Author Archives: Michael Tangeman O'Connor

Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles 

September 20, 2025

There has been a mixed response from the local Church to raids that have led to many Latino Catholics living in fear of being arrested and deported / By MICHAEL TANGEMAN.

LOS ANGELES – It is 6.45 on a Sunday morning in late August and I’ve arrived early for the first Mass at Our Lady of the Rosary. The church stands serenely in the early morning sunshine in this majority Hispanic suburb of Paramount, 15 minutes’ drive from downtown on the ubiquitous commuter freeways criss-crossing the working-class communities of south-east LA.

Fr Chris Ponnet takes part in a “Coalition of
Faithful Resistance”prayer and protest vigil.

The scene seems a far cry from the running street battle in June just a few blocks away, with live-streamed images of police in riot gear facing off against neighbours protesting against arrests of undocumented immigrants in a series of raids by armed federal agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE.

The scene seems a far cry from the running street battle in June just a few blocks away, with live-streamed images of police in riot gear facing off against neighbours protesting against arrests of undocumented immigrants in a series of raids by armed federal agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE.

This is home turf for me. I was born, baptised, raised and for 12 years attended Catholic schools in these communities. To this day, I can recite all the nearby parishes by name; I no longer live here, but I can visualise nearly every one. Driving through neighbourhood streets, I realise I still know this area like the back of my hand.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE in PDF, here or at The Tablet online, here.

The faith-based activists willing to face arrest for standing up for Gaza

September 3, 2025

Faith-based protests over Gaza are on the rise and likely to continue / By MICHAEL TANGEMAN.

Fr John McGowan OCD knows a thing or two about terrorism.

A member of the Discalced Carmelites and longtime parish priest, what McGowan knows he learned first-hand while living and working at the Carmelite house in the Notre Dame Centre in Jerusalem from 1998-2003, seeing the devastating impact of a terror campaign of suicide bombings of buses, restaurants and shopping centres that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians during the Second Intifadah.

“You had to go out, you had to have exercise. But you never knew if you were going to come back,” he said, “and that’s not exaggerating.”

As he headed into central London on the morning of 9 August from his parish of St Joseph in the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St Peter, McGowan also knew he was himself almost certainly about to be arrested later that day on terror-related charges, even though his only offence would be to engage non-violently in an act of passive civil disobedience to protest Britain’s refusal to withdraw support for the Israeli government over its relentless campaign of bombing of Gaza.

Despite the risk of arrest, Fr McGowan pressed on to join the growing ranks of faith-based activists willing publicly to protest against their government’s continued supply of military arms and component parts for use by the Israeli military in Gaza.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE at The Tablet online, here.

An immigrant bishop calls the church to reclaim its prophetic mission

August 19, 2025

Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala speaks of his experience as a refugee from violence and how Catholics should act toward the strangers among us / By MICHAEL TANGEMAN.

Arriving to the United States as a teenage undocumented migrant – a refugee from his native El Salvador – Auxiliary Bishop Evelia Menjivar-Ayala of Washington, D.C. proceeded along the path taken by most immigrants: night school to learn English, hard work in multiple jobs, paying taxes, and eventually seeking and earning U.S. citizenship.

Menjivar-Ayala says he felt a calling to serve God and the church from an early age. As a child in a devout, impoverished family, he witnessed the U.S.-backed military regime’s violence against the dispossessed and how they targeted the Catholic Church for defending people. By the time the country’s 12-year armed conflict ended in 1992. the government and paramilitary forces had killed nearly two dozen Catholic priests. four nuns. and hundreds of catechists, including three American nuns and a lay missionary working with them. In 1980, just days after Archbishop Oscar Romero called for an end to government repression, an assassin gunned him down while he was saying Mass.

Menjivar-Ayala was ordained a priest in 2004 and appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Washington in December 2022 by Pope Francis. In this interview, he speaks of his experience as a refugee from violence and how Catholics should act toward the strangers among us. He also holds out hope that the church will be guided by Catholic social teachings and become an outward-looking, prophetic church that accompanies the poor and the vulnerable in our world today.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE in PDF or online at U.S. Catholic, here.