As he presses his wife to convert from her native Hinduism, Vice President JD Vance might try better adhering to his newly adopted faith.
One timely and lively example for him to follow would be Sister JoAnn Persch, a 91-year-old nun who has been regularly visiting the Broadview ICE facility in suburban Chicago for two decades. She was among 2,000 of the faithful who gathered for Mass at a makeshift altar across from the facility on November 1.
“All Saints Day on November 1 is a sacred feast day in the Catholic tradition and we wish to include them in a religious service by offering them holy communion on this day,” her group had noted in a written request that ICE said it required at least a week beforehand. “We will be gathering that day for an outdoor Catholic Mass and our request is for a small delegation of eight religious ministers to provide Holy Communion during the Mass while our gathering remains outside of the ICE facility in peaceful prayer.”
When time at the Mass for communion, Persch and Chicago Auxiliary Bishop José María Garcia-Maldonado and six others carried the Host the 100 yards from the altar to a checkpoint the Illinois State Police established outside the ICE building. An officer relayed by telephone the group’s request to come in. ICE denied them entrance for safety reasons.
“Now, I want to know whose safety?” Persch later told the Daily Beast. “Are we going to attack the immigrants? Are they going to attack me? I don’t think so.”
She noted that she had been visiting ICE prisoners in local jails for years and nobody had tried to harm her. That left only the ICE agents.
“Do they think coming with the Blessed Sacrament of the Catholic Church that we were going to attack them?” she asked.
Persch walked back to the gathering and asked them to remain silent after she announced ICE’s decision, no matter how they felt.
She stood before the faithful and made the anticipatory request for silence. She then reported what might have been expected to trigger boos and angry shouts.
”The answer was ‘no’.”
The response surprised her. It was a testament to the power of moral authority possessed by someone who actively lives the gospel every day, as taught by the Roman Catholic Church that Vance says he embraces.
“I was amazed, 2,000 people, it was dead silent.” Persch told The Daily Beast. “There were tears, but for several minutes, they were so respectful of that moment, which was a very sacred moment.”
Should Persch ever be a candidate for sainthood, the total hush could go down as a possible miracle.
After that remarkable moment of silence among those gathered for an outdoor Mass in Broadview came a challenge to the faithful everywhere to speak out. Pope Leo XIV reacted by citing a principle by which Persch and other true Catholics guide their lives.
“Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, ‘How did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not?’” the pontiff told the press. “Many people who’ve lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what’s going on right now… Many times they have been separated from their families and no one knows what happens…I would certainly invite the authorities to allow pastoral workers to attend to the needs of those people.”
As reported by the Substack “Letters From Leo” by Christopher Hale, a White House spokesman responded to a request for comment by saying, “The pope doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Vance reached out to Hale on X, asking, “Hey Chris, which WH spokesperson gave you this comment?”
But Vance maintained a less-than-holy silence about ICE preventing detainees from receiving communion. He apparently failed to voice any objection when Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin falsely contradicted Pope Leo on X, insisting “religious organizations have ALWAYS been welcome to provide services to detainees” if they use “proper channels.”
For somebody in Vance’s high position to let such a lie go unchallenged lowers him to cowardly complicity, whatever his faith.
But, even an errant Catholic convert could redeem himself by following an example Persch has long set at the Broadview ICE facility. She and fellow Sister of Mercy Pat Murphy first stood outside the brick building in the early morning darkness of Friday, Jan. 5, 2007. Friday was deportation day there and an immigration lawyer had asked them to join him in praying for a group of migrants being sent off despite all his best efforts.
“It was literally 20 below zero, not just wind chill.” Persch told the Daily Beast this week. “We were out there in a bitter cold, watching families just being torn apart because their loved ones were being ripped from their lives.”
Persch and Murphy saw the deportees being loaded onto buses and vans for the ride to the airport.
“What struck me is they’re being moved like pieces on a chess board.” Persch recalled. “They have no control over their lives.”
The nuns returned to their car.
“We looked at each other, and we said, ‘We have to be here every week,” she remembered. “And so we have for 19 years. We’ve been there in rain and snow and ice and freezing and boiling hot.”
They began what Persch calls a “hug ministry” outside the facility,
“Families were traumatized, and they’d come up to us and what could we say, but just hold them and let them express their grief,” she remembered.
The nuns then decided they also needed to comfort those still being held inside. They strode up to the entrance.
“So we’re pretty naive,” Persch recalled. ”We went up and rang the bell and said we’d like to come in and talk to those being deported. And they just looked at us like, ‘What planet are you from? You can’t come in here.’”
The nuns called the ICE field office and left messages asking to speak to the Midwest director. They got no response, so they wrote a letter.
“Then some officer called us and said, ‘Go out to McHenry County Jail, where we have 200 immigrants,” she remembers.
The nuns made an appointment and drove two hours to one of the local correctional facilities that ICE used for detention.
“They said, ‘Oh, no, we don’t need any help’.”
But the nuns, who earned the nickname Rabble and Rouser, were nothing if not persistent.
“Peacefully and respectfully, we never take no for an answer,” she says.
They enlisted the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to help them with the state legislature.
“We got (a) law passed unanimously, by both the Illinois House and Senate, that gave access to religious workers to the immigrants for pastoral care,” Persch remembered.
But the ICE processing center in Broadview was a federal facility not subject to the new state law. And the nuns still wanted to see the immigrants who were briefly held there, either just after they were grabbed or before they were shipped out. They presented ICE with a possibility Persch describes as “two spry elderly nuns” lying down in front of the buses.
“So, I got a call from the field director and he said they wanted to negotiate,” Persch says.
The nuns were granted a tour inside the Broadview Facility, which they saw was only a depot equipped for a few hours of detention. They also got permission to visit deportees on the buses and vans before their departures for the airport.
“Talk with the people and pray with them,” Persch says. “They were shackled, behind Plexiglass, metal grating, but they were so grateful. They’d clap and shout out, ‘Thank you!’”
The nuns were able to achieve their immediate goal.
“Just to let them know that there are people that cared about them that saw them as human beings,” Persch says.
The nuns kept coming back every Friday and slowly reached an understanding with ICE.
“We trusted each other, and we built a relationship,” Pesch says. “And even though they had to stay on their side of the table, and we had to stay on ours, we could come close to the center and that’s how we were able to do what we could do.”
That all ended with the second Trump administration, which included the self-described “newbie” Catholic vice president.
“To see what’s going on now, the officers with riot gear and masks on,” Persch says. “People have asked me, ‘Can you help us?’ I have no idea who’s behind those masks. I’m sure it’s not the men and women that I know. They would talk like rational human beings.”
On July 21, Persch’s holy sidekick Murphy died at 96. Persch was continuing their decades-long immigration mission when ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz on Sept. 9, conducting sweeps across Chicago. Broadview became a detention facility even though it was still only equipped for processing.
“They’re keeping hundreds of people there,” Persch said. “There no beds, no showers, They’re sleeping on the floor, sitting up on plastic chairs. There’s no big kitchen.”
Persch is now with the Coalition for Spiritual & Public Leadership, which organized the All Saints Day Mass that concluded with the miracle of silence.
“That really touched my soul,” she told the Daily Beast this week.
Some material progress came on Wednesday, when a federal judge ordered ICE to improve conditions at Broadview. ICE now has to give inmates bedding and toilet articles, access to showers and three meals a day.
“People shouldn’t be sleeping next to overflowing toilets,” U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman ruled. “They should not be sleeping on top of each other.”
Meanwhile, JD Vance persists in turning silence into deepening shame. Persch was asked if she had any thoughts about the recent Catholic convert who persists in turning silence into deepening shame.
“Pray, I guess,” she said.
