Cardinal Tobin: Pray, mourn and say 'no' to ICE funding; National Catholic Reporter, January 26, 2026

 MICHAEL J. O'LOUGHLIN, National Catholic Reporter; Cardinal Tobin: Pray, mourn and say 'no' to ICE funding

"A high-ranking Catholic leader is ratcheting up criticism of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown and urging people of faith to be more vocal in calling out injustice.

Responding to a sense of helplessness many people are feeling in the wake of violence at the hands of federal immigration officials, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, urged people of faith not to shy away from the news and to use their voices to say, "No."

In a reflection delivered Jan. 26 during an online interfaith prayer service hosted by Faith in Action, Tobin employed some of the strongest language yet by a U.S. cardinal to condemn the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, describing Immigration and Customs Enforcement "lawless" and urging Catholics to tell their lawmakers to vote against additional funding...

Citing the Gospel story of the Good Samaritan, and invoking the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Tobin asked how people will say "no" to what's happening today.

"How will you say 'no?' How will you say 'no' to violence?" he said. "How will you say 'no' this week when an appropriations bill is going to be considered in Congress? Will you contact your congressional representatives, the senators and representatives from your district? Will you ask them, for the love of God and the love of human beings, which can't be separated, to vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization?"

Tobin concluded his remarks with a challenge to people of faith disturbed by what they see: "How will you scrawl your answer on the wall? How will you help restore a culture of life in the midst of death?""

What did Pope Francis think of JD Vance? His view was more than clear; The Guardian, April 23, 2025

Jan-Werner Müller , The Guardian; What did Pope Francis think of JD Vance? His view was more than clear

"We might never quite know what Pope Francis said to the US vice-president during their very brief meeting on Sunday. In the widely shared video clip, it was hardly audible. The morning after, Francis died, and Vance jetted to visit India, finding time to tweet that his heart went out to the millions of Christians who loved Francis (implying, I suppose, that not all Catholics loved him) and patronizing the dead pontiff by calling one of his homilies “really quite beautiful”).

Francis had been as outspoken as could be without naming names, when he criticized Vance in his February letter to US bishops; but he was not just registering his rebuke of Trump and Vance’s cruel treatment of refugees and migrants; he was reacting to a broader trend of instrumentalizing religion for nationalist and authoritarian populism...

Francis, in a letter to US bishops, instructed the flock that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings!”

He added, driving home the rebuke without naming names, that “the true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ … that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” Apparently, Cardinal Pietro Parolin was dispatched on Saturday to explain all this to Vance again.

Vance is not the only far-right populist who has smuggled nationalism into what he touts as the correct notion of Christianity. Viktor Orbán, a great model for Vance and other self-declared US “post-liberals” (meaning: anti-liberals), has been declaring for years that a proper understanding of “Christian Democracy” is not only “illiberal”, but nationalist."