The following statements were written by the Indigenous Solidarity, Palestine solidarity, immigration, gun violence prevention, and the nuclear disarmament working groups as reflections of where we are in 2026. We recognize that all these issues are interconnected and intersectional in their analysis, although they are presented separately in this document.
Indigenous Solidarity
As the United States marks 250 years of nationhood, the Indigenous Solidarity Working Group of Pax Christi USA pauses …. not in celebration, but in truth-telling.
For many Indigenous peoples, July 4, 1776 was not a beginning of freedom. It was another chapter in a long story of dispossession, forced removal, cultural erasure and survival. The land on which this nation was built — Turtle Island — was never ceded. The people who stewarded it for millennia were not consulted, not honored, not protected.
Two hundred and fifty years later, that reckoning is still unfinished.
We acknowledge that the Catholic Church, including institutions we call our own, participated in colonial violence – through residential schools, forced assimilation, and the doctrine of discovery. Indigenous communities continue to carry this trauma while also demonstrating extraordinary resilience and spiritual strength.
As people of faith committed to Gospel nonviolence, we cannot mark this anniversary in silence. We call on the Church and the nation to move beyond token apologies toward genuine restitution: the return of land, the restoration of sovereignty, the protection of sacred sites, and the honoring of treaty rights.
We lift up the leadership, wisdom, and ongoing resistance of Indigenous communities across Turtle Island. Their voices are prophetic. Their survival is sacred.
On this anniversary, Pax Christi USA’s Indigenous Solidarity Working Group invites all people of faith to listen, to learn and to act, not for independence, but for interdependence, justice and right relationship with one another and with the earth.
Immigration
Across the world, migrants and refugees flee war, poverty, and environmental devastation due to climate change and resource extraction to seek safe homes for their families. We recognize the role the US government and US-based corporations have played and continue to play in creating the conditions that millions are forced to escape. Racist fear mongering, victim blaming, and cruel, restrictive immigration policies have stained our nation’s soul from its beginning.
Today, however, we are seeing a new level of assault on the human dignity of migrants nationwide. The current administration tells its supporters that migration – not systemic injustice – is the cause of their discontent, and massive deportation is the solution.
The current national budget allots billions to ICE and Border Patrol and to privately run concentration camps for the apprehension and indefinite detention of our neighbors. We see escalating refoulement of deported persons to third countries and other violations of international law, wholesale violations of US law and due process, separation of families, inhumane and even lethal mistreatment of prisoners, the occupation of our cities, rapid and intentionally confusing shifts in law and policy, and a pervasive climate of fear among our migrant sisters and brothers.
The US Catholic Conference of Bishops 2025 Special Pastoral Message on Immigration clearly opposes indiscriminate mass deportation and prays for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence. In his 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV cites his predecessor in asking us “to see migrants not simply as a problem to be managed, but as a living image of the People of God on the move.” And Christ describes the criteria for the final judgment in Matthew 25:35: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me … .”
In the words of Pope Leo, “a litmus test for social justice today is the treatment of migrants . … The way a society treats them reveals whether its sense of justice is driven by fear or by the spirit of fraternity.” As a community of conscience, we stand together to fully support the right to migrate and seek refuge, citizenship, and justice; the right not to migrate and to live in safe conditions in our communities of origin; and the right of immigrants to live in peace and continue to contribute to their communities.
Militarism and nuclear disarmament
In 1976, the Cold War had driven the US and the USSR to stockpile about 45,000 nuclear weapons. Ten years later, when that number had climbed to over 70,000 weapons, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Iceland and reduced those arsenals to about 10,000 weapons. A framework of arms limitation treaties and verification measures ensured the nuclear warheads would be destroyed with hope for additional reductions in the future.
Those agreements are now gone, from nuclear-powered states’ indifference to long standing treaties like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to the newest effort to reduce nuclear weapons, the 2017 Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Not a single nuclear armed state has even acknowledged that the latter treaty entered into force over five years ago.
In 2026, the United States has begun an expensive nuclear modernization program which will cost trillions of dollars over the next decade. At the same time, the government is militarizing outer space, in contravention of other treaties, and militarizing policing its borders through massive funding of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies.
Fortunately, grassroots movements are countering these developments. Resistance to ICE is often in the mainstream news and in social media feeds; the resistance to nuclear modernization is not, but, across the United States, groups of people are pressing local governments and financial institutions to disinvest from corporations that make nuclear weapons or their components. They are also lobbying Congress to pass laws requiring limits on the power of the president to launch a nuclear strike and making the US government declare a “no first strike” policy with regard to nuclear weapons.
US bishops have joined with Japanese bishops to create a Partnership for a Nuclear-Free World, and many faith and civil society groups have formed coalitions like Back from the Brink to lobby Congress and the White House to change the policies of the Cold War and reduce the spending on nuclear weapons. Building on the teachings of their predecessor St. John XXIII, our two most recent popes have noted that mere possession of nuclear weapons is a grave sin; Pope Leo XIV constantly reminds us of the urgency of disarmament.
Palestine
Pax Christi USA stands in determined solidarity with the Palestinian people as they demand their inalienable right to self-determination. As US Americans, we understand our unique responsibility to oppose the unrestrained financial, military, and political support the United States provides to the State of Israel. We support all nonviolent strategies, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, to end Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, expulsion and erasure of Palestinian communities, and denial of Palestinians’ basic human rights to medical care, clean water, electricity, mobility, and the right of return to their ancestral homelands. As a Catholic Christian movement, we reject Christian Zionism and any conflation of solidarity with the Palestinian people with antisemitism. We believe that a just peace which recognizes the inherent dignity of every human being must be secured through a political and diplomatic process and adherence to all UN resolutions, Geneva Convention, Rome Statute and tenets of international and humanitarian law.
Gun violence prevention
The United States has a 250-year history that includes much of which we can be proud. One of the most important philosophies developed by our founders is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, stating that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are inalienable rights. This ideal was an original concept and is foundational to our way of life in this country. In contrast, the “right to bear arms” that appears in the second amendment has been interpreted in various ways, often being used to support the idea of unlimited gun rights in today’s society. To better understand the intentions of the authors and so determine how this right is best implemented, it is important to study the circumstances under which this amendment was written.
The Pax Christi USA Gun Violence Prevention Working Group wants to underscore the racialized origins of the protection of guns in our country’s founding. At the Constitutional Convention in 1791 in which the second amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, the Southern states were fearful of slave uprisings and worried that the new federal government might interfere with their militias, which they depended upon to put down the uprisings. To prevent the South from walking away from the convention, James Madison created the second amendment as a concession to assuage their concerns. It assured that states would retain their control over local militias, which were frequently mobilized to crush slave revolts.
Historically, the rights of people as described in the Declaration of Independence did not apply to Black Americans. This was made evident in the colonial-era slave codes, where strict laws were passed prohibiting both enslaved and free Black people from owning or even carrying guns, as well as in the time of Jim Crow. An argument can be made that this legacy remains today. Statistics show that whenever Black Americans exercise their right to bear arms in self-defense, they are treated as a deadly threat rather than protected citizens.
The Gun Violence Prevention Working Group believes that every human life is sacred and so works to pass laws that protect all individuals in our society. We are aware of the racialized origins of the protection of guns in our country and the racial differences in who is more likely to suffer the effects of gun violence today. We work by educating ourselves and others as well as communicating with legislators, urging them to enact reasonable gun safety laws. We ask, “whom do gun rights protect” and “whom do they harm?” While not perfect in its inception, the founders of the United States intended its inhabitants to experience life and liberty as foundational rights. This 250th anniversary of our country is a pivotal moment in our history. It is a time when we should be vigilant to ensure that these rights take precedence over other laws that contribute to a less safe and stable society.