The loss of SNAP benefits, LMU labor dispute, and America's attacks on boats in the Caribbean
Heidi, Daniel, and David look at the cascading effects of the government shutdown, as well as the recent attacks by the American military on civilian fishing boats in the Caribbean. Finally, we take a look at the unfolding situation at Loyola Marymount, where their Board of Directors has refused to recognize union negotiations moving forward.
INTRO
Congratulations to Heidi as she joins the staff at Commonweal!
David Dault Is Writing Things blog
Daniel’s latest column for NCR: “To be authentically Christian means to love your neighbor”
SEGMENT 1 - The loss of SNAP benefits
SEGMENT 2 - Loyola Marymount University
Rerum Novarum
Overview of LMU dispute
Marquette University (Heidi’s article)
The “demographic cliff”
Our Lady of Guadalupe SCOTUS case
Ex Corde Ecclesiae
University Ethics, by James Keenan
SEGMENT 3 - Killing on the high seas
The rule of law
Overview of the killings
Principle of solidarity
Principle of the dignity and value of the human person
Transcript
INTRO
DAULT: Hello and welcome to the Francis Effect Podcast. My name is David Dalt. I host a radio show called Things Not Seen about Culture and Faith, and I'm an assistant professor of Christian Spirituality at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago. I'm here with my dear friends, Heidi Schlump.
And Dan Haran. Heidi is an award-winning journalist and part-time faculty member at Loyola University Chicago. She's also senior correspondent at Common Wheel Magazine. Dan is professor of philosophy, religious studies and theology at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He's also a regular columnist at National Catholic Reporter.
Every couple of weeks we get together to discuss news and events through a lens of our shared Catholic faith. Dan and Heidi, welcome to you both. Heidi, how have you been? And in particular, I'd love to know about this little thing that I read in the Topper that has changed in your byline.
SCHLUMPF: Yes. So as of today, we're. This on Monday I have a new position, a full-time position with Common Wheel Magazine joining their 100 year history.
HORAN: Woo.
SCHLUMPF: Um, And I'm, you know, it's just a magazine I've read since I've been in this business and. Long respected and I especially really have a lot of admiration and respect for their current leadership.
So their editor, Dominic Posi, and their executive director, Ellen Konick. So conversations began a while ago and this has been going on behind the scenes for a bit. And so I'm just very excited. It's a wonderful place for me to land. I'll be writing both opinion and analysis. And one of the things they wanted to be sure was that I would continue with the Francis Effect Podcast, so I'm not going anywhere.
But we'll be writing for Commonwealth full-time now. So just really excited.
Thank you.
DAULT: Outstanding
SCHLUMPF: Yeah. Yeah.
So thank you to everyone for their support during, in the, in between time. But I think it's one of those things where everything turns out for the best, so
DAULT: Well, in my particular case, I mean, this is bringing together several of my favorite things because listeners will know that I have for a long time been sort of behind the scenes with Common Wheel, not as a member of their staff, but as a sort of fellow traveler who helps out with their podcast. And I helped to sort of launch that I guess, gosh, going on maybe seven or eight years ago now.
And, and they're just, again, they're some of my favorite people, and you're one of my favorite persons and I'm just, I'm so delighted that all this is happening, so just congratulations to you.
HORAN: Ditto to
SCHLUMPF: I'm Sure it helped that I knew you, so
HORAN: I was gonna say ditto to what David said, minus the podcast producing, which I cannot and do not do. But yeah, equally excited and really happy. I know we've known kind of behind the scenes for a bit and to be able to celebrate this publicly and share this with our listeners is really cool.
So congrats. I.
SCHLUMPF: so yeah that's my big news. Lots other, you know, kind of a few other things are going on but that's my big news for this episode. How about you, Dan? What's going on with you? I know you got the sniffles there.
HORAN: Yeah. So yeah, it's the typical sort of mid-semester, you know, cold that goes around. So if. Listeners hear a little bit of raspiness in my voice. That would be the the fall cold that hits most colleges and universities this time of year. But I can't complain. It could be worse. I'm doing well.
I guess the most exciting thing is since we last met, I spent. Fall break over in London, England. My partner Jessica and I traveled over there for fall break. She's also an academic, a theologian, and so we get fall breaks off and actually she's on sabbatical this semester, so she gets the whole fall off of sorts.
But it was a lot of fun. I get to travel to the United Kingdom in Ireland often for work, you know, conferences, lectures. I'll be there a couple times next year to give lectures at a few universities and other events. But this was just a little bit of vacation and much needed break from everything.
It was nice to be in a place. That has its own troubles in history, of course, but not to be there for any sort of commitment you know, work obligation, you know, event or something like that. And it was really nice. But then came back and hit the reality of the second half of the semester.
Another bright side is I had a really great meeting. I'm feeling like you, David, I mean, you've got two books coming out very soon. And so I'm still in the process of finishing two books that have been in the works for a while. And I had a great. Lunch meeting with one of my editors last week.
And have a clear sense of a timeline of a project I've been working on for more than 15 years. And this is the editing of the correspondence between Thomas Merton and his longtime agent editor and friend Naomi Burton Stone. And it is an awesome relationship and correspondence. But it is massive, as I've referred to at times in conversation on this podcast.
So, folks can keep an eye out. It would probably be in print around sometime in 2027, which sounds far away until we remember. It's November, 2025 right now, so the lights at the end of the tunnel getting brighter. David, how are you?
DAULT: Well, first of all, I'm delighted to hear about your travels. I'm delighted to hear about your successful meeting with your editor, and I'm delighted to hear about these projects that are happening. So congratulations on all those fronts. I'm doing very well. The thing that I want to talk about first and foremost is my kids, longtime listeners will recall I have two special needs children, both on the autism spectrum.
Halloween is a big holiday in our house and our older child started planning their costume, gosh. July. Anyway, it was a costume that involved like massive amounts of paper mache and and a a sort of a bright orange sort of wig that that was sort of reconverted. It's a long hair wig that, that our child ended up kind of braiding and preparing and all that.
The costume involved antlers and a huge broad ax and all these, and so like, and. They we all went out trick or treating on Friday night and our older kid could not have been happier about how everything turned out. Our younger kid, as you know, is very sort of passive about everything and so his response to Halloween was, there's a certain video game character, he bought a t-shirt and a pair of pants to look like the video game character, and that was his thing, and I think he was.
Pleased about how everything turned out as well. But in both cases they got a lot of candy and we just had a fun time going around the neighborhood. That's one of the highlights every year for me is just getting a chance to kind of be there and support our kids. You know, they're both in high school now and so some people might be critical of the fact that they're still trick or treating.
We don't care because it's just a magical time and we just had a delightful, just a delightful evening and a very good weekend. You mentioned the two books that I have the. The accessorized Bible is almost ready for release. In fact, I believe that the warehouse has just shipped me a box of 10 books, so I will physically be in possession of them sometime in the next week or so, and I'm very excited and terrified about that.
Coming up, there's a meeting in Boston for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature. I'm going to gonna get a chance to sit down with my editor and thank her and hopefully buy her a meal. For all of her patients because this has been a 15 year plus project for me. This first book, the second book, the Covert magisterium, is also coming out.
I, it'll be sometime in the spring, but we don't have a firm release date yet. Still working on things like the cover and the final copy edits and things like that. The other piece that's been happening is you listeners may or may not know that I started a regular weekly blog called David Dolt, is writing things on Substack and I'm putting out basically essays between 1500 and 5,000 words every week just about current events and theology and the stuff that I'm thinking about.
And so far the readership has been small but consistent. Got about 150 people that show up every week to, to engage with my writing. And I would love for that number to grow. But for right now, I couldn't be more pleased. The thing that has really been frustrating for me about writing through the years has been it's very low on dopamine hits.
You write stuff and it just basically goes into the void. And so I have enjoyed the medium of weekly. Releases because it means that I can get feedback on ideas much faster than the normal academic processes allow. You all have been very patient, as I info dumped a lot there, and I'm grateful to you.
But man, I just I'm feeling, you know, in the last episode I was feeling a lot of executive dysfunction. The last couple of weeks I've felt much in a much better place. So I'm just celebrating that with the two of you. Sometimes when the lights are on and somebody's home, it's good to like open the doors and say, we're home.
We're home. And so that has been my skull for the last. Two weeks speaking. Yeah.
SCHLUMPF: hear it, David.
DAULT: Speaking of what we are working on, let us talk about what's coming up here on the show today. In our first segment, we're gonna be looking at the tragedy that happened over the weekend where 42 million people here in the United States, 67% of those being families with young children have lost access to food security because snap benefits have been put into hiatus in the second.
Segment we're gonna be looking at the recent troubles at Loyola Marymount University. The trustees at that university have recently refused to recognize or have rescinded their recognition of the faculty union there. And so we're gonna talk about that. And then in our third segment where normally we have an interview, we're gonna talk about one more topic, and that is the extra judicial attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the high seas that have been authorized by the Trump administration. So all of that is coming up here on the Francis Effect. We hope that you will stay with us.
SEGMENT 1
SCHLUMPF: Welcome back to The Francis Effect. I'm Heidi Schlump and I'm here with Dan Haran and David Dahl. Every couple weeks we get together to discuss a variety of topics from a perspective informed by our Catholic faith. The shutdown of the federal government has now lasted more than a month with little sign of change in the immediate future.
While government employees have borne the brunt of the impact with hundreds of thousands of workers furloughed and thousands of essential workers on the job without pay for weeks, millions of people are about to experience the effects of the shutdown in a painful way. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as Snap and formerly known as food Stamps, provides food and related resources to about 42 million people in the United States, which amounts to about one in eight Americans.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the benefits, 79% of SNAP recipient households included either a child, an elderly individual, or a non elderly individual with a disability. According to the Trump administration last week, SNAP benefits were set to run out of funding on November 1st with payments scheduled to lapse this week.
In an 11th hour ruling. A federal judge in Rhode Island blocked the Trump administration from stopping the funding for federal food assistance on October 31st. However, at the time of this recording on the morning of Monday, November 3rd, the funding stopped for SNAP over the weekend and it remains unclear whether the administration would be able to or is willing to allocate contingency funds to comply with the court's ruling and to keep SNAP benefits in place. Archbishop Timothy Lio, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement released late October 28th. The group is, quote, deeply alarmed that essential programs that support the common good such as Snap may be interrupted. He went on to say this would be catastrophic for families and individuals who rely on Snap to put food on the table and places the burden of the shutdown most heavily on the poor and vulnerable of our nation who are least able to move forward.
Lio said. Dan, as Archbishop Lio said, this latest development in the federal shutdown saga is now weighing most heavily on the poor and vulnerable of our nation. How are you thinking about this situation?
HORAN: First I'm, I'm. Carrying a very heavy heart, I think as all three of us and so many others are, that this is as you rightly said, Heidi you know, moving to affect more and more people. Millions in this case, and millions who are the most in the most precarious of situations and the most vulnerable.
I do appreciate that. Archbishop Broo the president of the UC. U-S-C-C-B made this point. I only wish he made it a little bit more strongly, to be honest with you. That's my only sort of critical observation because I've been thinking about the centrality of our church's teaching on the option for the poor, that one of the key principles of Catholic social thought that's at the heart of.
The Hebrew Bible, the prophetic literature of the Old Testament, every message of Jesus', every action of his and the gospels is a prioritization. Is the care for, is the centering of the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the US bishops historically have been very strong on this topic thinking in particular their 1986 document, economic Justice for all.
And I just wanna share a few lines. I went back and looked at this in light of the circumstances unfolding right now in the federal government and the US bishops in 1986 were addressing the option for the poor within this context for moments just like this. So in paragraph 24, we read quote, decisions must be judged in light of what they do for the poor, what they do to the poor, and what they enable the poor to do for themselves.
Or in paragraph 86, we read the obligation to provide justice for all means that the poor have the single most urgent claim on the conscience of the nation. End quote, and here in pa, paragraph 87, just shortly after that passage quote, as individuals and importantly here as a nation. Therefore, we are called to make a fundamental option for the poor end quote.
I could go on. I, I encourage our listeners to check out that document, which reads as if it was written today or ought to have been written today. And so I think from a Catholic perspective, there is a moral obligation and I think there's really nothing kind of more disturbing more controversial, more disgusting than people who are.
Barely able to make ends meet, or people who are struggling to meet those, you know, fundamental needs for basic human flourishing, to have that taken away. And I know that this becomes a game of kind of lowercase p politics in the US political sphere where Republicans are blaming Democrats and Democrats are blaming Republicans and so forth.
But I, I think the sides are obviously not equal. I think the way that the Trump administration has discussed this and has used this, a suspension of snap benefits as another pawn and a political move is really disturbing. And so that's kind of how I'm approaching this, is thinking about this as again that old Testament gospel and magisterial mandate of the option for the poor.
I.
DAULT: Well, if I may this, the events this weekend also drove me back into Encyclicals and I was reading. Gel Vita from John Paul ii back in 1995, and I was drawn to paragraph 12. And in there this is the document where John Paul II really identifies this concept, which gets a lot of traffic. Now in Catholic circles, this idea of the culture of death.
And so this is the paragraph where he really begins to talk about that. He says, this reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity. And in many cases, takes the form of a veritable culture of death. This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic, and political currents, which encourage an idea of society exclusively concerned with efficiency.
Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak, a life which would require greater acceptance. Love and care is considered useless or held to be an intolerable burden. It is therefore rejected in one way or another.
A person who, because of illness handicap, or more simply just by existing compromises, the wellbeing or lifestyle of those who are more favored tends to be looked. Upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated In this way, a kind of conspiracy against life is unleashed. And I was really drawn to that notion of efficiency as being a hallmark of this culture of death.
And we, you know, we're coming out of the season right at the beginning of the Trump administration of the unleashing of this Department of Government efficiency. And the whole notion that somehow. The most important thing is to cut costs, even if it means harming people directly or doing violence to them and so what we as Catholics need to be thinking, not about the economic as the primary range of our moral concern, but rather the economic arises out of this really weird idea from ancient Greek, this idea of the ocos, which is the family.
Which is, you know, the O coast is a concept where understanding that we have limited resources. We have to talk to each other about how we're gonna make sure that everybody gets fed. Knowing that we have limited resources in the family, we need to talk to each other about our needs to understand how all those needs are gonna get met.
That fundamental notion of managing. It's not simply about efficiency, it's about communication and care. And we've lost that in this movement. We instead have thought that simply, you know, the management of efficiency is the only goal that God is gonna re reward us for. But that's completely wrong.
And you know, I, listeners will know it takes a lot to drive me back into the writings of. Of blessed Saint Pope John Paul ii, and nevertheless, I found that to be a really helpful way of thinking about things this week because this speaks to exactly what we're in right now. It is an efficiency driven culture of death.
HORAN: I'll just add on the JP. Reference. You know, I also thought about him too. He has this line that is worth quoting here for the measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. And that is to your point, David, about ocos meaning household. Right. And we can think of the, it's the root word for economy in ecology.
How we talk about the household, how we structure it. And I think your point about efficiency, while that is, is a favorite of the market is not the most important thing when it comes to Catholic teaching. It's the common good, right? It's the care for all, especially those who are most precarious.
SCHLUMPF: Yeah, so I, you know, I can't disagree with anything you guys have said about Catholic social teaching and issues such as this. You know, the option for the poor and vulnerable, and of course, the human dignity of. People, many of whom are working, or as we said at the beginning, are children, you know, elderly or people with disabilities.
And we're talking about the basics of life here with food. The politics of it has been really discouraging to me. So first of all, I was noticing, you know, especially on social media, a lot of misinformation about Snap, about who gets snap, about how much money they get, about what they can spend it on.
And I'm pretty sure that a lot of that misinformation that was going around social media was probably bot generated. So a lot of, I know somebody you know who gets snap and buys. The diamond ring with it or whatever, you know, it was just really a lot of wrong things. And when you try, you know, if anyone was trying to disagree in the comments was not getting anywhere.
But also let's remember why the government is shut down in the first place. And this is where, you know, when both sides are blaming each other, it's easy to think, oh, well they're both equally to blame. That's, let's remember the reason the Democrat are not. You know, are not willing to vote for the the bill that would open the government is because healthcare premiums are going to double, triple quintuple for so many Americans.
If the subsidies are not. Included. And so then you have like this one two punch. People are starting to get their renewal notices and seeing how much their healthcare premiums are gonna be going up. And these are the basics of life. Like people are literally gonna have to decide between food on the table.
Paying rent and paying their heating bill or having healthcare. And given that so many people voted for Trump because they were concerned about high inflation and high prices we are economically for working people in a very tenuous, scary position right now. The only thing that gives me hope is that I have seen a lot of folks stepping up.
Trying to do more for their local food pantries, food banks. I got a message from my kids' former elementary school that they're putting together food that they're gonna be having on campus for folks. But we have to recognize that no amount of private charity is going to fill the gap that government does for providing basics for people that really need it.
So I'm hoping by the time this. Podcasts, this might have been taken care of, and the Trump administration will do the right thing that it's being compelled to do by a court and restore those benefits for now.
HORAN: Yeah, I was gonna say something similar, Heidi, on that last point, which is this is a, you know, a developing story and we are recording on Monday. We're hoping Indeed, and praying that. This gets resolved in the coming days. I did see something where a treasury secretary Scott Bessett suggested that by Wednesday maybe they'd be able to channel the money into these accounts.
But again, this is, the fact that we're even having this conversation is deeply problematic. And you're right to say that you know that it's good that people have been moved by. The, this situation and, you know, are trying, many people are trying to support local food banks and other resources on the private and charitable sector.
But you know, from the Catholic perspective, which is what we are bringing to this conversation, to this. You know, developing story is quite clear that this is actually the role of the government. This is the purpose of the government, and it is not about you know, creating avenues of advancement and success for the few, for, you know, for those who believe in the falsehood of meritocracy that doesn't exist.
I mean, so many people in this country live paycheck to paycheck, and I think, Heidi, you brought that up well and made a good point that this isn't just. You know, no, to my knowledge, I've never met anybody in all of my years of ministry in all of my years of, you know, living in many different places in this country I've never known anybody who has willfully opted into seeking out these social benefits.
When they could have a living wage or, you know, work in a meaningful, dignified way. And so this is a situation in which so many people are, you know, on a knife's edge, in, into falling, into poverty, into illness into destitution. And we should not be taking this lightly. I find it deeply cynical.
I find it deeply sinful. When people are dismissing out of hand the government's role here, and for those who identify as Christian and those who claim to be Catholic including our sitting vice president including many people on the president's cabinet, including many people in leadership of.
Both chambers of the US Congress. We need to wake up people. It's, you know, there's a lot of talk how those four years of the Biden administration, there's a lot of hand wringing, including from US bishops about whether or not President Biden was a quote unquote, you know, good Catholic, whether he should be approaching communion because of.
Political parties platform. And yet here are people who are literally willing to let people starve to death, you know, to the tune of 42 million people who will be going without these benefits in this week. And I find it really deplorable.
DAULT: Well, and one just more dimension of this and that is when reports are saying that when you are onboarding at Walmart, one of the things that they tell all of their new employees is how to sign up for SNAP benefits. Because the expectation is you will not make enough at a wage working at this company for you to actually be able to make ends meet.
So what we're dealing with here is not some kind of natural disaster. We are dealing with engineered. Austerity. We are dealing with manufactured starvation. We are dealing with situations where, and this brings us back to Gelian vitae where the desires for some who have access to comfort and access to violence to protect that comfort are sort of circling the wagon.
At this particular moment in saying no, no, we don't yet have enough. Even as in the most, not just the richest country in the world, but the most wealthy country in the history of the world looks around and says. Turning out its pockets. Gee whiz. We certainly can't help all of these people as we are busy subsidizing billionaires as we are busy subsidizing the military as we are busy subsidizing a terror regime being unleashed on our cities, including my city.
And I'm curious when when the American people and particularly the Catholic bishops will find their voice. I hope they find it soon, and I, yeah, like you I'm finding it just really hard to be quiet in these times.
HORAN: Well. Maybe a coda to that last point. I know we don't have time to talk about it in this segment, and sadly we'll be re returning to this topic of the ice raids and the anti-immigration policies we see unfolding. But to your point about the Bishops, they can go back and read their own document from 2003, called Strangers No Longer to Gather on the Journey of Hope, in which they make a very strong case about the importance of immigration, the need for immigration and justice that's involved in this.
SCHLUMPF: Course our bishops will be meeting next week for their annual meeting. So it'll be interesting to see what the status of this and so many of these other issues are by at the time of this meeting and what they do. So we'll probably be around at our next episode to talk about just that. But for now, we'll take a break and we'll be right back with our next topic where we'll be talking about the union busting at Loyola Marymount University.
You're listening to the Francis Effect.
SEGMENT 2
DAULT: Welcome back to The Francis Effect. I'm David Dat, and I'm here with Heidi Schlump and Dan Horan. Every couple of weeks we get together to discuss a variety of topics from a perspective informed by our Catholic faith. Earlier this fall, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles announced that it would no longer recognize unions representing its employees.
The decision made by the university's board of trustees invoked a religious exemption from the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board, and came after 10 months of negotiations with a union representing non-tenure track faculty at the school union. Members called it a shock and a blanket rejection.
The 400 members of SEIU, local 7 21 who teach in the school's College of Liberal Arts, college of Communication and Fine Arts, and the School of Film and Television have been negotiating for better pay benefits and working conditions. The Jesuit University defended its action. Claiming the union's proposal would hurt the school financially and lead to layoffs, tuition, hikes, and program cuts.
Catholic labor scholars accused the University of Betraying Catholic social teachings support of the right to unionize, which goes back to the foundational papal in cyclical of 1891 Rum Navarro from Pop Leo 13, the representative of the Catholic Labor Network called Loyola Marymount University's actions cowardly and quote the opposite of what the gospels call us to do, unquote.
Since the board's decision, students and faculty have protested, signed petitions and threatened a strike. Heidi, what's the latest on this story? How should we be thinking about this?
SCHLUMPF: Well, here we are again facing like a very fundamental. Part of Catholic social teaching, which is workers' rights to right, to unionize and to seek better working conditions for from their employers. And we have this representative of the church not following Catholic social teaching. The union is the latest from them was last week.
They're regrouping and they're still trying to demand. That Loyola might change their mind, but they are threatening to strike. So we'll see if that actually happens. What I'm noticing is this is the second time that I've seen this. So a year ago I wrote a very similar story about another Jesuit institution, Marquette University, that did the exact same thing.
So they were negotiating, you know, in. What people thought was good faith with a union that, again, represented these non-tenure track and adjunct faculty. And then used that religious exempt exemption to then not negotiate with them and so not have to, you know, increase pay. I found it interesting that Loyola Marymount was, citing financial, the financial problems that might come if they were to offer more pay or better working conditions for these faculty members, because that, of course, is a serious issue facing, not just Catholic higher education, but all folks in higher education, since it's, all three of us are in it, we know that.
I just finished a couple stories for religion news service on the topic of Catholic higher education, and one is about this very issue, which is. The financial challenges and the way Catholic universities are going about ba them, we have this enrollment cliff of the demographics of people going to college, decreasing.
We have the increase, the additional pressures from the Trump administration and just rising costs and all these other issues. But the idea that a university would decide to settle this on the backs of some of the. Most vulnerable facul, you know, faculty there. Those without the protection of tenure, usually very low salaries, high teaching loads a lot of, you know, but yet doing the bread and butter work of teaching their undergraduate students is unconscionable.
And there's a lot of criticism of, there was of MARTA a year ago and there is now of LMU, but it doesn't seem to be changing anything. And I think it's very concerning that this seems to now be a trend.
HORAN: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you Heidi. And thank you for your great reporting on this. I'm thinking of a couple things, one of which is there's been a lot of industry and secular reporting on this as well. Touching on a number of the points that you just raised about the demographic. Cliff that's affecting enrollment in a lot of institutions.
I think since then that's been on the horizon for the better part of a decade. And as somebody who served on two university boards of trustees, I mean, this is something that would be discussed at the boardroom every meeting you know, with institutions that happen to be, you know, enrollment.
I. Tuition driven. And it's true even for those multi-billion dollar endowment institutions that are concerned about the bottom line. Add to that, the current Trump administration's hostility toward higher education, the threats to immigration, the threats to affirmative action and inclusion. You have a lot of pressure and higher education that in addition to.
Higher cost, the perception that higher education is no longer worth it, which is a very troubling mis misunderstanding. That gets a lot of people unfortunately into trouble. We can talk more about that but these are realities and you're right to name them. At the same time, I think there's a another misconception and you know, the three of us represent.
You know, three different people working in Catholic higher education. Right now I'm really fortunate to be a tenured professor. David's on the tenure track, you know, up for review. And Heidi, you're an adjunct at an institution and, you know, we are all privileged in lots of different ways. You know, you as an adjunct are not solely dependent on teaching a number of courses just to make ends meet.
But you do know from, and we won't have to get into the numbers, but people don't realize that. A large number of the teaching faculty, especially at large institutions like Loyola Marymount or even your home institution, Loyola Chicago, and even a small liberal arts college like St. Mary's, where I teach there's a fair number of.
A contingent faculty which are part-time faculty and at larger institutions, usually graduate students or those who are A, B, D, right? So they've not, they don't have their terminal degree in hand, but have advanced studies, usually one or two master's degrees and so forth. And those folks are not paid.
They're paid by class, right? They're paid a very small stipend for the work that they're doing. And if they have a full-time other job or another source of income, then that's usually not an issue. But there's also. Oftentimes, you know, no additional benefits guaranteed with those kinds of appointments, including things like healthcare or retirement savings.
And so what we see with this, and I remember. A multi-part story that either inside Higher Education or the Chronicle of Higher Education did a number of years ago, really showing how a number of adjunct faculty members at institutions, including Catholic institutions were working poor. You know, this goes back to our SNAP benefits conversation in the last segment.
And so I just say that because thing, there, there a lot of things can be true at once. And the question is, you know, what? What factor takes priority, takes precedent. And I think actually this segment that our conversation now follows closely from the last, which is Heidi, to your point that those who are suffering most immediately are those who are most vulnerable in this setting.
And that's really troubling, particularly for institutions that identify as Catholic.
DAULT: I just want to say a quick word about this religious exemption that is being invoked by Loyola Marymount University, and it's not the first time that this has been utilized. Longtime listeners know that will. Of my weird scholarly pursuits is I deal a lot with the Supreme Court and First Amendment law, and so two cases that are very important here, one from 2012, which goes by the name Hosanna Tabor, and the other from 2020, which goes by our Lady of Guadalupe.
You can Google those and sort of find out more about those two cases. What's happening here is an interesting dynamic where the university or the organization will say, okay, we don't have to do equal employment opportunity law because these people are ministers. And it is our fundamental first amendment right.
To be able to say who is a minister and who is not a minister in our organization, in our religious faith, whatever. But what's so interesting about this is the Catholic Church doesn't recognize women as ministers. They are not allowed to be priests. They are not allowed to be part of the clergy. This is sort of the brightest of bright lines for traditionalists.
Nevertheless, when female faculty. Are part of a bargaining unit, they are immediately classed as ministers under this ministerial exemption. And so that kind of moving fast and loose, I think is an important piece here because I can only speak for myself without going too much into the weeds, listeners, I have a document between myself and my bishop called the Manam, which comes out of a certain.
Couple of parts of Canon law and a certain document again from Pope John Paul ii, which ex corde Ecclesia from the heart of the church. And it basically means that I have agreed, and I have a written agreement with my bishop that says that when I teach, I will teach in such a way that the Catholic church can recognize itself in my teaching as being authentic and proper and correct.
And so, you know, this is an understanding that I take very seriously, but one of the things that is, at least in my man is. That I am not an agent of the magisterium. I am not a part of the clergy that is laid out with clarity in this document that church, that the church has asked me to have with my bishop, so that we all understand that what I'm teaching can be monitored and can be sort of kept in check.
You know, I'm not gonna go out and wildly say that the Catholic Church believes things that it doesn't believe. I'm fine to have that document, but I recognize that document says that I'm not a member of the magisterial clergy. And so for the, for an organization or for a university to suddenly recognize me as a magisterial agent for the purposes of this exemption so that we cannot organize and do things like that.
It's very scary and I don't wanna get too much in the weeds here, but I just wanted to say that.
HORAN: Well, what's complicated further too, I've seen some people make proposals that maybe this is something that the contingent faculty of LMU or those who are seeking to form the union might pursue in ecclesiastical courts, canonical court. And that I actually think is a dead end. I mean, the United States makes quite clear so, you know, it's true that Loyola Marymount University, which is a university sponsored by the society of Jesus that is the Jesuits, the religious of the sacred heart of Mary and the Sisters of St. Joseph, of Orange County in California, you know, have their Catholic identity, their Catholic status recognized by that sponsorship.
That is a real thing, but it is sort of odd intra when it comes to. To church identity and church sort of polity in the United States. As, as long as the US Constitution holds, there still remains a separation of church and state. And David, to your point, there is this ju history of religious exemption, right?
Because of that separation. At the same time you know that separation means that, you know, the institution itself as an institution of higher education is subject. To, you know, federal and state and local laws that govern educational institutions as well and protects things like academic freedom and, you know, the right to form and grant degrees and curricula and this sort of stuff.
It's also important to realize that a lot of these institutions, though they have. Maybe structured boards in which there are reserved powers that are held by some of these representatives of the sponsoring religious institutions in most cases. These are also independent nonprofit educational institutions, right?
So. In other words, the Vatican can't really come in and mess around in the same way as it could with like a Pontifical University or even maybe a local seminary. The authority does not exist there. So this is a way in which another kind of angle we might say that speaks to your point, David, about the kind of playing all sides here to benefit, you know, financially certain.
Powers and authorities. Maybe again, as Heidi said, to the detriment of those who are most vulnerable, who are in the most precarious of situations. I just wanna recommend a resource for listeners who may be in higher education like ourselves or interested in some of these ethical questions.
Speaking of Jesuits, the Jesuit moral theologian, James Keenan published a book a few years ago called University Ethics, and one of the kind of. Impetus for that as he tells it, is that there, ironically, for all of the theological faculty and ethicists that exist in higher education at these institutions, there hasn't been a whole lot of attention paid to these kinds of questions from within the tradition and within the context of US higher education.
So that's a resource that I would encourage folks to take a look at, to help think through some of these topics because they are complicated. But at the end of the day, you know, we go back to the option for the poor, then we go back. To the church's tradition about the dignity of work and the right to organize.
This is something that has been repeated for the last a hundred plus years. It's something that was repeated very recently by Pope Leo the 14th in his apostolic ex.
DAULT: Well, and just to add. Even though we're talking specifically right now about Loyola Marymount University, as Heidi pointed out, this is not just limited to LMU, this has been happening at other universities. We can also look at Wheeling Jesuit in West Virginia, but also the university where I teach Loyola University.
Chicago is currently in the process of a non-tenure track faculty union as a bargaining unit in discussion with the administration, and part of my. Task as a member of the the faculty council has been sort of listening to and learning what has been going on in these negotiations and how they are being conducted.
Are they being conducted in good faith? What are the possibilities? What are the hoped for outcomes, but also in the process of that learning? Very much the details of what my non-tenure track colleagues are living through. And as a person who, you know, worked my way into a tenure track position from doing a lot of adjunct teaching, I've lived that myself.
So I know some of that anecdotally, but also just realizing that it's a widespread problem of. People who are bringing in tremendous revenue to a university and nevertheless are not being compensated for that revenue and who are carrying a tremendous amount of emotional labor and administrative burden, even as they are not being compensated for those.
This is not simply an issue of economics, as we've said before. It's an issue of justice and it's an issue of how we think of ourselves as a community and a family working towards the common good. So listeners, we know that we've only scratched the surface here. And if you are embroiled in one of these labor disputes, please know that you are in our prayers and we stand in solidarity with you.
And we want very much to be lifting you up and finding ways to amplify. Your cause and your situation because again, it's not simply a matter of politics. This is core to Catholic identity and Catholic social teaching. But for now, we're gonna leave this topic and we're gonna move on to our final segment.
Please stay with us. You're listening to the Francis Effect.
SEGMENT 3
HORAN: Welcome back to The Francis Effect. I'm Dan Horan, and I'm here with David Dol and Heidi Schlump. Every couple of weeks we get together to discuss a variety of topics from a perspective informed by our shared Catholic faith. Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has acknowledged that it has authorized at least 14 strikes against small vessels at sea off the coast of South America. These attacks have resulted in the deaths of at least 60 people. Over this past summer, the United States began to build up its military presence in the Caribbean Sea, especially off the coast of Venezuela.
According to Joshua Baras of PBS news, quote, Trump and defense secretary Pete Hex have cited in intelligence that they claim proves the boats were involved in narco terrorism or transporting narcotics to the us. They've said that the people on board were affiliated with specific criminal organizations.
They have not publicly offered evidence to support their claims. This gets to the heart of the concerns that many lawmakers and observers have regarding these attacks over the past weeks. The administration says that they have evidence that the killings are necessary and justified, but refuses to make that evidence available.
Some Republican lawmakers have received briefings, but their democratic counterparts have been excluded from those discussions. The fear among critics is that these attacks amount to extra juridical killings a situation where the president can declare the murder of anyone in the world with no due process.
The Trump administration and its supporters counter with the claim that these attacks are necessary to protect the US from the inflow of dangerous drugs. Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro has claimed that the attacks are the first stage of an attempted regime change in his country. During the first Trump administration, Maduro was indicted on charges of narco terrorism.
David, there's a lot going on here. Where do you think we should begin with all of this?
DAULT: Well, I think the place that we should begin as. Has been the case so often since the first Bush administration, but it just continues, is we are creating what are often called states of exception. Places where we don't follow the procedures of bringing evidence and actually having a juridical process where the evidence is brought into an adversarial situation where.
Defense attorneys can actually say that they have counter evidence. Instead, there simply is a decision made, a drone strike happens and suddenly human lives are lost. And you know, I don't simply want to call out Republican administrations as I routinely do on social media. I also call out the Obama administration for its use of drone strikes and extra juridical killings. To me, that's an unconscionable thing for us to be doing as Americans. We are a nation founded on the rule of law. The idea that every person is innocent. Until they are proven guilty, which means that simply having evidence in your hand is not enough, and simply saying, you heard a rumor is not enough and most important, saying that you fear the consequences of their actions is not enough.
You can't jail them or kill them under those circumstances. You have to actually put them through a process where they get a chance to have their day in court, but that's not happening. And. Most troubling is that, you know, in, in the pushback that has rightfully happened against these murders on the high seas, Trump has elevated his rhetoric.
Basically saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's not a wild paraphrase. I'm the president, I can kill whoever I want. If that doesn't chill you to your bone listeners and friends, if that doesn't stop you in your tracks and make you realize that we are on again, a careening uncontrolled ride to the culture of death.
Let me just light up the upper balconies here and say. This is a very troubling thing for the President of the United States to say it was a troubling thing for the President of the United States to do it, and many presidents have but it's especially troubling now for the President of the United States to just be openly admitting, Hey, I think I can kill whoever I want.
SCHLUMPF: Yeah. David, you rightly put this in the context of like other things that are happening and just the rule of law and basic, you know, rights that. That, that we used to have under our constitution, both here and in our foreign policy are not being followed. So this whole idea that masked men with no Id can, like grab people and force them people who are citizens and force them into, you know, a van and take them away and send them off to a foreign country that they're not even originally from.
I mean, it's just sometimes overwhelming to think about how quickly we've moved into. The definition of fascism. But I guess what concerns me about the Venezuelan you know, killings, murders are that, I worry that it's not affecting Americans so closely that they're paying attention, and of course, we're drowning in the bad news and the chaos that the Trump administration is creating.
And so this is just one more thing, and it's sort of happening out in these waters where we don't. I have to pay attention. You know, the thing the masked men grabbing people are happening on my very block, you know, and so that's, that becomes very real for me. The snap cuts are affecting millions of people whose children are literally gonna go to bed hungry.
And there's just so many other things that are happening in the chaos of this administration that's something like this might get overlooked, and yet it's almost the scariest thing that's happening. Of all of them. And again, I don't know if this is an area where religious leaders would naturally see themselves as stepping up and saying something, but I would like to see ethicists and, you know, obviously peace and war and foreign policy is definitely the area, you know, an area that ca touches on our faith and our teaching as well.
So it's not crazy for me to expect religious leaders to be paying attention to this as well.
HORAN: Yeah, it's a good point Heidi. And I think I actually, I would take it in a different direction. I mean, it. The war and peace conversation is an important one, but there is no declared war. Congress has not declared war on the, sovereign nation known as Venezuela. And I think that, you know, whether you like Maduro or not, and it's clear that Trump and his administration really does not.
And I'm not s. Defending Maduro or any internal state policies. But I think he has a point when he's saying that this is an encroachment, this is a, you know, it's certainly a threat to the sovereignty of the people of Venezuela. And I think it's worth thinking about maybe two other principles.
This has become a Catholic social teaching episode this week. Maybe every week it is. But you know, the principle both solidarity and the dignity and value of the human person, and these things brought together, I think are the kinds of things you're pointing to, right? It's easier.
If not easy to recognize the violation of the dignity of human personhood in the neighbors and the folks that you see on the street, right? And it's easier perhaps to be in solidarity when folks gather for a celebration of the Eucharist outside of an ice detention center. It's a lot harder, as you rightly say, Heidi, to be in solidarity or to practice solidarity with, anonymous people who may or may not be engaged in criminal activity off the coast of a nation that most people in this country probably couldn't identify on a map, and yet that's what our faith calls us to do. I think your point about religious leaders is really important, and maybe there are a few of our brother bishops who are listening ahead of their meeting next week that might think about emphasizing the point of dignity and value of human personhood, particularly when it comes to those who also have equal dignity and value as everybody else who might be.
People who are not easy to like or to love. People who are drug traffickers, people who are violent, people who are criminals, right? And so even if we were to take, for instance hegseth and Trump's word, that these are people doing terrible things that does not give anybody according to church, teaching the right to execute them, not even with due process as Pope Francis made absolutely clear in the revision of the catechism.
There is no permission from the Catholic church's perspective and ethical standpoint to execute somebody as a response to a crime. They should be held accountable. They should experience due process, but what's going on right now is absolutely sinful and abhorrent, and that is just a matter of fact.
And so, but. That point of moving towards solidarity, particularly with people that, that may be doing things that are really bad is a hard thing to do. And, but that's what we're called to and I think that's where religious leadership is seen at its best.
DAULT: I wanna build on that, Dan, but in a slightly weird direction. One of the most beloved actors of my lifetime is Al Pacino, and he is known for many roles, but one of his standout roles is a movie called Scarface, which is a movie about a drug trafficker. One of the most beloved television shows of the two thousands is breaking bad a TV show about a drug trafficker.
We. In America, sitting in the comforts of our homes, love to tell stories of these people and get excited to kinda watch the intrigue of the drug trade and all of that. And I'm going back again to paragraph 12 from Evan Gallium Vitty, that comfort where we comfort ourselves and pleasure ourselves with these stories of extremity.
And then the way in which we refuse to be interrupted by the. Actual extremity of what life in the drug trade the economics of it, the ways in which the United States has been deeply involved in it throughout my lifetime. I'm thinking about Iran Contra, the way that we ran drugs during that particular time with the Central Intelligence Agency.
All of the ways in which we are inextricably bound up in both legal and illegal drugs as a major portion of our economy here in the United States. And yet we. Tend to continually want to say, we love to tell stories of these people, but when we actually have to deal with these people, we will just treat them as disposable. And that to me is again, an unconscionable shift where I will get pleasure and comfort from basically stories extracted from and told about this particular set of social arrangements. But when I actually have to encounter and deal with the realities of these social arrangements, the most convenient thing for me is simply to exterminate them. That again, it's just to me we're in it. We're in this place where we are narcotizing ourselves with our media. We're numbing ourselves to our moral obligations to the least of these among us, some of whom are involved in the lump and proletariat activities of the drug trade. For better or worse, they are made in the image of God and they are our brothers, sisters, and non-binary siblings.
We must find a way to account for them and care for them.
SCHLUMPF: What a great turn of phrase there, David. It's almost like you're a writer.
HORAN: Narcotize. I like it.
SCHLUMPF: But it, this is also to say that there hasn't been evidence yet or proof that these people are drug traffickers. So, I mean, and in part because we haven't formally declared war and we're not like getting the information that we should be about these sort of rogue killings.
But there's, you know, some claims that's at least some of the people who have been. Like you said, summarily executed. Were poor fishermen from other countries, not in the Caribbean, not even from Venezuela. So I mean, the whole, this is what's so problematic about these secret, you know, undeclared wars there where again, there's no due process or anything.
And just like I said very concerning and I'm so glad that we skipped my interview this week to do, to include this very important news story.
HORAN: Well, I mean, just to add to that too, you know, we think about the meddling, the. It's taken place over many decades in, in, in locations like Afghanistan, Iraq, and others in the Middle East. We've seen this obviously in the seventies, eighties, even in the nineties in Central and South America. As David reminded us, the consequences of this are really devastating in the short term for the people of these places, but it always comes back to bite.
The aggressors and in this case the United States in the rear end, in the long term. The protracted wars in the Middle East, I think are case in point. You know, it's been over and over again. Whether proxy wars with the USSR and Russia or what have you, like the effects the understandable animosity and hostility in the face of these unjust.
Unsanctioned, no due process killings. You know, there, there's that sort of element too that I think doesn't, you know, there's a kind of a recency bias that happens in, in, in these cases. But David, I'm curious, I know you've given this a little bit more thought than I have, you know, I'm not sure what to make of, you know, kind of perspective motivations here.
Right. You know, it's clear that the evidence has not been presented. The defense Department or his hele call it the War Department and President Trump and the rest of his cabinet have not given any justification for this. Maduro thinks that this is as was mentioned already, a kind of creeping regime change effort.
Again, US has been doing that for the better part of a century, and that has also not gone well. Do you have thoughts about what is going on? Why is this even happening?
DAULT: I mean, so I would only be able to speculate and that speculation is based on. Seeing patterns that go back to, again, the CIA's involvement in the Colombian drug trade and the golden triangle in Asia during the Vietnam War and this kind of extra juridical killing. You know, as I'm looking at these boats, I'm thinking about Eden Pastora and the people who were bombed in Le Pena.
You know, and it just, you know, where nuns are killed and religious are killed. Priests are killed because they're, again, inconvenient to the ongoing movements of American intelligence forces in the field. So we are, what we're seeing here is a set of maneuvers that, that certainly will involve trying, I think, to have access to petroleum.
Because of the important interests there in terms of minerals and other sorts of resources in Venezuela. We're also seeing, you know, in a lot of these countries in Central and South America attempts to move beyond capitalism. To have ways of kind of maneuvering that are not defined by US interests, but instead are, again, to get back to the, this concept of subsidiarity are defined by the people who are closest to the decisions being made and the effects of those decisions.
The US historically doesn't like people to be making decisions about their own lives. It really doesn't like supporting the dignified agency of every person towards their own destiny. There really is a notion that there is, there's a continuing manifest destiny that America gets to impose. I don't know, because we're white or because we think of ourselves as Christian, or because we're the richest, but for some reason we think we have the right to do this, and we have continually created havoc and chaos.
For the least of these in every place that we have attempted to do this. And you continually say it's not sustainable. We have been fooling ourselves thinking that it is sustainable for a long time. But I will just tie this back and say what we are now observing here in America with the loss of SNAP benefits, with the loss of healthcare, with the incredible precarity and with armed gangs, with no accountability roaming in our neighborhoods.
We're seeing things that we have exported to other countries coming home to us now, and that really, I think, again, should chill us, but also we should take accountability for that and begin. Not to continue it, but to make amends for it. That's my thought.
HORAN: Well, it's a chilling and truthful observation, David, and I think it's prophetic in that it calls people to return to the key principles, and we've talked about a lot of them on these very. Distressing, very important, very impactful topics in this episode. And that is to go back to Catholic social teaching.
You know, this is at the heart of our faith tradition. There are insights and resources. The question is, as Jesus asks in the gospels, to those who would be his followers, do we have eyes to see, ears to hear? And are we gonna put that. Into practice. So we will keep working on that. In the meantime, I know all three of us are keeping our listeners and all those who are affected by these terrible developments in prayer as we try to practice solidarity ourselves.
That's it for now, but I'm sure we'll be coming back to some of these themes again and again, quite sadly. And you know, we hope that maybe we'll talk about something a little bit brighter next time. But in the meantime, we we will always bring these topics to you and in conversation with our faith tradition.
So thank you for listening to The Francis Effect. We'll see you in two weeks.