Searching for God # 74

A New Hampshire Episcopal bishop's stark warning to his clergy is resonating across the nation, drawing fervent praise from some and rebukes from others.

Bishop Rob Hirschfeld was one of several community and faith leaders gathered in Concord, N.H., for a vigil for Renee Macklin Good just days after she was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in

Hirschfeld called out the "cruelty, the injustice and the horror … unleashed in Minneapolis," and warned his clergy to prepare for "a new era of martyrdom."

"I've asked them to get their affairs in order to make sure they have their wills written," he said, "because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable." (From NPR, January 18, 2026, in a piece entitled, ‘Amid ICE clashes, New Hampshire bishop urges clergy to prepare their wills’ by Tovia Smith)

From merton.bellarmine.edu, quoting the preface to ‘The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer,’ we read:

‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘ Reinhold Neibuhr,’ in his preface, was one of the truly creative spirits of the Church. In Nazi Germany he carried his Christian loyalty to the actual point of taking up his cross and going to his own Golgoltha….(Bonhoeffer) sets forth what the doctrine of the grace of Christ really means, in distinction from the formalisms of thought which have often obscured its searching truth’’ and semi-mystical interpretation he treats at length the Sermon on the Mount and he concludes with a rapt and semi-mystical interpretation of ‘The Church of Jesus Christ and the Life of Discipleship.’ Here are convictions wrought in the fires of magnificent self-sacrifice and a courage which went all the way to a martyr’s death.

First published in 1937, Bonhoeffer was answering the call to return home to face the Third Reich. First published in 1894, and also in response to the Sermon on the Mount, Leo Tolstoy’s epic work, ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You,’ includes these words:

This is the case with all men in authority, who occupy positions more profitable than they could occupy except for the present regime, from the lowest police officer to the Tsar. All of them are more or less convinced that the existing order is immutable, because—the chief consideration—it is to their advantage. But the peasants, the soldiers, who are at the bottom of the social scale, who have no kind of advantage from the existing order, who are in the very lowest position of subjection and humiliation, what forces them to believe that the existing order in which they are in their humble and disadvantageous position in the order which ought to exist, and which they ought to support even at the cost of evil actions contrary to their conscience? (p. 300)

Bishop Herschfield’s ‘call’ to his clergy to ‘get their affairs in order to prepare for a possible and feasible martyrdom’ echoes both Bonhoeffer and Tolstoy, and while some may, and likely will, call his rhetoric catastrophizing, it is the most clear-headed, authentic, responsible, and encouraging ‘call’ to come from the ecclesial hierarchy in this turbulent period in United States history. Statements have to give way to bodies in the streets, on the roads, in the Home Depots and the Walmart parking lots. And with bodies in the streets, with or without a clerical collar, those bodies, just like Rene Good’s, will suffer the ignominy of bullets from the terrorists who themselves have been recruited and serve at the pleasure of the single-most dangerous terrorist, the occupant of the Oval Office.

Millions of ordinary citizens have already, for months, been putting their bodies and their whistles, and their cell phones and cameras in the streets whenever the ‘jack-booting thugs’ invade their cities and neighbourhoods.

Once again, theology collides with political history in a most dramatic stage setting. There are, of course, are other equally violent, deplorable scenes playing out in other theatres of conflict outside the U.S. borders where thousands are dying, being displaced, starving, suffering from disease and the stress and anxiety of when and where the next missile, bomb or drone will attack.

Language, legitimate language that depicts truth and reality in terms we can all agree are authentic, has evaporated into the sound-bites of propaganda, lies, deceptions and dissembling. The pursuit of personal power has replaced any vestige of political ideology, or even the modicum of human decency, threatening not only the ‘existing order’ of the previous 80 years but the actual lives of what to the thugs in power call, the collateral damage of war, human casualties. Vocabularies, text-books curricula and even college-admission requirements have been overtaken by the MAGA scorched earth campaign, as well as appointed positions and elected positions been filled with MAGA loyalists. Courts have been defied, mass communications behemoths have been secured through the financial assets of sycophantic friends of the chief executive, who is reported to have enhanced his personal wealth by $1 BILLION in the first year of his second term.

Some readers may not have thought specifically about those clergy in New Hampshire and elsewhere, who might consider Bishop Herschfield’s exhortation to  be more than they ‘signed up for’ when they completed the protracted process for ordination. “Get your wills and affairs in order” has not been the predictable and predominant homily of Bishops in ordination ceremonies. Rather, it might have been something akin to, ‘there are serious hidden risks in this business, and some will attempt to betray or to pillory or to exhaust or even to remove you in their excessive need for control.’ And the risks in that context would have been exclusively considered as members of and/or adherents to the church, certainly not enemies without, but still within the nation.

To those whose theology tends to avoid the political, the prophetic and the nature of discipleship that we have witnessed in Latin America, with Bishop Oscar Romero. Here is a brief description of Saint Oscar Romero from Britannica.com:

     

    St. Oscar Romero…was a Salvadoran Roman Catholic archbishop who was a vocal critic of the violent activities of government armed forces, right-wing groups and leftist guerillas in El Salvador’s civil conflict. Although Romero had been considered a conservative before his appointment as archbishop in 1977, he denounced the regime of Ge. Carlos Humberto Romero (no relation). The archbishop also refused to support the right-wing military-civilian junta that replaced the deposed dictator. Further his outspoken defense of the poor-who were powerless victims of widespread violence-brought repeated threats to his life. Romero declared his readiness to sacrifice his life for the ‘redemption and resurrection’ of El Salvador. His unreserved advocacy for human rights made him a hero to many, and he was nominated for the 1979 Nobel Prize for Peace by a number of U.S. congressmen and 118 members of the British Parliament. The following year Romero was assassinated at the hands of an unknown assailant while saying mass.

The tragic irony of Bishop Herschfield’s exhortation to his New Hampshire clergy echoing the martyrdom of the assassinated El Salvadoran Roman Catholic Bishop while he was saying mass in 1980 and the current highly complex and heinous and nefarious relationship between the United States government and the government of El Salvador with its cruel and inhuman(e) prison for deportees (Terrorism Confinement Centre CECOT) from the United States cannot be lost.

Alevo Airlines has stopped flying deportees for the administration after public protests ; Apple, Ben & Jerry’s and Costco have resisted the administration’s attempt to trash all DEI programs. Millions of Americans have repeatedly gathered on the streets of American cities and towns and villages in protest of this administration’s gross violation of human rights, something no American ever thought or conceived s/he would ever have to do in his or her own country.

Mark Carney’s historic line at Davos to middle powers in the new world, Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu, signals a kind of refined, dining room law-of-the-jungle where the powerful ‘eat the weak.’ And the other table, the communion table over which the Eucharist is celebrated and when and when sacrifice and atonement are worshipped and revered is being evoked indirectly by Bishop Herschfield. Denominations no longer matter; even religious sects and faith communities must all join together, just as must all middle powers, in a phalanx of opposition to the inhumane, unjust sinister, evil, tyrannical and apparently unstoppable American administration. Just as Romero opposed the violence of both the right and the left, and the legal and financial impoverishment of the poor, so today we must not be deferred, distracted, dispirited or detained in our collaborative, non-violent, confrontation of evil by force.

Decision time has arrived for the priests in New Hampshire, as well as for the rest of the citizenry in America, in NATO countries, and in all nations that support democracy, human rights, the pursuit of equality and equity, the protection of the environment and the reduction of military armaments and military conflicts as ‘normal.’

As Carney also reminded us, ‘Nostalgia is not a strategy,’ and the church is renowned for having clung to many ‘sacred’ nostalgic perceptions, icons and attitudes, especially the one that has enmeshed the mainline churches with the establishment of both corporate and government America and the West generally. That complicity has been shattered, at least by the current administration of the United States, and the clergy and the public have really no choice but to acknowledge that umbilical cord, like many others, has been ripped up. The glimpse of silver lining, perhaps here, is that the power and wealth structures that have embossed the reputation of mainline churches through their cheques and their public reputations, and filled their pews with others seeking to ‘be affirmed’ by the ‘establishment’ no longer can rely on such a platinum spin-off, given that the establishment is proving that, like the emperor, it has no clothes.

Dis-membering the ecclesial establishment from the political and social and corporate hierarchies and their ‘faux-star-imprimatur’ may yet be one of the most fortuitous outcomes from this stormy decade. How ironic to envision that a tyrant obsessed with the pursuit of his own personal self-aggrandisement might actually nudge or even shove the churches back to being the voice of the voiceless, the arms and legs of the amputees, and the Good Samaritan for all those forgotten and taken for dead in the ditch, across the world.

Not only a Samaritan for the hated Jew, but a Samaritan all the dispossessed! And at the same time, a forceful, cognizant, sentient and committed enemy of the tyrant and the abuse of power.

Can Pope Pius XII possibly, from the grave, hear the plea and the prayer from Bishop Herschfield and weep for having maintained his policy of strict neutrality and public silence regarding the Nazi extermination of Jews? Can the church, generally, hear the voice of this Bishop, who, through both courage and faith, seems to be prepared to move beyond statements into the bodily activity of physical and sacrificial protest? Can the church continue to redeem itself, however painfully, in and through the active listening to new voices of agape, compassion, courage, and fearless faith?