Cardinal McElroy fans the flames

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 30, 2026

By now all responsible public leaders have recognized the need to dial down the rhetoric and de-escalate the confrontations in Minnesota. Yet Cardinal Robert McElroy has joined with several other religious leaders in Washington to rouse passions still further, beyond their already dangerous heights.

“The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti,” the religious leaders’ joint statement begins. Right away that opening statement signals their choice to use inflammatory language. They could have spoken in neutral terms about the “deaths” of those two people. Or “killings” would have been perfectly accurate, and conveyed a better sense of the violence involved. But to term these tragic deaths as “murders” is simply irresponsible.

Murder is a specific word, describing an intentional killing without justification or excuse. In law, a charge of murder requires proof of malice aforethought. Whether the law-enforcement officers who shot these two unfortunate people intended to kill is debatable; whether they acted without justification or excuse is even more questionable. But to say that they acted with malice aforethought is simply implausible; in all likelihood the officers did not know these individuals before the fatal confrontations.

In any case these killings will be thoroughly investigated, the actions and motivations of the shooters will be weighed against the extenuating circumstances, and in time we should know whether criminal charges are warranted. But the religious leaders in Washington have already proclaimed the shooters guilty of a capital crime.

When I mention the extenuating circumstances that law-enforcement officials could cite in their own defense, I am speaking of a reality that any reasonable observer should acknowledge. The shootings took place during tense, noisy, chaotic confrontations, in which both sides felt they were under attack—even potentially lethal attack.

Cardinal McElroy and the other signatories of the January 30 statement take no notice of those complications. They describe the victims, Good and Pretti, as “two US citizens devoted to civic engagement and to caring from their immigrant neighbors”—thereby ignoring the considerable evidence that the two were actively engaged in an organized campaign to impede the work of law-enforcement officials.

Those officials were entitled to use force, if necessary, in the execution of their legal orders. (Whether they used excessive force is another matter.) And the orders to arrest and deport illegal immigrants were lawful orders, given in pursuit of a policy which, while controversial, is not illegal, and won the apparent approval of American voters in the last presidential election. Yet again the Washington religious leaders dismiss those inconvenient facts. Doing their best to suppress one side of the argument, and portray this debate as a clear contest between good and evil, they say: “When the power of the state is exercised without regard for life, justice or the common good, the foundations of democracy are put at risk.”

Implicit here is the charge that our democracy is now in danger because the Trump administration has no “regard for life, justice, or the common good.” This is clearly not the dispassionate rhetoric of religious leaders appealing for peace. This is the incendiary language of partisans, pouring kerosene on an already overheated situation. The cardinal-archbishop of Washington—joined by representatives of the Episcopal, Jewish, Methodist, Unitarian, and Zoroastrian faiths—has given his support to a statement that aggravates the dangerous divisions within our society.

By the way, why do religious leaders in Washington feel compelled to comment on a crisis unfolding in a city more than 1,000 miles away? The January 30 statement attempts an explanation:

Communities in the greater Washington region have already experienced the fear and disruption caused by aggressive enforcement tactics, including incidents near schools and houses of worship—places that should remain sanctuaries, not sites of intimidation.

Do you notice something missing? The clerics cite their “fear” that religious services might be disrupted “by aggressive enforcement tactics.” In their rush to place all blame on one side, they fail to notice that in Minnesota, church services already have been disrupted—not by federal enforcement officers, but by the activists who have been opposing them. Those same radical activists indeed might choose to disrupt worship services in Washington, DC, before too long. And I doubt they’ll choose to disrupt the Zoroastrians.