Copy Desk Daily, April 21, 2020

Our team of copy editors reads and posts most of what you see on the websites for National Catholic Reporter, Global Sisters Report and EarthBeat. The Copy Desk Daily highlights recommended news and opinion articles that have crossed our desks on their way to you.

Hymns, teach-ins and a horse ride to school: Catholic stories of the first Earth Day:  A few years after the Second Vatican Council, amid the Cold War and the civil rights movement, Catholics were among the 20 million Americans who took part in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Brian Roewe shares some of their stories, as part of a new feature series examining five decades of Earth Day, through a Catholic lens: 50 Years of Earth Day.

"No one planned that this transition would happen mid-pandemic, a silent, invisible, life-altering tsunami. But I can't imagine anyone better suited to take the helm mid-storm." Executive editor Tom Roberts on handing the leadership to Heidi Schlumpf, NCR national correspondent — and our next executive editor: A good place, a strange moment.

In Bridgeport, a microcosm of COVID-19's impact on America's poorest: Jamie Manson focuses her latest column on Mercy Learning Center, a program for undereducated and underserved women that operates out of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The center is a window into the devastation that COVID-19 causes for the marginalized in our country. The disadvantaged struggle to eat, while privilege insulates nearby residents. Manson's friend Jane Ferreira, the president and CEO of the program, told her, "When this happens you really see the divide in our society. The poorest of the poor are always the ones that suffer the most. But even their suffering becomes extreme."

Links for 4/21/20: In Michael Sean Winters' latest roundup of political news and commentary, the case for Joe Biden to pick Elizabeth Warren for VP; Trump's suppporters craft scapegoats; and Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her 94th birthday. 

In case you missed it: Senators urge anti-bias police training over mask fears.

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