The Hope that Does Not Disappoint

Dear Sisters and Brothers –

Earlier this week, after reading the New York Times front page stories about the murder of Alex Pretti and its aftermath, I pushed the paper away and dropped my head into my hands. The inaudible words that crossed my lips were simple and familiar: “Jesus, what do you want me to do?” Immediately, I heard a response, also inaudible, but clearly, in the way God sometimes speaks when we are listening: “You have a body, and you have a pulpit.” It was a voice I have known and trusted for decades. I understood it to mean that my faithfulness to Jesus now requires both presence and proclamation: that I must show up with my body, and that I must speak and write from the responsibility entrusted to me in my mission as pastor of St. Ignatius Parish. I share this with you because it matters that you know that what I write comes from prayer, from discernment, and from my understanding of what God is asking of me in this moment.

In the years leading up to World War II, as the United States struggled to remain officially neutral while fascism spread across Europe, Eleanor Roosevelt insisted on a hard truth: while a nation might claim political neutrality, there was no such thing as moral neutrality. “We are not neutral in thought,” she said. “We cannot be neutral in our hearts.” I find her conviction compelling now. I know well that, as pastor, I cannot be partisan in my preaching or claim the Gospel for any political party or platform. But the Gospel and the Church’s social teaching – which is grounded in the immutable truth that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God – are never neutral about human dignity, violence, injustice, or the suffering of the vulnerable. In moments like the one in which we find ourselves – marked by violence, grief, anger, and fear, in Minneapolis and echoed across our country – silence is not a morally safe option. Scripture never treats silence in the face of injustice as neutral; silence protects the status quo and the comfort of those least affected. Choosing not to speak remains a choice, but I am bound to the Gospel entrusted to me – and Jesus’s words echo in my soul.

The murders of Keith Porter, Jr., Renee Good, and Alex Pretti must be named for what they are: grave moral evils, outrages against human dignity, and wounds to the Body of Christ. Violence that takes life is never justified or excusable. The Gospel leaves us no room for ambiguity here. Likewise, tactics that terrorize communities, separate families, or treat human beings as disposable in the name of enforcement or order stand in direct contradiction to the teaching of Jesus and the social teaching of the Church. We mourn these deaths, and we grieve with their families and loved ones. And we stand firm in our conviction: this is not who we are called to be as disciples of Jesus.

Jesus intends us to be a community whose way of life and whose virtue of hope are visible in a broken world. “Blessed are the peacemakers” presumes a world where peace is under threat, and it insists that disciples stand in the midst of the brokenness rather than withdraw from it. To follow Jesus in moments like this does not require heroics, but it does cost something: faithful presence, honest speech, a refusal to look away. The Church does not exist to bless the status quo, but to manifest, through our words and our deeds, the kingdom of God.

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, helped me think about what a faithful response looks like. In remarks made last Sunday at a Faith in Action prayer service, he recounted a scene from Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone, set amid the rise of fascism in the 1930s, in which a young woman asks a priest, “Father, what can we do?” With what Tobin called “the machinery of death” already in motion, the priest replies that what most unsettles dictators and authoritarian regimes is not force, but the person who quietly scrawls on the wall of the piazza a single word: “No.” Tobin suggested that this is one way faith takes flesh in dark times: we do not pretend death has not occurred, we mourn, we name what has happened, we pray for the dead, and we refuse to allow violence to pass unnoticed. And he posed a question that does not leave me alone: “How will you scrawl your answer on the wall? How will you help restore a culture of life in the midst of death?”

I do not yet know all that this will ask of me or of us. What I do know is that we cannot respond faithfully unless we stay rooted in prayer. As Jesus himself returned again and again to his Father, so must we. We must not begin with our own strategies, but with humility and with trust that God is already at work, often in ways we cannot yet see or name. Our prayer must keep returning to the simple question “Lord, what do you ask of us now?” and hold up to God those who are suffering, grieving, afraid, or harmed. But we must also pray – as difficult as it may be – for those who perpetrate violence and injustice, for the conversion of hearts hardened by fear, greed, rage, or despair. To pray this way does not excuse evil; it is a refusal to surrender our fundamental belief that every person remains a child of God, and that no one is beyond the reach of grace and redemption.

St. Paul reminds us that we are earthen vessels, so let us walk together in these difficult and unsettling days with humility, charity, and care – and in hope because God is faithful and remains at work even when the path ahead is obscured. Rooted in prayer, sustained by the Eucharist, and bound to one another in love, we trust that the Spirit continues to lead us, calling us to courage without hardness, to truth without cruelty, and to the hope that does not disappoint, that God always brings light into darkness and life out of death.

Oremus pro invicem.

Fr. Greg

Photo: Interior of the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis. Wikimedia / August Schwerdfeger (cc)