Our long national nightmare requires Christian leaders to seek opportunities for deeper, more politically engaged ecumenism. These days, detente with Rome is tugging at my heart — and not just because my spouse, Canon Kathy Hannigan O’Connor, grew up in the Roman Catholic church in the Bronx, though it helps. Events are bringing us closer day by day. Under the shadow of the new American authoritarianism, Catholic archbishops and bishops have taken a prophetic line on immigration justice which is indistinguishable from that of so-called progressive Protestants.
For instance, this week, Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez posted these words under a photo showing him kneeling before an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe: “As Americans, as Christians, we have to speak out for the dignity of the human person. Every crisis is a crisis of saints. So now is the hour for our Christian witness. It is our duty as followers of Jesus, to help America recover her soul.”
The Episcopal and Roman churches have profound differences on matters of orientation and identification. These are a source of deep anguish for women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and their allies. But we have no chance of addressing these issues, or any issues, if our country goes down the tubes. To help keep that from happening, our God in Christ may well be calling us to capitalize on our newfound unity in support of our immigrant worker neighbors.
This is nothing new. We are bathed in the same empty tomb light. Anglo-Catholicism is a vital part of our tradition. Our respective experts brought us into agreement decades ago on the nature of baptism and Holy Eucharist. Several of my Episcopal colleagues were first ordained as Roman Catholic priests. Others have longstanding friendships with the saints at Los Angeles Catholic Worker. As a parish priest in Orange County, I worked with the amazing Dwight and Leia Smith at Orange County Catholic Worker in Santa Ana.
These ties are lively and important. But this moment requires even deeper reconciliation and collaboration. The Holy Spirit has been busy even in my little sphere. Last month I was a guest of Holy Family Parish in South Pasadena, part of their pre-Lenten retreat speakers series. During the Q&A and afterward, congregants and I had rich conversations about gender and the priesthood, immigration justice, and climate change.
A parish member named Michael, sitting in a pew toward the back, read a portion of one of Pope Francis’s encyclicals on climate change and asked if The Episcopal Church took a similar position. Of course we do, I said, in the form of numerous General Convention resolutions. But how would Michael know? We spend most of our time in our denominational silos. That evening, we managed to join forces. My questioner turned out to be South Pasadena city council member Michael Cacciotti, the incoming chair of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, one of the country’s most powerful environmental regulators. At his gracious invitation, he’ll soon host members of our Bishop’s Commission on Climate Change and me for a tour and briefing at AQMD headquarters in Diamond Bar.
Then last week, at a family friend’s funeral at our Lady of Guadalupe Roman Catholic Church in Los Angeles, I met Fr. Joe Donovan of the Maryknoll Society, a storied order dedicated to serving those most at risk around the world. Fr. Joe offered an exquisite homily about Jesus’s colloquy with Martha about the death of Lazarus. He described it as Our Lord’s effort to empower non-male evangelism. Mistaking me at first for my predecessor, Jon Bruno, he invited me into the sacristy for a hushed conversation as communion was being served. I returned the favor by promising to steal his patriarchy-shattering homily.
It’s not just Canterbury and Rome being lured together by events. Tens of millions of our fellow mainline Christians, Jews, Muslims, non-Abrahamic practitioners, progressive evangelicals, and loving humanists all center the values of self sacrificial love and the dignity of every human being — basically, the golden rule. Together, we are the incarnate opposite of the body of Trump. If this sounds like a call to more vigorous political or at least public policy engagement, you’re right. Forget about the separation of church and state. For the time being, with the nation Lincoln called the last best hope of earth under massive assault by barbarians, we can’t afford the separation of church and state.
Imagine 85-100 million golden rule Americans, encouraged by their spiritual leaders, saying no to this regime’s most wicked aims. Take just four issues to start. By his own admission, Trump wants to deport over 15 million of our neighbors; steal the next election; invade any home or workplace he chooses with an administrative warrant signed by his autopen and detain or arrest whomever he finds without probable cause; and continue to murder young men of color who may or may not be running pot or cocaine on the high seas — killing for killing’s sake, killing them, as Johnny Cash sang, just to watch them die, including as they floated in the wreckage in September, waving desperately at U.S. personnel who were about to slay them in cold blood.
None of this is a hard sell for mature people of faith. Some European nations have Christian democratic parties. We would be a multi-faith democratic coalition with a one-plank platform: No support for any candidate who doesn’t pledge to observe the golden rule, insofar as it prohibits hurting or killing people unnecessarily, and do all they can, whatever their political beliefs, for the largest number of our people.
If you’ll permit a postscript, this post was inspired by an exchange of emails with portraitist Juan Fernando Bastos, who recently painted my official portrait, thanks to the generosity of Geoff and Alison Rusack. Juan says that it was his first religious commission and that it helped him obtain another, from the papal nuncio in Washington, Cardinal Chrisophe Pierre, to paint Leo XIV’s portrait for the apostolic nunciature.
Juan unveiled it this week. As part of the package, the cardinal, whom I met in Archbishop Gomez’s sacristy a few years ago at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, received a coffee table book of Juan’s oeuvre which displays the pope and me side by side. It is as close as I will ever get to His Eminence. But especially these days, it feels like a good place to be.