Existential threats to the environment, a global refugee crisis, anti-democratic movements at home and abroad, and the COVID-19 pandemic are among the challenges surrounding President Joe Biden’s meeting with Pope Francis on Oct. 29. As collaboration between these two world leaders takes shape, a key to its success will be their both recognizing and then acting upon the interconnectedness of everything that confronts them.

This ability to see interconnection is constitutive to the spirituality of the Catholic sisters whose legacy lives on in the U.S. Church and at NETWORK in particular where it is my honor to continue that legacy. And it is not difficult to see this ability lived out by the pope and the president themselves. Both men are of the same generation. Both came into leadership positions in their 30s, have weathered periods of darkness and were entrusted with power late in life. They share the opportunity to use that power to guide the world toward a much brighter future than is currently being offered and both feel called by God to this role at this time.

Their meeting will be the 31st of its kind, starting with the 1919 meeting of Woodrow Wilson and Benedict XV. But to connect this week’s meeting with a comparable example of a pope and president meeting amidst great upheaval and positioned to build the future anew, we should look to the October 1965 meeting in New York between Paul VI and Lyndon Johnson.

Two months before that meeting, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, offering legal protection to millions of people whose rights were violated by racist laws. The ground lost on this issue in recent years would have once been unthinkable to many well-intentioned white people. But now, as that ugly truth confronts us, we urgently need to protect the right to vote under federal policy with the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Two months after the New York meeting, Pope Paul closed the Second Vatican Council and instituted the Synod of Bishops, setting a trajectory of engagement with the world and encounter with people at the peripheries. Communities of women religious were among the most robust adopters of the council’s vision, and Pope Francis ardently pursues it for the whole church to this day.

Biden, himself a proponent of that vision and an ally to women religious, has proposed a formidable economic agenda, reminiscent of LBJ, which seeks to help people where they are, in their everyday struggles. These struggles are worsened by the egregious income and wealth disparity in this country, a fact the Catholic Church rightly condemns. In 1965, the U.S. sought to go to the moon in a shared spirit of scientific exploration. Today billionaires have begun traveling to outer space for fun.

The last time Francis and Biden spent significant time together was the pope’s 2015 visit to the United States, where Francis challenged our country to live up to our own ideals. The same year, Francis published his letter on care for the environment, “Laudato si,” again highlighting the interconnection of all creation. A lot has happened since then, and at times the pope seems to grasp the threats we face more acutely than our own elected officials do.

Shortly before the election of Donald Trump, Francis spoke against building walls and the manipulation of fear, which he said “anaesthetizes us to the sufferings of others, and in the end makes us cruel.” He later noted that those who manipulate fear reject the interconnection of all people and shift blame onto a “non-neighbor.”

These words proved prophetic in heralding the racist immigration policies of the Trump administration. They also highlight why it’s so unacceptable for the Biden administration to have continued Title 42 and other policies that make life even more difficult for people seeking refuge in our country. Disapproval for the president’s handling of immigration is now at 58 percent (Grinnell College National Poll), and it is senseless to allow these cruel policies to jeopardize his entire agenda.

If our Catholic president wants to be a world leader in keeping with the vision of Pope Francis, he should follow the lead of women religious and enact policies that better recognize the interconnected nature of all people, all creation, and the common good. He must ensure the protection of the people most targeted by the anti-democratic forces he denounces. I pray Pope Francis can provide him the spiritual strength and fraternal correction he needs to act on the interconnectedness that we know he sees, making it real for the millions of folks who have been left behind for so long.

One of the four cornerstones of NETWORK’s Build Anew agenda is cultivating inclusive community. This means fostering life-giving relationships – in communities and movements – that recognize our fundamental interrelatedness and the intrinsic dignity and worth of each living being. During LGBTQIA+ History Month this October, we reflect on the long history of LGBTQ+ people who have educated, organized, and lobbied for justice. We also recognize how cultivating inclusive community requires affirming our LGBTQ+ siblings and working to end all dehumanizing structures.

We are called to welcome and honor LGBTQ+ people. LGBTQ+ folks have always been a part of our communities, though their stories have often been obscured. Sister Grace Surdovel, IHM creates space for sharing and uplifting these stories in editing Love Tenderly: Sacred Stories of Lesbian and Queer Religious, a recent anthology of personal essays. The book not only makes visible the experiences of queer Catholics, but is also a work of community-building: centering compassion, vulnerability, solidarity, and hope. The religious in the communion that is this anthology are but one part of the vast body of LGBTQ+ justice-seekers calling us to shape more liberative community today.

While anti-trans legislation has been on the rise, Sister Louisa Derouen, OP has ministered among transgender people for over two decades, spending thousands of hours accompanying folks through experiences with churches, families, and transitions. Sr. Louisa writes, “Transgender people are far more attuned than most of us to the reality that we human beings are a complex, mysterious, body-spirit creation of God, and they want nothing more than to honor that reality… They are part of the body of Christ, and they deserve to be treated as the body of Christ.” Sr. Louisa captures the spirit of cultivating inclusive community: acknowledging everyone – but especially those marginalized by dominant society’s refusal to tolerate human diversity – as indispensable members of the body of Christ.

Father Bryan Massingale is a tremendous example of someone who recognizes that affirming LGBTQ+ people is inseparable from advancing a wider vision of social justice. Fr. Massingale is a Catholic priest and an ethics professor at Fordham University who came out as a gay in 2019. His leadership on racial justice as well as LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Church highlights the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and Catholicism in the U.S. Fr. Massingale’s witness calls attention to the ways in which our structures of power deny the humanity of Black people, LGBTQ+ folks, and those with intersectional identities.

As Fr. Massingale leads us to understand, embracing queerness is not only about including LGBTQ+ people in community, but also about breaking free of all oppressive and unjust social systems.  As a queer Catholic, I understand my queerness not just as my sexual identity, but as a mode of being that means challenging categories and structures that stifle flourishing, and living into life-affirming ways of relating to myself and others — which is exactly the work of social justice. In this sense, Jesus’ ministry was a beautiful example of queerness as he subverted the gender, family, and social norms of his time in radically just and life-giving ways.

To me, queerness is deeply Catholic, in that it means being attuned to how God made me as a relational being with inherent dignity and capacity to love. It means looking to God’s creation and finding a rich plurality of forms of life — each “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Justice work requires seeing each person in the fullness of their humanity, which requires affirming the varied ways in which humans love and live in authenticity. In my view, queerness is a powerful, creative basis for envisioning alternatives to structures that seek to suppress, homogenize, and limit possibilities for real flourishing and loving relationship.

By their witness and ministry, Sr. Grace, Sr. Louisa, and Fr. Massingale call us to center people and experiences on the margins over ideology in our work for justice. As we strive to enact the Build Anew agenda, let us ensure that our policies — especially in health care, housing, taxes, and workplace and family policy — include and protect members of the LGBTQ+ community and their families.  Let us remember to ground our advocacy work in our encounters with our neighbors, in all their vibrant variety of gender and sexuality. And let us see queerness as a mode of being that invites us to creatively challenge oppressive social structures and imagine new forms of community that truly honor the wondrous diversity of God’s holy creation.

On October 18^th, NETWORK hosted a monthly Community Conversation titled “Called to Action– The Spirituality of NETWORK’s Political Ministry.” The event began with a presentation on NETWORK’s foundational history from Historian Sister Mara Rutten, RSM. NETWORK was founded in 1971 when 47 Catholic Sisters gathered at Trinity College in Washington, D.C. to form a lobbying group in the spirit of Catholic Social Teaching. These Women Religious created a nationwide community of political justice activists and held legislative seminars to train new justice-seekers on priorities such as fair wages, tax justice, health care, workers’ rights, and more. Over the decades, our spirit-filled network has expanded to include thousands of people of all backgrounds.

NETWORK’S foundresses based the organization’s mission on Catholic Social Justice tradition– living out the Gospel values of pursuing the common good and uplifting every person’s inherent human dignity. When approaching federal policy through a Catholic Social Justice lens, we center the lived realities of those experiencing systemic inequalities such as sexism, racism, and economic exploitation. NETWORK’s principles of Catholic Social Justice continue to guide our approach to educating, organizing, and lobbying for transformative change.

After reflecting on NETWORK’s history, Community Conversation participants were asked to consider how Catholic Social Justice informs our current work as advocates. Many participants shared frustrations of living in communities where many Catholics are single-issue voters and are unaware of equally sacred issues. People agreed that our country’s divisive political climate can be discouraging on a familial, parish, neighborhood, and national level in the fight for justice and the common good. However, a profound message stood out to me on how we can sustain our work during difficult times.

In my small discussion group, I explained how advocacy work is very important to me, but can disheartening and emotionally draining at times. One of my group members, Sister Betty McVeigh, then shared a phrase that has stuck with me: “Hope is a verb.” In the moments where there seems to be only tragedy and an extreme lack of progress on the issues that matter, we must move forward with radical hope in order to realize our vision of an equitable society with justice and human dignity at the center. As the NETWORK community organizes and lobbies on priorities such as democracy, the Build Back Better plan, immigration reform, and more we must come together to rise above the brokenness and suffering, and live out the same Gospel call NETWORK’s foundresses were moved by.

Catholic Social Justice is not only doctrine, but a tool we can use to build relationships and work for societal change. So much can be achieved when we approach every situation with the hope of building our country anew to dismantle systemic racism, cultivate inclusive community, root our economy in solidarity, and transform our politics. Pope Francis calls us to be “social poets,” people that “have the ability and the courage to create hope where there appears to be only waste and exclusion.” As we embark on the journey of celebrating NETWORK’s 50^th anniversary I hope we can all renew our dedication to the foundresses’ mission of rejecting exclusion and inequality and building a just world together. We be social poets together through hope, hope, hope.