Commentary
The right to protest in a spirit of good-will is aligned with the freedom of conscience and is also perfectly disposed to employing a vocal intercessory prayer strategy for positive change in the public sphere. Even St Thomas Aquinas acknowledged the legitimacy of good-willed public opposition to a social, moral or political evil that posed a threat to both the wellbeing of society on a personal as well as collective level, and to the integrity of social cohesion. Therefore, I think it’s wrong of Robert Barron to call out all protest as ‘counterproductive’.
To some degree, people using mass public gatherings to voice their opposition to a social injustice that violates the dignity of life (regardless of wherever the violation stems from) is a legitimate response to such outrage, provided it is done well and peacefully at that. The March for Life is another sound example of public opposition to abortion in the form of mass gatherings that speak vocally in the public sphere to get national and international attention spotlighted on this issue. So, the recent issue about how immigration officials acted in total contravention of respecting the dignity of one person’s life by shooting them down without any solid grounds as to why such an extreme measure should be taken is good enough reason to protest, for that woman’s life ought to be seen as just as important as that of any Mexican or Guantemalan national for instance, who wants to migrate to the U.S. Frankly, it was grossly unnecessary for those armed security officials to use lethal force relative to Reneè Good. Formal arrest as per usual if she was indeed breaking the law ought to have been as far as they should have gone. Capturing a photo of her vehicle’s numberplate as she attempted to drive away in case she was unable to be apprehended for questioning or firing a shot at one of the tires as her car was moving at a slow enough speed for the shot not to induce a serious car crash would have been sufficient. Actually, from what I read, she was not armed and dangerous, so how come she was shot? She was, according to the report from Catholic News Agency (CNA), merely sitting in her car surrounded by ICE agents! (See link below) It’s okay for bishops to call for a “lowering of the temperature of rhetoric” but it’s more important they call out the extremist actions of those ICE agents and call it what it, i.e. those actions, really are: murder. If these bishops don’t do that, their inaction is a cowardly case of being complicit, as though they are in silent agreement with the appallingly reckless actions of those officers who shot that woman. Ironically, only a coupĺe of weeks back they were rather vociferous about the security measures taken by ICE to refuse a cohort of pastoral staff into one of the immigration holding bays to say Mass with some of the pretty nefarious looking inmates but now tĥat a poor lone woman has been fatally shot, not one of these prelates gives (to use the words of Fr Stu just before he became “Fr Stu”), ‘a flying f**k!’
She was not reported as having been armed and dangerous, nor was she firing shots at anyone! This is completely ridiculous and a downright abysmal instance of wrong judgement on the part of these ICE officers. A completely avoidable death of an innocent woman who was not armed or dangerous – she may have been doing an act of civil disobedience but that in this day and age, you would think is no right cause to shoot her as you would a Mafiosa boss trying to escape arrest. Anyhow, arresting her if she was doing something actually criminal, and not just for protesting, ought to be the go-to strategy but not treating her as though she was in the middle of carrying out a shooting spree when clearly, she wasn’t – she was, in her own way, protesting, not in a violent manner though but just a cumbersome act of civil disobedience. So why didn’t the officers simply try to talk with her before any disciplinary action, i.e. arrest, was carried out? This is a totally extreme and unwarranted case of law-enforcement abuse! By contrast to the shooting of that itinerant preacher Charlie Kirk some months prior, the Catholic Church alongside the Protestant churches have largely remained silent on this issue, and this signifies a shameful lack of consistency when it comes to following the Gospel’s imperative call to “love our neighbour”. This mandatory call to love others can be best done by supporting those who are largely unknown in the public sphere and are therefore all-too-often, quickly and tragically forgotten in the minds of even those spiritual leaders and educators, who say in all manner of other instances, that they are “for social justice”, that they are “for hearing the cry of the poor” and as for responding to these cries, the question my conscience puts to you now is “Are you really there?”
I have to say that Donald Trump is sure getting way out of his legitimate decision-making boundaries as president. Considering too, he has an ego almost the size of Hell – I quickly discerned that one after hearing him say, courtesy of Channel 9 News¹ that out of all the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize that both this century and the last have seen, he considers himself the most, if not the only worthy recipient. He was reported on that nightly news segment from Friday 16th January, to have voiced his opinion on his own supposed suitability to receive the prize to something of the effect of: “I can’t think of anyone in history or currently who is more deserving of it than I am!” Therefore, you can forget Mother Teresa, Mikhail Gorbachev and Mahatma Gandhi then, amongst a whole host of other laudible persons who did amazingly wonderful, timely and necessary things in the humble service of humanity and the rest of creation. In such statements as that burnished by Trump, the makings and markers of a dictator are clearly seen, not to mention echoes of another small-a anti-Christ (well, we already see these in Netanyahu and Putin anyway). And Trump’s own idea of “a New World Order” sure beats the likes of George W Bush and Ronald Reagan, who were at their time, hugely vocal for some quite controversial domestic and international policies. But they pale in comparison to Trump as his agenda smacks of a clout harbouring and boasting a never-before-heard-of extremist overload insofar as U.S. politics is concerned, even when compared to those two predecessors of his. Arresting another president from another country’s one thing – first I’d ever heard of it happening – never knew it was legal! Why so many other dictators from other places and times had never been arrested by other, more good-willed prime ministers or presidents in times gone by? Also, Donald Trump’s desire to annex Greenland is both greedy and appalling². And as for his using of military air strikes on Venezuela when the latter is not trying to attack any other country….well, this is also completely ludicrous as these kinds of extremist plans and tactics have never been employed by any other U.S. president. Time for a change to who’s in charge of the White House once again!!
Other References
¹ Channel 9 News, 6pm Edition, Friday 16th January, 2026
² See the following article: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2026-01/parish-priest-nuuk-greenland-our-home-is-not-for-sale.html
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