By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The Catholic prelate warned people that it’s better not to leave their native land.
He’s the top Church official thereabouts and cautioned against the migrants’ mistaken belief they’ll find “a promised land” elsewhere.
Despite their suffering and dangers, he said, they shouldn’t fall prey to “this leaving frenzy,” just thinking “about seeking a more comfortable life.”
When a religion reporter said that “many just want to run away,” the Church official replied:
“We are being tested right now. Each of us is called to look into our hearts, and we may discover that the Lord’s consolation is the only source of strength and the only treasure. It is the thing that is most dear to us. But many fall victim to this leaving frenzy.
“They don’t even stop to think about what is really going on in their lives. They seek a future,” he continued. “But for those who have the gift of faith, hope for a better future cannot just be about seeking a more comfortable life.”
The prelate criticized Americans who beckon the people to leave their homeland with asylum-request forms. He condemned clergymen who want to use foreign newcomers to “beef up” the numbers of Catholics in their own areas and who behave like “businessmen instead of remaining shepherds of souls.”
Here’s this Catholic prelate’s outlook when reporter Gianni Valente asked him about a U.S. bishop trying to arrange for “tens of thousands” of these aliens to come to the U.S.:
“He is…not experiencing firsthand what we are experiencing. In America they put baskets with asylum-request forms on church altars during Mass. As if the migration of thousands of . . . Christians to the U.S. was something to ask God’s blessing for. That’s a strange thing to do and only confuses people’s faith.
“Unfortunately, some members of the clergy turn into businessmen instead of remaining shepherds of souls. They think in business instead of evangelical terms, even in relation to the faithful,” the prelate continued.
“To some they are just numbers who can help priests beef up numbers of Catholics in the areas over which they have jurisdiction. They have them transferred from one bleak situation to another, which may even be worse in the long run.”
When the reporter asked what the Church official would say to people who want to leave, he replied:
“I repeat: Each Christian needs to look inside him or herself and ask themselves what future it is they are seeking. They need to try and feel God’s love in this situation. Ask themselves what the Lord is asking from them in that moment and maybe realize that we have a future here in this devastated and blessed land of ours. And that the whole country represents our mission.”
No doubt there are some U.S. bishops and other Church officials who silently regret the development of the hard-line, deeply mistaken, politically liberal fight for “comprehensive immigration reform” insisted upon by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
It once may have seemed desirable to try to help some thousands of Latinos who wanted to improve their economic status. But the appealing little tiger cub grew into a ravenous illegal-immigration tiger destroying all in his fierce path, including legal systems, borders, family ties, culture, and hoped-for stable futures.
How, some U.S. bishops must ask themselves today, can we restore some sanity and true compassion to the “reform” agenda that has been twisted into a relentless tool of Barack Obama’s “Culture of Death” Democratic Party, as well as the Republican Party elite’s dream of never-ending boxcar loads of laborers?
These bishops know how most U.S. Catholics and other Americans are offended and alienated by the USCCB’s false language and unyielding insistence that its purely political “migration” agenda must prevail. Maybe these bishops can put their heads together and start figuring out how they can restore some common sense at the USCCB.
Maybe it would help if they contacted the prelate quoted above who knows that the basic answer for his people isn’t to flee to the U.S. Where can bishops find him?
Well, they won’t find him in Mexico. They’ll find him in Iraq! Yes, Iraq — a country under the dire threat of Muslim terrorists. His people and their Church have been there for millennia, the prelate says, and they should hold true to their faith without leaving their land.
“We do not wish to force anyone” to stay, says Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako. “But it is our duty to direct people toward the path laid out in the Gospel. Those who leave must be aware that the West is not a promised land, let alone Paradise.”
Sako’s remarks are part of an interview with Valente, posted on September 28 at “Vatican Insider” (www.VaticanInsider.com), a project of the daily Italian newspaper La Stampa.
Even many Americans who favor border security may think it’s allowable for people to flee here from a Muslim terrorist army. But Sako speaks from the perspective of the religious shepherd of an area that had resident Catholics long, long before the United States had any Europeans arriving. It’s not new that some people migrate. But it’s also true that the Lord puts people in countries to improve and maintain them, not simply abandon them.
Even Russian hero novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn wanted to stay to fight his Soviet oppressors, but they kicked him out of the USSR. He went back home after their rule crumbled. Today’s Chinese demonstrators assemble to try to improve their own country, not demand airline tickets for illegal entry to the U.S.
Today we see how ideologues in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have supplanted sound Church teaching with a borderless agenda cultivated by globalists who see peoples and nations as powerless peasants and pawns on their chessboard.
When the White House itself is invaded, placing the president’s life potentially in peril, just about everyone agrees that the commonsense answer is more fences, more locks, more guards, more security — just as it would be if burglars easily broke into bishops’ residences.
However, when armed criminals and terrorists regularly, easily invade the United States, the elite media, prelates and politicians insist that fences are bigotry, border guards are brutish, and immigration laws are unwelcoming barriers that must be ignored.
It seems the key distinction is between protecting politicians’ and other leaders’ lives instead of those of ordinary American citizens and their families, who are rendered defenseless.
It’s regarded as highly desirable that “sanctuary cities” run by liberal U.S. politicians should violate immigration law so as to welcome unlawful aliens. But when states like Arizona merely pass or propose new laws in conformity with American immigration law in order to help protect legal U.S. citizens and residents, they’re denounced by lawless Barack Obama and by the USCCB.
Following the law isn’t the concern of the elite. Destroying any barrier to their agenda is.
“North Americans”
Occasionally a reminder slips out that erasing international borders is the aim, nothing less.
An April 2003 story by The Dallas Morning News said Mexico’s then-President Vicente Fox said a meeting that June on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would, in the reporter’s words, “explore ways of expediting the three nations’ integration, improve housing and infrastructure, and facilitate the movement of people across borders.”
The three nations are the agreement’s participants, Mexico, the U.S., and Canada.
In March 2005 those nations’ leaders announced formation of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), later renamed the North America Leaders’ Summit when the SPP felt the heat of opposition. Step by step, under whatever name, the U.S. merger with Mexico and Canada was being effected.
A March 2006 news story by the ZENIT News Agency said the president of the Mexican Episcopal Conference, Bishop José Guadalupe Martin Rabago, said it wasn’t the time “to build walls, but bridges that will allow the integration of countries for mutual development, for the benefit of the populations on either side.”
The ZENIT story quoted another bishop in the same assertive open-borders vein: “Man is not born attached to a land. . . . All men have always walked, all peoples have been migrants. The doors cannot be closed to them.”
Try this for comparison: As 30 million U.S. citizens strap on their backpacks to invade Mexico illegally, the Mexican bishops must open their doors to us to make us comfortable and welcome and well-funded.
What’s that, you say? The U.S. has no such right? Hmmm.
Testifying before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2005, an official of the elitist, globalist Council on Foreign Relations, Robert Pastor, said:
“The best way to assure security is not at our borders with Canada and Mexico and not by defining ‘security’ in conventional and narrow terms. We need to think about these issues in the context of a continent that is integrating economically and socially at a rapid rate.”
Pastor went on to say: “Centers for North American Studies in the United States, Canada, and Mexico would help people in all three countries to understand the problems and the potential of an integrated North America — and to think of themselves as North Americans. Scholarships should encourage North American students to study in each other’s country. Until a new consciousness of North America’s promise takes root, many of these proposals will remain impractical.”
Yes, think of yourself only as a “North American.”
In 2001 the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley, recalled that even back in 1984, that newspaper believed U.S. policies should be guided by the maxim, “There shall be open borders.”
Referring in the Journal in 2001 to the Mexican president of that time, Bartley wrote: “Reformist Mexican President Vicente Fox raises eyebrows with his suggestion that, over a decade or two, NAFTA should evolve into something like the European Union, with open borders for not only goods and investment but also people. He can rest assured that there is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision. To wit, this newspaper.”
Actually, many more than one voice, Mr. Bartley.
The problems only continue to multiply when the law is kicked to the side of the road for whatever subterfuges are employed for the moment.
“Shaming” And
“Stigmatizing”
Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Matthew Continetti wrote on October 3 about the irresponsibility and inscrutability of the elite. “While the public wants to reduce immigration, the preeminent legislative objective of both parties is a bill that would increase it.”
And, Continetti asked, why can’t stronger measures be taken against the spread of the Ebola virus? “Simple: because doing so would violate the sacred principles by which our bourgeois liberal elite operate. To deny an individual entry to the United States over fears of contamination would offend our elite’s sense of humanitarian cosmopolitanism.
“For them, ‘singling out’ nations or cultures from which threats to the public health or safety of the United States originate is illegitimate,” he continued. “It ‘stigmatizes’ those nations or cultures, it ‘shames’ them, it makes them feel unequal. It’s judgmental. It suggests that America prefers her already existing citizens to others.”
It’s why, Continetti said, the U.S. was slow to contain the arrival of the Central American illegal entrants, and why the U.S. doesn’t follow up on aliens who fail to show up for their immigration hearings.
Quite aside from the possibility of Ebola being employed by terrorist border-jumpers, national radio talk host Laura Ingraham noted other diseases surprisingly spreading in the U.S. “We know a heck of a lot of people came into this country unscreened over the last few years,” she said on October 6.
Meanwhile, news on October 3 said the federal government will be showering the USCCB with millions of delectable dollars — dare one say “bribes”? — to address the provision of legal aid for unauthorized alien minors.
Sometimes the Parable of the Good Samaritan is cited as justification for massive illegal immigration. There’s a man lying by the side of the road who needs our help. However, that man in Jesus’ parable was beaten by robbers and left for dead.
He wasn’t a passive fellow who just decided to drop the bundle the Lord had given him to carry in his life and lie down by the road, in hopes that a gullible passer-by would shoulder this man’s responsibility instead.
The USCCB may think it’s bravely standing up for illegal aliens. In reality, the USCCB risks being one more tool to wrench into place a secularist, globalist agenda. It’s an agenda that has no patience with orthodox religious believers, as becomes increasingly plain each day.
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