The U.S. government is at war with the Catholic Church

The U.S. government is at war with the Catholic Church

by Nathan Schneider March 19, 2026

Giving Caesar what is Caesar’s: President Donald Trump receives the FIFA Peace Prize at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Dec. 5, 2025. Credit: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File

Most Catholics don’t seem to have allowed themselves to recognize the gravity of the conflict underway in the United States. One can go to church, see an American flag alongside the altar, pray for the country and its leaders, share Communion with fellow believers, and go home under the impression that the flag and cross are more or less in harmony. But they are not. Seen through the eyes of recent church teaching, and most of all alongside the ministry of Jesus, the United States of America is a hostile power—a country so shrouded in the clothes of its own idols that it is incapable of hearing the prophets that the church has raised, from the Holy Father to a child in a detention center.

 

Short Take

How the cover-up of Cesar Chavez’s abuse mirrored the clergy sex abuse crisis

by J.D. Long García March 19, 2026

United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta looks at a mural of Cesar Chavez during a dedication of the Cesar Chavez Monument on the San Jose State University campus in San Jose, Calif., on Sept. 4, 2008. Credit: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File

As a child in Arizona, I grew up hearing Cesar Chavez’s name. Schools, streets, plazas and parks are named after him in this state, and we learned about his movement in school. Chavez was born in Yuma, Ariz., and died not far from it in San Luis.  

Years later, I visited the old United Farm Workers headquarters while reporting on the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns. In some ways, it felt like I was visiting a pilgrimage site. Chavez was Catholic, and beginning in the 1960s, Catholic leaders walked shoulder to shoulder with him in advocating for workers’ rights. In 1988 he fasted for 36 days to call attention to deadly toxins used in the fields of California. 

Trump attacks Iran with neither a plan nor a purpose.

A War of Whim

Trump attacks Iran with neither a plan nor a purpose.

The Editors

March 19, 2026

Editorial

War and Peace

Donald Trump

Please email comments to

Members of the military carry a transfer case during the dignified transfer of the remains of U.S. Army Sgt. Benjamin Pennington at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware (OSV News photo/Kylie Cooper, Reuters).

During his presidential campaign in 2024, Donald Trump baselessly claimed that Joe Biden had brought the United States to “the brink of World War 3.” Yet with his reckless and unjustified attack on Iran, it’s Trump, the self-proclaimed “peace president,” who has brought the world a new war. Within hours of the initial U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28, Iran retaliated with drones and ballistic missiles targeting Israel, Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Israel opened a second front in Lebanon for the purpose of rooting out Hezbollah. Soon Iran struck Iraq, Cyprus, Jordan, and Oman with missiles or drones, and Iranian missiles were intercepted in the airspace of Turkey, a member of NATO. Some two thousand miles from Iran, off Sri Lanka, a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian frigate returning from multilateral exercises with eighteen other nations in India. After Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, thereby cutting off one-fifth of the world’s oil supply, Trump was on social media imploring China, France, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea to send warships to escort tankers. Meanwhile, the administration brokered an agreement to release strategic oil reserves—in the process lifting sanctions on Russia and giving it a huge financial windfall as it continues its war against Ukraine. Now the Ukrainian government is providing personnel and antidrone technology to the United States so it can defend itself and its regional allies from the same kind of Iranian drones Russia has been using against Ukraine. More than two thousand people have been killed and tens of thousands wounded in twelve countries, including many civilians. The economic and humanitarian impacts of the war—from the soaring costs of fuel and fertilizer to shortages of food and electricity—are being felt globally, and Americans are on high alert against the threat of terrorist attacks at home orchestrated by the Iranian government or its sympathizers. 

Your letters: Cryptocurrency donations, just war theory and Opus Dei

 

Letters to the Editor

Opinion

Your letters: Cryptocurrency donations, just war theory and Opus Dei

NCR Staff

New survey reveals most Americans back LGBTQ rights, amid divides within religions

 

News

New survey reveals most Americans back LGBTQ rights, amid divides within religions

Camillo Barone   ncr

Georgetown panelists on women's leadership in the church: 'We have a lot of work to do'

 

Columns

Opinion

Georgetown panelists on women's leadership in the church: 'We have a lot of work to do'

Christine Schenk  ncr

Bishop Seitz urges ICE agents not to follow illegal deportation orders

 

Dispatches

Bishop Seitz urges ICE agents not to follow illegal deportation orders

In a pastoral letter on March 15, Bishop Mark Seitz urged immigration enforcement agents not to follow illegal orders and denounced the “grave moral evil” of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

by Edward Desciak

Dust Called to Glory

The Christian humanism of Bishop Erik Varden crosses borders of language and culture.

Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

February 24, 2026

Theology

Bishops

Please email comments to letters@commonwealmagazine.org.

Bishop Erik Varden in 2020 (OSV News photo/Catholic Press Photo)

Erik Varden, born in Norway in 1974, doctorate holder from Cambridge University, monk and eventually abbot of the Trappist monastery of Mount St. Bernard in England, and, since 2020, bishop of Trondheim, Norway, is a figure who resists easy classification. He is a member of a contemplative monastic order who also serves in an apostolic ministry. He is a scholar of early and medieval monasticism who writes for a broad audience and draws readily upon modern history and literature. He is committed to the traditional teachings of the Church and approaches those who do not live according to those teachings with sympathy and compassion. Pope Leo’s choice of Varden to lead the Vatican’s Lenten spiritual exercises this year has raised his profile and will no doubt suggest to some the urgency of classifying Varden, since this will help them classify Leo, which is currently a popular sport among professional Catholics.