One week after President Trump was inaugurated, about 500 Catholics trekked around Capitol Hill asking our U.S. senators and representatives to support programs that would help those most in need in our country and throughout the world. About a dozen of us were from Massachusetts.

As we went from office to office, shock and disbelief were unfolding over the new administration’s policies. We quickly learned the nightmares were just beginning. Each day now brings new nadirs in officially sanctioned callousness, cruelty, crassness and craziness.

Nothing seems sacred any longer as our national conscience seems to be convulsing in a death spiral.

One of our key public policy requests to our senators and representatives was for an increase in poverty-fighting aid to the poorest of the world’s poor, delivered through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Today, that agency, the longstanding exemplar of our national compassion and generosity to our brothers and sisters across the world, is shuttered. The State Department, to which its functions were ostensibly to be transferred and perhaps kept alive, now appears only to be the undertaker.

In little more than a month, our national character has plunged from institutional kindness of the first order to meanness of the worst kind. Rather than proud of who we are, we citizens are ashamed.

Other policies we asked of lawmakers were similar – funding to help break the devastating poverty cycle that starts with children in desperate straits, for housing and shelter for the homeless or about to be homeless and for health care for the poor.

These policy goals emerged from our annual social justice conference – the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering (CSMG) held in D.C. on the preceding days. Whereas just a few weeks ago, these goals seemed to reflect our most noble national principles and common cause as a society, today they are officially mocked and cynically depicted as waste, fraud and corruption.

We reject the notion that our fellow citizens of the richest country in the world want to run roughshod over the poor and the downtrodden. But if we do not speak up now and do so forcefully and repeatedly, the incoming tide will erode our humanity. So we wish to set an example with this message.

The Gospel parables of how we are to conduct ourselves in society are instructive. Pick your favorite: the Good Samaritan (compassion and generosity to the helpless, wounded stranger); the miracle of the loaves and fishes (feeding the hungry); sparing the adulterer (mercy, tolerance, kindness in judging); curing the blind and the lame (healing, the personal touch of comfort); the Prodigal Son (forgiveness, mercy, welcoming).

Compare and contrast those with narratives spun by official Government spokespersons today.

Pope Francis put it this way in The Joy of the Gospel: “Politics, though often denigrated, remains a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity inasmuch as it seeks the common good.” And “politics,” as essayist Vincent Miller explains, is “at its fullest … the prudential struggle to creatively and doggedly enact moral principles in public life.”

To drive the point home, the Pope goes on: “An authentic faith – which is never comfortable or completely personal – always involves a deep desire to change the world, to transmit values, to leave this earth somehow better than we found it …. If indeed ‘the just ordering of society and of the state is a central responsibility of politics,’ the Church ‘cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice.’”

Pope Francis wrote these words in 2013.

In 2025, we do not ask our clergy and faith leaders to tell us what to do, for we each have the obligation to form our own individual conscience. But in these dark times, we do need our faith leaders more than ever to help us find the guideposts so we can “see, judge, and act.”

To persevere as simply good people, we must re-unite in the two most fundamental tasks of living together in community. We must seek the common good of all and ensure the dignity of each person.

Tom Dwyer is the Executive Director of A Faith That Does Justice.