More Lessons From Soviet Occupation Re Government Violence in Minneapolis

I continue the excellent article penned by Fr. Adam Bucko the morning after Alex Pretti was murdered by government thugs, paid for by our tax dollars.

Bovino (now dismissed) said Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Steve Miller from the Oval Office called Pretti an “assassin” who “tried to murder” federal agents. HSS head Kristi Noem repeatedly called Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” These lying people are heads of agencies running the government and advising the president. 

The grieving sister of Alex Pretti asked: “When does this end? How many more innocent lives must be lost before we say enough? Hearing disgusting lies spread about my brother is absolutely gut-wrenching.”

As we all know, Alex worked as an ICU nurse in a VA hospital. His fellow workers praised him as a warm, humorous, generous person and an excellent and caring nurse.

Regimes like the current administration run on lies. As do its many enablers in congress, still in public (not private) in denial about the insurrection the president led on January 6, 2020. Now they have financed another violent insurrection to the tune of $75 billion.

Adam Bucko offers a perspective from Eastern Europe having grown up under the heavy hand of Soviet dominance. Saturday, he shared how two priests he knew spoke up and told the truth; both were murdered by the government. As he said in that DM,

They saw all that, and from the pulpit, they said no.
They said violence does not become just because it is legal.
They said fear enforced by law is not peace….
We are seeing similar things today….
We are seeing fear used deliberately as a governing tool. We are seeing cruelty justified as enforcement. Just like then, we are told this is necessary.
Just like then we are told to look away.
Just like then, silence is called neutrality.
It isn’t.

Adam continues:

This is why contemplative prayer matters, but only when we understand it rightly.

Contemplation is not a spiritual vacation, not a way to numb ourselves or escape the world. We do not pray to get away from our lives. We pray in them, in our fear, our grief, our anger, our confusion, and we bring all of it into stillness.

To sit in contemplation is to open ourselves to the Living Presence at the heart of everything, a quiet but insistent movement toward wholeness, toward justice, toward communion. This movement is not automatic. It longs to live through human bodies and human choices, human courage. It needs consent. And contemplation is where the consent is learned.

That presence does not anesthetize us. It sharpens our sights. It breaks through denial. It refuses to let us make peace with what dehumanizes.

Real contemplation clarifies rather than comforts. It trains us to see violence without becoming violent, to face lies without becoming cynical, to stay tender in the presence of suffering. It is subversive because it will not allow us to privatize our spirituality or turn prayer into a commodity for personal well-being. This is why real contemplation is dangerous.

And still it is not sufficient.

Many stop here, assuming that clarity of heart will somehow produce change. It rarely does, because moral clarity alone does not dismantle systems built to outlast conscience.

Those priests I remember from my childhood understood this intuitively. They prayed. And I think they sensed that both prayer and action cannot be abstract or theoretical and that both must become presence among those being brutalized: workers on strike, families of the imprisoned.

They became part of extended families, assisting households broken by violence rather than standing at a distance and analyzing suffering in the abstract.

They also understood that social change does not come from lone moral heroes, but from communities and movements acting together over time. From that shared life and from proximity and responsibility—They learned how change actually happens. This is why they organized, why they embedded their courage in shared social analysis of how power operates and in collective discipline, and why their wines carried weight.

This is how contemplation enters history—not as private virtue, but as part of a shared ecology of action.*

* Adam Bucko, “They Killed Him in Public and Called It Order: On Practicing Contemplation When the State Kills,” Contemplative Witness with Adam Bucko on Substack, January 25, 2026.

To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.

Banner Image: A protest in Prague against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968. Photo by Reijo Nikkilä. Wikimedia Commons. 

Queries for Contemplation

Do you agree that contemplation enters history—not as private virtue, but as part of a shared ecology of action? And that presence breaks through denial?

Related Readings by Matthew Fox

Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation. 
Prayer: A Radical Response to Life. 
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice. 
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality. 
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society. 
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ. 
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet. 
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.