Copy Desk Daily, June 4, 2020

The need for food assistance is greater than ever, but more difficult to provide while trying to prevent spread of the coronavirus. "It's sad. People need food. And they're predominantly new faces." Striving to meet the challenge, Catholic sisters take food pantry ministries outdoors during pandemic.

"To say, as all who eat from the table of the Eucharist should be able to say, that black lives matter is just another way of repeating something we in the United States seem to so often forget, that God has a special love for the forgotten and oppressed." Read a guest commentary contributed by El Paso's Bishop Mark Seitz: Black lives matter.

Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister points out that white Americans will say they don't want to apologize for things that happened centuries ago. But she says we can't lay all the blame on racist generations that came before: Racism is the temptation white people have yet to overcome. "Maybe just apologizing for our own sins against a people would be a start," she says.

Fr. Bryan Massingale's words provoked self-reflection in Young Voices columnist Adele McKiernan. We liberal white Catholics must get serious about racial justice, making commitments to concrete anti-racist actions.

'I can't breathe' — the words that haunt us. George Floyd's words as he was killed rang in our ears on the weekend of Pentecost, the same weekend that COVID-19 deaths passed 100,000 in the United States, a place where immigrants suffer in the stale air of prisons, on a planet where lungs are clogged from climate-induced wildfires. Franciscan Sr. Joan Brown sees connections in her column for GSR.

Want to keep updated with the latest news from the National Catholic Reporter? Sign up here for news updates by email — including one that will send you Copy Desk Daily every Monday through Friday.