Posted inFaith in Focus

This Lent, I’m fasting from being an online spectator

by Ariele Lee March 13, 2026  America

Credit: iStock/quantic69

The nature and accessibility of technology today easily can form us into perpetual observers of other peoples’ lives and listless consumers of information.

It is almost a cliché at this point. Yet, the metrics on my own phone show me that, to my horror, six hours of my day are dedicated to Instagram, YouTube and other corners of the internet. On social media, curated influencers pepper my feed with sourdough starters and gym routines, which are followed by news reports about ICE, controversy around the latest sporting event or reality show or chilling tidbits on the Epstein files. It should feel overwhelming to consume this amount of content all at once. And yet I don’t stop because this is what online culture has trained us to do.

There’s danger in U.S. bishops’ reluctance to criticize Trumpism.

 

Bad for the Church, and the World

There’s danger in U.S. bishops’ reluctance to criticize Trumpism.

Massimo Faggioli

March 16, 2026

Donald Trump

Please email comments to letters@commonwealmagazine.org.

Pope Pius XI is seen in a publicity still from the documentary “Holy Silence” (CNS photo/PerlePress Productions).

Historians are wary of making comparisons between different eras and events, but also professionally disposed to doing so—Church historians included. Hence this consideration of the role and response of the Catholic Church in the Trump era in the United States, and in the Fascist era of Italy from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s. There are differences, of course. Yet given the current moment—an authoritarian president attacking democracy at home and waging war abroad, a U.S.-born pope in the Vatican—it’s helpful to consider some of the similarities.  

The Vatican and Italian Church’s relationship with Mussolini’s regime went through many phases. Few Catholics protested the early arrests and assassinations of socialist and communist dissidents by the Blackshirts. Few were shocked when the Popular Party was shut down and its founder, Fr. Luigi Sturzo, fled into exile in 1924. The creeping totalitarianism evident in 1925 and 1926—abolition of anti-Fascist parties, suppressing freedom of the press—didn’t derail negotiations over the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Indeed, some of these antiliberal measures were consistent with positions taken by Pius IX in his Syllabus Errorum (1864).

Holding on to the light: Lessons from a friendship on death row

Guest Voices

Opinion

Holding on to the light: Lessons from a friendship on death row

Susan Kaspari   ncr

 

A Divine Identity

 

 

 

Subverting the Honor-and-Shame System

A Divine Identity

Monday, March 16, 2026

READ ON CAC.ORG

 

 

Father Richard describes how the early church followed Jesus’s practice of honoring universal human dignity:

There is a telling phrase used in the Acts of the Apostles to describe this new Jewish sect that is upsetting the old-world order in Thessalonica. Christians there were dragged before the city council and referred to as “the people who have been turning the whole world upside down…. They have broken Caesar’s edicts” (Acts 17:6–7). No one is called before the city council for mere inner beliefs or new attitudes unless they are also upsetting the social order. Almost all of Jesus’s healing and nature miracles were a rearranging of social relationships and therefore of social order. By eating with the underclass, touching the untouchables, healing on the Sabbath, and collaborating with upstarts like John the Baptist down at the river, he turns the traditions of his society upside down.

Most Christian Palestinians are nonviolent peacemakers,' says Jonathan Kuttab

 

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  John Dear

'Most Christian Palestinians are nonviolent peacemakers,' says Jonathan Kuttab

Guest Voices  ncr

Pope Leo to receive Liberty Medal from National Constitution Center on eve of US 250th

 

Pope Leo to receive Liberty Medal from National Constitution Center on eve of US 250th

News

• ncr

  Camillo Barone

Why I’m wearing a black plastic box on my ankle for Lent

 

Opinion

Why I’m wearing a black plastic box on my ankle for Lent

(RNS) — A small black box on our ankle invites us into solidarity with those who, like Jesus, have committed no crime but have been declared suspicious and dangerous.

FILE - An immigrant woman wears an ankle monitor after being processed and released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Sunday, June 24, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File)

Renée Roden

March 13, 2026

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(RNS) — At a recent check-in at our local U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, a friend and fellow parishioner at our Catholic church came out wearing an ankle monitor.

Several months before, in a June 2025 memo, Dawnisha Helland, ICE’s acting assistant director for management of non-detained migrants, had ordered ICE staff to place ankle monitors “whenever possible” on the more than 180,000 migrants enrolled in the alternative detention program, which allows them to stay in their communities while being processed. According to The Washington Post, fewer than 25,000 migrants were wearing ankle monitors at the time of Helland’s order.

THE POLITICS OF MERCY

 

THE POLITICS OF MERCY

In the intense, partisan, polarized climate of our society, many people of faith are persuaded that topics deemed “political” are best avoided. It’s an understandable impulse, yet such avoidance only plays into the hands of those who benefit from our withdrawal from public discourse.  READ MORE...