The aim of the day by day meditations, as promised after we launched six years in the past, is to help in “praying the information” and never simply watching it.
This crucial has elevated as we watch the fear of our personal authorities play out within the streets.
Having lunch yesterday with a pal, the desk subsequent to us jumped into our dialog when it was talked about that ICE operatives invaded an Oakland, CA faculty that day, and dragged away each kids and fogeys on the spot. The ugliness decreed in Washington is taking part in out in cities across the nation every day.
There are various and diverse types of resisting the authoritarian march of the present White Home (what’s left of it), Republican Occasion, Supreme Court docket, and billionaire-driven media.
Right here is one welcome instance:
Headline: “Pope Leo Torches Trump’s ‘Extraordinarily Disrespectful’ Agenda.” Subtitle: “The Pope stepped up his criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration insurance policies.”* The primary American pope “has launched a contemporary volley at Donald Trump over his administration’s immigration insurance policies,” begins the article. Evidently about 9 out of 10 individuals rounded up within the anti-migrant drive are Catholics from Latin America.
Just lately the American Catholic Bishops put out a uncommon “particular message”—the final one they delivered was 12 years in the past and such an announcement requires a 2/3 majority of the bishops. That sort of unanimity has been missing for a very long time, since a plurality of bishops, together with the leaders of the convention, have been influenced by Opus Dei, and are extra keen on controlling ladies’s our bodies than in standing as much as ecocide, matricide, democracide, out-of-control capitalism, or taming the super-wealthy.
However this “particular message” from the bishops handed 216 to five. It acknowledged: “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of individuals.”
This put them on board with Pope Leo who insisted that “now we have to search for methods of treating folks humanely, treating folks with the dignity that they’ve. If persons are in the US illegally, there are methods to deal with that. There are courts. There’s a system of justice.”
After all, these courts need to be funded with an elevated variety of judges to be in any respect efficient—which is the other way the present administration is taking. Says the pope: “When folks have lived good lives—lots of them for 10, 15, 20 years—treating them in a method that’s, to say the least, extraordinarily disrespectful, and with situations of violence, is troubling.”
I’ve not heard the vp, who calls himself a Roman Catholic, reply to this papal critique of his administration. However the current election and up to date polls counsel that the Latino voters who voted for his ticket in 2024 are having severe regrets. Congressional elections subsequent 12 months could present very completely different outcomes.
The No Kings resistance by 7 million marching Individuals is having an impact.
One other type of resistance appeared this week within the type of a documentary on the American Revolution that performed on PBS (just lately stripped of all tax greenback assist by the present administration). There, Ken Burns and staff offered an incredible service in laying out the fuller story of the beginning of America, the distinctiveness of its imaginative and prescient in its day, and the prolonged eight-year battle with a number of defeats for the Individuals. This nation was birthed at nice price of blood, in what was the truth is a civil battle and a worldwide one.
In mild of present efforts to dismiss democracy altogether — resembling within the speeches of vice-presidential patron Peter Thiel ,whose firm Palantir is making billions on the spy know-how it bought to the Protection Division which is now being deployed in opposition to US residents, immigrants, and wannabe residents alike — that story wants telling in these instances. Thanks, Ken Burns and staff!
Thiel, like his billionaire buddy Elon Musk, are themselves immigrants who dismiss democracy as a path to the long run. They need Silicon Valley billionaires like themselves to run the nation, as an alternative of voting residents. The president, SCOTUS, and the Republican congress who’re in mattress with them, may study one thing from the sacrifices of the earliest Individuals.
Remembering the American Revolution and its goal is a part of resistance additionally.
To be continued.
* Isabel Van Brugen, Pope Leo Torches Trump’s ‘Extraordinarily Disrespectul’ Agenda, The Every day Beast, November 19, 2025.
** Thom Hartmann, Every day Take: The Epstein Affair Has Transfer From Sleaze to a Disaster for American Democracy Itself, The Hartmann Report, November 13, 2025.
See additionally George Washington’s Farewell Deal with (1796), which is quoted within the Hartmann article and in Matthew’s video meditation.
To learn the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click on HERE.
Banner Picture: “Resist,” a protest signal seen in Washington DC throughout Trump’s first inauguration on January 20, 2017. Picture by James McNellis. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
What types of resistance are you engaged in, and do those talked about above encourage you? Are you praying the information and never simply watching it or operating from it?
Associated Readings by Matthew Fox
Trump & The MAGA Motion as Anti-Christ.
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Reworking Evil in Soul & Society, pp. 301-304.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Consciousness with Social Justice.
Unique Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
“Opus Dei,” in The Pope’s Conflict: Why Ratzinger’s Campaign Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved, pp. 106-124.
Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, Jen Listug, Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Imaginative and prescient of Love and Motion.
“Warriors for Ecological and Financial Justice,” in Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Occasions.
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Imaginative and prescient For a New Technology.
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