On February 25, 2026, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops filed an amicus curiae brief in Trump v. Barbara, a birthright citizenship case before the Supreme Court. One phrase caught my eye: “As Catholics, our faith compels us to protest laws that deny the dignity of the human person and harm innocent children.”
Immigration is a complex issue. Since I study resistance and protest from the Middle Ages down to the present day, how (and how well) my fellow Catholics understand our obligation to engage in political protest is highly interesting to me.
In many domains—family life, liturgy, even the nature of citizenship—Catholics rely on a centuries-old tradition of reflection. Political protest is not one such area, however. As Charles Taylor, the Catholic philosopher who won the Ratzinger Prize in 2019, explains in A Secular Age, the public sphere is less than three hundred years old. Medieval kings considered “public opinion” no more than they met anarcho-syndicalist peasants out in the fields—the gag in Monty Python and the Holy Grail notwithstanding. There is no venerable old tradition, then, that instructs Catholics about how to protest in public.
The is no consensus in society at large about political protest, either. Are political protests about persuasion, pressure, or performance? Some political theorists argue that protests raise awareness about issues, communicate grievance, and aim to persuade public opinion. This is why they have megaphones and signs. For others, protesters are pressure groups that cause a ruckus so that certain policies become costly to implement. One recent example is the civil disobedience in Minneapolis, where protesters blocked traffic and blew whistles to obstruct federal officers working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And some radical professors even argue that protest is a liberating performance or transformative experience for protesters’ own sake. Think of protesters encamped at Columbia University who performed an act of solidarity with besieged Palestinians by inviting the New York Police Department to besiege them.
Political protest in the United States might take the form of persuasion, protest, performance, or all of these at once. Nobody agrees in advance what protest should look like.
Recent popes and the U.S. bishops call for political protest as public witness. It is important to recognize that this is a fourth way of understanding political protest, and a distinctly Catholic one.
Church teaching about public witness is anchored in the last and longest apostolic constitution of the Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes describes the obligation of Catholic laypeople to engage in honest and charitable discussion about the laws of our nations, even when we disagree:
Laymen should know that it is generally the function of their well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city. . . . Yet it happens rather frequently, and legitimately so, that with equal sincerity some of the faithful will disagree with others on a given matter. . . .
Hence it is necessary for people to remember that no one is allowed . . . to appropriate the Church’s authority for his opinion. They should always try to enlighten one another through honest discussion, preserving mutual charity and caring above all for the common good (43).
Public witness requires neither the political unity of Catholics nor the explicit instruction of the clergy. But what it does require is a certain attitude. Gaudium et Spes informs how Catholics ought to protest: in the spirit of honest discussion, mutual charity, and the common good.
Catholic public witness involves persuasion, (perhaps) pressure, and performance, but it must exceed the usual standards for each of these. Honest discussion aims at persuasion, but public witness furthermore requires communicating in a charitable way. Pressure and civil disobedience are possibilities presented to our prudential judgment, because Catholics can draw on the principle of lex iniusta non est lex—an unjust law is no law. However, this principle involves strict “side constraints” that prohibit giving scandal to others, for example, by undermining the authority of law in general.
Finally, public witness is a performance, but our role model must be Christ. Gaudium et Spes explains, “Since they have an active role to play in the whole life of the Church, laymen are not only bound to penetrate the world with a Christian spirit, but are also called to be witnesses to Christ in all things in the midst of human society.”
Public witness is one of several ways, at least in the United States and in American culture, that Catholics may take an “active part in public life” to fulfill our obligations to promote the common good. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1914) rightly suggests that public witness is less important than primary obligations of social participation that involve our personal responsibilities in our families and workplaces. This is consistent with Catholic Tradition, where there is a place for political resistance, but in which revolutionaries cannot outshine the teachings of the apostles and the example of the martyrs.
Preponderantly Catholic protests like the March for Life, unsurprisingly, are marked by the public witness of families, Catholic schools, priests, and religious communities. Many marchers are honest, charitable, and willing to suffer opprobrium for their public witness. Protest demonstrations against mass deportation and war, on the contrary, often draw individuals who are attracted to a protest lifestyle.
Public witness against the foreseeable evils involved in mass deportation and war is important. But here, Catholic protesters must hold themselves to higher standards of conduct than other protesters do. We cannot utilize dishonest and uncharitable techniques of persuasion, engage in civil disobedience that undermines respect for the law and legitimate authority, or embrace protest as a form of self-expression. Our public witness is to Christ.
The political optimism of Church documents since the 1960s sometimes stands in glaring contrast to the everyday realities of polarization, the culture war, and the politics of resentment. For example, Pope Francis went further than the U.S. bishops to call not only Americans, but Catholics in every nation to “desire integration” and to draw closer with their compatriots in a “multifaceted culture of encounter.” But public witness reminds us that we must be prepared to suffer for the common good along the way. This realistic expectation is in line with the perennial tradition of the Church. In his commentary on Romans 13:1-7, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes how wicked rulers are part of God’s punishment for sin, no less than natural evils like storms and sicknesses. We can simultaneously have democratic hope that our people will come together and recognize that, on our part, this will always include our suffering witness to injustice.
The highest and oldest meaning of public witness is martyrdom. Understanding political protest as a suffering witness can be part of a “spiritual discipline against resentment.” Patrick Deneen, a leading Catholic political theorist who teaches at the University of Notre Dame, reminds us of the role of this distinctively Christian political virtue in advancing American democracy and civil rights. Whereas secular progressives might express frustration and indignation at progress that ought to have been made, Christians who prepare themselves to suffer patiently for the common good will be more resilient. Public witness must counteract, rather than perpetuate, our present politics of resentment.