Hello everyone, before we start this video I want to warn you that the topics I’m about to discuss are extremely upsetting and may have a triggering effect on some viewers. I have been thinking and praying for a few weeks now about whether or not to share something and what to say, and have ultimately come up with this video. This is not a hot take, it’s not without prayerful reflection, and it is not easy to talk about, no matter who you are.
I hope that you will use discernment in watching, consuming, and reacting to what I have to say. Let’s get into it. Over the past few weeks, I have opened my phone to one horror after another.
Every day, it seems, something worse and worse gets revealed about the state of our world and those who run it. Like most, I have been following the activities of ICE agents around the country for a few months now. I have watched videos of agents using excessive force against suspected undocumented immigrants and protesters alike; I’ve spoken with a local attorney who says she has seen people thrown into unmarked vans and become completely untraceable—even as a lawyer, she cannot find them; our friars work directly with immigrants following all of the rules, only to have the rules change or to be arrested while waiting in line for their court hearing, splitting up families and sowing fear in neighborhoods.
Powerful men are using their power to dehumanize and abuse the most vulnerable in our world. Just a few days ago I read an article following up on the effects of DOGE’s cut to USAID, how the US government, making unsubstantiated and sometimes outright false claims regarding fraud in foreign aid, cut 83% of our budget to the poorest nations last year. I made a video about this almost one year ago, warning that this was immoral and unchristian, that it would cause unnecessary deaths.
It was the most unpopular and hated video I’ve ever made. But I wasn’t wrong. Researchers this week estimate that the cutting of this aid resulted in more than 600,000 deaths worldwide, two thirds of them children, with an additional 14 million preventable deaths projected in the next four years.
Powerful men are using their power to dehumanize and abuse the most vulnerable in our world. And that’s just the normal level of greed and abuse we’ve come to expect from those with ridiculous amounts of power and money. What we’re seeing from the release of the Epstein files… it’s worse that I thought.
With the most recent batch of files being released, we are coming to understand just how deep these heinous crimes go. Within these files are not just accusations of the sexual abuse of children under the age of ten—arguably the worst thing a human being can do—they reveal the trafficking of, request for, and absolutely cavalier approach to human life by the world’s richest and most powerful men. What it reveals is that these actions were not isolated events perpetrated by only a few bad people.
This was an organized, widely spread conspiracy involving hundreds and hundreds of the most influential people in the world, committing heinous crimes and covering for each other to ensure that they never face consequences. Powerful men are using their power to dehumanize and abuse the most vulnerable in our world. I have to say, it has been a few weeks of really gut wrenching prayer for me.
I start every day with an hour of prayer and meditation, and I have struggled to talk with God. What. The Actual.
F** I have found myself this week routinely enraged. Sickened to my core. Left feeling completely powerless.
I haven’t blamed God as much as I have just vented my rage to him. We’re talking about issues that are well beyond my ability to fix. We’re talking about a world order that appears to be evil to its core, pulling the strings of society to ensure that they maintain their power and riches while others suffer, using their power and wealth to dehumanize people just because they can.
Really, what we’re talking about here is a level of evil that rivals the biblical stories of greed and abuse, how God’s anger flared up at the people who sold their neighbor for a pair of shoes, how they stole from the homeless, how they ate sumptuous meals while their countrymen starved to death. Yeah, I’m starting to see how God’s anger flared up because my anger has been up pretty high lately. I sit in prayer, I go to God, and I feel myself fuming.
Within me is a righteous anger that wants to flip tables and burn cities down. And it’s because I take this to prayer, because I bring these feelings to God, something is revealed to me. What I’m expressing is partially righteous… but there is also a good dose of hatred in there as well.
I am not just angry at the injustice that has occurred, I am not just angry at the people who have committed these acts. There is a part of me, I realize, that hates, that wants people to suffer for what they’ve done. There is a part of me that is growing in resentment, clinging to self-defeating anger that does nothing to make the world better, it just consumes us from the inside.
It is in these moments that I have I heard the words of Jesus repeated back to me: love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Do good to those who hurt you.
I am reminded of how Jesus prayed for his executioners while he was literally dying on the cross, how even though he was completely innocent and would have been justified in hating those who had rejected him, he did not. Why? Because what they did wasn’t really that bad?
Because they didn’t deserve to be hated? No. He loved them because that is what is means to be God—to love what he has created, not because of what it is, but because of who God is.
Jesus tells his disciples to love even the worst of the world, not because they have earned it but precisely because love is that which cannot be earned. If you love only those who are nice to you and offer your life benefit, that is not love, that is a transaction. Love is self-sacrificing.
It is unrestricted. In many ways it has nothing to do with the object of one’s love and everything to do with the one who is doing the loving. As Christians, we love others not because of who they are but because of who we are and who has loved us first.
Concepts that sounds really beautiful in a vacuum, but are really put to the test when we’re talking about men so rich and powerful that they think they can literally abuse the weak and vulnerable without any repercussions. Yeah… that’ll put your faith to the test. That’ll show whether we love as Jesus does.
Can I love Jefferey Epstein? Can I love the people of this world that hurt and abuse the weak and vulnerable? I surely hope so… but it does raise the critical question of what do we mean by love?
Especially around this time of Valentine’s day when love is in the air, most of our culture has the tendency to equate love with passion, romance, and feelings of tremendous affection. To love someone is to want to be with them, to find joy in their presence. And while that is sometimes the case, this is not the sense of love that we’re talking about as Christians—this is not what Jesus meant when he said love your enemies.
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the truest definition of love for a Christian is to “will the good of the other. ” To will the good of the other.
What we mean by this is that we desire the other to flourish, to have their basic needs and intentions met, to be pleasing in the eyes of God. It means that we want for others what we ultimately want for ourselves—to live happy, healthy, virtuous lives that lead to one day to heaven. We want other people to have good things.
Truly good things. But this doesn’t mean that we overlook sinful behavior or enable evil to persist. Quite the opposite.
Love is not a matter of letting people do whatever they want with impunity. Love is not just a nice feeling or expressed only in kindness. Sometimes to love an another, to will the good of the other, means holding them accountable for the evil they have done and facilitating their conversion.
This is the needle that is so difficult for our culture to thread. On the one hand, there are those who look upon those who do bad with what they believe to be mercy, overlooking evil and allowing it to persist, and on the other hand are those who act for what they believe to be justice, exerting nothing but punitive measures to cause harm in the evildoer. That is not mercy, it is not justice, and it most certainly is not love.
To act as God does, to act as Jesus calls us to in loving our neighbor, we neither condone evil nor do we punish for our own gratification. We must always do what is best for the good of the other, what will ultimately lead to their conversion. This necessarily involves forgiving them of their sins, but it may also involve removing them from power, forcing them to serve prison sentences, expecting reparative justice for the harm they have caused, and taking measures to ensure that they are no longer able to cause harm in the future.
Just because we cannot hate those who do evil does not mean that we must tolerate it, either. Justice requires that actions be taken to protect the weak and vulnerable, and justice requires that that actions be taken to protect the rich and powerful. And yes, I did say protect the rich and powerful.
Protect them from mob justice that would inflict retribution upon them for its own gratification. And protect them from themselves, as it is clear that many of these men are not cable of taking care of their own souls, not capable of wielding wealth and power justly. Left to their own devices, they will not only hurt others but will forfeit their own souls to eternal damnation.
Love cannot allow this. Love seeks something greater. Not because they deserve it, not because they’ve earned it, but because we were loved in our sin and saved from ourselves, and so we must do the same for others.
My prayer for anyone still watching, the ultimate reason I made this video, is to protect your soul from the temptation to hate. There are so many people out there who have done heinous things. There is evil all around us.
And these things should raise our anger to seek justice. We should not stand idly by while the rich and powerful use their power to abuse the weak and vulnerable. But don’t lose your own soul in the process.
Don’t let yourself be consumed by hate, taken over by resentment, eaten alive by the antithesis of who our God is. If God is love, if God is self-sacrificial favor to even those who do not deserve it and we turn around and act with hate, seeking the punishment of sinners and attempting to inflict pain upon them for our own satisfaction, are we not acting completely contrary to the nature of God? Are we not denying who God is and what he asks of us?
Horrible things are all around us, but don’t let them get inside us. Protect your soul. Love your enemy.
Love those who persecute. Do good for those who hurt you. Will the good of the other, just as God does for you.
