Catholics in social ministry told to build bridges with God's help 'organizing hope'

Catholics in social ministry told to build bridges with God's help 'organizing hope'
By Kimberley Heatherington , OSV News

WASHINGTON (OSV News) -- The theme of bridge-building in community outreach and organizing spanned several presentations at the 2025 Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, aiming to equip participants with practical and timely tools to transform their communities.

Organized by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops with 20 national Catholic organizations, the Jan. 25-28 CSMG gathered in Washington at the same time as the new Trump administration issued a whirlwind of policy directives that impact Catholic social priorities.

Emilce Cuda, secretary of the Vatican's Pontifical Commission for Latin America, and an assistant adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago, began the Jan. 26 plenary session titled "Salt and Light: Building Bridges by Organizing Hope" by telling attendees it is impossible to speak about hope without linking politics and the economy.

"Hope," Cuda said, "is the dynamo that turns fear into (an) organizing community." She explained that oppressed people, properly united, can afford the luxury of hope once their fear is converted into organized action.

Cuda added that debt -- a relevant topic for the Jubilee Year, since an important part of the biblical jubilee tradition included forgiveness of debt -- corrodes hope, and remains a primary cause of both poverty and migration.

Cuda admitted that hope may sometimes seem in short supply, observing a current "air of unrest, because Catholic social workers feel that they are being called to supernatural effort."

Wryly remarking that the days-old second Trump administration would be wise to regard the Catholic Church as "a repository of common sense," Cuda then pointedly, with some amusement, explained why: "We have a lot of history. Donald Trump is the 47th president; Pope Francis is the 266th successor of St. Peter. When George Washington was the first president, we were already on our 250th vicar of Christ."

Cuda delved into the task of how to build community bridges -- locally, and across the Americas as Pope Francis exhorted them in his letter to the CSMG shared the day before.

"The first thing is to have a solid foundation that can support the weight of the load that moves over the bridge," advised Cuda. "That solidity is what we call solidarity; it is one of the four principles of the social doctrine of the church." (The other three principles include the dignity of the human person; the common good; and subsidiarity -- basically, handling challenges at the nearest level capable of doing so.)

This isn't, however, accomplished in isolation. Solidarity, explained Cuda, "is the result of organizing community; it is not an individual act.

"Solidarity requires the personal decision to unite in order to be saved," she added. "And then, along the way, we see which was the strategy that made possible a good and abundant life as our Lord Jesus Christ tells us."

Cuda emphasized that the "supernatural help of grace through theological virtues: faith, hope and charity" is also a critical bridge building tool.

"Without this divine help," she said, "bridges cannot be built."

"The Catholic Church is unity. And the solutions it offers to social problems are neither political nor economic, they are evangelical; the whole Gospel calls for unity," she said. "Far from social antagonism, we Catholics preach unity in difference as the path to salvation. That is our contribution to politics in the chaos that every change of era generates."

Ultimately, said Cuda, the church transcends secular and time-bound politics.

"The Catholic organizing community is greater than political time. That is why it is enough to start processes, because others will follow. The poor know this," she continued, "because they start the process with the hope that their children will have a more dignified life. They know that the organization conquers time. This is the church of the borders."

That said, Cuda still had a word of caution: "Hope is never lost, but it can be manipulated. Hope can be politically manipulated. Careful!" she said. "When we do that, we are not doing theology, but ideology; and that is the worst politics.

"Therefore," concluded Cuda, "we must go out as church, but build bridges of communication, without leaving anyone outside or behind."

An afternoon bridge-building session focused upon "Engaging Restorative Practices for a Synodal Church on Mission" through the Catholic Mobilizing Network's formation tool, "Conversations in Communion: Parish Dialogues for Connection and Understanding."

The Catholic Mobilizing Network works to fulfill the church's commitment to abolish the death penalty, advance justice solutions aligned with Catholic principles, and promote healing and restorative justice.

Designed to equip Catholics to introduce the restorative practice of the circle process in their parishes and ministries, "Conversations in Communion" aims to deepen, expand, and strengthen the synodal culture called for by Pope Francis.

Informed by Indigenous peacemaking traditions, circle process literally involves participants sitting in a physical or virtual circle, passing a "talking piece" to signal speaking order. Facilitators guide the dialogue using a series of prompts and questions. Practically, it creates a forum for communal dialogue and engagement with difficult topics through storytelling.

"For 15 years, Catholic Mobilizing network has been introducing, facilitating, and training in the restorative practice of circle process at local and national levels," said Caitlin Morneau, director of Restorative Justice at the Catholic Mobilizing Network. "As we work to dismantle the death penalty, we also need to be building up capacities and awareness for responses to harm and crime that are healing and transformative, and offer alternatives to some of those most punitive responses to crime that we see as kind of the default in our country."

Other sessions covered Jan. 26 included discussions centered around how to provide hope by understanding community needs, addressing social distrust and misinformation, foster care, the climate crisis, caring for elders and those dealing with sickness, fighting human trafficking, and community action to heal intergenerational trauma in Native American contexts.

A late afternoon session dubbed "Encountering Migrants in Your Parishes and at the Border" -- originally intended to discuss helpful methods of welcoming and accompanying immigrants -- was instead transformed by the flurry of immigration-related executive orders issued by the Trump administration.

The executive orders include enhanced vetting of visa applicants; limiting of birthright citizenship -- an act a federal judge has already called "blatantly unconstitutional" -- declaration of a "national emergency" at the Southern border with new immigration enforcement policies, including the broad authorization of conducting arrests at churches, schools, hospitals by immigration-enforcement agents; and suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

"On Friday, we received one of the stop work orders from the Department of State, which funds the bulk of our overseas work," said Hilary Chester, vice president of Domestic Program Operations for Jesuit Refugee Service USA. "We are one of the organizations that received a hard stop notice."

"We're very concerned about, really, all of our programs," she said.

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Kimberley Heatherington writes for OSV News from Virginia.
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