Copy Desk Daily, July 24, 2020

Recommended for you today, from the NCR/GSR/EarthBeat copy desk:

For Franciscans in the United States, Junípero Serra is an important figure. They acknowledge his massive contribution to the church and are yet mindful of his complicated legacy and history. Should statues to him remain in public view? NCR's Sarah Salvadore talked to a number of Franciscans about Serra's legacy and meaning today. See what they had to say.

With Ireland on something of a green wave, Fr. Dermot Lane said he believes the Irish bishops should "seize the moment" to promote Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si' and its teachings on care for the Earth. Read EarthBeat's interview with him today, thanks to one of our longtime freelancers, Sarah Mac Donald, based in Dublin.

You can just hear this 5-year-old's questions to Mercy Sr. Jennifer Wilson: Did God tell you that you could not have a kid? If God is not actually a person, how did he tell you that? If God is a person, where does he live? You love me and kids, so why would God not let you have one? Read about her COVID-times evaluation of her vows, in GSR's weekly Horizons column.

Roy Bourgeois is back on our pages. If you don't know who he is, you may be a newer reader of NCR (good!), and if you do know that name (and his cause), you'll be happy to see him still at it. Read his commentary here.

Fun fact from Michael Sean Winters' column today: "A survey of 37,000 ads run by the five most endangered Republican senators showed that only 5% contained a pro-Trump message." This leads him to ask: Will GOP officeholders go down with the Trump ship?

In it, he mentions Attorney General William Barr, the subject of a long reported story here yesterday. Today, NCR has an editorial on Barr, which begins:

NCR's recent profile of U.S. Attorney General William Barr quoted his now-famous 2019 speech at the University of Notre Dame, in which he railed against secularism's attack on the "traditional moral order," an attack he believed caused, as he put it, "immense suffering, wreckage, and misery" and "virtually every measure of social pathology."

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