“You’re Out of Here”
Pablum or Prophecy: on preaching the whole of the Catholic moral tradition to a congregation that has decided in advance which parts it will tolerate
Jun 22, 2026
When the full spectrum of Catholic teaching no longer informs homiletic reflection, the priest who attempts to preach prophetically finds himself in an unenviable position. He is not introducing novelty; he is recovering what has been quietly amputated. Yet he will invariably encounter the vocal wrath of a number of parishioners who are, in practice, more devoted to the narrow ethics of a particular administration than to the catholicity and breadth of the moral tradition the magisterium actually teaches. The grievance is rarely that the homilist has said something false. The grievance is that he has said something true that they had not been told was theirs to believe.
The Story
A dear priest friend of mine, who meticulously prepares his homilies each week and preaches prophetically from a carefully written text, was both surprised and dismayed not long ago. Between ten and twelve parishioners rose and walked out during his homily. Afterward, in the vestibule, he was accosted by an angry man who jabbed a finger at him and repeated, again and again, “You’re out of here. You’re out of here.”
The crime? He had spoken about the ethical implications of climate stewardship and the unfettered use of fossil fuels under the present administration — and, in the same breath, about the plight of immigrants summarily victimized, swept up and deported without the due process that is supposed to be a hallmark of our judicial system. He had framed both precisely where the tradition frames them: within our stewardship of the earth and our stewardship of the stranger, as creatures answerable to a Creator who commands us in a single moral grammar both to till and keep the garden and to welcome the foreigner as one of our own (Leviticus 19:34; Matthew 25:35). The two are not separate causes. They are the same summons — to recognize the brother and the creation entrusted to us, and to refuse to discard either. A novel ethic? Pope Francis devoted an entire encyclical to it. So did the Catechism. So, in their way, did the prophets.
This is what happens when preachers pick and choose their subjects — when the pulpit becomes a place to ratify what the pews have already decided rather than to set before the faithful the full breadth of the Catholic ethical tradition. When a homilist’s vade mecum is telling people what they want to hear rather than preaching, in the Spirit, what they need to hear, it becomes very difficult for a Catholic priest — one charged with proclaiming the whole of Catholic magisterial teaching — to do his work with integrity.
A congregation fed pablum and pious platitudes is, of course, scandalized the moment it is prophetically challenged. The reaction is ancient. Amos was told to take his visions elsewhere, to prophesy somewhere he could earn his bread (Amos 7:12). Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern for the offense of saying what the court did not wish to hear. “Shut this man up.” “Get him out of here.” The vestibule on Sunday morning and the gate of the king’s house in Jerusalem are, spiritually, the same address.
The Best-Kept Secret
One of the best-kept secrets of our ethical tradition is the call to be good stewards of the earth’s resources. It is not a borrowed plank from a secular platform. It is woven into the first pages of Scripture, where the human person is set in the garden to till it and keep it (Genesis 2:15) — to cultivate and to guard, not to strip and to discard. Pope Saint John Paul II spoke of an “ecological conversion.” Benedict XVI — hardly anyone’s idea of a green progressive, and far more often cast by the press as an arch-conservative — was nonetheless fittingly remembered as “the green pope.” He taught that the book of nature is one and indivisible (Caritas in Veritate §51), and that a Church which defends the dignity of the human person must, with the same conviction, defend the creation within which that person lives. That a pontiff so resolutely identified with tradition should have insisted on it is itself the refutation of the notion that creation care belongs to one party.
Pope Francis gave this teaching its fullest modern voice. The encyclical that treats the ecological crisis head-on is Laudato Si’ (2015), and its blunt 2023 sequel, the apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, leaves no scintilla of ambiguity about the gravity of the climate emergency or about the responsibility of the wealthiest and highest-emitting nations. But the theme does not stay quarantined in those two documents. It runs straight through Fratelli Tutti (2020), the encyclical on fraternity and social friendship — and it is Fratelli Tutti that shows us most clearly why creation care is not a single-issue cause but a thread in the seamless garment of life.
What Fratelli Tutti Actually Says
Francis takes his title, Fratelli Tutti — “brothers and sisters all” — from the saint of Assisi, who felt himself brother to the sun, the sea, and the wind, even as he knelt beside the poor, the abandoned, and the outcast (FT §1–5). That is the whole architecture of the encyclical in miniature: one cannot claim kinship with creation while discarding the brother who depends upon it. Presenting the letter, the Holy Father said plainly that human fraternity and the care of creation form a single path toward integral development and peace. Not two paths. One.
The text makes the connection explicit. In §117, Francis writes that when we speak of caring for our common home, our planet, we appeal to a spark of universal conscience still flickering in the human heart. He offers a deceptively simple example: those who enjoy a surplus of water yet conserve it for the sake of the wider human family have attained a genuine moral stature — they have learned to look beyond themselves. That is stewardship rendered as a virtue, not a regulation.
He then grounds the whole matter in one of the oldest principles of Catholic social teaching: the universal destination of goods. The earth and its resources are given for all; the right to private property, real as it is, is always subordinate to that prior gift (FT §118–123). Created things are not ours to exhaust at will. We hold them in trust — for the poor of today and for the generations not yet born. When development serves only the amassing of wealth by a few (FT §122), something has gone wrong not merely economically but morally and theologically. Here Fratelli Tutti reaches back and clasps hands with Laudato Si’, which it cites repeatedly: everything is connected. The cry of the poor and the cry of the earth, Francis insists, are a single cry.
The Paris Accord, Read Through the Encyclical
Set that teaching beside the Paris Agreement. Adopted by nearly 195 nations at the 2015 climate conference and entering into force on November 4, 2016, the Accord is, for all its diplomatic imperfection, a concrete instrument of precisely the international solidarity Fratelli Tutti demands — a recognition that no nation can wall itself off from a crisis that respects no border, and that the strong owe assistance to the weak who did least to cause the harm and will suffer most from it.
On January 20, 2025, Executive Order 14162 directed the United States — historically the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases — to withdraw a second time, and the withdrawal took formal effect on January 27, 2026. The accompanying rationale was framed almost entirely in the grammar of national self-interest, “economic efficiency” and the unleashing of domestic fossil-fuel production. Read alongside Fratelli Tutti, the contrast is not subtle. Where the encyclical insists that goods are destined for all, the withdrawal asserts a right of national appropriation. Where the encyclical names indifference to the suffering stranger as the sin of the priest and the Levite who passed by on the far side of the road (FT, Chapter 2), the withdrawal codifies a passing-by — and calls it prudence.
Augustine had a phrase for the disordered impulse beneath this: the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate. It is the will to master creation and one’s neighbor rather than to serve them. “Drill, baby, drill” is not, at root, an energy policy. It is an anthropology — a claim about who the earth belongs to and who may be left by the roadside.
Not a Partisan Cause
Let me be unambiguous, lest the point be heard as something it is not. This is not something only Democrats do, nor a cause Catholics may dismiss as the property of one party. The summons to reverence the earth our Creator entrusted to us belongs to every Christian — indeed to every person of good will — precisely because it rests not on a platform but on the doctrine of creation itself. The God who looked upon all that He had made and called it very good (Genesis 1:31) did not append a footnote exempting the convenient. To treat the safeguarding of creation as a tribal marker, to be embraced or scorned according to which administration holds office, is to commit the very error the prophets condemned: to make the worship of the living God serviceable to the idols of the moment.
The moral implications follow without strain. Our lex orandi — the creation we bless at every Eucharist, the bread and wine that are “fruit of the earth and work of human hands” — must shape our lex credendi - what it is we believe - and, finally, our lex vivendi, the manner in which we actually live upon and within the world. A Catholic who can recite the Creed but cannot recognize the stewardship of creation as a genuine demand of that Creed has been catechized only in half the faith. And a Church whose pulpits fall silent on this matter, for fear of the man in the vestibule, has quietly conceded that the magisterium may teach only what the congregation has pre-approved.
Conclusion
My friend was not “out of here.” He was, in the deepest sense, exactly where he was supposed to be — standing in the long line of those sent to say the difficult and necessary thing to people who would rather not hear it. The walkout and the jabbing finger were not signs that he had failed. They were signs that he had touched something real, that the word had landed where pablum never does.
The faithful do not need a chaplaincy to their preferences. They need shepherds who will set before them the whole counsel of God — the seamless garment entire, not the few threads that happen to match the season’s politics. The care of our common home is not a secret to be kept, nor a partisan plank to be quietly buried beneath safer homilies. It is, as Francis reminds us, one of the surest tests of whether we have understood what fraternity means at all. The brother in need and the earth that sustains him are crying out together. The only question that finally matters is whether, when we rise to preach, we will answer them — or pass by on the other side.
Brothers and sisters all. Including, Francis would insist, the ones not yet born, who will inherit precisely the world our courage or our cowardice prepares for them.
Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L., is the retired rector of Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano and publishes the Substack newsletter Liturgy and Truth.
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