With the calm, understated, diplomatic tone for which he is so widely known (I kid), Esquire's Charlie Pierce picks up on an Eli Lake story in The Daily Beast about how Elliott Abrams is one of Paul Ryan's foreign policy tutors, and observes:"Maybe, during a break at his next foreign-policy briefing, Paul Ryan, devout Catholic, can ask his primary foreign-policy mentor whether the guy's feelings about gunning down archbishops in the middle of mass have evolved over the years."Pierce refers to Abrams' role in the Reagan administration's (criminal) Central American policy---a policy that abetted not only the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, but also the killing of American nuns and lay missonaries, as well as Jesuit priests and their housekeepers.At the very least, it's a reminder that there were, and still are, parts of the world where the Catholic Church is one of the few institutions whose leaders speak and act for justice at the risk of their own lives. (And that there were, and still are, parts of the world where those lives are considered "collateral damage" by American neoconservatives.)

Luke Hill is a writer and community organizer in Boston. He blogs at dotCommonweal and MassCommons. 

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