Truth. Sacrifice. Radical Conviction.
On Tuesday I was at the southern border. I will tell you what I saw, and then I will tell you what it means.
I saw families sleeping under the bridge. Not tents. Not shelters. The concrete overpass, because there is nowhere else.
I counted forty-three people in that space. Eleven were children under five. I know this because I walked through and asked. Three of the children had fevers. One woman was eight months pregnant.
At Niepokalanow, we made a decision that shaped everything we built: we would price our publications at cost, or below cost, because the people who most needed the information were the people who could least afford to pay for it.
This was not philanthropy. It was a design principle. A communication system that excludes the people who most need to communicate is not a communication system. It is a privilege system with a technology layer.
They burned me in 1431. They declared me a saint in 1920.
I want to talk about the gap. Not because the history matters – it does, but it is not my point. Because the pattern matters, and the pattern is alive in every institution that has ever condemned a person for doing the right thing and then, decades later, celebrated them for it.
The pattern is this: a person acts on conviction. The institution that benefits from their action also feels threatened by it, because the action exposes the institution’s failure to act. The institution condemns the person. The person is destroyed. Time passes. The institution, no longer threatened, recognizes the value of what the person did. The person is rehabilitated, celebrated, canonized.