According to Christian doctrine, one of the “offices” or roles that every baptized person shares with Jesus is his “prophetic office.” Part of Jesus’ mission was prophetic: He reveals the will of God.

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it.” Malcolm X said that, and you can’t deny the truthiness of it even if you’re not a fan of the man or his methods. He also said, “Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it.” No less true if troubling in these days of challenged orders of authority.

THOUGH a grandson of the legendary Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill, a member of the famed Medill-Patterson newspaper family, and the founder of the New York Daily News, the nation’s first tabloid newspaper and the most successful paper in U.S. history at the time, Joseph Patterson was nonetheless highly critical of the wealthy and preferred the point of view—and sometimes the company—of common people.

With love for God’s commandments and remorse for our sins, we turn to the Lord for forgiveness.

Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers. In the Sunday readings this month the church has been sampling the Letter of James on the importance not only of acting on one’s faith but also of acting rightly.

Religious traditions have a funny habit of condemning all other traditions. It wasn’t that long ago that Catholics consigned all Protestants to hell, and vice versa. Some of us can even remember when it was considered a sin for parishioners of the Irish church to go across the street to the Italian church, or the Polish church, or the German church, or whatever the other church was.

If people kept only what is required for their daily needs and if the surplus were given to the poor, both riches and poverty would be abolished. —Saint Basil (ca. 329-379)