Catholic News

Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal law enforcement operations on January 07, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Credit: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Jan 19, 2026 / 09:34 am (CNA).

Winona-Rochester Bishop Robert Barron has called on federal immigration officials to focus on deporting only serious criminals while also urging U.S. protesters to "cease interfering" with the work of immigration agents, with the plea coming amid heightened national tensions amid mass deportations and the killing of a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis.

Barron issued the statement on Jan. 18 via X. A native of Chicago, he was made bishop of the southern Minnesota diocese in 2022.

The prelate made the remarks as officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continue enhanced deportations of immigrants in the country illegally. The mass deportation effort is a major part of U.S. President Donald Trump's domestic policy in his second term.

Tensions were heightened greatly on Jan. 7 when an ICE officer shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis as she apparently engaged in a protest of ICE enforcement in the city.

Good had partially blocked a street with her car and was approached by ICE agents, who ordered her out of the vehicle; when she attempted to speed away she allegedly struck ICE agent Jonathan Ross with her car. Ross shot and killed her in response. The killing generated national outrage and major protests throughout the country.

'There is a way out'

Barron, who regularly weighs in on Catholic and other issues in the public sphere, said on X that his "heart is breaking" over the "violence, retribution, threats, protests, deep suspicion of one another, political unrest [and] fear" that has spread throughout Minnesota in recent weeks.

Offering "a modest proposal" for resolving "this unbearable state of affairs," Barron urged immigration officials to "limit themselves, at least for the time being, to rounding up undocumented people who have committed serious crimes."

"Political leaders should stop stirring up resentment against officers who are endeavoring to enforce the laws of the country," he continued. "And protestors should cease interfering with the work of ICE."

Americans, meanwhile, "must stop shouting at one another and demonizing their opponents."

"Where we are now is untenable. There is a way out," the bishop said.

Minneapolis is only the latest flashpoint in ongoing national unrest over the federal government's immigration actions, one that has touched the U.S. Catholic Church in numerous ways.

Multiple U.S. bishops have issued dispensations from Mass for those who are afraid of being arrested and deported, including the Archdiocese of New Orleans, the Diocese of San Bernardino, and numerous others.

In December of 2025 ICE agents arrested a Catholic church employee in Minnesota, after which they surveilled the parish, with the church pastor claiming the agents were "terrorizing" locals "just by their presence."

Church leaders have regularly attempted to reach out to immigrants who have been targeted for deportation by ICE. In November of 2025 Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila and Auxiliary Bishop Jorge Rodriguez led the Stations of the Cross at an ICE detention facility in Aurora, while prelates such as Lincoln Bishop James Conley have urged the government to allow pastoral access to detained immigrants.

At their November 2025 plenary assembly, the U.S. bishops d eclared their opposition to the indiscriminate mass deportation of immigrants in the country illegally. The bishops urged the government to respect the dignity of migrants as well.

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We March with Selma event. | Credit: Via Flickr CC BY NC 2.0

Jan 19, 2026 / 04:00 am (CNA).

Sister Mary Antona Ebo was the only Black Catholic nun who marched with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

"I'm here because I'm a Negro, a nun, a Catholic, and because I want to bear witness," Ebo said to fellow demonstrators at a March 10, 1965, protest attended by King.

The protest took place three days after the "Bloody Sunday" clash, where police attacked several hundred voting rights demonstrators with clubs and tear gas, causing severe injuries among the nonviolent marchers.

Sister Mary Antona Ebo died Nov. 11, 2017, in Bridgeton, Missouri, at the age of 93, the St. Louis Review reported at the time.

After the "Bloody Sunday" attacks, King had called on church leaders from around the country to go to Selma. Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis asked his archdiocese's human rights commission to send representatives, Ebo recounted to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2015.

Ebo's supervisor, also a religious sister, asked her whether she would join a 50-member delegation of laymen, Protestant ministers, rabbis, priests, and five white nuns.

Just before she left for Alabama, she heard that a white minister who had traveled to Selma, James Reeb, had been severely attacked after he left a restaurant and later died from his injuries.

At the time, Ebo said, she wondered: "If they would beat a white minister to death on the streets of Selma, what are they going to do when I show up?"

In Selma on March 10, Ebo went to Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, joining local leaders and the demonstrators who had been injured in the clash.

"They had bandages on their heads, teeth were knocked out, crutches, casts on their arms. You could tell that they were freshly injured," she told the Post-Dispatch. "They had already been through the battleground, and they were still wanting to go back and finish the job."

Many of the injured were treated at Good Samaritan Hospital, run by Edmundite priests and the Sisters of St. Joseph, the only Selma hospital that served Blacks. Since their arrival in 1937, the Edmundites had faced intimidation and threats from local officials, other whites, and even the Ku Klux Klan, CNN reported.

The injured demonstrators and their supporters left the Selma church, with Ebo in front. They marched toward the courthouse, then were blocked by state troopers in riot gear. She and other demonstrators knelt to pray the Our Father before they agreed to turn around.

Despite the violent interruption, the 57-mile march drew 25,000 participants. It concluded on the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery with King's famous March 25 speech against racial prejudice.

"How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," King said.

King would be dead within three years. On a fateful April 4, 1968, he was shot by an assassin at a Memphis hotel.

He had asked to be taken to a Catholic hospital should anything happen to him, and he was taken to St. Joseph Hospital in Memphis. At the time, it was a nursing school combined with a 400-bed hospital.

There, too, Catholic religious sisters played a role.

Sister Jane Marie Klein and Sister Anna Marie Hofmeyer recounted their story to The Paper of Montgomery County Online in January 2017.

The Franciscan nuns were walking around the hospital grounds when they heard the sirens of an ambulance. One of the sisters was paged three times, and they discovered that King had been shot and taken to their hospital.

The National Guard and local police locked down the hospital for security reasons as doctors tried to save King.

"We were obviously not allowed to go in when they were working with him because they were feverishly working with him," Klein said. "But after they pronounced him dead we did go back into the ER. There was a gentleman as big as the door guarding the door and he looked at us and said, 'You want in?' We said yes, we'd like to go pray with him. So he let the three of us in, closed the door behind us, and gave us our time."

Hofmeyer recounted the scene in the hospital room. "He had no chance," she said.

Klein said authorities delayed the announcement of King's death to prepare for riots they knew would result.

Three decades later, Klein met with King's widow, Coretta Scott King, at a meeting of the Catholic Health Association Board in Atlanta where King was a keynote speaker. The Franciscan sister and the widow of the civil rights leader told each other how they had spent that night.

Klein said being present that night in 1968 was "indescribable."

"You do what you got to do," she said. "What's the right thing to do? Hindsight? It was a privilege to be able to take care of him that night and to pray with him. Who would have ever thought that we would be that privileged?"

She said King's life shows "to some extent one person can make a difference." She wondered "how anybody could listen to Dr. King and not be moved to work toward breaking down these barriers."

Klein would serve as chairperson of the Franciscan Alliance Board of Trustees, overseeing support for health care. Hofmeyer would work in the alliance's archives. In 2021, both were living at the Provinciate at St. Francis Convent in Mishawaka, Indiana.

For her part, after Selma, Ebo would go on to serve as a hospital administrator and a chaplain.

In 1968 she helped found the National Black Sisters' Conference. The woman who had been rejected from several Catholic nursing schools because of her race would serve in her congregation's leadership as it reunited with another Franciscan order, and she served as a director of social concerns for the Missouri Catholic Conference.

She frequently spoke on civil rights topics. When controversy erupted over a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer's killing of Michael Brown, a Black man, she led a prayer vigil. She thought the Ferguson protests were comparable to those of Selma.

"I mean, after all, if Mike Brown really did swipe the box of cigars, it's not the policeman's place to shoot him dead," she said.

Archbishop Robert J. Carlson of St. Louis presided at her requiem Mass in November 2021, saying in a statement: "We will miss her living example of working for justice in the context of our Catholic faith."

A previous version of this story was first published on Catholic News Agency on Jan. 17, 2022.

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WBVM/Tampa (90.5 Spirit FM) announces the promotion of Davis Watts to Program Director. Watts will continue to serve as Music Director and host of the More Music Middays (10 a.m. - 3 p.m.) Watts says, "It's been an honor serving the Tampa Bay community with this amazing team for the past 13 years. I feel that the Lord, our listeners and the industry friends I've made over these years have prepared me for the exciting challenge of leading our air staff and I'm eager to get started."  

Watts joined the Spirit FM team in 2008, moving through the ranks of night time announcer, to middays, Music Director and now Program Director.  "I've seen tremendous growth in Davis, and a hunger to improve not only his craft, but the station's as a whole.  I'm excited that he's up to the challenge." said John Morris, Station Manager. 

Spirit FM is a 100,000 FM station serving the Tampa/St. Petersburg market since May 1986. The station is owned by the Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg, the only Catholic station in the country programming contemporary Christian music. For more information about Spirit FM, visit myspiritfm.com.

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