“Are you okay?” These were the last known words of Alex Jeffrey Pretti. In the moments before his death, he was holding up his phone to record the actions of ICE and CBP agents. When a woman backing away from those agents was shoved to the ground by one of them, Pretti yelled, “Don’t touch her!” And then—as he and the woman were both pepper-sprayed—he turned to her and asked, “Are you okay?” After this, several masked men tackled Pretti to the ground and struck him repeatedly in the face. Finally, they shot him ten times in the back.
Alex Pretti was a martyr. I am not using this term merely rhetorically. Martyrdom is one of the most essential categories of Christian life. It first means to witness or testify to our faith. We primarily do this by our words and deeds, by teaching and evangelization. Its second and better-known meaning is to lay down one’s life. Very few live out this form of martyrdom. But some do. Pretti did.
One might object that a true martyr is killed for witnessing to his or her Christian faith. And this is no doubt true of most of the Church’s official martyrs. Yet not all. St. Maximilian Kolbe was not killed for professing his faith but because he chose to take the place of another prisoner in Auschwitz. In 1971, when Pope Paul VI preached at the beatification of Kolbe, he spoke of him as “a martyr of love.” Pope John Paul II affirmed this by declaring the new category of “martyrs for charity.” Both popes taught that such martyrs remind us of the central Christian truth that we are all called to lay down our lives for others. That is what Pretti did.
Consider what we know about the man himself. Baptized into the faith as an infant, he attended Catholic grammar school and was formed by his experience in a Catholic Scouting troop where he earned a Light of Christ medal. Pretti worked in an intensive-care unit, caring for people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries. Fr. Harry Tasto, who worked with Pretti as a hospital chaplain, preached that Pretti was known “for his kindness and gentleness.” These are, notably, fruits of the Holy Spirit. In a powerful video clip recorded at the VA Hospital where Pretti worked, we see him speaking after the death of a veteran. He says that to keep our freedom we “have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.” Spending his life in service of those in the ICU, he recognized that those in the Armed Services have given their lives for freedom. He was doing much the same in the frozen streets of Minneapolis—working for freedom, nurturing it, protecting it, and sacrificing for it.
On the day of his death, Pretti witnessed by filming. He was participating in a citywide (and nationwide) effort to document the injustice, the madness and brutality, of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. He knew he could be tackled, tear-gassed, or detained for days. He also knew, after the murder of Renee Good, that he could be killed. He had no doubt seen the clips of CBP and ICE agents asking protesters and observers if they had not learned their lesson from Good’s death. Pretti had refused that lesson. Undaunted by the threats, he held up his phone camera to record what this fascist administration has been doing in his city. And so did the people who recorded his killing, risking their own lives so that we could know the truth about Pretti’s death despite the lies of Trump-administration officials.
Pretti’s charity was expressed in his willingness to intervene for an unknown woman who was thrown to the ground by a thug working for the federal government. Many conservatives lament the decline of chivalry and the loss of what they call the “masculine virtues.” Well, stepping in between an innocent woman and a gang of violent men must count as chivalry if anything does. Shouting “Don’t touch her!,” Pretti stood between the brutal power of ICE and the vulnerability of a stranger.
But it’s Pretti’s last words that stick with me: “Are you okay?” I think of my own children. I want them to be the kind of people who will say, “Are you okay?” if they see someone on the ground. I think of my students at Villanova, many of them studying to be nurses, and want them to be ready to ask, “Are you okay?” Alex Pretti’s last words might have been the Good Samaritan’s first words when he chanced upon the victim of thieves on the road to Jericho. It would have been so easy for Pretti just to back away, to let the masked men tackle her instead of him, to avoid the sting of pepper spray, the pain of being hit in the face, and the moment of death. Pretti could have told himself that this woman he’d never met before was not his problem. Instead, like the Good Samaritan, he went out of his way for a stranger. He paid the ultimate price for that decision.
Alex Pretti no doubt had his flaws—as we all do, even martyrs—and we will likely hear about them in the days and weeks to come. But heroic virtue does not require perfection. And as theologian Dawn Goldstein puts it, Pretti “died the way every Catholic...the way every person of good will should hope to die, helping his neighbor.”
No death is good, for death is a wage of sin. Pretti should be checking in for another shift at the hospital, or walking his dog, or mountain-biking. He should not have died, but his death is still a witness. Martyrs shed light on both good and evil. And Pretti has shed light on this vile regime. Watching it do to him what it did to Renee Good, what it has done to people on boats in the Caribbean, what it is doing to migrants all across this country, we have all seen for ourselves what Trump and his enforcers are and have always been: liars, defamers, purveyors of death, destroyers of all that is finest about this country, and in many cases blasphemers, spouting pious nonsense and sporting gold crosses as they betray the faith. It is a mortal sin to call Pretti and Good domestic terrorists, to say they were out to kill, and to call the CPB agents who beat and murdered Pretti “the real victims.” Pretti’s death drew out their vile lies and showed us what we all should already have known: Trump and his cronies are fascists.
But even more important than shedding light on evil, Pretti’s witness shows us what love looks like. Love helps those who have been cast down and lifts up the lowly. Love is willing to sacrifice, willing to protect, willing to care. Love takes risks, including the ultimate risk of death. It asks, “Are you okay?” instead of just moving on. Pretti did all those things in the time it takes to read this paragraph. By his spontaneous example, Pretti called all Americans, but especially American Christians, to account. Martyrs always do that. They force us to ask ourselves if we are really living out our convictions. Too many American Catholics are too comfortable following Trump and disregarding the Church, too keen to explain away the Church’s teaching on immigrants, or too willing, like J. D. Vance, to endorse Stephen Miller’s description of Pretti as a would-be assassin. Whether we are just lukewarm and playing it safe or following Trump into the abyss, Pretti calls us to account.
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