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An Open Letter to the Bishop and Chancellor of the Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls

Published Friday, July 4, 2025

Dear Bishop Degrood and Chancellor Pals,

I'm writing to you as someone who grew up in this diocese, who was formed by this 👇facebook.com/jordan.deffenb…

faith, and who walked away from it twenty years ago. I'm writing because I'm coming back, but not in the way you might expect.

I was raised at St. Michael's Parish under Father Joe's care. My parents, Dudley and Tammy Deffenbaugh, poured their hearts and wallets into building 👇

St. Catherine Drexel. I served as an altar boy for years, traveled to the Vatican twice, studied Dante so deeply I rewrote the Inferno myself, and made pilgrimages to Florence and Ravenna.

But in the 2000s, I left. Not because I lost my faith, but because I couldn't reconcile 👇

what I believed with what the Church was doing.

Two things broke me: the sexual abuse scandals and the cover-ups that followed, and the Church's silence, or worse, its blessing, of the Iraq War. These weren't political disagreements. They were moral catastrophes. The👇

institution that taught me to love the vulnerable was protecting predators. The Church that preached peace was sanctifying war.

I couldn't stay. So I joined the ranks of the spiritually homeless, carrying both the wound of what the Church had done and the memory of what it 👇

had meant to me.
Now it's 2025, and I'm watching democracy crumble while authoritarianism rises. I'm seeing concentration camps being built in America. Yes, that's what they are, no matter what euphemisms we use. I'm watching the vulnerable being targeted while the powerful 👇

celebrate cruelty as strength. And I'm asking: where is the Church's voice?

Christ flipped tables in the temple. He healed on the Sabbath when the religious authorities told him not to. He touched lepers, ate with tax collectors, welcomed prostitutes. He stood up to empire 👇

and chose the cross over compromise. But his Church? Too often, it chooses silence over prophecy, comfort over conviction, institutional survival over Gospel truth.

That's why I'm coming back. Not to submit quietly, but to bear witness. On Sunday, July 6, I'll be at 👇

Mass somewhere in this diocese. I won't disrupt the liturgy or hold signs. But my presence will be intentional. It's a return with purpose.

I'm publishing this letter on July 4th because while others wave flags and talk about freedom, I'm using my actual freedom (of speech, 👇

of religion) to call the Church to account. This isn't unpatriotic. It's a deeper kind of patriotism. It's reclaiming liberty through spiritual integrity.

And I'm not coming back alone. I'm calling on others who've left their churches (Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant, 👇

whatever) because of trauma, hypocrisy, exclusion, or moral failure. Come back on Sunday. Not to any particular church, but to whatever sacred space calls to you. Not to submit, but to witness. Not to accept what is, but to demand what should be.

Sacred space belongs to all 👇

of us who hunger for justice, who mourn, who long for God's kingdom to break through the kingdoms of this world. It's not the exclusive property of hierarchies or the comfortable. It's ours by right of our baptism, our seeking, our refusal to give up on what the Church could 👇

be.

Chancellor and Bishop, I know this letter might make you uncomfortable. Good. The Gospel should make us uncomfortable. Christ didn't come to preserve religious institutions. He came to transform them. He didn't come to bless empire. He came to announce its end. He didn't 👇

come to make us comfortable. He came to make us holy.
The Church stands at a crossroads. It can keep its comfortable silence while blessing the powerful and ignoring the oppressed. Or it can remember its calling as the Body of Christ, called to be salt and light in a world 👇

growing bitter and dark.

I'm extending an olive branch here, but I'm also drawing a line. The Church must examine its conscience, confess its failures, and commit itself again to the radical love of Christ. It must welcome back the exiled, heal the wounded, and restore 👇

itself not as an institution of fear, but as a body of love.
True safety doesn't come from walls or silence. It comes from truth, justice, mercy, and love. The Church must not be complicit in injustice through its silence. The prophetic tradition that runs from Moses through 👇

Christ himself demands that we speak truth to power, even when that power wears religious garments.
This is a call to repentance, not just personal, but institutional. The Church needs to rekindle the prophetic fire that should burn in every Christian heart. It needs to 👇

welcome back those who left not because they lost faith, but because they kept it when the institution didn't.

I'm not asking you to agree with everything I've said. I'm asking you to wrestle with it. To sit with the discomfort. To ask yourself: what would Jesus do in this 👇

moment? Not the domesticated Jesus of comfortable religion, but the Jesus who overturned tables, who challenged authority, who chose love over law and justice over order.

The Gospel isn't comfort for the comfortable. It's a challenge to the complacent. Christ came not 👇

to bring peace to the systems of this world, but to transform them. He came not to preserve institutions, but to birth the kingdom of God.

I'm coming back because I still believe that's possible. I'm coming back because I refuse to let the Church become complicit in the 👇

darkness. I'm coming back because somebody has to say these things, and it might as well be me.

See you Sunday.

In hope and with love,
A Returning Son of Sioux Falls

Published in the spirit of religious freedom and the First Amendment, inviting all who seek justice and 👇

truth to bear witness in whatever sacred space calls to their hearts.

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