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On 30 September President Trump called back his military leaders from around the world to the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia and told them: “we’re under invasion from within”. America’s cities were to be their new “training grounds”. The “enemy within”, the constant refrain of authoritarian States facing opposition, has become Trump’s too. On social media, for instance, he describes the Democratic Party as a greater enemy of the United States than Russia, China or North Korea.
Trump has domestic plans for the US military. But after 22 October it is going to be a lot harder to find out what they are. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, brought in a set of policies restricting media access to the Pentagon, banning soliciting from staff release of unauthorised information by journalists doing their job. There was a mass walk-out: five major US television networks, even Fox News threw in the towel. Some 60 other journalists, from the merely right-wing to the ‘loony-tunes’ variety, described by Hegseth as the “next generation of the Pentagon press corps”, replaced them. Fraught and perilous legal judgements face the USA in the next few days. District and Circuit (Federal Appeal Court) judges are making decisions permitting or curtailing deployment of the National Guard in three Democrat and one Republican-led States: Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland and Memphis. Much hinges on a legal requirement that State Governors call for their deployment. Trump, like Eisenhower and Kennedy with very different circumstances and intentions – namely desegregation - has called on an 1807 Insurrection Law to justify intervention. Federal judges are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. They don’t necessarily do what Trump wants. On 4 October, Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee to prominent Federal level judicial roles, acting as U.S. District Court Judge in Oregon, issued a temporary restraining order to keep some 200 Oregon national guard from being ‘federalized’, that is put under the President’s control and going onto Portland’s streets. The Trump administration promptly sent 200 members of the California National Guard to Oregon, and there were plans to send hundreds more from Texas. In an emergency hearing, Judge Immergut issued a second restraining order - for a shorter time – for National Guard troops from anywhere in the USA deploying to Oregon. A court of the 3rd Circuit in Chicago came back with a similar decision supporting their local authorities. But on 20 October a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a majority decision, stayed Immergut’s first order saying she was in error. The lawsuits continue. Trump had first declared a 30 day ‘emergency’ in August in Washington DC deploying 300 National Guard troops onto the streets to deal with “out of control crime”. Republican governors then sent their own National Guard to reinforce them. In reality crime had been falling. Some 2,500 National Guards still remain at the ready in Washington after the Emergency expired.. In the case of Portland, Trump’s absurd reason was the city was ‘on fire’ and supposedly 'a war zone'. This Goebbels-grade falsehood was partly based on Fox News showing a small, group of demonstrators outside the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facility on the Portland south waterfront. This was interspersed with video clips from 2020 when Portland actually did experience growing riots and vandalism in the streets after the murder of George Floyd. There were also Republican videos circulating using clips from Latin American riots as disinformation. There was nothing prosaic about the streets around the Portland ICE Sunday 12 October. Unless the local TV station's websites, KGW.com or KOIN.com were engaging in remarkably creative fake news, there was the World Naked Bike Ride happening, an annual Portland event, and quite a large collection of demonstrators dressed as frogs, bananas, and giraffes holding a costume protest party of sorts against ICE. A war zone it was not. In Judge Immergut’s words: "the President's determination is simply untethered to the facts." Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar who served in a number of Federal posts, and from 2020-2021 as White House senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights, spoke of an “authorised blindness to facts” so Trump “can decide there’s a war when there’s nothing but bluebirds”. The background to Trump’s pressure on the US judiciary is, of course, the myth of ‘the enemy within’. Quite brazenly and publicly, Trump has announced that certain people whom he dislikes should be prosecuted. And they are being prosecuted: James Comey, former head of the FBI, Letitia James, first black New York Attorney-General, John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN and Trump’s former national security adviser. Trump’s pick for the US 87th Attorney-General, Pam Bondi, went in person to the Eastern District of Virginia to go after Comey. The chief Federal Prosecutor in the District, Erik Siebert, investigated the case, refrained from calling a grand jury (customary procedure) finding insufficient evidence to prosecute. Within a couple of days he was fired and replaced by Lindsay Halligan, an insurance/property lawyer who had been working in Trump’s legal team since November 2021. In Trump-World, if you don't like somebody, just fire them and replace them with a loyalist. And the more responsible people that you fire, the larger is the collection of ignorant, unqualified toadies. It is all very similar to the protection racket that the mafia traditionally ran on small businesses, pay up a ransom or else: management by fear, threats and money, or rather the withholding of the latter. . There are many examples of universities, companies, law firms, and the media being leaned on. A recent example is the case of CBS’ 60 minutes, not some online website, but a major media programme with an excellent history and reputation, providing in depth treatment of contemporary stories. Last year before the Presidential election in November 2024, they did a piece on Kamala Harris. Trump sued them alleging that the editing of the programme was misleading and had caused him emotional distress. CBS was covered by the freedom of speech First Amendment, and had the case gone to court, most agreed, they would have won. Dependent on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) giving permission for a forthcoming sale of the company, CBS settled out of court for $16 million. Trump and the Republicans are relying on gerrymandering and public approval of his peace-building efforts to garner votes in the US mid-term elections. Heather Honey was a Trump activist who promoted his story of election rigging following his dethronement after his first Presidency. Trump made her “deputy-assistant for election integrity” at the Department of Homeland Security. She reportedly told a group of right-wing activists in March that the President could declare a “national emergency” to effectively take control of local election administration. Straws in the wind? If the polls are going against him next year, postal voting may be banned on the grounds it was the cause of the fraudulent voting that brought Biden and the ‘lunatic left’ to power. But the most important question is can Trump rely on the military to support him if he tears up the constitution to obtain a third term on 7 November 2028. Or will it fracture like the rest of society with dire consequences?
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One of the anomalies of English Catholicism is that Catholics working for social justice have in the past been made to feel they are oddities, peripheral to the main life of the Church, worship, sacraments, and prayer, a troublesome add-on, sometimes vaguely threatening. Yet the St Vincent de Paul Society active in every parish and the red boxes of the Pontifical Mission Societies (MISSIO today) in Catholic households were a constant reminder of belonging to a Church rooted amongst the poor throughout the world.
Pope John XXXIII and Pope Paul VI were clearly concerned about global poverty. But the subject was not directly addressed in a discrete document by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). This was, to some degree, remedied by Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio in 1967, his Apostolic Letter to the laity and the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission in 1971, Octogesima Adveniens, alongside "Justice in the World", a document dealing with the issue of justice and liberation of the poor and oppressed, produced by a Synod of Bishops (established by Paul VI as a follow-up to the Council) meeting in Rome that year . It was Liberation Theology with its theme of “the preferential option for the poor” emerging from Latin America in the late 1960s and 1970s which brought a distinctive development in what was an unbroken tradition whose origins lie in the New Testament and the early Church, and carried forward by bishops and theologians through to the 5th century, and by Religious Orders after that. It might be summed up as a demand on Christians to make “a decisive and radical choice in favour of the weakest”. Yet, so little is done to make ‘ordinary’ adult Catholics aware of what any Pope has to say, mass-going Catholics may yet be unaware of how central to faith is Church teaching about poverty and the poor. And this is a Church which has, at least since the 1950s, taught Catholic social teaching in its schools based on papal encyclicals dating back to the Pope Leo’s XXIII’s Rerum Novarum on capital and labour, and workers’ rights. Priests and Sisters working in barrios, or supporting peasants under semi-feudal conditions, alarmed a powerful minority of Latin American bishops who saw proximity to power, dinner with the oligarchs and generals, as a sign of the Church’s influence. And some, such as Francis before he became Pope, believed they could garner some protection for their radical clergy. Others steered clear but did not speak or act decisively. Martyrdom awaited those who did. Because of its work in Latin America, the London-based CIIR (the Catholic Institute for International Relations) challenged British Foreign policy and promoted the theology of liberation from the mid-1970s. As the 1980s progressed, more development agencies and charitable bodies alleviating poverty also began advocating anti-poverty measures. By 1985 it was the Foreign Office’s opinion that CIIR’s staff were communists. None were. Alleviating poverty remained an official mission of the church. But trace the development of charities such as The Passage set up in 1980 for homeless people. Or CAFOD, the official aid agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, part of the international Caritas family in the same period. They too moved on to advocacy of pro-poor policies. Such official flag-ship Catholic charities –– could be distinguished from “free range” NGOs in more adversarial relationships with government which expected a degree of suspicion. Neither Pope John Paul II with his grudging acceptance of liberation theology’s key themes, nor Pope Benedict XVI, set out resolutely to dissipate this sense that work for justice outside episcopal or Vatican control was seen as a potential problem. Then along came Francis, a Pope who himself seemed to many conservatives – dangerously - out of control and who himself tried to demonstrate what the Church’s relationship with the poor should be. Pope Leo XIV set out immediately to act in such a way as to heal divisions and to calm Vatican and conservative anxieties. He had been heralded by commentators as a missionary Pope sharing, alongside Pope Francis, a Latin American vision of a Church of the Poor born of many years in Peru. The publication of an Apostolic Exhortation on the Love of the Poor, Dilexi Te (I have loved You) addressed to all Christians just six months after the Conclave that elected Leo, revealed that the commentators had been right. Dilexi Te develops a document Francis had been preparing before he died. Even the title had been chosen by Pope Francis, to follow his – longer – encyclical published in October 2024, Dilexi Nos (He loved Us). Leo indicates his intentions quoting from Dilexi Nos in the second paragraph, writing that in contemplation of the love of Christ “we too are inspired to be more attentive to the sufferings and needs of others, and confirmed in our efforts to share in his work of liberation [my italics] as instruments for the spread of his love”. His intention is continuity as much as dispelling any idea of incompatibility between popular piety, traditional Christian practice and work for justice. At 20,000 words Dilexi Te is more user-friendly, the language clearer than papal writings before Francis. Popular movements are affirmed. Solidarity “also means fighting against structural causes of poverty and injustice: of lack of work, land and housing” and denial of rights. This demands working “with the poor not for the poor” - re-iterating the theme of the poor as subjects of their own history which is so distinctive in liberation theology. Pope Leo charts in detail how the Church’s option for the poor runs throughout history. He discusses the role of education in the eradication of poverty, the extraordinary contribution of women serving the poor, work with immigrants and in prisons, their spiritual needs, the importance of listening to the poor not neglecting or devaluing popular piety, and continuing almsgiving. Sharp phrases such as “the absolute autonomy of the market-place”, ”the dictatorship of an economy that kills”, “the empire of money”, cultures “that discard others” make the message politically clear. Leo repeats the Church’s call for all Christians to take “a decisive and radical choice in favour of the weakest”. But who is going to hear this call, reflect on its political implications, and act on it? How many parishes will find it even mentioned in their weekly newsletter or bulletin? How many sermons will share the message of Dilexi Te with congregations. And how many bishops will write a special letter to all parishes about it? How many mass-goers will even know the Bishops’ Conference has a website and provides a summary? It’s an odd approach by bishops to the teaching authority of the Petrine Office. Meanwhile the little and large platoons working for social justice will be getting on with it, feeling a lot less peripheral to the mainstream than in the past. Hope and joy are wonderful gifts. The hostage crisis ends, the endless bombing and killing in Gaza stop. You would not think that Gaza had seen two previous ceasefires with exchanges of prisoners and captives and a brief flow of humanitarian aid.
Palestinians have bitter grief and unimaginable suffering to digest: both genocide and a new form of Middle East apartheid. The road to their future has been obliterated. There is no going back to their past, or, for most, their homes. Jews globally face a sharp rise in antisemitism, and in Israel the loss of 1,200 fellow citizens at Hamas’ hands and, longer term, reduction of US support. Forty years ago, at the height of mobilization against apartheid and repression in South Africa, theologians saw contemporary events as a Kairos, a critical moment, one of great opportunity and great danger. For Palestine now, the opportunity is to build on the weakness of Hamas and Trump’s – fickle – pressure on Israel. The danger is accountability for genocide will be brushed under the negotiating table, the price for the peace-plan getting beyond phase one, a blow seriously undermining international law, possibly beyond repair. In international law genocide has a precise definition. If genocide charges are legally proved then perpetrators can be, and are, charged. The former President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, for example, was prosecuted for genocide and war crimes but died in prison. There are consequences even without convictions. South Africa’s 2024 complaint to the International Court of Justice, ICJ, resulted in International Criminal Court, ICC, arrest warrants for Hamas and three Israeli leaders. Netanyahu avoided the airspace of several European countries he should have flown over enroute to the UN General Assembly. The UN Independent International Commission of Enquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 16 September 2025, provides a lengthy, detailed and evidence-backed analysis of the conduct of the Israeli government and its armed forces. Both proofs of actions and intention are needed to establish guilt of genocide So, the Commission’s judgement is based both on detailed analysis of actus reus, actions by the IDF, mass killing, withholding the means of life from the Palestinian population in whole or in part, and inflicting serious physical and mental harm, and mens rea, evidence of the Government intention to commit genocide. The Enquiry’s conclusion was: “the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”. It was put in the following context. “The events in Gaza since 7 October 2023 have not occurred in isolation... They were preceded by decades of unlawful occupation and repression under an ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and its replacement”. The Vatican responds to human rights violations and conflicts wherever they occur. So what has the Catholic Church said about Gaza - where a tiny Christian population still cling on, made famous by Pope Francis’ daily phone calls to Holy Family Church? On 29 September 2025, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, speaking at the opening of the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly, gave an informed global tour d’horizon including Ukraine, the Rohingya, Darfur, the Rwanda-DRC border area, Haiti, and South Sudan, plus a clear statement of the ethical norms governing the behaviour of soldiers in battle. He did not use the terms genocide or war crimes. But on Sunday, 17 November 2024, Vatican News and the Italian daily La Stampa had quoted Pope Francis in an interview as having said that some international experts had declared that “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide", and asking for this to be assessed. Papal statements name no names and are traditionally generalised. In a message to participants in the annual Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) conference on 30 June this year, Pope Leo wrote how he was “currently witnessing with despair the iniquitous use of hunger as a weapon of war”. Archbishop Gallagher in his speech to the UN General Assembly said “military personnel remain fully responsible for any violation of the rights of individuals and peoples, or of the norms of international humanitarian law. Such actions cannot be justified by obedience to orders from superiors”. The IDF seemed likely to be the un-named military personnel they had in mind. Caritas Internationalis is the Church's highly experienced official humanitarian body with a presence all round the world. It is rarely in the headlines. On 25 August 2025 Vatican News the official - on-line - portal of the Holy See carried an article entitled Caritas Internationalis: Famine in Gaza Violates Genocide Convention, an excoriating denunciation of the deliberate starvation of the Gazan population. Yet aside from Independent Catholic News, the Caritas statement has hardly been reported. At the level of Bishops Conferences there is also reticence to attribute responsibility and talk of crimes against humanity and genocide. Engagement with public issues deemed political is tentative except for immigration (though American bishops have needed pushing by both Francis and Leo who recently sent them a letter asking them to speak out). In the case of Gaza, there is also the Church’s history of antisemitism demanding sensitivity in dealing with extremist Zionism. The Church’s sees its role in conflicts as advocating reconciliation, attempting mediation, thus taking up a position between the contending parties, not taking sides. And language has to be appropriate to the task. But the experience of the South African Dominican theologian, Albert Nolan OP in the exceptional situation of apartheid, challenged this approach. “There is no neutral place between the tortured and the torturer”, he would say. The dilemma of Church leaders in such circumstances grows when there is reluctance to admit there are enemies. Or there is no clear idea of who or what is the enemy. Yet the language of the Magnificat, which we prayed at evening prayer at the Dominican priory in Johannesburg, is uncompromising and clearly takes sides. “He pulls down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly”. Reconciliation is hard and complex. Easier to talk about in principle than practice. Reconciliation between, say, family members is different from reconciliation between nations and groups defined by different cultures, histories and characteristics. The other caveat, directly relevant and more often noted, is that a call for reconciliation can seem coercive unless concern for justice is integral to it, as traditionally advocated by the Church. As well as preaching the Gospel and promoting ethical norms, the bishops reach out to share feelings, are “deeply shocked”, or “saddened”, with “hearts that go out to the victims”. But, any analysis of root causes, who is responsible and must be made accountable, is rarely shared. Israel and its outsize American-funded military force has the power and wields it. A commitment to, and implementation of, a Christian understanding of power should not be curtailed by inveterate caution. Unfortunately, in today’s world “speaking truth to power” can damage the economy. But not so for the Church. Truth, justice, and peace, we owe this to the Palestinian people. Peaceful protest at the Gaza genocide and at the version of apartheid practised by the Israeli State has to continue. |
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