Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles

Michael Tangeman O'Connor — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:58:00 +0000

September 20, 2025

There has been a mixed response from the local Church to raids that have led to many Latino Catholics living in fear of being arrested and deported / By MICHAEL TANGEMAN.

LOS ANGELES – It is 6.45 on a Sunday morning in late August and I’ve arrived early for the first Mass at Our Lady of the Rosary. The church stands serenely in the early morning sunshine in this majority Hispanic suburb of Paramount, 15 minutes’ drive from downtown on the ubiquitous commuter freeways criss-crossing the working-class communities of south-east LA.

Fr Chris Ponnet takes part in a “Coalition of
Faithful Resistance”prayer and protest vigil.

The scene seems a far cry from the running street battle in June just a few blocks away, with live-streamed images of police in riot gear facing off against neighbours protesting against arrests of undocumented immigrants in a series of raids by armed federal agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE.

This is home turf for me. I was born, baptised, raised and for 12 years attended Catholic schools in these communities. To this day, I can recite all the nearby parishes by name; I no longer live here, but I can visualise nearly every one. Driving through neighbourhood streets, I realise I still know this area like the back of my hand.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE in PDF, here or at The Tablet online, here.

The faith-based activists willing to face arrest for standing up for Gaza

Michael Tangeman O'Connor — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 04:50:14 +0000

September 3, 2025

Faith-based protests over Gaza are on the rise and likely to continue / By MICHAEL TANGEMAN.

Fr John McGowan OCD knows a thing or two about terrorism.

A member of the Discalced Carmelites and longtime parish priest, what McGowan knows he learned first-hand while living and working at the Carmelite house in the Notre Dame Centre in Jerusalem from 1998-2003, seeing the devastating impact of a terror campaign of suicide bombings of buses, restaurants and shopping centres that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians during the Second Intifadah.

“You had to go out, you had to have exercise. But you never knew if you were going to come back,” he said, “and that’s not exaggerating.”

As he headed into central London on the morning of 9 August from his parish of St Joseph in the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St Peter, McGowan also knew he was himself almost certainly about to be arrested later that day on terror-related charges, even though his only offence would be to engage non-violently in an act of passive civil disobedience to protest Britain’s refusal to withdraw support for the Israeli government over its relentless campaign of bombing of Gaza.

Despite the risk of arrest, Fr McGowan pressed on to join the growing ranks of faith-based activists willing publicly to protest against their government’s continued supply of military arms and component parts for use by the Israeli military in Gaza.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE at The Tablet online, here.