A high-ranking Catholic leader and prominent ally to Pope Leo XIV offered a strongly worded condemnation of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants this week while encouraging more people of faith to speak out against it.
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, was one of several religious leaders to take part in an online prayer service organized by Faith in Action in response to the Jan. 24 shooting of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti.
In excerpts of his remarks, Tobin urged Congress to “vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization,” referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
“We mourn for a world, a country that allows 5-year-olds to be legally kidnapped and protesters to be slaughtered,” he said. “How will you say no to violence? Because as the great teacher Martin Luther King said, ‘Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.’”
Elsewhere in the service, Tobin referenced Ignazio Silone’s 1936 novel “Bread and Wine,” which was written while the author was living in exile from his native Italy during dictator Benito Mussolini’s regime.
He concluded his segment of the service with a quote from the novel: “How will you help restore a culture of life in the midst of death?”
In an interview with OSV News published Monday, Tobin stood by his sentiments and said he agreed with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who previously described the U.S. as being at an “inflection point.”
“I would say that we do stand at an inflection point — or maybe I would just simply say a crossroad, where there are different alternatives,” he told the outlet.
Elsewhere in the interview, he noted: “I think that some of the policies of the government, especially as showcased recently in Minneapolis — but not only in Minneapolis, in other places — certainly give question to what sort of oversight this particular branch of law enforcement is actually receiving.”
Tobin’s remarks came less than a week after he and two other U.S. cardinals signed a statement that was critical of the Trump administration’s recent foreign policy moves, including the Jan. 3 capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
A day after the prayer service, the National Catholic Reporter’s digital editor, John Grosso, published an opinion piece that rebuked Vice President JD Vance’s incendiary response to Pretti’s death.
“As a Catholic, Vance could have chosen to share the Gospel message of healing and human dignity. Instead, he chose to offer the MAGA message of division and blame,” Grosso wrote in the piece, which bore the headline: “Catholics must decide if they serve Donald Trump or the Gospel.”
Describing Vance’s comments as “a moral stain on our collective witness of Catholicism,” he added: “Given its scandal, the vice president’s cafeteria Catholicism must continue to be repudiated by people of faith.”