Of all the people Donald Trump could blame for the opioid epidemic, he chose the victims. After his own commission on the opioid crisis issued an interim report this week, Trump said young people should be told drugs are “No good, really bad for you in every way.” The president’s exhortation to follow Nancy Reagan’s Read more
If someone’s house was on fire would you pour gasoline on it? Well the answer is obvious: Of course you wouldn’t. Yet that is very similar to what the United States and many other more economically developed nations are doing. Despite the tragic fact that approximately 40 current armed conflicts worldwide are causing over 150,000 Read more
Brownsville, South Texas, USA on the border with Mexico is within the fifth country that I have worked in as a Marist priest and is my fourth foreign country. One walks with the people wherever one is but especially when it is with the poor. But out of respect for the country that permits you Read more
Over 37 years-ago when Annunciation House – a sanctuary and home of hospitality that has served over 100,000 refugees, homeless poor and undocumented workers – was started in El Paso, Texas, founding director Ruben Garcia and a few friends wanted to place themselves among the poor, to see where the poor would lead them. He Read more
While much needed attention is being given to refugees flowing from war-torn Syria, one desperately suffering Middle East nation is barely a blip on the developed world’s radar screen. And to be honest, Yemen wasn’t on my radar screen either, until I met Barbara Deller. For 12 years Deller worked as a hospital nurse-midwife in Read more
For nearly 350 years, anti-Catholic bias was a reliable and powerful presence in the political and religious culture of the United States. Today, when the Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, for example, insists that Muslim immigrants ‘want to use our freedoms to undermine… freedom’, it can be easy to forget that for most of US history, Read more
President Obama publicly thanked Pope Francis for helping facilitate the beginning of normalised relations between the US and Cuba. The president’s comments came, Thursday, on a nationally televised address. Obama said Pope Francis wrote to both Cuban president Raul Castro and himself urging them to find a way to resolve Cuba’s imprisonment of US citizen Read more
Pope Francis is to make his first trip to the United States as the head of the Catholic Church in September, the Vatican said Tuesday, NZ time. He will travel to the World Meeting of the Families, said Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi. The Catholic public event, which celebrates the family as the basic Read more
We appear to have reached one of those extraordinary moments in history when people everywhere, communities and even entire nations, feel increasingly stressed and vulnerable. The same may be said of the planet as a whole. Whether intellectually or intuitively, many are asking the same question: Where are we heading? How do we explain the Read more
“Who says men don’t cry?” is New Zealand Marist priest, Tony O’Connor’s initial reflection of ministering on the border of Mexico and the United States. Part of Fr O’Connor’s ministry, working in the Brownsville Texas parish, is to visit two detention centres, one for captured minor migrants and the other for captured adult migrants. Given their personal circumstance and Read more