By Johnny Zokovitch
A friend of mine who was a priest serving in Latin America once told me that persecution is the true hallmark of the authentic Church. He knew firsthand what this looked like. His own congregation had been threatened by government-aligned militias because of their work with and among impoverished peasants, and he was kidnapped, interrogated, and ultimately deported from the country where he was stationed because of his “subversive” activities.
I’ve thought a lot lately about his assertion that authentic witness to Jesus is revealed when the powerful take aim at you.
In these two weeks in the wake of Easter, the Catholic Church has been squarely in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. President Trump has repeatedly attacked Pope Leo with absurd critiques, accusing the pope of being “WEAK on crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” that the pope has “no idea what is going on” in Iran, and that he should “stop catering to the Radical Left.”
Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, has waded into those waters too, telling the Holy Father to “stick to matters of morality” and chastising him to be “careful when he talks on matters of theology.”
We also found out this week that, at a January meeting between the Pentagon and Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Holy See’s apostolic nuncio to the US, a Department of Defense official intimated that the Trump administration has the power to do whatever it wants and expects the Vatican to fall in line with its support. The same official then made allusions to the Avignon Papacy, a veiled threat recalling when the French crown arranged the demise of a pope who challenged their authority, then installed popes who would fall in step with the wishes of the king and the royal court. The meeting was reportedly called by the Trump administration in response to Pope Leo’s January 9 “State of the World” speech to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps where he warned that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
One might explain away such verbal jabs as political posturing if they weren’t emblematic of a wholesale strategy aimed at persecuting the Church in its most vulnerable members, “these least brothers and sisters” with whom Jesus most stridently identifies (Matthew 25).
While the verbal attacks are garnering the most attention right now, the deepest persecution of the Church has been happening at the grassroots level. The defunding of USAID decimated programs that were carrying out the social mission of the church all across the globe, including the work of Catholic Relief Services. Church-sponsored projects that were receiving significant government funding in Africa, Asia and Latin America aimed at alleviating poverty, making crops drought resistant, mitigating famine, securing clean drinking water, preventing disease, and providing healthcare were decimated, resulting in the projected deaths of millions of people.
Immigrant communities throughout the US have been terrorized by the scourge of ICE enforcement, detention and deportation, ripping families apart – including a majority of families identifying as Catholic – who worship at Catholic churches and have children who attend Catholic schools. Priests, women religious, teachers and lay ministers who work alongside them and minister to them in parishes and schools have suffered harassment and arrests for the practice of their faith.
Despite the personal attacks by Trump, Vance and others aligned with the power of the current US administration, Pope Leo seems resolute in his prophetic vocation.
“I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the states to look for just solutions to problems,” he told Reuters on April 13. “Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent people are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way.”
If persecution by the powerful is indeed the hallmark of the authentic Church, the Church today – at every level – seems to be preaching and practicing its deepest truths. And inviting the persecution that comes with it.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.
The above essay by Johnny Zokovitch is profoundly important, especially now, in that it delineates the often overlooked difference between Holy Mother Church and her frustratingly imperfect children beginning with me and including her many eminences who are called to a much higher commitment to Truth and know a lot more than I regarding morality. Humanly speaking I can understand, even though it fills me with rage, why so many of our ecclesiastical leaders, Catholic, Episcopalian, Protestant, Latter Day Saints, and Jewish dread political confrontation. It’s disagreeable and could even be costly in a financial sense if Big Brother decides to hurt. Nevertheless, Pope Leo, guided by the Holy Spirit, keeps the presence of Holy Mother present in our lives, a presence that will never acquiesce before the most obscene and satanic of all evils, war, including the sickeningly called “just war,” now invoked by far too many Catholics and, especially, Evangelicals.
David-Ross Gerling, PhD