Jordan Paul

Love for widows and orphans, prisoners, and the sick and needy of every kind, is as essential to her as the ministry of the sacraments and preaching of the Gospel. The Church cannot neglect the service of charity any more than she can neglect the Sacraments and the Word.
—Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love)

Dear Friends,

On February 7, 2024, the Texas Attorney General demanded that Annunciation House—a Roman Catholic nonprofit serving migrants in El Paso—turn over documents about those it serves. Annunciation House refused, sued the state, and was sued in return. A hearing in the case is scheduled in March.

In mid-2023, the first trial in a criminal case against a member of Food Not Bombs—an organization that feeds the homeless in Houston—ended in a not-guilty verdict when the jury refused to convict despite the group violating city law, an act known as jury nullification. In subsequent trials, the city was unable to find enough jurors who had not already made up their mind about the cases and eventually dismissed them. On February 14, 2024, a federal judge ordered the city to stop issuing tickets.

In 2019 and 2020, through a combination of jury nullification, bad government lawyering, and religious freedom defenses, Scott Warren and other members of No Más Muertes/No More Deaths—a ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson—avoided federal criminal convictions for leaving food and water for migrants in the Sonoran Desert.

In today’s reading from St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, recounting an earlier prison epistle, he writes: “but though we had already suffered and been shamefully maltreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition. For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.”

St Paul knew that his proclamation of the Gospel and of the Kingdom of God would not necessarily be popular. And rightfully so, because a society that needs such proclamations will undoubtedly be shaken by them. In the face of hostile governments, a call to place ourselves at the center of all we do, and a general retreat from thinking of the common good, I pray that the whole Church, like St Paul, contributes to that shaking.

In Christ,

—Jordan