibility and the church’s concurrent respect for individual dignity and human rights.
At its core, socialism stands against these Christian basics, as it is rooted in at least three of the seven deadly sins and, at a minimum, two of the Ten Commandments. All the popes cited above, as well as thousands of other Christian scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, have understood that the foundational assumptions of neo-Marxist socialism stoke envy, reward sloth, encourage covetousness, fan the fires of tribal animus and enable the theft of private property.
So, once again, the answer is no. Christians are not obligated to heed Pope Leo’s call for the “equitable distribution” of someone else’s private wealth. Faithful adherents throughout the ages have understood that poverty is never solved by governments preying on the worst instincts of the people.
Poverty is solved by people following God.
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Our Very Christian Founding
The United States has reached its 250th birthday, and remarkably, there is still a debate about whether we were founded as an explicitly Christian nation.
BY: Frank Friday, The American Thinker (July 1, 2026).
The United States has reached its 250th birthday, and remarkably, there is still debate about whether we were founded as an explicitly Christian nation. That’s because late 19th-century academia came up with the nebulous idea of a post-Christian “Enlightenment,” causing a lot of confusion. But there shouldn’t be.
Part of the problem is that some Christians today want to see the Founders as conventionally Christian, when some were not. Jefferson, for one, was a resolutely heterodox thinker. The amateur historian David Barton even had to withdraw his 2012 book The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson due to the numerous fake or unsupported quotes he used.
But that’s all quite irrelevant to the question at hand.
Rather, consider this — a country today with Sharia law as its official justice system would undoubtedly be considered a “Muslim country.” So also, the United States is founded upon an explicitly Christian system — the English common law.
49 of our 50 states have laws that essentially state — the common law of England, insofar as it is not repugnant to the principles of the Bill of Rights and Constitution of this Commonwealth, shall continue in full force…
That includes Justice Coke’s magisterial 1608 opinion in Calvin’s Case, where he wrote the “law of nature is the law of England,” and the “law of nature is that which God at the time of creation of the nature of man infused into his heart, for his preservation, and direction…”
The English common law began with Saxon King Alfred’s 893 AD Doom book, enshrining Christian natural law by coordinating the customary laws of the Anglo-Saxons with the principles of the Ten Commandments and New Testament.
The British scholar John C.H. Wu wrote that the “English common law is a cradle Catholic while Roman law was a deathbed convert,” referring to the legal system begun by Catholics, and continued by Protestants, such as Coke.
Russell Kirk explained in The Roots of American Order (1974), that Blackstone’s famous 1765 Commentaries was the common law’s “lodestar” for the Founders.
From this Christian jurist they learned of “no taxation without representation,” the “absolute rights of the individual,” and that the law of nature “being coeval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.”
Kirk stated “The natural law described by Blackstone was rooted in Christian ethics… There, more clearly expressed than by Locke, is (the) fundamental doctrine of American politics.”
Not content to leave credit for the Founding to the lawyers and the Scholastics, though, academics since the late 19th century have tried to claim our system for a collection of disparate philosophers, later dubbed “Enlightenment thinkers.” Men who never studied law or theology — from Voltaire to Kant — who shied away from Christian natural law, or like Hume, Bentham and others, denied it entirely. Some, like Locke, were also supporters of slavery, and nearly all of them supported “scientific racism.”
Few of these men or their ideas were of great interest to the Founders. Rather, they were only championed later by Progressive-era politicians such as Woodrow Wilson, who dismissed natural law and promoted a ” living Constitution,” or Oliver Wendell Holmes and his “legal realism,” which stood common law on its head.
The Founders also had no use for the anti-clerical zealotry of Tom Paine. (And even Paine believed in a soul and an afterlife and a Supreme Being who authored the Rights of Man).
Benjamin Franklin, who called himself a deist at times, might be better described as a super-generic Protestant. A lot of the Founders were merely estranged Anglicans, as the English Crown treated its American church as a patronage operation and filled it with Tories.
But the Founders knew modern natural law began with St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and with St. Augustine’s principle — restated by Coke — that “an unjust law is no law at all.” They knew the Imago Dei became the universal political refrain, “all men are created equal” under the Church Fathers.
Some, such as the brilliant James Wilson, read Aquinas and the Anglican Richard Hooker. Educated in law and theology, he wrote in 1791, “Human law must rest its authority, ultimately, upon the authority of that law which is divine… Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistants. Indeed, these two sciences run into each other. The divine law, as discovered by reason and moral sense, forms an essential part of both.”
All knew of Cardinal Langton and his role in Magna Carta, securing the right to trial by jury among other things. They also knew of Simon de Montfort, the struggle for elective democracy and the birth of “no taxation without representation.”
The lawyers read the cleric and jurist, Henry De Bracton, a contemporary of Aquinas, who wrote his monumental On the Laws and Customs of England in 1259, insisting that the King was always bound by law and that his nobles could even bridle him like a horse if need be.
The English American scholar Theodore Plucknett stated that the “Constitution of the United States was written by men who had Magna Carta and Bracton, and Coke and Littleton before their eyes.”
They also had the best of later Scholastics, distilled down by secondary sources. Such as Cardinal Bellarmine and his work, De Laicis, which the Founders encountered continuously — through Locke’s Second Treatise, Filmer’s Patriarcha, and Sidney’s Discourses, which alone offers two dozen quotations. British American historian Caroline Robbins in 1947 called the Discourses the “textbook of the American revolution.”
It was even discovered in 1917 that Jefferson’s personal copy of Patriarcha had quotations from De Laicis underlined, especially regarding the consent of the governed.
Jefferson was always evasive about the broad sources of his work, writing to Henry Lee in 1825, he would only mention “the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.”., skipping 1600 years of European history between the Stoics and the Enlightenment; and ignoring the giants of the English common law, both the Catholics — Bracton, Fortescue, Littleton and the Anglicans — Coke, Hale, Blackstone.
Unfortunately, shortchanging the traditional Catholic and Anglican thinkers has led to the myth that the Founders were all deists. But the history is clear. Jefferson’s phrases — “all men are created equal,” “endowed by their Creator,” and “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” — were already common in 14th-century England.
Patrick Henry’s 1775 Liberty or Death Speech, a great influence on Jefferson and Washington, well illustrates the Christian God the Founders had in mind.
“We are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power… millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force… we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles…”
Someday, Americans might get a better understanding of their real history and all the things progressive-era academics have labored to obscure. Beginning with the Christian ideals in the center of the Declaration of Independence, the Apple of Gold, as Pres. Lincoln memorably phrased it.
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Time For A Fake Wall To Come Down
Fake liberals were cornered with the facts about their unfounded attitude against the Christian worldview, and they built a wall between church and state that has no right to be there.
BY: Anthony J. DeBlasi, The American Thinker (June 28, 2026)
Before the “woke times” messed up honest discussion, whenever fake liberals were cornered with the facts about their unfounded attitude against the Christian worldview, they countered with egalitarian clichés. “Who is to say” and “opinions are equal” were two favorite put-downs against “retrograde” views of the subject. And from the ramparts of a wall they built between church and state they shot down all who challenged their rantings against God in human affairs. They still do.
Well, Christ spoke and established his church. So much for “who is to say.” It was he and his apostles who spoke for the relation of God to us. Walking with Christ would be walking with one who embodied the truth regarding the mind and will of the Creator, not the mind and will of false prophets who as I write, continue to make news headlines.
As for the argument that opinions are all equal, well, if all opinions were equal, no opinion would be worth a dime. How does the opinion of one who is on drugs equate to the opinion of one who is free of that addiction? How does the opinion of a person who is mentally ill equate to that of a person not so afflicted? I touch on extreme cases to highlight the fallacy in the argument. And what of the great range of inequalities in perception and judgment among individuals regarding anything, even including professionals in their respective fields?
Big deal? Well, it’s a huge deal in a democracy. Cutting to the bone: What is the value of the “average” between what is best and what is not to what is required? Or the value of a ”consensus” among crooks? Can a majority of voters be wrong? Christians who remember that a majority voted to crucify Christ would shout YES.
The tendency of majoritarian rule to devolve to mob rule alerted America’s founders to configure a system of government that would make it difficult for any faction to dominate and take control. The prerequisite for honest and open debate was taken as self-evident in achieving just and responsible rule. The “checks-and-balances” method of government crafted by the architects of the American republic is intended to maximize cooperation and minimize self-interest among those elected to govern the nation.
History proves that we live in a chronically wicked world, where “money talks” and wisdom is not a genetic feature of human society. It was therefore a necessity against social chaos that wisdom became centered in religious doctrine and promoted by clerics whose lives were dedicated to justice and wellbeing predicated on laws higher than those of the marketplace. The founders of America recognized what all right-minded people recognize, that Providence must be included in a just social order. This calls for Church AND State, not Church VERSUS State, as the Left has twisted it.
Liberals of an intolerant kind and dystopia-bound progressives willfully ignore or distort the moral factor in democracy, permitting the Law of the Land — America’s Constitution — to be made an asset of power-hungry elites instead of being the instrument of justice for all Americans, the aim of men much wiser than any in government today.
The idea of separating the church from the state was never meant to separate God from the public. It was meant to keep America from being ruled by a particular religious sect. No legitimate argument exists in this light for the non-observance of Judeo-Christian morality in American public life. To all honest parties it was clear from the beginning that isolating the church from the state was not a motive for building a wall between God and the United States.
It is worth remembering that the hatred of the church by the Left is an inheritance of 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment pundits who placed themselves above God, a few assuming that role for themselves. That act of piracy resulted in the blood bath that turned the French Revolution into a Reign of Terror. The reckless pitting of human against human, ending in countless lives lost, continues to occur today for essentially the same reason, namely regarding Christianity and the church of being an enemy of the people instead of an enemy of a wicked state.
Benighted intellectuals of the Age of Reason branded in their followers an unreasoning contempt for divine guidance since it too frequently interfered with their prescriptions for society. The conflict continues to “chop heads,” as it were, to this day, as in the French Reign of Terror. (I can’t help picturing Nancy Pelosi with her gavel presiding over the march to the guillotine.)
The rebellion of the Left against the Creator needs no special acuity of vision to detect in today’s deranged world. It is evident in the constant distortion of the facts of reality and the censorship of truthful speech, smeared as “hate speech” and targeting for jail those who speak the truth.
What surprise can there be that churches have shut down, been burned, their holiest icons wrecked, their congregants scattered, demonized and persecuted, their leaders pressured to turn against their own religion? Did Christ and the church he established declare war on the state? Or was it rather that the state declared war on God, a war still raging 2,000 years after His Word became flesh — a war against all that is good and beautiful and best for humanity?
And what surprise can there be that morality was not excluded from public affairs by the architects of the United States of America? The founders of America warned of the ill effects of being at odds with Gospel teaching. The ill consequences were spelled out by visiting French scholar Tocqueville in the early years of the American republic. In recent times, Solzhenitsyn made it plain that forgetting God in human affairs creates injustice among people. This articulate Gulag survivor and defector from Soviet Russia warned of the prospect for a communist-style dystopia in America that, regardless of how attractive and comfortable leftists could make it, would end the freedom of mind, body and soul of the people it descended upon.
Some will say that it is a waste of time to stir up a retrograde view of the relation between church and state in these “woke times.” I say, there is no expiration date for speaking the truth about the relation between us and the One who gave us life.
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America’s Bishops ‘Turn A Blind Eye’ to Abuse of American Generosity
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops speaks eloquently about migrants’ dignity but too seldom about the safety and dignity of Americans.
BY: S.A. McCarthy, The American Spectator (June 28, 2026).
They’re at it again. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to support President Donald Trump in terminating temporary protected status (TPS) for a host of foreign nationals, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is once again raising the hue and cry. Here’s what USCCB Migration Committee chairman Bishop Brendan J. Cahill had to say:
Revoking the legal status of hundreds of thousands of people residing in our country creates a moral crisis when returning to their country of origin is not a safe or reasonable option. If we are truly to affirm the God-given dignity of every human person, we as a nation cannot turn a blind eye to such an injustice and the impossible choices it will create for families and communities.
First of all, as the name suggests, TPS is not exactly the same thing as legal status, properly understood. Instead, TPS is intended to be temporary, which is exactly what the Supreme Court and the Trump administration agreed on. Second of all, returning to Haiti is in no way an unsafe or unreasonable option for Haitian nationals.
Deporting those who have no right to be in the country to their home countries … is not an affront to the dignity of the foreigners.
Haiti was first granted TPS in 2010, following a major earthquake in January of that year. The designation has been repeatedly renewed for more than 15 years; first, it was renewed due to slow recovery from the earthquake, then due to a cholera epidemic, then due to hurricanes, and, under former president Joe Biden, due to a combination of factors like poverty, political instability, and the impacts of COVID-19. The only time anyone has tried to terminate TPS for Haiti was under both the first and second Trump administrations, when the decision was challenged in court.
Syria was first designated for TPS in 2012, due to armed conflict in Syria and the violent suppression of rebellion by then-president Bashar al-Assad and his regime. Al-Assad and his regime were overthrown in 2024 and al-Assad fled the country.
In the cases of both Haiti and Syria — as in the cases of countless other countries designated for TPS — the de jure “temporary” relief afforded to foreign nationals hailing from those places has de facto become permanent, long after conditions returned to the status quo and the cause for offering temporary relief came to an end. Cahill and his brother bishops conveniently ignore this fact. While the bishops say that “we as a nation cannot turn a blind eye to such an injustice” as returning foreign nationals to their home countries, in a manner that is both safe and humane, the USCCB has been happy to “turn a blind eye” to the horrors wrought upon American citizens by these “temporary” visitors who have long overstayed their welcome.
Earlier this year, Haitian national and TPS beneficiary Rolbert Joachin bludgeoned a 51-year-old woman to death in Fort Myers, Florida. Joachin was repeatedly striking a vehicle at a gas station with a hammer when the female gas station clerk approached him. The TPS beneficiary abandoned the car, walked over to the woman, knocked her to the ground with a blow to the head, and then continued hammering at her until she was dead. Last year, federal authorities arrested Honduran national and TPS beneficiary Felix Bustillo Diaz, who was granted TPS even though he had a criminal record, including illegal entry to the U.S. Diaz was accused of repeatedly raping his 12-year-old grand-niece, who had been illegally smuggled into the U.S. in 2014.
Another Honduran national in the U.S. under TPS, Julio Ceasar Herrera Gonzalez was driving drunk in Nashville when he crashed his Maserati (how does a TPS beneficiary from an impoverished nation afford a Maserati?) into oncoming traffic, killing a 37-year-old woman and nearly killing her husband, who suffered serious injuries. In 2023, Haitian national and TPS recipient Hermanio Joseph was illegally driving in Springfield, Ohio, on a Mexican driver’s license, when he crashed into a school bus, killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark and injuring 20 other children.
Crickets from the USCCB. Of course, these are only some of the most egregious, horrific examples of the abuses that the American people have suffered at the hands of TPS beneficiaries; there are countless instances of American families being forced from their homes because TPS recipients have taken their jobs or have outbid American families thanks to the taxpayer-funded housing stipends they receive, countless instances of TPS beneficiaries causing property damage, taking over neighborhoods, and transforming the streets of small-town America into the unlivable, trash-littered streets of the Third World slums they hail from. Again, no comment from the USCCB.
Cahill and his brother bishops complain that it may not be “safe” or “reasonable” for foreign nationals to be returned to their countries of origin, long after the end of the adverse conditions that prompted the offer of temporary relief in the first place. Never once do the bishops seem to ask what would be “safe” or “reasonable” for the American people. While they complain that poverty in Haiti is such a grave matter, they never once turn their attention to the poverty of the American families whose livelihoods and homes have been ripped away from them by the invading foreign horde, with their government-funded stipends and benefits. While the bishops decry the abuses that Syrian nationals suffered under the al-Assad regime, they have done far too little to speak out against the abuses that American Catholics — their own flocks! — suffered at the hands of the Biden regime.
The bishops — not just the USCCB, but even the Bishop of Rome, as I wrote recently— lay great emphasis on treating foreigners with respect, dignity, and charity, but “turn a blind eye” to the fact that, in many cases today, those same foreigners threaten the dignity of the American people. Deporting those who have no right to be in the country to their home countries — or to safe third countries, as the Trump administration has managed to do in some cases — is not an affront to the dignity of the foreigners and secures the dignity of the American people, too. The tone-deaf and (seemingly willfully) myopic responses from the bishops on the immigration crisis are ignorant — both of the Church’s longstanding teachings and of the needs of the people that the American bishops are tasked with caring for.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 