NCR Editorial Staff

We say: We need to ensure that the merchants of political hatred will find geofencing Catholic churches a futile act because they know they will receive little support in those precincts.

We say: As experts learn more about the novel coronavirus and how it spreads, there is evidence that indoor gatherings of medium- to large-sized groups are more dangerous than most outdoor activities.

Symbols matter. And the versions of Jesus that white Catholics see in their parishes will surely influence how they look at their non-white neighbors and whether white Catholics will oppose sinful structures of racism.

We say: Baltimore Archbishop William Lori should respond to the petitioners' concerns about the Knights of Columbus' politicking and the organization's own history of prejudice and racism.

We say: While education, housing and other budgets are routinely cut, police budgets continue to rise. Like runaway military spending, police spending seems untouchable. Until now.

We say: Stop judging ministries that have been sincerely serving Catholic folks for decades. Stop judging LGBT Catholics trying to find their place in the church so they can tend to their spiritual lives.

We say: So much has been said in recent months about the rending of the fabric of the nation. The images on our screens are devastating. But where are the U.S. bishops?

We say: While the culture warriors in the U.S. bishops' conference have been obsessed with sexual ethics, what we need right now are the core principles of Catholic social teaching: solidarity, the common good, human dignity of all.

We say: Four years ago, on the first anniversary of the encyclical, an NCR editorial heralded "the emergence of a lay-led, community-based, action-oriented movement for the environment." Has that happened?

Incarceration shouldn't be a death sentence, especially for nonviolent offenders, or those awaiting trial but unable to afford bail, in our nation's already overcrowded jails and prisons.

Friendships have existed in the past between U.S. presidents and princes of the church. But it is rare, if not unprecedented, that the church's leadership would be co-opted to the degree seen in the case of Trump.

While the world struggles against a microbial menace, nature itself is under attack from the deliberate and steady overthrow by the Trump administration of environmental regulations, some in place for decades.

Maybe our questions out of quarantine — a pope and people in place, captive to the unseen and unheard — are too small, too much about mechanics and organizational strategies.

In the midst of a global pandemic, the presumption that clerics will somehow figure a way to safely conduct public services and distribute the Eucharist is delusional.

Catholics who bought the single-issue strategy find themselves stuck in what once was a fun house now turned house of horrors, incongruously lashed to Trump, while the daily reality is a grim report of the spiraling number of sick and dying.

The saintly designation tends to obscure the saint's ordinary flesh-and-blood reality. It is a tendency to resist at all costs when commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination of St. Óscar Romero.

The coronavirus threat has stopped us in our tracks and is forcing fundamental questions about who we are and what we will become, about what our communities of faith mean in a time of lockdown and quarantine.

The reality, easily observable, is that most of the service in the church, especially in the form of ministry and teaching, is done by women. The power to decide resides almost exclusively with ordained men.

We say: March 2020 may go down as the month that turned our world on its head, or at least made us think more about the precariousness of the ordinary and the power of the unseen.

We say: The church owes Archbishop John Wester and Bishop Steven Biegler a debt of gratitude for going on the record against anonymous accounts that claim Pope Francis called Jesuit Fr. James Martin to task over his ministry to LGBT Catholics.