I’ve been cooling my heels at our cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, just over the border from Wisconsin. I go snow shoeing or cross-country skiing in the Ottawa National Forest while I also work building an off-grid I’m calling The Hermitage.
It beats doom-scrolling in Oak Park while Trump signs executive orders by the bushel, Elon Musk kabooms the federal government, and JD Vance sticks hot pokers in the eyes of our European allies.
But the political and the snowy forest came together on Sunday, when I went to Mass at St. Albert’s Catholic Church in Land O Lakes, Wisconsin, a little town I’ve visited for over 50 years.
To give you an idea about whether Land O Lakes is MAGAland, in the last presidential election, Trump won by nearly 70 percent, with 479 votes to 217 votes for Kamala Harris. It’s a fair guess that the congregation at St. Albert’s is overwhelmingly for Trump.
But the service turned out to be a bit of surreal counter-programming.
In rural America, it’s become common for Catholic priests to be immigrants from Africa or India. And the two celebrants at St. Albert’s were both Indian.
In addition, the Gospel reading was none other than the Beatitudes. You remember what Jesus said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.”
And “woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” (Are you listening, Elon?)
A week ago, JD Vance went on Fox News and turned these Beatitudes on their head. He said that, under America First, “You love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” He called this “a very Christian concept.”
News to me. And none other than Pope Francis countered JD’s Fox News theologizing.
In response, the Pope wrote a letter to U.S. Bishops stating, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that, little-by-little, extend to other persons and groups.”
He said, “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
The Good Samaritan isn’t MAGA, he said, because “worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”
In other words, JD’s America First is a non-Christian, nationalistic deadend.
Meanwhile at St. Albert’s, Fr. Raja Birusu also gave a talk on the Beatitudes to the MAGA faithful, implicitly countering JD in heavily accented English and without irony, saying that we all need to tend to the poor and hungry, and help people outside our borders.
What if the resistance to Trump is not located in Oak Park, but deep in these North Woods? At little churches? Where a shepherd knows the sheep?