When Walter Ciszek was a young Jesuit, he got his wish to go to Russia to minister to the spiritually starved people there suffering under an atheist communist regime. But when he was imprisoned on false charges of being a Vatican spy in 1941, he got a rude awakening. Some people desperately wanted to receive the sacraments and were glad he was there, but a lot more hated him on sight, just because he was a priest. Decades of propaganda had taught them that priests were parasites, oppressors and perverts.
It was, of course, the government that had taught the Russian people to think this way. That is how oppressive governments often work: They don’t just openly present themselves as the enemy whose goal it is to make the masses miserable. What they do is much more effective and harder to undo: They make the masses complicit. They get people to spy on each other; they get people to mistrust each other. They tell disgusting lies about large groups of people, and they get them to wish evil upon each other.
You probably think I am talking about the Trump administration. Well, I am, because they have managed to get a lot of American citizens to become complicit in our own country’s degradation. People in my generation grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which ends “with liberty and justice for all,” but now half the people I went to school with gleefully wave the flag over developments like beating and arresting peaceful protestors, threatening the free press and forcing the church underground. The Bill of Rights? What’s that?
This degradation has also affected American Christianity. One of my kids recently told me that when she sees someone wearing a cross, her first thought is “Oh, no,” because in 2025 America, the bigger the fuss you make about being a Christian in public (especially on TV or online), the more likely you are to be cruel. This is the experience she had going to Catholic school: Many of the kids who came from those wholesome, upstanding families that were the backbone of the community were often the same ones who doodled swastikas, mocked people with foreign accents and yapped about women being servants and incubators. Some of the teachers pushed back, but some of them didn’t. The Beatitudes? What’s that?
Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.
Image: Detail of photo by Heute (Creative Commons)
I wasn’t able to read the rest of the article, because it was behind a paywall. But thank you for addressing this topic. It’s horrifying how much credibility MAGA has taken from Christianity and the pro-life movement. I agree that your kids are better off seeing this type of behavior at their public school as opposed to seeing it displayed hypocritically in Catholic school.