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Throughout
his nearly two-hour address, Trump highlighted victims of crimes
committed by immigrants. But there are parts of the stories he does not
bother to tell.
U.S.
President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address at the
Capitol in Washington Feb. 24, 2026. (OSV News photo/Kenny Holston pool
via Reuters)
By his own standards and those of his political base, President
Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union address this past Tuesday can be
counted as a triumph. He stayed mostly on message, focusing primarily on
the economy and immigration, and rather than losing his cool and
getting angry at Democrats, he deployed a set piece in which he
challenged them to stand up if they agreed with the statement, “The
first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens.
Not illegal aliens.”
John
Carr is the founder of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and
Public Life at Georgetown University. He served as director of the
Department of Justice, Peace, and Human Development at the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops, secretary for the Office of Social
Concerns for the Archdiocese of Washington, executive director of the
White House Conference on Families under President Jimmy Carter, and
director of the National Committee for Full Employment under Coretta
Scott King.
After fifty years working for peace and justice, Carr retired in
December 2025. At a retirement event hosted by the Initiative, president
and CEO of Catholic Charities USA Kerry A. Robinson called Carr “our
collective conscience,” while New York Times columnist David
Brooks said he was part of the “best argument for Christianity.”
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, praised him as “a man of
faith,” even when facing failure. Carr spoke with Commonweal senior writer Heidi Schlumpf on the occasion of his retirement. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Heidi Schlumpf: Minnesota is your home state. What
are your thoughts about the Trump administration’s immigration
enforcement there—and the response from Minnesotans?
John Carr:I grew up in south
Minneapolis, not far from the recent killings [of Renee Good and Alex
Pretti], less than a mile from where George Floyd was killed and near
where Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota Speaker of the House, was killed.
Annunciation [the site of a mass shooting last year] was the next parish
over from ours. It was a neighborhood where everybody cared about each
other. I’m really happy to see that part of “Minnesota nice” come back,
where people stand in solidarity and take care of each other. That’s
what I learned at an early age. I didn’t know what solidarity was, but
it was in the air I breathed.
Father
Bryan Massingale, a theology professor at Fordham University in New
York City, is seen here in a 2017 panel discussion in New York. Credit: CNS photo/Bruce Gilbert, Fordham University
I have always admired Father Bryan Massingale, a Catholic theologian
at Fordham University. A few years ago, at the Ignatian Family Teach-In
for Justice, he delivered one of the best lectures I’ve ever heard,
on any topic. His focus was on racism in the Catholic Church. Bryan has
the ability to focus attention on problematic areas in the church in a
way that is both challenging and undeniable. He is an enormous asset in
our church.
Another reason I admire him is that he is a Black
Catholic priest in a country where there are proportionately fewer Black
men in the priesthood. Even rarer, Bryan is also an openly gay man.
Now, before we go any further, this means that he is a celibate gay man
who is a Catholic priest. (There is always the tendency in some more
critical circles to assume that talking about a “gay priest” means
someone talking about someone who is sexually active. That is not the
case.) So, he is something of, as he says, a “unicorn.” Or what we might
have called in earlier times a rara avis. But
as Bryan said in our moving conversation on “The Spiritual Life,” he
sees those parts of himself as integrated into a single whole. And, in a
sense, aren’t we all “unicorns” in that way, all of us with our own
unique constellation of family background, sexuality, emotional makeup,
as well as our gifts and blessings, challenges and struggles? Each of us
is unique. Nonetheless, Bryan is a rare priest these days.
This
rarity has helped Bryan to advocate for those who are marginalized,
excluded or ignored in both the church and the broader society. In terms
of racism, he tells the shocking story of being rejected in his own
church as he was about to celebrate Mass. One parishioner wanted to know
why he wasn’t an “ordinary” priest—that is, white. Bryan points out, as
he did in the talk that I heard, that whiteness in the church in the
United States is normative, with other races, cultures and ethnic
makeups seen as extrinsic to the church’s identity.
His
experiences shocked me (even though I’ve known him for some time). But
as he noted calmly, they shouldn’t surprise us: There is still a great
deal of racism in the Catholic Church.
Ralph McCloud, for example, served for 16 years as the director of
the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the anti-poverty program of
the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Once, Mr. McCloud visited an
unfamiliar town as part of a business trip. On Sunday, staying in a
hotel, he looked up a list of local churches to see where he might
attend Mass. Upon entering a church filled with white Catholics, a
priest approached him at the door and said: “Excuse me. You do know that
this is a Catholic church, right?”
“Yes,” said Ralph. “I do know that this is a Catholic church. Do you?”
I’m
grateful to my friend Bryan Massingale for living with integrity, for
being willing to be a “unicorn” and for turning our eyes to those in the
church who are on the margins, including our Black and L.G.B.T.Q.
brothers and sisters. We need him, and I was grateful to speak to him
this week.
President
Donald Trump holds up an executive order he signed during a White House
ceremony May 3, 2018 to establish a faith-based office, the White House
Faith and Opportunity Initiative (CNS photo/Leah Millis, Reuters).
Recent data
from the Pew Research Center reveals that Donald Trump is losing a
small amount of support among white Evangelicals. Anecdotally, I do know
plenty of Evangelicals disgusted with the president’s handling of
foreign affairs, his immigration policy, and his general
authoritarianism. But the voices of these Trump skeptics are often
drowned out by fellow Evangelicals who traffic in a MAGA-informed
politics of outrage and grievance. These are the Evangelicals that
Public Religion Research Institute describes as “adherents” to Christian
nationalism. They make up about 11 percent of the U.S. population, and many of them have large platforms and committed social-media followings.
