The New Archbishop of New York Rounds Out the Pope's Team U.S.A.

"Ignazio Silone's novel " Bread and Wine " tells the story of Pietro Spina, a socialist and revolutionary who is a wanted man in Fascist Italy, and who, in order to elude capture, disguises himself as a village priest in the Abruzzo countryside. The book, which was published in 1936, is partly a parable about survival and resistance: The villagers awake one morning to find anti-government slogans scrawled on the church steps. They're alarmed, fearing that the authorities will crack down on them all until the person who did it comes forward. But Spina encourages them to see the graffiti as an act of conscience-without letting on that he, himself, wrote it. "In the land of Propaganda," he says, "it is enough for one little man to say 'No!' murmur 'No!' in his neighbor's ear, or write 'No!' on a wall at night." Such a person may die at the hands of the state, he tells them, but the corpse will keep saying no. "And how can you silence a corpse?""

"On January 25th, the day after federal agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the Archbishop of Newark, spoke during a webinar organized by Faith in Action, a global network of religious leaders and activists. He paraphrased the episode from "Bread and Wine," and then addressed the participants directly. "How will you say no to violence?" he asked. He urged them to phone members of Congress, who were due to take up the Department of Homeland Security budget, and demand that they "vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization." He went on, "How will you say no-scrawl your answer on the wall? Will you help restore a culture of life, in the midst of death?" Tobin's speech was national news; here was a prelate challenging the Trump Administration in blunt, anguished terms."

The piece questions whether Pope Leo XIV, by appointing Ronald Hicks to a prominent U.S. Church post, is assembling a coordinated American episcopal team. It evokes Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine as a parable of solitary resistance, where one person's defiant 'No' can inspire collective conscience even if the resister is silenced. Cardinal Joseph Tobin invoked that parable after federal agents killed Alex Pretti, urging activists to contact Congress and oppose funding for what he called a lawless Department of Homeland Security action, and asking how communities will publicly resist violence and restore a culture of life.

Read at The New Yorker