By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has revealed a curious motive for his support of unlimited illegal immigration.
“Now more than ever, we’re short of workers,” he told reporters outside the Capitol on November 16. “We have a population that is not reproducing on its own, with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the ‘Dreamers’ — and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here.”
This palaver is nothing new from the Left. These champions of the Culture of Death have constructed a malevolent matrix with abortion at its core, and life in America as its target: feminism, the celebration of sodomy and its LGBTQ+ variants — they all aim to destroy marriage, the family, and ultimately, a free society.
In their years of cheering on the murder of the unborn, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have worked overtime to make sure that there will never be enough Americans.
Now they claim that there can never be too many illegal aliens!
With his dictum that “unlimited abortion and unlimited illegal immigration will save America,” Chuck hides murder in the disguise of a moral imperative.
Let’s call it the Schumer Doctrine.
One wonders: What do America’s bishops make of it?
Well, they’re all aboard the illegal immigration train. In fact, they support it so strongly that it’s become their Prime Mandate.
So they agree with Schumer on the desirability of illegal immigration, although we can pray that they don’t support his reasons.
But let’s face it — if they’re afraid to confront Joe Biden on abortion, they don’t dare confront “The Schume” either. So they remain silent.
Thomas Sowell’s masterful Migrations and Cultures details how America’s bishops welcomed legal immigrants over the past two centuries. But their current shift to supporting illegal immigration on such a massive scale is unprecedented.
What caused it?
Ten years ago, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez predicted a Hispanic “Next America.” And today, Hispanics constitute over half of American Catholics under the age of thirty.
Like the rest of the country, America’s Catholic population “is not reproducing on its own, with the same level that it used to.”
Why not?
Don’t ask your bishop.
Collision — Or Collusion?
In the past fifty years and more, America’s bishops have increasingly tended to make the optional magisterial, and the magisterial optional.
Today, their agenda features a vast array of government programs and policies as the authoritative teaching of “the Church,” while they fall silent on the magisterial teachings of Humanae Vitae on contraception, Romans 1:26-27 on sodomy, and Matthew 19:3-6 on marriage and divorce.
Admittedly, the alliance between Schumer and the bishops is peculiar. Here we have the most pro-abortion majority leader in Senate history saying out loud what the bishops will not say but apparently support: Americans are not having enough children, so we have to import someone else’s children.
The death knell for Catholic demographics came long ago, with the massive wave of opposition to Pope Paul VI’s promulgation of Humanae Vitae in 1968. Alas, the core of that opposition was within the Church herself, including the hierarchy. Opponents were so hateful that Cardinal Stafford later described those dark days as “Gethsemane.”
But even that opposition had precedents. Throughout the 60s, as historian Donald Critchlow recounts, America’s bishops had already refused even to oppose taxpayer funding of contraception in government family planning programs at home and abroad.
Their abdication of that consecrated duty persists today.
In 2010, Bishop Howard Hubbard, as chairman of the USCCB’s International Committee on Justice and Peace, joined with other secular lobbyists at the federal trough to support half a billion dollars in funding for contraceptives, and $65 million for abortion, in foreign aid “family planning” programs.
When I asked Hubbard how he could support such immoral initiatives, he assured me that Catholics could disagree with his decision after “prayerful consideration,” but he did not apologize for his position. And it is still official USCCB policy today.
Call it the “Hubbard Doctrine.”
Since 2010, Hubbard has admitted to covering up for sexual abusers of children, has been accused of child abuse himself, and, most recently, has now asked to be laicized.
Such sad news is profoundly disappointing, but hardly surprising.
Curiously, today Schumer embraces Hubbard’s goal — aborting the population of Third World countries, on the one hand, while welcoming to our shores millions of illegal aliens from those same countries.
Apparently, Chuck Schumer is just as confused as our beloved bishops are.
Indeed, while the USCCB publicly recognizes abortion as its “preeminent issue,” and relegates Canon 915 to a quiet footnote to its document on the Eucharist, we can safely predict that they will continue to do nothing about either.
Divided Loyalties
In their annual meeting this month, bishops reaffirmed their support for the Schumer Doctrine by electing Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso to head the USCCB’s Committee on Migration.
Bishop Seitz received 127 votes to 116 for Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami.
Admittedly, there wasn’t much of a choice. Both prelates strongly support Schumer and are openly hostile to the Rule of Law.
We note that this is the same Rule of Law that protects the religious freedom of the bishops from the constant attempts by none other than Chuck Schumer to destroy it.
The Schumer Doctrine raises painful questions for Catholic bishops. Will they remind Schumer that the reason we have 50 million fewer Americans today is abortion?
More than likely, on that score we will see the same silence they have demonstrated for over fifty years, per the Hubbard Doctrine.
Bishops are plainly torn between their love of illegal immigration and their hatred of abortion. But why are they vocal on one issue — receiving millions in federal funding to perpetuate it — while giving the other only lip service? Is it because there’s no federal money in fighting abortion? Is that why they’ve left that battle to the laity for fifty years?
As my con law professor Charlie Rice said 50 years ago, mimicking this sort of amiable duplicity, “I’m not schizophrenic — neither am I!”
Meet The New Boss,
Same As His Old Boss
You can’t make this stuff up.
At their meeting earlier this month, bishops celebrated the twentieth anniversary of their adoption of the “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.” They read aloud a letter to Pope Francis offering their continued “apology and vigilance” in their efforts.
That didn’t last long.
At the same meeting, they elected Richmond Bishop Barry Knestout to head their Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People.
Some twenty years ago, Knestout lived in the same apartment as then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and served as his secretary in the Washington chancery. When McCarrick was removed years later, Knestout wrote: “Throughout the time that I was in Washington, I can tell you that I was not approached by anyone with any allegations or evidence of sexual harassment or abuse involving the cardinal.”
Unfortunately for the bishop, the question in the minds of the people was, “But what did you know?”
Knestout recently removed Fr. Mark White, a pastor in the Richmond Diocese, criticizing “his scurrilous and public, published attacks on His Holiness, Pope Francis and other members of the hierarchy.”
Translated, Fr. White had criticized bad bishops for covering up their role in the scandals. One focus of his criticisms was Ted McCarrick — whose role especially troubled him, because McCarrick had ordained Fr. White years before.
That was too much for Knestout. He wrote the Vatican demanding that Fr. White be reduced to the lay state.
The bishops knew Knestout’s history. They voted for him anyway.
Nothing will change.
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