I have covered this growing pessimism about our political system in previous columns, but the evidence keeps coming.

A threatened strike by freight rail workers is not about wages but about the right to take time off for a doctor’s appointment or to care for a sick child. Catholic social teaching supports this right for all workers.

“If Catholic schools were a state, they’d be the highest performing in the nation on all four N.A.E.P. tests,” Kathleen Porter-Magee, the superintendent of Partnership Schools, pointed out on Twitter.

“The plea for peace cannot be suppressed,” Pope Francis said today. “It rises from the hearts of mothers; it is deeply etched on the faces of refugees, displaced families, the wounded and the dying.”

This week on “The Gloria Purvis Podcast,” Gloria speaks with Dr. Amanda Joy Calhoun about the deep vestiges of racism in our medical institutions and the strategies she is using to challenge them in her own practice.

How are negotiations possible, Father Andriy Zelinskyy asked, when the Russian opening position is: “Either you do what we want or we kill you.”