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Archbishop Charles C. Thompson of Indianapolis issued a decree on Thursday excusing Catholics across central and southern Indiana from Sunday Mass if they fear being arrested on the way there.
The decree took effect Friday and runs through the end of the month. It covers “all those persons living within the Archdiocese of Indianapolis who reasonably fear being detained, separated from their families, or experience intimidation due to the increased immigration enforcement,” and it shuts the door the government’s defenders would otherwise walk through:
“This applies even to those with proper legal documentation.”
Thompson wrote it in the language of canon law, citing canon 87, which lets a bishop lift a disciplinary law “when it contributes to their spiritual welfare.”
In plainer English, the archbishop of Indianapolis has decided that the government of the United States now threatens the spiritual welfare of his people.
What happened on Post Road
Here’s what precipitated Thursday’s decree.
On Monday, cell phone video caught ICE agents chasing a man across several lanes of traffic on Post Road at Interstate 70.
Masked agents took a man at a gas station near 38th Street and German Church Road on Tuesday morning while he was getting ready to pump gas.
“That’s probably somebody’s father, somebody’s husband,” Devon Brown, who filmed it, told FOX59. A woman at the station told the agents she believed they had followed her painter’s van from her own driveway.
People were protesting on Monument Circle by Tuesday night, and on Wednesday Rep. André Carson opened a congressional inquiry into “masked agents, unmarked vehicles, and a dangerous foot pursuit across multiple lanes of traffic.”
Indiana’s Republican leaders cheered.
Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith wrote that he “proudly support[s] all ICE officers in our state today removing illegal immigrants,” and Sen. Jim Banks warned that “we will not let Indianapolis become Minneapolis.”
Banks was talking about protesters.
Most Americans remember Minneapolis for Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the two U.S. citizens federal agents killed there in January.
Thompson’s own statement, while tempered, is clear: “While recognizing the need for law enforcement to protect and defend, it is gravely concerning to witness families being torn apart,” he wrote.
Indianapolis joins the long list
Indianapolis joins a long list of Catholic dioceses telling its people to stay home from Sunday Mass.
Nashville dispensed its immigrants from Mass in May 2025, San Bernardino followed in July, Charlotte acted in November, and Baton Rouge and New Orleans followed in December; on Dec. 23, Bishop Earl Fernandes of Columbus (a bishop nobody mistakes for a progressive) excused anyone who “reasonably fear[s] being detained” through the end of the Christmas season.
Thompson repeats Fernandes almost word for word, down to “even those with proper legal documentation.” The American bishops now share a canonical vocabulary for one specific problem, and the problem is Washington.
Bishops have lifted the Sunday obligation for blizzards and for a pandemic. The president of the United States is a new category.
Four days before Thompson acted, Bishop Frank Caggiano of Bridgeport, Connecticut, published a letter about what ICE has been doing in Danbury and Stamford.
“I have heard of husbands and fathers taken from their cars on the way to work, of spouses unable to find where a loved one has been brought,” he wrote, and he made a promise: his parishes “remain, as they have always been, places of welcome and refuge, and no one need fear that the doors of our churches will ever be closed to them.”
“Whatever one believes about the just enforcement of our nation’s laws,” Caggiano added, “no person of faith can look upon this kind of suffering with indifference.”
“A type of prayer”
Nuns in Ohio were among the first to act.
On Sunday, Aug. 9, nearly 700 people lined the street outside the ICE field office in Blue Ash, north of Cincinnati, as Haitians from Springfield reported to have GPS trackers clamped onto their ankles after the Administration revoked Haitians’ temporary protection status.
Springfield, an hour’s drive north of that office, is a city of 60,000 where roughly one in four residents is Haitian, and many of them lived and worked there legally under Temporary Protected Status until the administration ended it on July 27.
Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami spent two days on Capitol Hill that week pressing the Senate to extend the protections. “It’s like sending people back into a burning house,” he said.
I will have more soon on how JD Vance’s false 2024 claims about Haitians eating their neighbors’ pets led directly to the ankle monitors in Blue Ash.
On the corner stood Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of the Precious Blood, Sisters of Charity and Sisters of Divine Providence, and Sister Patricia Wittberg held a sign that said in eight words what the bishops’ decrees say in canon law: “It’s so bad even the NUNS are mad!”
Sister Sally Duffy of the Sisters of Charity answered the objection she hears most often. “I’ve had people say to me, ‘Sister, they need to come here legally.’ Well, they came here legally,” she said. “We are changing the rules.” Wittberg put the administration’s strategy in one sentence: “They don’t want another Minneapolis … but they’d love for all the Haitians to be deported in secret.”
Sisters Anita Marie and Maria Francine, twins with the Sisters of Notre Dame, stood at the ICE office door in full habit at an hour when they would ordinarily be praying in their rooms before Mass. “And this,” Sister Anita Marie said, “is a type of prayer.”
The Church walks out to find them
I encourage you to put these three scenes from the past few weeks side to side.
A bishop in Indianapolis has told his people they may stay home from Mass, since the road to church has become dangerous.
His brother bishop in Bridgeport promises that the doors stay open to anyone who can get through them, while the nuns in Blue Ash have given up their own Sunday morning to stand at the door of an ICE office instead.
Parish by parish, city by city, state by state, without asking anyone’s permission, the Catholic Church in the United States is reorganizing its sacramental life around a single task — protecting people from their own government.
For two decades, the loudest voices in American Catholic politics told us that religious liberty was under siege from contraception mandates and wedding cakes.
Today, an archbishop in Indiana has concluded that his flock cannot keep the third commandment without risking a masked man at a gas station. The real threat to religious freedom in this country, as I wrote when Bishop Fernandes acted in December, is a government that makes families choose between their God and their safety.
Pope Leo XIV told the crowd in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday that “we cannot remain as unengaged spectators,” and that believers are called “to take on the burdens of their brothers and sisters, especially those who are crushed by injustice, discrimination, and violence.” Thompson issued his decree the next day. The U.S. bishops declared in July that ICE’s conduct must “never be normalized,” and a dispensation is what a refusal to normalize looks like on paper.
The decree expires on Sept. 30 “unless further extended,” and its last instruction is addressed to the priests of the archdiocese: attend to the people who cannot come, carrying Penance and the Anointing of the Sick, and Communion to the homebound.
That is the oldest Catholic instinct there is.
When the faithful cannot reach the altar, in the name of our Lord who seeks all and excludes none, the Church walks out to find them, whether they are sitting in a painter’s van on 38th Street or standing on a corner in Blue Ash in ankle monitors.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Thompson, Bishop Caggiano, Bishop Fernandes, and the sisters of the Ohio Sisters Justice Network, who have decided that a frightened family on the east side of Indianapolis is their responsibility, whatever the lieutenant governor says about them.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are tired of watching their government empty the pews and call it safety. They want the faith Sister Anita Marie described at the door of an ICE office (a prayer with its feet on a sidewalk), the kind Bishop Caggiano promised when he said the church doors will not close.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every family the government is tearing apart — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
You write that priests are to bring the Sacraments to the faithful who fear trying to get to Mass. How soon before ICE starts following priests on their rounds?
That is the right thing to do. Thank you.