Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles
The Tablet, 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.
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.
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.
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The faith-based activists willing to face arrest for standing up for Gaza
The Tablet, September 3, 2025
Faith-based protests over Gaza are on the rise and likely to continue.
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.
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.
>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE online at The Tablet.

An immigrant bishop calls the church to reclaim its prophetic mission
U.S. Catholic, 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.
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…
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.

Spanish diocese asks Vatican to take over Opus Dei complex
The Tablet, July 3, 2025
The appeal came just a week after reports of an imminent resolution to the dispute between the Diocese of Barbastro-Monzón and Opus Dei over the Torreciudad complex.
The Diocese of Barbastro-Monzón in northern Spain called on the Vatican to assume control of Opus Dei’s Torreciudad complex, which lies within the diocesan boundaries, and to conduct a full audit of its financial accounts “as well as those of the societies and foundations related to the complex”.
In a statement published on 1 July, the diocese proposed that the Vatican elevate the canonical status of the massive Marian shrine complex from its current designation as a semi-public oratory or chapel to that of an international sanctuary, which under canon law would be regulated directly by the Vatican.
>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE online at The Tablet.

Evelio Menjivar: Bishop Without Borders
The Tablet, June 12, 2025
A bishop who has compared the abuse being inflicted on immigrants by the US government to the suffering of Jesus on the Cross was himself an undocumented migrant fleeing poverty and political violence in El Salvador.
IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE of our interview that Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala paused, remembering we were speaking nearly 45 years to the day from the infamous Sumpul River massacre in his native El Salvador. He was just nine years old at the time.
Born into a devout family of poor subsistence farmers in the village of Carasque, in the remote and mountainous terrain bordering Honduras in the department of Chalatenango, Evelio and the rest of the family, led by his mother, had gone fishing nearby at the Gaulzinga River, a tributary of the Sumpul, at a point just upstream from where the two rivers met.
“We saw a group of people hurrying across the river, carrying things, carrying bundles. And we said, ‘What’s going on?’” Menjivar recalls. Then, about 200 yards upstream, they saw armed government troops running across a narrow, suspended footbridge – soldiers rushing toward the village upriver and the civilian population fleeing downstream.
“We heard a big bombardment going on up above. And then we realised what had happened to the village up there,” he recalls. “They had all been massacred … massacred.”
>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE in PDF or online at The Tablet.

Leo’s in-tray: What will he do about Opus Dei?
The Tablet, May 17, 2025
Among the unresolved issues Pope Leo XIV has inherited from Pope Francis are several thorny questions involving the influential Catholic movement founded in Spain in 1928 by Fr Josemaria Escriva.
TORRECIUDAD, Spain – Remnant clouds gave way to a bright Spanish sun and dazzling blue sky, the snowcapped Pyrenees standing picture- perfect in the distance as worshippers arrived for Mass on the first Sunday of May at the Marian sanctuary of Torreciudad, built and run here for 50 years by Opus Dei in the northern Spanish province of Huesca.
But while warm weather and clear skies surrounded this towering brick complex with a mood of serenity, clouds were gathering some 800 miles away at the Vatican, where 133 cardinals from around the globe were assembling to select a successor to Pope Francis. Opus Dei members were praying for a providential outcome. But the unexpected choice of Cardinal Robert Prevost – a US born and Peruvian-nationalised bishop, friend and colleague of Pope Francis, who as the new pontiff has taken the name of Leo XIV – may not have been to the satisfaction of all their leaders.
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The US border bishop standing up to Trump
Independent Catholic News, April 11, 2025
EL PASO, Texas – Just days into the second term of US President Donald Trump, millions of Americans watched live as his administration went on the attack against the country’s Catholic hierarchy over its objections to Trump’s plan for mass deportations of immigrants and refugees, legal and illegal alike.
While apparently directed at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the individual who lies squarely in the crosshairs of the administration’s attack plan is Bishop of El Paso Mark J Seitz, the elected chair of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration and Refugees.
It was Bishop Seitz, two days after Trump signed a flurry of executive orders overriding existing laws and federal government policies on immigration, who issued a response on behalf of the USCBB saying the orders appeared “specifically intended to eviscerate humanitarian protections enshrined in federal law and undermine due process, subjecting vulnerable families and children to grave danger.”
The next day, Seitz led the heads of the Catholic Health Association of the United States and Catholic Charities USA in criticizing Trump’s rescinding of the government’s long-standing guidance for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to refrain from conducting raids and making arrests in schools, places of worship, hospitals and other sensitive locations.
>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE online at Independent Catholic News (ICN).

Where have all the migrants gone?
The Tablet, April 12, 2025
President Donald Trump promises to deport ‘millions and millions of criminal aliens’ but the evidence from church-affiliated shelters on either side of the US-Mexico border is that he is scrambling to find the numbers that will satisfy his Maga base.
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – They stand silently, facing the altar and the massive raised platform next to Chamizal park and within sight of the Rio Grande river, where in February 2016 Pope Francis celebrated Mass, delivering a homily exhorting the powerful on both sides of the border to treat poor and long-suffering migrants and refugees with compassion and dignity.
Eleven huge white field tents of waterproof canvas now stand here arrayed in the sun, anticipating the arrival of thousands of immigrants that the US administration of President Donald Trump says will soon be deported, dumped unceremoniously over the border into Mexico from the United States.
Across that border, in El Paso, Texas, the construction of a 10,000-bed immigration detention centre at the massive 1,700 squaremile Fort Bliss army base is about to begin, announced during a 26 March visit to the base by Trump’s newly appointed secretary of the army, Daniel Driscoll. Four days later, the first two of eight M1126 “Stryker” armoured fighting vehicles arrived at El Paso, visibly underscoring preparations for Trump’s promised “hardening” of the US border. It was all part of the pledge made to his supporters in November to deliver the “largest deportation programme in American history”.
>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE in PDF or online at The Tablet.

The church must risk all to support migrants, says Bishop Seitz
U.S. Catholic, Apr 8, 2025
Jesus makes it clear: the church has a special responsibility to serve the poor and the stranger—even if this leads to persecution.
“I fully expect the church to be persecuted,” says Bishop of El Paso Mark J. Seitz. Seitz has just spoken out strongly against the anti-immigrant policies of U.S. President Donald Trump in a sermon following a march through downtown El Paso in defense of immigrants and refugees on March 24. The occasion was the feast day and 45th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who, in 1980, was killed by an assassin’s bullet while saying Mass because of his outspoken defense of the poor and vulnerable.
Before nearly 500 worshipers at an evening vigil in the Jesuit mission church of the Sacred Heart, just blocks from the U.S. border with Mexico, Bishop Seitz, who also serves as president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference’s Committee on Migration, called out the Trump administration’s militarization of the U.S. southern border as “simply empire masquerading as security in pursuit of benefits for a select few” and demanded the administration: “Stop the asylum ban! Stop the deportations!”
>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE online at U.S. Catholic.

Bishop condemns Trump’s ‘war on the poor’ at border vigil
The Tablet, Mar 25, 2025
‘We say to all those who live in fear of deportation: the Church stands with you in this hour of darkness.’
Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, the chairman of the US Catholic Bishops Conference’s Committee on Migration, delivered strong words and a warning on Monday to the administration of President Donald Trump over its escalating crackdown against immigrants and asylum seekers along the country’s southern border and nationwide.
In a sermon delivered to a congregation of nearly 500, as well as scores of diocesan clergy and members of religious orders, a dozen US and Canadian bishops and a Vatican cardinal, Bishop Seitz criticised those whose actions in this world are motivated by the desire for wealth or empire as “idolatry of the worst sort”.
He then turned his argument to the Trump administration’s so-called “hardening” of the US-Mexico border, involving the deployment of US Army troops and the increased presence of armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents throughout the borderlands region, calling it “simply empire masquerading in the guise of security for the benefit of a select few”.
>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE online at The Tablet.