What's Happening

April 7, 2025, Adrian, Michigan – On behalf of Adrian Dominican Sisters and Associates, the General Council of the Congregation has issued the following statement, calling for building a beloved community among the American people in the face of the many dehumanizing executive actions and decisions of the Trump Administration.

Since President Trump took office more than two months ago, we have been deeply pained and alarmed by executive actions and orders that challenge our fundamental values and commitments as women of faith in the Catholic and Dominican traditions.

When we Adrian Dominican Sisters gathered in 2022 to set our direction for the next six years, we made a commitment to “build the beloved community in which everyone is cared for, absent of poverty, hunger and hate.” We called ourselves to the task of dismantling unjust systems “that oppress, dehumanize and deny the image of God in each of us and Earth community.” We committed ourselves to “acknowledge and repent of our complicity in the divisions prevalent in our Church and our world.” 

We felt called to make these commitments by the Gospel imperative to love one another as God loves us. We also felt called by the Dominican motto of Veritas – Truth – honored by all members of the world-wide Order of Preachers, founded in the 12th century by St. Dominic. 

In the past 11 weeks, we have witnessed a staggering array of orders issued by the White House and its agents with deeply troubling impacts that oppress and dehumanize persons, deny the image of God in each of us, and dangerously divide us as a nation and global community.  

We have witnessed these dehumanizing impacts in the harsh treatment of refugees and immigrants, some of whom were arrested and, without due process, deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. We have witnessed them in the disturbing termination of visas, without notice, of law-abiding international students – some of whom, shockingly, were apprehended by masked agents, whisked away in unmarked vehicles, and flown to Louisiana to be held in detention centers. 

We have witnessed dehumanizing impacts in the erasure from museums, national parks and government websites of our nation’s history of racism – a shameful history we had finally begun to acknowledge as truth. We similarly witnessed it in the erasure of unknown and well-known stories highlighting the heroism and ingenuity of Black, Native American, Hispanic, LGBTQ+ and other historically marginalized Americans, including women. “Across the federal government,” NPR reports, “agencies have been scrubbing photographic and written references about women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community from their websites.” Transgender and non-binary persons have “faced the most consistent removal from government websites,” according to NPR. Transgender persons, made in the image of God like all human beings, are the explicit targets of several dehumanizing executive orders, including one barring them from military service. 

We have witnessed dehumanization in the blunt firing, without cause, of more than 24,000 workers in 18 federal agencies, according to CBS News, some with outstanding performance evaluations. These firings are creating immediate hardships for laid-off federal workers and their families. 

The firings will also soon impact the wellbeing of ordinary Americans served daily – in visible and invisible ways – by the wide range of critical services government workers provide. These include programs that prevent the spread of infectious diseases; ensure the safety of our food and drugs; respond to natural disasters; uphold standards of education and the availability of libraries, museums, the arts and sciences; ensure consumer protection; offer food and shelter for those in need and Meals on Wheels for elders; provide mental health care; protect our water, air, fish and wildlife habitats; and care for veterans and first responders, among many other essential services. 

We are witnessing the dehumanizing impact of White House orders in the alarming dismantling of the Social Security Administration, the nation’s largest government program. The draconian workforce reductions, closure of offices, and new ID demands on beneficiaries pose a clear and present danger to the health and wellbeing of millions of elderly Americans who have worked all their lives, paid into the system, and now rely on social security checks to cover their basic housing and food needs.

We are witnessing division and discord – as well as dangerous economic instability – in the stunning levy, without rationale, of tariffs on nations across the world. Among its
disturbing impacts, the U.S. tariffs are bringing an end to a decades-long global era of “alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect” with a “free and open exchange of goods,” as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney remarked. 

All of these and other deeply concerning White House actions run counter to our commitments as Dominican women of faith to build a beloved community – and are undermining the democratic values and ideals we hold dear as U.S. citizens.

We call on members of Congress to exercise their Constitutional authority to uphold the programs, agencies and departments that they, our elected leaders, enacted on behalf of and for the good of the American people. If members of Congress wish to upend them, the House and Senate have clear legislative means to do so in ways that comport with our nation’s ideal of a government of, by and for the people.  

We pray that the goodwill characteristic of the American people of all faith traditions will call us to kinder, more compassionate, respectful, and generous ways of being good caring neighbors to one another – and to all the other beautifully diverse peoples of the world’s nations, neighbors in our common Earth home.

 

Members of the Adrian Dominican Sisters General Council are Sisters Elise D. García, OP, Prioress; Bibiana “Bless” Colasito, OP, and Frances Nadolny, OP, General Councilors; Lorraine Réaume, OP, Vicaress and General Councilor; and Corinne Sanders, OP, General Councilor.

April 3, 2025, Adrian, Michigan – Religion and science are not opposed to each other since they are both involved in the search for truth. Despite the misunderstanding of many people, the Catholic Church is not anti-science but has been engaged in science for centuries. That was the core message that Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, Director of the Vatican Observatory, delivered to an audience that filled the auditorium of Weber Retreat and Conference Center on March 13, 2025. 

An accomplished astronomer – with a master’s degree in Earth and planetary science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in planetary science from the University of Arizona – Brother Guy began his talk with a focus on the stars. He noted that they have been a source of wonder for people through the ages, proclaimed as gods by some and hailed in Scripture – especially in the psalms – as signs of God’s glory. 

“The stars were made by a God who is outside of creation. God was already there, outside of space and time,” Brother Guy said. “If God made the universe, then the universe is worth studying.”

Brother Guy continued to note that, just as the stars are a creation of God, so are we human beings. “We’re a created people,” he said. “The angels are envious of us because we have bodies. We celebrate God-Made-Flesh who so loved this world that he became a created thing for the love of us. ...This sense of physical works is why there’s a Catholic science.”

A native of Harper Woods, Michigan, Brother Guy was fulfilling his role as Director of the Vatican Observatory even as he spoke to an audience close to his native home. “When Pope Leo XIII established the observatory, it was to show the world that the Church supports science,” Brother Guy said in an interview. “Now my job is showing the world. I’m the ambassador to the people in the pews. My goal isn’t to convert atheists into being Catholics, but I’m speaking to the Catholics to remind them that science is something the Church helped to invent … and that it is a glorious way to get to know the Creator.”

Founded in 1891, the Vatican Observatory was originally established at the Roman College in Rome but was moved to Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence, in 1935. With that move, Brother Guy said, the pope put the Jesuits in charge of directing and staffing it. The Observatory also supports an office in Tucson, Arizona, and the Mount Graham International Observatory on a mountain outside of Tucson.

Brother Guy began his fascination with astronomy as a student at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs School, where the Sisters of Charity fed his interest in math and science. Growing up at the time of Russia’s launching of Sputnik and the urgency of the United States to get into space also contributed to his interest. “This guaranteed a lot of boys would want to be astronomers,” he added.

Brother Guy spent five years doing post-doctoral research at MIT and Harvard when he faced a crisis: “I had this feeling that all of the astronomy I was doing was a waste of time” in light of people throughout the world who were starving, he recalled. 

He joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Kenya – not to work with poor people, as he had hoped, but to teach at a university. Every weekend, he visited his Peace Corps friends in the villages and brought his telescope. “Everybody in the village would see the moons of Saturn and go, ‘Wow!’ That’s when I realized why you do astronomy: that hunger to know who we are and what this universe is.”

After finishing his tour with the Peace Corps, Brother Guy taught astronomy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. His longtime connection with the Jesuits and an earlier realization that he was not called to the priesthood or married life ultimately led him to the decision to become a Jesuit brother. 

Brother Guy entered the Jesuits in 1989. After two years in the novitiate and two years of study, he expected to be assigned to teach at a small university – and was surprised by his assignment to do research at the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo. Pope Francis appointed him as director in September 2015. 

His years at the Vatican Observatory have taught Brother Guy even more than he gained through his research on meteorites. He also learned more about science and its place in human life.

“Science done correctly has some spiritual benefits, and the most surprising is that it teaches you humility,” Brother Guy said. “Science [involves] the answers we don’t know. It’s the pursuit of the answers, and you can only start by saying that you don’t know the answers.”

Science also lifts the souls of scientists and people who intrigued by it. We are called not only to feed the poor, but to feed their souls, Brother Guy said. “Is our goal in serving the poor to make them rich? Our goal ought to be to give everyone the opportunity to do what God calls us to do on Sunday – to contemplate the universe.”

Brother Guy sees Sunday – and other times of sabbath – as “a day when we can feed our souls: to look at the moon and say ‘wow,’ or to write a poem about it, or to dance. If you’re struggling every day to work and you don’t have that sabbath, that day of rest, you’re no better off than a wild animal in the woods looking for the next piece of food to grab.”

Art performs the same service as science in this area, Brother Guy said. “That’s why art is a high calling. That’s why science is in the School of Arts and Sciences. Science is an art.” Quoting a professor at Boston College, Brother Guy said, “There are science theories that are Mona Lisas and Picassos – and scientific theories that are Elvis painted on black canvas. It takes an artistic soul to see the difference.” 
 

Caption for above feature photo: Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, at the Zeiss Refractor, Castel Gandolfo
Photo by Marco Valentini, ESA, Courtesy of the Vatican Observatory