Serious financial woes have plagued the Palm Springs Art Museum for at least six years, according to internal documents obtained by The Times. Recent developments have opened a Pandora’s box.
On Jan. 15, the accounting firm conducting the annual audit of the museum’s 2024 books attached to its report a “letter of material weakness,” a standard accounting practice for alerting a client to the reasonable possibility that its internal financial statements are significantly out of whack.
Less than three months after the audit letter, in early April, the museum’s director suddenly resigned, and trustee defections began. A cascade of at least eight resignations from the museum’s board of trustees — nearly one-third of its membership — has occurred since spring. One resignation came on the advice of the trustee’s attorney. With 19 trustees remaining, according to a listing on the museum’s website, the total number has fallen below the minimum of 20 required in the museum’s by-laws.
Palm Springs Art Museum board chair Craig Hartzman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Accountants at Eide Bailly, citing a “deficiency in internal control” at the museum, highlighted six areas of concern, including problems with reporting of endowment spending, improper recording of the market value of donated and deaccessioned art, and faulty recording of admissions revenues.
Former museum director Adam Lerner had reportedly been negotiating a three-year contract renewal when he stepped down. Without elaborating on his unexpected decision to depart, he was cited in a museum press release as leaving for personal reasons. Lerner returned to Colorado, where he previously headed the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.
Reached by text, Lerner declined a request for interview, referring questions to the museum.
Financial problems at PSAM are not new. According to six pages of notes obtained by The Times, compiled by a trustee who led a task force charged with examining museum finances, the ending statement on the 2019 endowment balance was $3 million higher than the beginning balance on the 2020 statement. Audits and tax returns posted on the museum website confirm the puzzling discrepancy.
The notes say it is “highly unlikely” the funds were stolen. Instead, they question internal museum accounting practices, which can create a misleading appearance of fiscal health. By the 2021 audit, the outside accounting firm that had been preparing them annually prior to Eide Bailly had quit.
“This is always a red flag,” wrote museum trustee Kevin Comer, an art collector who retired after 30 years as a managing director at Deutsche Bank in New York, and who is a former professor of accounting and fiduciary management techniques at the Ohio State University. A trustee for less than two years, Comer resigned Nov. 6.
Reached by telephone, Comer declined to discuss the accounting firm’s letter or the task force notes.
Palm Springs Art Museum
(Guillaume Goureau/Palm Springs Art Museum)
Since late July, a lengthy anonymous email has also been circulating from a self-described “whistleblower with a direct relationship” to the Palm Springs Art Museum. Fourteen itemized complaints, most concerning fiscal matters, are presented with sobriety, plus a slow burn of understandable anger. Whether or not the unidentified whistle blower has an ax to grind is unknown to me, but plainly the email is not a list of wild accusations hurled by an unreliable gadfly.
The coherent level of informed specificity certainly suggests authorship by a knowledgeable insider. Some stated grievances may have benign explanations, while others are troubling.
Comer pulled few punches in his own letter of resignation to fellow trustees, also obtained by The Times. The fiduciary expert, a former member of the board’s finance committee, said he was resigning on the advice of his attorney.
The board, Comer alleged, is sidestepping the fundamental fiduciary obligation to protect “the integrity of the museum, despite our best intentions.” The letter urges hiring both a law firm and a forensic accounting firm to review museum finances, partly to untangle apparently inappropriate methods in the past for the benefit of the current board, and partly to address potential liability.
An earlier task force suggestion to that effect was discussed by the board but went unheeded, he charges.
Especially concerning is a 2019 reclassification of some restricted funds. Task force notes suggest the $3-million discrepancy between 2019 and 2020 may have originated as a change in restricted funds to unrestricted status. Assets specifically donated for a particular function could then appear to be available for general operating purposes.
The museum consistently operated at a loss, the notes say, with some operating shortfalls covered by the 2019 reclassification. A deficit is not unusual for an art museum, but whether the reclassifications of some restricted funds were appropriate appears to be in doubt. Presumably, funds reclassified as unrestricted at the end of one year to make the financial filing look good may have had their restricted status restored at the start of the next year.
Restricted funds can include money raised through the deaccession and sale of art donated to a museum’s collection. Common museum ethical standards require income from deaccessioned art to be sequestered, used only for other art purchases, as well as for direct care of the collection. For accounting purposes, the monetary value of a nonprofit museum’s art collection is not considered a material asset to be carried on the books. Reclassification of sequestered art funds could support an appearance of general financial vigor.
During the lengthy 2020 pandemic closure, the cash-strapped museum made the controversial decision to deaccession and then sell a prized 1974 Helen Frankenthaler painting, which brought $4.7 million at auction. The 2024 audit puts total donor restricted funds for art purchases and collection maintenance at $7.8 million.
To pay the bills the museum has also been drawing down the endowment. According to the 2024 audit, the most recent financial statement currently available, the endowment is slightly more than $17 million — extremely small for a museum that last year had an operating budget of approximately $10.5 million.
“Endowment draws over the past decade totaled roughly $8 million, and contributions to the endowment totaled roughly $500,000,” the notes report. “Most years the museum operated at a loss, including for the last three years when the board believed we were profitable,” it states.
Such a disproportion between fundraising and expenditure, between money coming in and money going out, is frankly unsustainable for this — or any — art museum, especially when inflation is factored in.
The endowment is a nonprofit’s “seed corn,” eaten for short-term gain only at its long-term peril. Most disturbing: The notes suggest that while the five-person executive committee may have been aware of some of the situation’s more difficult details, the rest of the board appears not to have been fully informed of the museum’s financial position . “Bottom line,” Comer’s resignation letter astutely observes, “this is a leadership group that doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, and that is the most dangerous place in which an institution can be placed.”
The Palm Springs Art Museum has apparently wedged itself firmly between a rock and a hard place. Now, it is unclear how the museum can move forward without a full cohort of 20 trustees authorized to vote on making essential decisions — including accepting new members to the board.
When millions of European immigrants came to the United States in the 19th century only to be scorned by mainstream society, it was the Catholic Church that embraced them, taught that keeping the customs of one’s native lands was not bad and created systems of mutual aid and education for the newcomers that didn’t rely on the government.
The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish American Catholic, showed that the U.S. was ready to expand its definition of who could become president. Labor organizers like Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day and Mother Jones pushed for the dignity of workers while frequently citing the woke words of Jesus — the Sermon of the Mount and the Beatitudes among the wokest — as the fuel for their spiritual fire.
Catholicism is the faith I was baptized in, the one I embraced as a teen and that’s the bedrock for my moral code of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. My work desk covered with statues and devotional cards of Jesus, Mary and the saints is a physical testament to this.
I stopped going early on in my adulthood because the Church became something I didn’t recognize.
The bishops and cardinals who preached we should follow Jesus’ admonition we should tend to the least among us presided over a child sex abuse scandal in the 1990s and 2000s that cost parishioners billions of dollars in legal settlements and their ethical high ground. The obsession that too many of those same church leaders had over abortion and homosexuality — which Christ never talked about — over social justice matters during the Obama administration left me disappointed. Their continual condemnation of pro-choice Catholic Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for taking Communion while staying silent about Donald Trump’s constant violations of the Ten Commandments was rank hypocrisy.
The Pew Research Center found 55% of my fellow faithful voted for Trump. Key Catholics have blessed Trump’s uglier tendencies: A majority of them rules over our revanchist Supreme Court while the president’s team features a vice president who’s a convert and a rogue’s gallery of influential insiders that bear surnames from previous generations of Catholic diasporas — Kennedy, Rubio, Bovino, Homan among the worst of the worst.
Yet I remain a Catholic because you shouldn’t turn your back so easily on institutions that formed you and you don’t cede your identity to heretics. The election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American to head the Holy See, to succeed Pope Francis stirred in me the sense that things might change for the better as our country worsens.
Now, without naming him, the U.S. Catholic hierarchy has rebuked Trump on his signature issue and one close to my heart in a way that shows my hope hasn’t been in vain.
Clergy attend the 2021 Fall General Assembly meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, Md.
(Julio Cortez/Associated Press)
This week the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a so-called “special message” to blast Trump’s deportation Leviathan, decrying its “vilification of immigrants” “the, indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and how hundreds of thousands of residents have “arbitrarily lost their legal status.” Citing passages from across the Bible — the Gospel, the Old Testament, the Letters of Paul — to argue for the human worth of the undocumented and the holy mandate that we must care about them, it was the first time since 2013 that American bishops collectively authored such a statement.
Even as a majority of U.S. Catholics have gone MAGA, support for the special message was overwhelming: 216 bishops voted in favor, 5 against, and there were 3 abstentions. Their missive even concluded with a shout-out to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the brown, pregnant apparition of the Virgin Mary who’s the patroness of the Americas for Catholics.
Talk about someone who would get deported if la migra saw Her on the street.
The cruelty this administration has shown throughout its deportation campaign — families torn apart as easily as the Constitution; U.S. citizens detained; wanton federal violence that a federal judge in Chicago described as “shock[ing] the conscience” — has become one of the most pressing moral issues of our times. The call by Catholic bishops to oppose this wrong is important — so like a voice crying in the wilderness, the church must set an example for the rest of the country to follow.
This example already is being set in parishes across Southern California.
Priests and deacons have marched at rallies and prayed for those detained and deported from Orange County to downtown L.A. and beyond. Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights has let local activists stage know-your-rights workshops since Trump won last November. While L.A archbishop José H. Gomez and Diocese of Orange bishop Kevin Vann, the two most senior Catholic prelates in the region, have spoken out forcefully against immigration raids, some of their local brother bishops have pushed harder.
Diocese of San Bernardino Bishop Alberto Rojas has allowed Catholics who are afraid of la migra to skip Mass since July after immigration agents detained migrants on church property, arguing “such fear constitutes a grave inconvenience” for his flock. In San Diego, Bishop Michael Pham — who’s been in his seat for only four months — helped launch a program encouraging religious leaders to accompany migrants to immigration court to bear witness to the injustices inside and has participated himself.
Expect to hear gnashing of the teeth from the conservative side of church pews about how everyone should respect the rule of law and to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s as if there ever was a Pope Donald. Already, Trump border czar Tom Homan has cried that the bishops are “wrong” for issuing their pro-immigrant letter and suggested they focus on “fixing the Catholic Church.”
But Homan’s dismissal and that of his fellow travelers doesn’t make the bishop’s admonition against Trump’s policies any more prophetic. The president’s immigration dictates are out of Herod — no less an authority than Pope Leo described them in October as “inhuman,” told a delegation of American bishops that “the church cannot remain silent” on those outrages and stated in a separate speech that such abuse was “not the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather grave crimes committed or tolerated by the state.”
The Catholic Church never will be as progressive as some want it to be. Even as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released its message, the group elected as its next president Diocese of Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley, whose public politics have so far mostly aligned with those of his deep-red state. But on the issue of dignity for immigrants during the Trump era, U.S. bishops have been on the right side of history — and God. They criticized Trump’s Muslim ban and his move to separate undocumented parents from their children during his first administration and have kept a watch on his attempt to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows some people who came to this country as children to legally remain in the U.S.
We’re about to enter the Christmas season, a holiday based on the story of a poor family seeking shelter in an era when their kind was rejected by the powers that be and ultimately had to flee home. It’s the story of the United States as well, one too many Americans have forsaken and that Trump wants all of us to forget.
May Catholics remind their fellow Americans anew of how powerful and righteous standing up for the stranger is.
MADISON, Wis. — Out in Wisconsin’s state capital, where the orange leaves are falling and every other person seems to wear the red and white of the University of Wisconsin Badgers, the pride and pain of rooting for the Dodgers in 2025 played out in the household of Carolina Sarmiento and Revel Sims.
They’re urban planning professors, Southern California natives — he’s from Eagle Rock, she’s from Santa Ana; they met at UCLA — and longtime friends of mine who have lived in Madison for a decade but are still involved in immigrant and anti-gentrification activism back home. I visited them recently as part of a speaking tour of Midwestern colleges and found myself in the middle of a debate that passed through the lives of too many people we know back home.
It’s one that’s unlikely to completely fade away no matter how many rings and parades the Boys in Blue rack up:
Is it OK to, well, revel, in this year’s World Series champs?
On one hand the Dodgers won back-to-back titles for their first time ever and became the first team to do so in a generation. The squad looked like Los Angeles at its best: people from across the world who set aside their egos to win and bring joy to millions of Angelenos in a most difficult year for the City of Angels.
L.A., a city long synonymous with winning — the weather, the teams, the people, the food — has suffered a terrible losing streak that started with the deadly and catastrophic Eaton and Palisades fires and continues with mass deportations that the Trump administration vows to escalate.
That’s where the rub came for Sarmiento and other Dodgers fans. For them, the actions and inactions of the team this year have been indefensible.
“For me, it started when the Dodgers went to the White House,” said the 45-year-old as we drove to their blue-and-white house. She especially took issue with shortstop Mookie Betts, who skipped a White House visit in 2019 when he was with the World Series-winning Boston Red Sox but shook Trump’s hand this time around, describing his previous snub as “very selfish.”
“Who got in his ear?” she exclaimed, bringing out dried mangoes for us to snack on as we waited for Sims to come home. “Since when has standing up for injustice been about you?”
Sarmiento didn’t grow up a Dodgers fan but bought into the team once she and Sims became a couple. They and their two young sons usually attended Dodgers games on trips back home and regularly caught the Dodgers in Milwaukee whenever they played the Brewers. One time, manager Dave Roberts “happily” signed a jersey for them when the family ran into him at a hotel, Sarmiento said.
In Madison, she long wore a Dodgers sweatshirt emblazoned with the Mexican flag that Sims bought for her because “it was a way to represent home. But not anymore. I tell Revel, ‘Babe, I’m not asking you to boycott the Dodgers forever, but they gotta give us something back.’”
Sure, the Dodgers blocked federal agents from entering the Dodger Stadium parking lot in June just after la migra raided a Home Depot facility. Shortly after, the team donated $1 million to the California Community Foundation to disburse to nonprofits assisting families affected by Trump’s deportation Leviathan.
But as the summer went along, Sarmiento grew frustrated that only Dodgers outfielder Kiké Hernández spoke out against immigration raids and Trump’s deployment of the Marines and National Guard. She also wondered why Dodgers chairman Mark Walter wouldn’t address charges that companies he has investments in do business with Trump’s deportation machine. One has a stake in a private prison company that contracts with the federal government to run immigrant detention centers; another has a joint venture with Palantir, which ICE has contracted to create data surveillance systems that would make the Eye of Sauron from “The Lord of the Rings” series seem as innocuous as a teddy bear.
“After a while, it’s like a woman who knows her partner is a cheater but keeps saying, ‘He’s not a cheater, he’s not a cheater’ and then gets upset when he cheats on her again. At that point, all you can say is, ‘Girl…‘”
I brought up how many Dodgers fans I know saw the team’s World Series win as a giant middle finger to Trump.
The heroes of Games 6 and 7, outfielders Kiké Hernández and second baseman Miguel Rojas, come respectively from Puerto Rico and Venezuela, a commonwealth Trump has neglected and a country he’s salivating to invade. The team’s most popular player, Shohei Ohtani, still proudly speaks in his native Japanese despite being in the U.S. for eight years and knowing some English. Tens of thousands of fans came out for the Dodgers victory parade and celebration at Dodger Stadium, many of them undoubtedly immigrants.
Isn’t it OK to let folks be happy?
“It’s like community benefit agreements,” Sarmiento responded, referring to a tactic by neighborhood groups that sees them win commitments from developers on issues like open space, union contracts and affordable housing with the threat of protests and lawsuits. “You know what’s coming, so you try to get something out of it. This year was a political moment that fans could’ve taken and they didn’t, so the Dodgers gave nothing.”
We greeted Sims as he walked in. The two of us walked down to the basement, where he watched the World Series in exile on a big-screen TV.
“It’s a little lonely being a Dodgers fan out here,” joked the 48-year-old, although he was heartened to have seen a fellow University of Wisconsin professor decked out in a Freddie Freeman jersey earlier in the day. Sims grew up going to Dodger Stadium with his father and remembered going to games on his own in the mid-2000s “when it wasn’t a pretty time.”
He brought up the Dodgers’ owner from that era: Frank McCourt, who raised ticket and concession prices seemingly every year and who still partially owns the parking lots surrounding Dodger Stadium. Fans responded to his disastrous regime by protesting before and during games. “It was disheartening to not see that in the stadium this year, when there was an even bigger problem going on.”
Sims felt “conflicted” rooting for the Dodgers this year. He watched every game he could but admitted he found the team celebrating ethnic pride nights “hollow” as raids increased across Los Angeles and the Trump administration attacked the rights of groups that the Dodgers were honoring.
“It would’ve been easy [for the Dodgers] to make a bland statement — ‘We’re a team full of immigrants in a city of immigrants and we’re proud of us all’ — and you wouldn’t have to go any further. They have a historical obligation to do that because of their history.”
But not rooting for the Dodgers was never an option.
Pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto stands onstage at the World Series celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“I want to see L.A. people happy. The parade! It’s a free holiday. People just ditch work and don’t get in trouble for it. We’re the only city — not New York, not Boston, not San Francisco — with a chant against us. We’re despised and misunderstood. So if the Dodgers win, L.A. wins.”
Sarmiento joined us. “She’s my better political half,” Sims cracked. “Caro said to pick another sport.”
“No I didn’t!” she kindly replied. “I just said to take a pause, just for now. A political pause.”
Sims admitted that that a vintage jacket that he used to bring out every October as the Dodgers made another playoff run and Wisconsin turns cold was still in the closet. “I haven’t worn any gear all year.”
“When you went to the game!” Sarmiento shot back, referring to a visit to Milwaukee earlier this year with his local softball team.
“I went with a Valenzuela jersey to represent L.A.,” Sims responded as Sarmiento shook her head.
He laughed.
“I love the team. I just don’t like this team for not saying anything. But it’s what I signed up for.”
Commentary: Audit questions roil the Palm Springs Art Museum
Serious financial woes have plagued the Palm Springs Art Museum for at least six years, according to internal documents obtained by The Times. Recent developments have opened a Pandora’s box.
On Jan. 15, the accounting firm conducting the annual audit of the museum’s 2024 books attached to its report a “letter of material weakness,” a standard accounting practice for alerting a client to the reasonable possibility that its internal financial statements are significantly out of whack.
Less than three months after the audit letter, in early April, the museum’s director suddenly resigned, and trustee defections began. A cascade of at least eight resignations from the museum’s board of trustees — nearly one-third of its membership — has occurred since spring. One resignation came on the advice of the trustee’s attorney. With 19 trustees remaining, according to a listing on the museum’s website, the total number has fallen below the minimum of 20 required in the museum’s by-laws.
Palm Springs Art Museum board chair Craig Hartzman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Accountants at Eide Bailly, citing a “deficiency in internal control” at the museum, highlighted six areas of concern, including problems with reporting of endowment spending, improper recording of the market value of donated and deaccessioned art, and faulty recording of admissions revenues.
Former museum director Adam Lerner had reportedly been negotiating a three-year contract renewal when he stepped down. Without elaborating on his unexpected decision to depart, he was cited in a museum press release as leaving for personal reasons. Lerner returned to Colorado, where he previously headed the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.
Reached by text, Lerner declined a request for interview, referring questions to the museum.
Financial problems at PSAM are not new. According to six pages of notes obtained by The Times, compiled by a trustee who led a task force charged with examining museum finances, the ending statement on the 2019 endowment balance was $3 million higher than the beginning balance on the 2020 statement. Audits and tax returns posted on the museum website confirm the puzzling discrepancy.
The notes say it is “highly unlikely” the funds were stolen. Instead, they question internal museum accounting practices, which can create a misleading appearance of fiscal health. By the 2021 audit, the outside accounting firm that had been preparing them annually prior to Eide Bailly had quit.
“This is always a red flag,” wrote museum trustee Kevin Comer, an art collector who retired after 30 years as a managing director at Deutsche Bank in New York, and who is a former professor of accounting and fiduciary management techniques at the Ohio State University. A trustee for less than two years, Comer resigned Nov. 6.
Reached by telephone, Comer declined to discuss the accounting firm’s letter or the task force notes.
Palm Springs Art Museum
(Guillaume Goureau/Palm Springs Art Museum)
Since late July, a lengthy anonymous email has also been circulating from a self-described “whistleblower with a direct relationship” to the Palm Springs Art Museum. Fourteen itemized complaints, most concerning fiscal matters, are presented with sobriety, plus a slow burn of understandable anger. Whether or not the unidentified whistle blower has an ax to grind is unknown to me, but plainly the email is not a list of wild accusations hurled by an unreliable gadfly.
The coherent level of informed specificity certainly suggests authorship by a knowledgeable insider. Some stated grievances may have benign explanations, while others are troubling.
Comer pulled few punches in his own letter of resignation to fellow trustees, also obtained by The Times. The fiduciary expert, a former member of the board’s finance committee, said he was resigning on the advice of his attorney.
The board, Comer alleged, is sidestepping the fundamental fiduciary obligation to protect “the integrity of the museum, despite our best intentions.” The letter urges hiring both a law firm and a forensic accounting firm to review museum finances, partly to untangle apparently inappropriate methods in the past for the benefit of the current board, and partly to address potential liability.
An earlier task force suggestion to that effect was discussed by the board but went unheeded, he charges.
Especially concerning is a 2019 reclassification of some restricted funds. Task force notes suggest the $3-million discrepancy between 2019 and 2020 may have originated as a change in restricted funds to unrestricted status. Assets specifically donated for a particular function could then appear to be available for general operating purposes.
The museum consistently operated at a loss, the notes say, with some operating shortfalls covered by the 2019 reclassification. A deficit is not unusual for an art museum, but whether the reclassifications of some restricted funds were appropriate appears to be in doubt. Presumably, funds reclassified as unrestricted at the end of one year to make the financial filing look good may have had their restricted status restored at the start of the next year.
Restricted funds can include money raised through the deaccession and sale of art donated to a museum’s collection. Common museum ethical standards require income from deaccessioned art to be sequestered, used only for other art purchases, as well as for direct care of the collection. For accounting purposes, the monetary value of a nonprofit museum’s art collection is not considered a material asset to be carried on the books. Reclassification of sequestered art funds could support an appearance of general financial vigor.
During the lengthy 2020 pandemic closure, the cash-strapped museum made the controversial decision to deaccession and then sell a prized 1974 Helen Frankenthaler painting, which brought $4.7 million at auction. The 2024 audit puts total donor restricted funds for art purchases and collection maintenance at $7.8 million.
To pay the bills the museum has also been drawing down the endowment. According to the 2024 audit, the most recent financial statement currently available, the endowment is slightly more than $17 million — extremely small for a museum that last year had an operating budget of approximately $10.5 million.
“Endowment draws over the past decade totaled roughly $8 million, and contributions to the endowment totaled roughly $500,000,” the notes report. “Most years the museum operated at a loss, including for the last three years when the board believed we were profitable,” it states.
Such a disproportion between fundraising and expenditure, between money coming in and money going out, is frankly unsustainable for this — or any — art museum, especially when inflation is factored in.
The endowment is a nonprofit’s “seed corn,” eaten for short-term gain only at its long-term peril. Most disturbing: The notes suggest that while the five-person executive committee may have been aware of some of the situation’s more difficult details, the rest of the board appears not to have been fully informed of the museum’s financial position
.
“Bottom line,” Comer’s resignation letter astutely observes, “this is a leadership group that doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, and that is the most dangerous place in which an institution can be placed.”
The Palm Springs Art Museum has apparently wedged itself firmly between a rock and a hard place. Now, it is unclear how the museum can move forward without a full cohort of 20 trustees authorized to vote on making essential decisions — including accepting new members to the board.
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Commentary: Can opposing Trump’s deportation machine help Catholic Church regain its moral mojo?
When millions of European immigrants came to the United States in the 19th century only to be scorned by mainstream society, it was the Catholic Church that embraced them, taught that keeping the customs of one’s native lands was not bad and created systems of mutual aid and education for the newcomers that didn’t rely on the government.
The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish American Catholic, showed that the U.S. was ready to expand its definition of who could become president. Labor organizers like Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day and Mother Jones pushed for the dignity of workers while frequently citing the woke words of Jesus — the Sermon of the Mount and the Beatitudes among the wokest — as the fuel for their spiritual fire.
Catholicism is the faith I was baptized in, the one I embraced as a teen and that’s the bedrock for my moral code of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. My work desk covered with statues and devotional cards of Jesus, Mary and the saints is a physical testament to this.
But I’m also one of the 72% of U.S. Catholics that a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. found don’t attend weekly Mass, which we’re obligated to do.
I stopped going early on in my adulthood because the Church became something I didn’t recognize.
The bishops and cardinals who preached we should follow Jesus’ admonition we should tend to the least among us presided over a child sex abuse scandal in the 1990s and 2000s that cost parishioners billions of dollars in legal settlements and their ethical high ground. The obsession that too many of those same church leaders had over abortion and homosexuality — which Christ never talked about — over social justice matters during the Obama administration left me disappointed. Their continual condemnation of pro-choice Catholic Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for taking Communion while staying silent about Donald Trump’s constant violations of the Ten Commandments was rank hypocrisy.
The Pew Research Center found 55% of my fellow faithful voted for Trump. Key Catholics have blessed Trump’s uglier tendencies: A majority of them rules over our revanchist Supreme Court while the president’s team features a vice president who’s a convert and a rogue’s gallery of influential insiders that bear surnames from previous generations of Catholic diasporas — Kennedy, Rubio, Bovino, Homan among the worst of the worst.
Yet I remain a Catholic because you shouldn’t turn your back so easily on institutions that formed you and you don’t cede your identity to heretics. The election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American to head the Holy See, to succeed Pope Francis stirred in me the sense that things might change for the better as our country worsens.
Now, without naming him, the U.S. Catholic hierarchy has rebuked Trump on his signature issue and one close to my heart in a way that shows my hope hasn’t been in vain.
Clergy attend the 2021 Fall General Assembly meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, Md.
(Julio Cortez/Associated Press)
This week the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a so-called “special message” to blast Trump’s deportation Leviathan, decrying its “vilification of immigrants” “the, indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and how hundreds of thousands of residents have “arbitrarily lost their legal status.” Citing passages from across the Bible — the Gospel, the Old Testament, the Letters of Paul — to argue for the human worth of the undocumented and the holy mandate that we must care about them, it was the first time since 2013 that American bishops collectively authored such a statement.
Even as a majority of U.S. Catholics have gone MAGA, support for the special message was overwhelming: 216 bishops voted in favor, 5 against, and there were 3 abstentions. Their missive even concluded with a shout-out to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the brown, pregnant apparition of the Virgin Mary who’s the patroness of the Americas for Catholics.
Talk about someone who would get deported if la migra saw Her on the street.
The cruelty this administration has shown throughout its deportation campaign — families torn apart as easily as the Constitution; U.S. citizens detained; wanton federal violence that a federal judge in Chicago described as “shock[ing] the conscience” — has become one of the most pressing moral issues of our times. The call by Catholic bishops to oppose this wrong is important — so like a voice crying in the wilderness, the church must set an example for the rest of the country to follow.
This example already is being set in parishes across Southern California.
Priests and deacons have marched at rallies and prayed for those detained and deported from Orange County to downtown L.A. and beyond. Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights has let local activists stage know-your-rights workshops since Trump won last November. While L.A archbishop José H. Gomez and Diocese of Orange bishop Kevin Vann, the two most senior Catholic prelates in the region, have spoken out forcefully against immigration raids, some of their local brother bishops have pushed harder.
Diocese of San Bernardino Bishop Alberto Rojas has allowed Catholics who are afraid of la migra to skip Mass since July after immigration agents detained migrants on church property, arguing “such fear constitutes a grave inconvenience” for his flock. In San Diego, Bishop Michael Pham — who’s been in his seat for only four months — helped launch a program encouraging religious leaders to accompany migrants to immigration court to bear witness to the injustices inside and has participated himself.
Expect to hear gnashing of the teeth from the conservative side of church pews about how everyone should respect the rule of law and to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s as if there ever was a Pope Donald. Already, Trump border czar Tom Homan has cried that the bishops are “wrong” for issuing their pro-immigrant letter and suggested they focus on “fixing the Catholic Church.”
But Homan’s dismissal and that of his fellow travelers doesn’t make the bishop’s admonition against Trump’s policies any more prophetic. The president’s immigration dictates are out of Herod — no less an authority than Pope Leo described them in October as “inhuman,” told a delegation of American bishops that “the church cannot remain silent” on those outrages and stated in a separate speech that such abuse was “not the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather grave crimes committed or tolerated by the state.”
The Catholic Church never will be as progressive as some want it to be. Even as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released its message, the group elected as its next president Diocese of Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley, whose public politics have so far mostly aligned with those of his deep-red state. But on the issue of dignity for immigrants during the Trump era, U.S. bishops have been on the right side of history — and God. They criticized Trump’s Muslim ban and his move to separate undocumented parents from their children during his first administration and have kept a watch on his attempt to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows some people who came to this country as children to legally remain in the U.S.
We’re about to enter the Christmas season, a holiday based on the story of a poor family seeking shelter in an era when their kind was rejected by the powers that be and ultimately had to flee home. It’s the story of the United States as well, one too many Americans have forsaken and that Trump wants all of us to forget.
May Catholics remind their fellow Americans anew of how powerful and righteous standing up for the stranger is.
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Commentary: From far away, an L.A. couple grapples with all-too-familiar debate after Dodgers win
MADISON, Wis. — Out in Wisconsin’s state capital, where the orange leaves are falling and every other person seems to wear the red and white of the University of Wisconsin Badgers, the pride and pain of rooting for the Dodgers in 2025 played out in the household of Carolina Sarmiento and Revel Sims.
They’re urban planning professors, Southern California natives — he’s from Eagle Rock, she’s from Santa Ana; they met at UCLA — and longtime friends of mine who have lived in Madison for a decade but are still involved in immigrant and anti-gentrification activism back home. I visited them recently as part of a speaking tour of Midwestern colleges and found myself in the middle of a debate that passed through the lives of too many people we know back home.
It’s one that’s unlikely to completely fade away no matter how many rings and parades the Boys in Blue rack up:
Is it OK to, well, revel, in this year’s World Series champs?
On one hand the Dodgers won back-to-back titles for their first time ever and became the first team to do so in a generation. The squad looked like Los Angeles at its best: people from across the world who set aside their egos to win and bring joy to millions of Angelenos in a most difficult year for the City of Angels.
L.A., a city long synonymous with winning — the weather, the teams, the people, the food — has suffered a terrible losing streak that started with the deadly and catastrophic Eaton and Palisades fires and continues with mass deportations that the Trump administration vows to escalate.
That’s where the rub came for Sarmiento and other Dodgers fans. For them, the actions and inactions of the team this year have been indefensible.
“For me, it started when the Dodgers went to the White House,” said the 45-year-old as we drove to their blue-and-white house. She especially took issue with shortstop Mookie Betts, who skipped a White House visit in 2019 when he was with the World Series-winning Boston Red Sox but shook Trump’s hand this time around, describing his previous snub as “very selfish.”
“Who got in his ear?” she exclaimed, bringing out dried mangoes for us to snack on as we waited for Sims to come home. “Since when has standing up for injustice been about you?”
Sarmiento didn’t grow up a Dodgers fan but bought into the team once she and Sims became a couple. They and their two young sons usually attended Dodgers games on trips back home and regularly caught the Dodgers in Milwaukee whenever they played the Brewers. One time, manager Dave Roberts “happily” signed a jersey for them when the family ran into him at a hotel, Sarmiento said.
In Madison, she long wore a Dodgers sweatshirt emblazoned with the Mexican flag that Sims bought for her because “it was a way to represent home. But not anymore. I tell Revel, ‘Babe, I’m not asking you to boycott the Dodgers forever, but they gotta give us something back.’”
Sure, the Dodgers blocked federal agents from entering the Dodger Stadium parking lot in June just after la migra raided a Home Depot facility. Shortly after, the team donated $1 million to the California Community Foundation to disburse to nonprofits assisting families affected by Trump’s deportation Leviathan.
But as the summer went along, Sarmiento grew frustrated that only Dodgers outfielder Kiké Hernández spoke out against immigration raids and Trump’s deployment of the Marines and National Guard. She also wondered why Dodgers chairman Mark Walter wouldn’t address charges that companies he has investments in do business with Trump’s deportation machine. One has a stake in a private prison company that contracts with the federal government to run immigrant detention centers; another has a joint venture with Palantir, which ICE has contracted to create data surveillance systems that would make the Eye of Sauron from “The Lord of the Rings” series seem as innocuous as a teddy bear.
“After a while, it’s like a woman who knows her partner is a cheater but keeps saying, ‘He’s not a cheater, he’s not a cheater’ and then gets upset when he cheats on her again. At that point, all you can say is, ‘Girl…‘”
I brought up how many Dodgers fans I know saw the team’s World Series win as a giant middle finger to Trump.
The heroes of Games 6 and 7, outfielders Kiké Hernández and second baseman Miguel Rojas, come respectively from Puerto Rico and Venezuela, a commonwealth Trump has neglected and a country he’s salivating to invade. The team’s most popular player, Shohei Ohtani, still proudly speaks in his native Japanese despite being in the U.S. for eight years and knowing some English. Tens of thousands of fans came out for the Dodgers victory parade and celebration at Dodger Stadium, many of them undoubtedly immigrants.
Isn’t it OK to let folks be happy?
“It’s like community benefit agreements,” Sarmiento responded, referring to a tactic by neighborhood groups that sees them win commitments from developers on issues like open space, union contracts and affordable housing with the threat of protests and lawsuits. “You know what’s coming, so you try to get something out of it. This year was a political moment that fans could’ve taken and they didn’t, so the Dodgers gave nothing.”
We greeted Sims as he walked in. The two of us walked down to the basement, where he watched the World Series in exile on a big-screen TV.
“It’s a little lonely being a Dodgers fan out here,” joked the 48-year-old, although he was heartened to have seen a fellow University of Wisconsin professor decked out in a Freddie Freeman jersey earlier in the day. Sims grew up going to Dodger Stadium with his father and remembered going to games on his own in the mid-2000s “when it wasn’t a pretty time.”
He brought up the Dodgers’ owner from that era: Frank McCourt, who raised ticket and concession prices seemingly every year and who still partially owns the parking lots surrounding Dodger Stadium. Fans responded to his disastrous regime by protesting before and during games. “It was disheartening to not see that in the stadium this year, when there was an even bigger problem going on.”
Sims felt “conflicted” rooting for the Dodgers this year. He watched every game he could but admitted he found the team celebrating ethnic pride nights “hollow” as raids increased across Los Angeles and the Trump administration attacked the rights of groups that the Dodgers were honoring.
“It would’ve been easy [for the Dodgers] to make a bland statement — ‘We’re a team full of immigrants in a city of immigrants and we’re proud of us all’ — and you wouldn’t have to go any further. They have a historical obligation to do that because of their history.”
But not rooting for the Dodgers was never an option.
Pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto stands onstage at the World Series celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“I want to see L.A. people happy. The parade! It’s a free holiday. People just ditch work and don’t get in trouble for it. We’re the only city — not New York, not Boston, not San Francisco — with a chant against us. We’re despised and misunderstood. So if the Dodgers win, L.A. wins.”
Sarmiento joined us. “She’s my better political half,” Sims cracked. “Caro said to pick another sport.”
“No I didn’t!” she kindly replied. “I just said to take a pause, just for now. A political pause.”
Sims admitted that that a vintage jacket that he used to bring out every October as the Dodgers made another playoff run and Wisconsin turns cold was still in the closet. “I haven’t worn any gear all year.”
“When you went to the game!” Sarmiento shot back, referring to a visit to Milwaukee earlier this year with his local softball team.
“I went with a Valenzuela jersey to represent L.A.,” Sims responded as Sarmiento shook her head.
He laughed.
“I love the team. I just don’t like this team for not saying anything. But it’s what I signed up for.”
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