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In the weeks since the release of
“Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on the protection of
our humanity in the age of artificial intelligence, the document has
sparked widespread debate in the worlds of technology and theology, as
well as among ordinary people who are increasingly subject to A.I. tools
and content in their work and personal lives.
The encyclical was presented at the
Vatican on May 25 by the pope, alongside a panel of experts from various
fields, including Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. Anna Rowlands,
the St. Hilda Chair in Catholic Social Thought and Practice at Durham
University, represented the sphere of academic theology.
U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stand guard at the Delaney
Hall detention center while demonstrators gathered outside in Newark,
New Jersey, May 29, 2026 (OSV News photo/Eduardo Munoz, Reuters).
During
morning rush hour in Chicago last week, ICE agents crashed into a
bystander’s car while trying to detain a Venezuelan migrant. After
tackling the screaming, shirtless man to the ground and handcuffing him,
agents tased him, according
to a local reporter and other witnesses on the scene. Then they used
the taser and pepper spray to threaten bystanders who had gathered and
started blowing whistles. In the chaos, an agent dropped a loaded
magazine in the street.
The scene was reminiscent of last fall’s Operation Midway
Blitz, the Trump administration’s massive immigration-enforcement
campaign that resulted in the arrest and detention of thousands of
migrants in the Chicago area—and which famously prompted a backlash from
community residents who used whistles to alert neighbors to ICE
activity. During that time, the suburban Broadview processing center also became the focus of protests, including by Catholics demanding pastoral and sacramental access to detainees.
The violent, aggressive tactics employed under U.S. Border
Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, which resulted in the killings of two
citizens in Minneapolis, slowed after Trump replaced Bovino with border
czar Tom Homan in January. Homan replaced Bovino’s strategy with
lower-profile, more targeted arrests, rather than the previous, more
visible sweeps. An estimated 580 people were detained in Chicago in the first two and half months of 2026, about the same number detained in just two weeks of Midway Blitz. National numbers have also declined,
from an all-time high of about seventy thousand persons detained on any
given day in December 2025 to about sixty thousand today. This still
exceeds the average of forty thousand during President Biden’s tenure,
or the roughly sixteen thousand detainees at the end of Trump’s first
term.
The detention slowdown is just one of several victories
that should be celebrated, studied, and learned from, say those who work
in immigration advocacy. Thanks to the massive pushback, especially in
Minnesota, the Trump administration was forced to admit it had
overplayed its hand and that militaristic ICE raids are unpopular.
Bovino and later Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem were sacked,
masked agents were pulled back from targeted cities, and the war in Iran
took over the headlines. Some groups have also had success challenging
the Trump administration in court—for example, the Coalition for
Spiritual and Public Leadership recently reached an agreement with ICE to be able to provide spiritual and pastoral care to Broadview detainees.
As the war on immigrants continues, it has expanded to target those legally in the country.
But these successes don’t change the goal of mass deportations, and Congress’s passage
of a $70 million immigration funding package will mean the
administration has plenty of money to ramp up arrests and detentions.
“We cannot become complacent,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of
the Hope Border Institute, an El Paso–based research, advocacy, and
humanitarian-action organization at the U.S.-Mexico border. “But we
should not underestimate what happened: there was moral clarity and
community engagement, and that changed the calculus of power.”
As the war on immigrants continues, it has
expanded to target those legally in the country. Today, arrests are
more likely to happen outside a courtroom than in the street,
notwithstanding last week’s Chicago incident. Also, with a massive
increase in 287(g) agreements, nearly a third of the U.S. population now
lives in a county with local law enforcement deputized by ICE—making
traffic stops and ordinary interactions potential sites of immigration
enforcement. Critics say
the program fuels racial profiling, violence, and civil-rights
violations, while drawing law enforcement away from their communities
and concentrating the Trump administration’s power.
The administration has also shifted to other less public
and more subtle tactics to make legal immigration more burdensome. DACA
renewals have slowed, and the administration recently announced
a plan to force foreign nationals here legally to return to their home
countries if they want to apply for a green card. Attention has also
turned to the squalor inside detention centers, which many observers are
accurately calling concentration camps. Detainees—including children,
pregnant and nursing mothers, and the elderly—are held in inhumane
conditions. Children have no access to education, facilities are
overcrowded, and the sick often lack medical care. Deaths in detention
have surged to record highs.
At Delaney Hall in New Jersey, a hunger strike by some
three hundred detainees has entered its third week, while protests rage
outside the facility. Detainees’ families describe
substandard medical care, inedible food, and neglectful and sometimes
abusive guards. The strike and work stoppage has also brought attention
to the issue of forced labor
by detainees, whose “jobs” cooking, cleaning, and doing other
maintenance pay as little as $1 a day, saving the for-profit prison
company GEO Group that operates the facility millions in overhead costs.
The multibillion-dollar company has deep ties to the Trump administration, and its profits have nearly doubled
in the first quarter of 2026, thanks primarily to federal contracts.
Yet oversight of the facility has been difficult. Democratic New Jersey
congresswoman LaMonica McIver is facing criminal charges for trying to
conduct an oversight visit to the center last year. She urges officials to “follow the money” at Delaney, which receives $60 million per year from taxpayers.
Outside Delaney Hall, a Catholic sister has been ministering
to detainees’ families at a “Radical Hospitality Tent” for the past
year, offering coffee and doughnuts, toys for kids, and a listening
ear. Susan Francois, a sister of St. Joseph of Peace, calls her work “an
act of resistance” and posts a video to social media about her work
each Sunday. The Catholic Church more broadly also continues other
direct service to immigrants, including legal aid and material support,
despite cuts in federal funding.
Deaths in detention have surged to record highs.
Religious
leaders, communities, and activists must continue what they do well,
but will need to do even more in response to the administration’s
changing tactics. This includes more collaboration with other groups and
across religious denominations. Catholic leaders, including Pope Leo
XIV and the U.S. bishops, have been successful in challenging U.S.
Catholics to see “welcoming the stranger” as an urgent question of
conscience today. The bishops’ “special statement” last fall and the
appearance of the three cardinals on 60 Minutes in April have broadened the reach of the Church’s witness.
But as the midterm elections approach, the Church must
shift to more explicitly political strategies. The Dorothea Project, an
online group of women devoted to spreading Catholic social teaching,
undertook a letter-writing campaign
to bishops urging them to update their voters’ guide to better reflect
Church teaching, including on immigration. The bishops discussed
“Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” in private sessions at
last November’s USCCB meeting; a brief update is on the agenda for the June 10-12 gathering in Orlando. The bishops have also unveiled a prayer service
centered on migrants as part of the nation’s 250th-anniversary
celebrations this summer, in what is perhaps a subtle rebuke to Trump’s
semiquincentennial plans for a UFC fight on the White House lawn and a
commemorative $250 bill bearing his own image.
Church advocacy must go beyond the bishops, however, and
several groups have been busy doing grassroots organizing, including at
the parish and diocesan levels. The Catholic Immigrant Prophetic Action
Project, or Catholic IMMpact,
has attracted sizable numbers of people to its local and regional
trainings in Providence, Phoenix, and Detroit. In San Antonio, some 250
priests, deacons, and auxiliary bishops learned how their pastoral
service to immigrants can be a steppingstone to more prophetic work.
Collaboration with Catholic IMMpact, which is a partnership of Hope
Border Institute and the Center for Migration Studies of New York, often
leads to pastoral plans or letters, such as the missive “Be A Merciful Neighbor” from Bishop Steven Biegler of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Corbett senses a hunger from everyday Catholics to bring
the Church’s teaching on human dignity to bear in the public debate on
immigration. According to a recent survey
from the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Catholics said clergy at
their parish had spoken about immigration, and the message was more
likely to be welcoming and supportive of migrants than not. That number
is significantly higher than in white mainline Protestant and
Evangelical churches. Corbett believes the key is converting pastoral
witness and action into civic formation that ties immigration to the
common good—and to the defense of democratic norms. “We’ve got to
continue to build consensus, because there is going to be a moment when
immigration reform is possible,” he said. “We’ve got to get prepared for
that moment now.”
Pope Leo XIV warned of a "profound spiritual and cultural crisis" gripping the world, taking aim at war, rearmament and the decay of international cooperation in one of his most politically charged speeches since becoming pope just over a year ago.
Steven Spielberg is a believer. His
article of faith: We are not alone in the universe. His films about
humanity encountering extraterrestrial life all have a distinctly
spiritual flavor: “E.T.” (1982) is full of wonder and miracles; “War of
the Worlds” (2005) is rife with religious terror; and in “Indiana Jones
and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008) the lines between aliens
and gods blur. His first film on the subject, and still his most
powerful statement, was “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977),
which reinterprets St. Paul on the road to Damascus as a family man who
has a stunning, inexplicable encounter with a U.F.O.
Spielberg’s new film, “Disclosure Day,” is
his ultimate testimony. Written by his frequent collaborator David
Koepp based on a story by Spielberg, “Disclosure Day” is most interested
in the existential shockwaves that the revelation of alien life would
have on humanity’s sense of meaning. How would that revelation shake our
sense of ourselves and our place in the natural order? What ripples
would it send through religious faith? As the film ponders these
questions, it also takes on the decline in American empathy and trust in
our institutions. If our society’s foundational beliefs are challenged,
will it all fall apart? Or will it open the way to something new?
This is the dilemma facing Daniel Kellner
(Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity technician for Wardex, a shady
corporation with close ties to the defense industry. When he finds
evidence that Wardex has covered up proof of aliens—and, even worse, has
imprisoned and experimented on them—he steals decades of incriminating
footage and goes on the run. Pursued by the cold-blooded Scanlon (Colin
Firth) and guided by Hugo (Colman Domingo), another Wardex defector, he
needs to keep the evidence safe until it can be released to the public
on a planned Disclosure Day.
Meanwhile, Margaret Fairchild (Emily
Blunt), a TV weather reporter, suddenly discovers that she can speak a
multitude of languages and, seemingly, read people’s minds. She and
Daniel share a mysterious connection, including a strange gap in their
childhood memories. They must find each other and uncover their buried
pasts before Disclosure Day arrives.
Personally, I believe there is no better
time to be a movie lover than when Spielberg has a new summer release.
The onetime industry-shaking “movie brat” has long since become
Hollywood’s elder statesman, but time has not dulled his talents. Few
filmmakers understand the camera as a storytelling device like Spielberg
does; combined with his preternatural talent for blocking (a lost art
in most modern blockbusters), each shot tells a story and delivers an
emotional wallop.
In an age of flat, confusing C.G.I. action
scenes, Spielberg’s are thrilling master classes in mood and visual
clarity. He knows how to bring you right to the edge of your seat,
whether in a raucous chase involving a car stuck to a speeding train or a
quiet, gripping sequence in which Scanlon uses alien technology to
invade another character’s mind. Some of the sci-fi mechanics and
narrative shortcuts are a little hard to believe, especially as the film
races to a frantic finale, but for the most part Spielberg balances
bravura filmmaking with the story’s weightier concerns.
And how weighty they are. “Disclosure Day”
reckons with two things sorely lacking in American society:
institutional trust and empathy. The former, the film says, needs
repair; the latter is our only way forward as a species. As Margaret’s
psychic powers develop, she finds that she can reach the hearts of
others, so often buried behind fear, anger or prejudice. Blunt’s
performance is the lynchpin of the film, a dizzying balance of humor,
vulnerability and verbal acrobatics. She becomes, somewhat unwillingly,
the prophet of a new age of understanding.
Daniel, meanwhile, is a prophet of truth.
(I suspect his name is a nod to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon
Papers in 1971—and whose story Spielberg dramatized in the 2017 film
“The Post.”) His storyline also contains the film’s greatest tension: Is
it always right to share the truth? The film plays out against the
backdrop of looming war between America and North Korea; Daniel’s
revelations threaten to make that situation even more precarious. How do
you balance the good of the truth with its ability to cause harm?
In particular, the film wrestles with the
impact Disclosure Day will have on religion. This perspective is
embodied by Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), who goes from
bystander to pivotal player in the conflict. Early on we (and Daniel)
learn that she was once a novice nun at the Monastery of St. Clare of
the Dawn (who, we learn, bilocated when she was too sick to attend
Mass—similar to stories about the real St. Clare of Assisi). Jane lost
her vocation but not her faith: She says that while she is no longer
certain that God is “divine,” she still believes that God is
“essential.” That statement is a little difficult to parse theologically
(how could God not be divine but still be God?) but it expresses the
heart of her argument: Human beings need to believe in something.
Jane fears that Disclosure Day will tear
apart human systems of belief, leaving people without hope or moral
guidance. “People have been raised to believe in a supreme being, and
now you want to show us actual supreme beings?” she says. “The world
can’t handle both.”
It is a compelling conflict on paper,
although as a Catholic, I found it a little overblown. As many Catholics
have observed—including Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J., former president
of the Vatican Observatory—belief in extraterrestrial life can coincide
quite easily with belief in God. During a U.F.O. news flurry a few
years ago, Charles Camosy wrote for America:
“Far from being a kind of backbreaker for religious faith, our becoming
aware of the existence of other rational creatures in the cosmos would
likely reinvigorate theological inquiry quite dramatically, and the
church’s intellectual tradition on these questions would be brought to
bear in exciting and important ways.”
In the film, Jane’s former superior,
Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), expresses a similar sentiment. If
anything, she says, it would almost be a waste to think that God created
such a vast universe with only one spark of life. The idea of other
lives, other civilizations out among the stars only increases our
understanding of God’s grandeur.
“Disclosure Day,” clearly, is a film with a
lot on its mind. While Koepp’s screenplay often sings (like Spielberg,
he’s one of the steadiest hands in the business), it is also too often
declarative and obvious, overexplaining where brevity would be more
powerful. But it’s refreshing to see a big, action-packed summer movie
with anything on its mind, particularly when its goals are so noble.
Ultimately, “Disclosure Day” is asking a
more fundamental question than whether or not aliens exist, a question
that strikes at the meaning of life itself. In a time of doubt and
despair, isolation and polarization, Spielberg answers with the
confidence of a true believer: We are not alone.
In the wake of Pope Francis’ passing, many
LGBTQ+ Catholics wondered whether the momentum of synodal dialogue
would continue. I can say with confidence: It has not stopped. If
anything, it is evolving—and becoming a more permanent part of the life
of the church.
From March 26 to 28, 2026, I had the
opportunity to participate in a unique and deeply moving gathering: a
bishops’ meeting on LGBTQ issues. Convened by New Ways Ministry at the
Siena Retreat Center in Wisconsin, the meeting was held under the
Chatham House Rule to protect participants’ privacy and foster a safe
space where people could speak openly and honestly. (According to the
Chatham House Rule, participants at a meeting or event are allowed to
share information they learn there but not people’s identities.) The
gathering was marked by listening, humility, and a shared desire to
discern how best to serve LGBTQ+ Catholics, who are an integral part of
the body of Christ.
