Copy Desk Daily, July 9, 2020

Brazil's Indigenous communities are being devastated by COVID-19. Eduardo Campos Lima reports from Brazil, where critics say President Jair Bolsonaro's policies lifting Amazon protections have worsened the situation. "With the pandemic, the already insufficient number of monitoring agents in the Amazon almost disappeared and invasions quickly increased," says one Catholic leader. "The intruders are not only destroying the forest and threatening the Indigenous peoples, but they're also taking the virus with them."

In India, migrant workers flood Goa beaches for jobs; sisters help them fit in. This latest entry in GSR's A Place to Call Home series looks at the work of three Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary with about 1,600 migrants, mostly tribal women of various religions, in the state of Goa, India's tourism hub.

Sr. Robancy Amal Helen has answered God's unique, mysterious call to serve the Dalits in India. The discrimination and suffering faced by Dalit Christian women "have not made them any less than they are," she writes. "Their courage, conviction and faith surprised me and gave me hope."

The second of three commentaries by Black Catholic women is by Valerie D. Lewis-Mosley, who has raised her voice against racism back to when she was a teenager and witnessed police brutality: My unbridled tongue challenges inequities that threaten Black women's lives.

"I live in a nation of white people who deny the devil within." Young Voices columnist Rebecca Collins Jordan writes of a nation possessed: white supremacy and the devil.

For a country that's socially distanced and politically split, Sr. Joan Chittister lays out ten commandments for a pandemic moment in American history.

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