Booklet To Inform Catholic Voters . . . May Be Losing Some Of Its Focus

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — While the Democratic Party positioned itself deeper within the Culture of Death as years passed, party leaders assigned priorities to issues. Promoting permissive abortion was awarded a key place. Democrats chose their “non-negotiable” standards to insist upon.
This caused difficulties for voters who thought it more important to oppose the massive destruction of unborn babies than to, for example, press for a higher minimum wage. By way of comparison, would the Ku Klux Klan make itself more morally acceptable if, under the shade of its lynching trees, it served free lunches to the poor?
A leftist strategy sometimes called the “seamless garment” emerged, seeking falsely to equate the issues so as to mitigate a politician’s strong support for, say, abortion.
True, the strategy said, the politician may be “bad” on abortion, but he’s “good” on nine other issues, so you shouldn’t be an extremist and reject him for just one thing — even if he’s adamant on promoting abortion.
To try to refute this sort of confusion, Phoenix Catholic Bishop Thomas Olmsted issued a booklet in 2006 titled Catholics in the Public Square, which found wide popular acceptance for clarifying issues. He used a straightforward Q-and-A format for 29 key topics. The answers didn’t ramble.
For instance, the 17th question was, “Are all political and social issues equal when it comes to choosing a political candidate?”
The answer was two paragraphs long. Noting that the Church “is actively engaged in a wide variety of important public-policy issues,” it went on to point out that “when it comes to direct attacks on innocent human life, being right on all the other issues can never justify a wrong choice on this most serious matter.”
Although the topic of altering federal immigration law was actively discussed in U.S. politics when the booklet was issued in 2006, it had no specific question dealing separately with immigration. That subject did, however, arise in some places in the booklet.
For instance, the 14th question was, “Can Catholics honestly disagree in matters of politics, social or cultural issues?” The two-paragraph response included this: “There are, indeed, many issues upon which Catholics may legitimately differ, such as the best methods to achieve welfare reform or to address illegal immigration.”
On the 18th question, of whether there are “any ‘non-negotiable’ issues,” the response noted that other issues, although not having the highest importance of being “non-negotiable,” “deserve prayerful consideration, such as questions of war and capital punishment, poverty issues, and matters relating to illegal immigration.”
One notes the term being used is “illegal immigration,” not something softened like “migration” or “lack of documentation.”
The Catholics in the Public Square booklet was revised three times in subsequent years for a total of four editions, mainly restating the original Q-and-A’s but adding a few more topics. The first two editions lacked a foreword, but the third and fourth booklets had one.
The second edition, in 2008, had a total of 33 Q-and-A’s instead of the original 29. Immigration was added as a separate topic as number 32, “What is the Church’s position on immigration?”
The three paragraphs of this response began by saying, “The immigration issues facing our country today are extraordinarily complex and do not lend themselves to easy answers and simple solutions. Nonetheless, there are certain principles of Catholic Teaching that are relevant in addressing these matters.”
The next two paragraphs presented selective quotations from Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, while overlooking the more complex situation just mentioned. And even if the Popes unequivocally were in favor of lightly restricted or unrestricted immigration, those would be “prudential” political views that practicing Catholics are free to debate and reject.
Omitted from Catholics in the Public Square is acknowledgment that Pope Benedict took a stand differing from the popularly understood position that critics call “amnesty.” Obviously the concise booklet can’t include everything. So why did it quote briefly from one comment to the U.S. bishops about welcoming immigrants but state nothing more informative?
In fact, Benedict gave an airplane news conference on his way to visit the United States in 2008. Unlike the freewheeling airborne media conferences of Pope Francis, where the Holy Father can appear to be responding without careful thought, the Vatican had asked journalists to submit questions in advance for Benedict’s flight.
Only four questions were chosen, prudently considered and answered. One of these wondered if Benedict would be “ask(ing) America to give a warm welcome to immigrants, many of whom are Catholic?”
Rather than swallow this bait, Benedict responded with 21 lines of comment that included this instruction, according to the Vatican text released April 15, 2008:
“. . . It is necessary to distinguish between measures to be taken straight away and long-term solutions. The fundamental solution is that there should no longer be any need to emigrate because there are sufficient jobs in the homeland, a self-sufficient social fabric, so that there is no longer any need to emigrate. Therefore, we must all work to achieve this goal and for a social development that makes it possible to offer citizens work and a future in their homeland.
“And I would also like to speak to the President (George W. Bush) on this point, because it is above all the United States that must help these countries to develop. It is in everyone’s interests, not only these countries but of the world and also of the United States,” Benedict said.
Similarly, John Paul II offered a more detailed analysis entirely missing from the seven lines of type quoting him in Catholics in the Public Square about “the rights of migrants and their families.” It is misleading for the booklet to present this brevity and leave it at that.
Actually, in his message for World Migration Day in 1996, John Paul said in part: “Illegal immigration should be prevented, but it is also essential to combat vigorously the criminal activities which exploit illegal immigrants. The most appropriate choice, which will yield consistent and long-lasting results, is that of international cooperation which aims to foster political stability and to eliminate underdevelopment.
“The present economic and social imbalance, which to a large extent encourages the migratory flow, should not be seen as something inevitable, but as a challenge to the human race’s sense of responsibility,” John Paul said.
He went on to raise the possibility, if a solution isn’t foreseen in the country they have entered, that the immigrants receive material assistance “either to seek acceptance in other countries, or to return to their own country.”
The booklet’s “immigration” Q-and-A has continued in its incomplete form since it debuted in the second edition. The fourth edition adds a paragraph noting Pope Francis’ 2015 visit to the U.S. and his view that the immigrants are renewing society here.
The third edition of Olmsted’s booklet, released in 2012, had 35 Q-and-A’s and a foreword by Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., of just over nine pages. The fourth edition, issued in September 2016, has 36 Q-and-A’s and a foreword by Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez lasting a full 11 pages.
Chaput wrote more along the lines of general principles while saying people’s selfishness is responsible for “abortion, euthanasia, racial and ethnic bigotry, attacks on the meaning of marriage and the family, greed, exploitation of the poor, and all the other acts of violence against human dignity in our day.”
Gomez, well-known for what critics consider an open-borders attitude to massive immigration, goes so far in his foreword as to make his argument against “a broken immigration system that breaks up families and leaves a permanent underclass living in the shadows of our prosperity.”
Among other items on his list, Gomez also cites “a widening gap between poor and rich,” “scandalous conditions in our prisons,” “global poverty,” and “climate change.”
The archbishop must know that it’s often illegal immigrants trying to trick their way past the law, not immigration laws themselves, that cause family breakups. But he seems so set on his own political preferences that he goes down his winding road before conceding, “Among the evils and injustices in American life in 2016, abortion and euthanasia are different and stand apart.”
A reader can fear, as the booklet continues to expand, that it’s in danger of losing its original clarity, and that it occasionally seems to spend time telling what it’s not about as well as what it is.
A resident along the U.S.-Mexico border told The Wanderer in a September 23 email that U.S. bishops’ stand on illegal immigration “grows more unbalanced year by year. Their stance this election season seems lacking both in the articulation of the whole of the teachings of the Church on immigration and on the facts with which to apply the Church’s teaching to the current situation.”
The person asked not to be identified because of the “chance of repercussions to family in both countries.”
Although Olmsted’s booklet grants that it’s permissible for Catholics to disagree about addressing immigration, the person said, “One could be forgiven for not realizing that they could disagree…because year by year the American bishops in almost one voice have pushed a message of open borders and open arms, to the exclusion of the duties of the immigrant to obey the laws of America.
“Such a naive policy was bad enough when it was only Mexico that sent illegal immigrants; now it is deadly with the influx of Syrians and others from Middle Eastern countries.
“The idea that our ‘broken immigration system’ is breaking up families is truly false,” the person continued. “It is Mexico and Guatemala and Syria, and on and on, that are the true cause of family fracturing. None of the illegal immigrants who come to the United States would be leaving their families to come were it not for the governments in the sending countries. And it is those governments and the globalist-corporatist cabal which cause the poverty to cause the illegal immigration to flood America with cheap labor and hopefully Democrat voters.”
John Paul II noted 20 years ago that the phenomenon of illegal immigration already had “assumed considerable proportions, both because the supply of foreign labor is becoming excessive in comparison to the needs of the economy, which already has difficulty in absorbing its domestic workers, and because of the spread of forced migration,” the person quoted him, adding:
The Polish Pope “was balanced on his treatment of illegal immigration, taking into account both the illegal immigrant and the displaced worker in the host country. Would that the American bishops would be so balanced. However, educated and experienced Catholics can and should promote candidates and policies that take into account both” sets of individuals.

Harmful To Families

Meanwhile, Luz Fuenzalida, a Chilean native now a U.S. citizen living in Arizona, told The Wanderer in a September 24 interview that illegal immigration damages families.
“Illegal immigration destroys the family,” she said. “The father moved here alone, leaving the mother and children behind, with the promise he is sending money back to support them. Originally there are good intentions.” But, “within a few months, he meets a new, younger woman and starts another family, then he stops sending money back” to the first family.
In this election year, Fuenzalida added, it’s important for Hispanics in the U.S. to realize how strongly the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, supports immorality and openly stated her admiration for the racist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.
“With us living in a Culture of Death, we need to be apostles for life,” Fuenzalida said. “…It is important that every single Hispanic Catholic understands and knows where Hillary’s coming from. She’s pro-death. She admires a racist who wanted to exterminate blacks and considered Hispanics ‘unfit’.”
The Culture of Death includes promotion of abortion, euthanasia, and contraception, she said, and also infanticide.
Fuenzalida asked how many Hispanics are aware that Barack Obama voted for infanticide when he was an Illinois state senator because he fought against providing medical care to infants who survived abortion.