By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Trust is one of the most necessary qualities in relationships. Without honest language, there’s no basis for reliable understanding.
If a penitent tells a priest he’s a financial customer when he means a bank robber, or a disciplinarian when he means child beater, or a window evaluator when he means Peeping Tom, the priest has been misled.
If the very words upon which a debate occurs are intentionally misleading or deceptive, trust is broken and the exchange of thought impaired. That’s an important reason that so many Catholics feel alienated from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over an issue it champions.
“Illegal immigration” and “illegal aliens” are simple, factual words to describe a certain reality. Border crossers intending to stay awhile arrive without authorization or permission to enter.
Aware that using the simply descriptive words would undermine its case from the start, the USCCB prefers imprecise terms like “migrants” or “undocumented” — people who might not be unauthorized at all. Just misplaced their documents.
Bishops who consecrate the Body and Blood of Christ for the people of the Church do not speak plainly to their own flocks. This lack of lucidity isn’t the trait of good shepherds.
A bishop I respected took to the pulpit and spoke of “undocumented workers.” That bishop lessened himself.
He and I knew very well these workers may have plenty of documents, phony documents. Someone whose identity was stolen was thereby hurt, and another law was broken, in order to provide cover for a person “hiding in the shadows” — hiding because his conscience knows he doesn’t deserve the sunlight.
During the last decade, Church leadership suffered a devastating blow when the truth emerged that bishops had sex-abusing priests migrate from parish to parish who continued preying on victims. This was not the behavior of good shepherds caring for their flocks.
Today, bishops’ deceptive words are uttered out in the open, false words trying to bless massive illegal entry. Many in the flock rightly resent this betrayal of trust, of honest dealing.
Although its advocates often claim that most people want “comprehensive immigration reform,” even lawless Barack Obama was forced by the irate public to beat a retreat from his vow to redo immigration laws by himself by the end of summer. Obama feared overwhelming negative voter reaction against Democrats this November.
So, cynical as always, Obama said he’d just wait until after Election Day to make his changes, when it’d be too late to punish Democrats any more. Compliant reporters were impressed, not disgusted.
At a recent meeting in the Southwest, lay people gathered regarding other topics, not illegal immigration. Still, a Church executive said in passing as he made his remarks that “the immigrants who are coming across” deserve to receive qualities like love and mercy. It was the imprecision that lay people have come to expect from bureaucrats who diminish themselves.
Did the executive mean high-tech workers from Asia who properly completed their entry paperwork? He could have been clearer. It tells us something that he chose not to be.
As for love and mercy, everyone deserves them, whether Christian or not. How did the executive desire that we convey these qualities? Are we to ignore the border violations of, for instance, previously deported people who find the U.S. welfare state to be more to their liking?
Are love and mercy dispensed to them in the same way as everyone else? Do they get less love and mercy? We have to ask because the bureaucratic fog conceals.
Any priest in Confession may need to discern before he can reach a proper judgment. Who are these immigrants, and what have they done? No judge can walk the halls of a U.S. courthouse and proclaim that everyone is innocent and freed.
It was typical when a woman from Honduras said she sneaked into the U.S. with her children because she heard there are good schools here for them. Tax-supported good schools, we must remind her, to which she has no legitimate claim, nor any moral right to enroll her children in.
The U.S. cannot be a welfare state for whoever wants to enter from throughout this hemisphere and beyond. She wanted an immediate solution when the answer is longer-term.
How are we to show the love and mercy to her that the Catholic executive desires? By telling the truth, not with smiling evasions.
Give her our good wishes, perhaps a return ticket home, and encourage her to apply to enter legally, the way responsible aspirants do. Some schools in Honduras may not appeal to her, but the answer has to start there. Is it possible that even home-schooling is worth considering?
I might prefer to leave my own lower-middle-class Arizona home and burst into one of the fine residences up the road, but I have no right to do so, even though I’m not directly responsible for every deficiency in my life. I am speaking personally.
Some bishop may say I deserve to break in, would have a happier life by doing so, and the homeowner is a bigot for resisting me. I might think that’s a pretty swell bishop, but I’d question his judgment and common sense.
The days are gone when people took pride in an unfenced Southern border, because trust has become massively violated. Especially now, veteran violent drug runners, smugglers, rapists, and gang members of various ages are being joined by terrorists awaiting their chance to deal the U.S. a deep blow.
Is every border-jumper a criminal this bad? No, but to hear the bishops, you’d think not one of them is.
Just try suggesting to the USCCB that big, strong border barriers are a downright necessity, and you’ll be denounced in harsh terms that bishops don’t apply to criminal aliens. The only sin that hierarchs seem to see regarding massive illegal immigration is the justified widespread opposition to it.
People illegally cross the border for different reasons, some more serious than others, some not even serious. The U.S. has to be able to make distinctions quickly about who gets to stay and who goes home. Many crossers would just as well work here for a while then return south.
U.S. citizenship is nothing they want or need. This must be remembered during the debate about “comprehensive immigration reform.”
The guilty party denying jobs to truly needy non-citizens is none other than the Democratic Party so often loved by the USCCB. The Democrats’ aim is to bring in as many millions of their new voters as they can by insisting on dispensing U.S. citizenship as a mandatory part of “immigration reform.” Simply arranging jobs for wage-seekers isn’t on their agenda.
As soon as Obama’s malign, crippling influence on the U.S. economy is removed, the logjam against legislative changes on immigration could disappear when the mandatory citizenship provision is dropped from the bill, while bearing in mind that work for U.S. citizens already here comes first. And that reform in native lands also is needed.
In 2006, when large Latino demonstrations for immigration changes burst onto the scene, the Mexican flag was prominently carried. The demonstrators were proud of their own country and were just looking for a paycheck here. This sent the wrong message, however. It disproved the fable that they all were dying to become U.S. citizens.
They were cautioned to cool it and to start pretending. I read warnings to marchers in both a Spanish-language weekly newspaper and English-language daily in Arizona that they should not carry the flag of any other nation.
Proponents of massive illegal immigration for innumerable reasons may argue that accepting it is a Christian duty. This isn’t true, and isn’t in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The catechism specifies, in part: “Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”
“To obey its laws.” Exactly what illegal immigrants refuse to do from the moment they slip into this country, and continue to do while they remain in those well-known shadows.
A Southwestern bishop has issued his own pamphlet about Catholic political responsibilities. In the little more than one page where he addresses immigration, he says nothing about the guidance of his own Church’s catechism. Why? Because immigrants are told to obey the nation’s laws?
Then there’s the pressing problem across the nation of trying to address the massive financial burden of accommodating innumerable people who aren’t even approved to be here. The Catechism of the Catholic Church may not be the first consideration of an elementary-school official being told to fund hundreds of minors whose individual expenses are greater than a college student’s.
If the minor stayed at home, he wouldn’t have to be learning an entirely new language, perhaps seeing a therapist because of a smuggler who abused him on the way, or living with strangers.
One purpose of controlled immigration is so that governments can budget and provide for local and state needs. Cities and towns simply being overwhelmed is one of the strong arguments against limitless border-jumping.
Some observers recall the strategy proposed by academic radicals Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in the 1960s, to so stress and overload the system that it would collapse. As a leftist radical, Obama, doing his best to diminish the U.S., is sure to have studied it.
A mid-July Fox News story from Lynn, Mass., said the arrival of illegal minors and their families in that city “is stressing almost every service from trash collection to health care.”
The story quoted Lynn Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy: “The way this is going, Lynn looks like a microcosm of the United States, in that we have been filled to capacity and we can’t take any more without having the people who are already here suffer.”
The New York Daily News followed up with an August 29 story quoting Flanagan Kennedy that some illegal alien adults from Guatemala were enrolling in Lynn public schools, but the city couldn’t prevent them because Obama’s federal government said officials can’t ask about ages or immigration status.
A September 7 Washington Post story about new Central American illegal children in D.C.-area schools began: “Ripped from distant worlds, most of the new students speak no English, and some are psychologically scarred from abuse by gangs or smugglers. Reunited with parents or other relatives they barely know, and still grieving for family and friends back home, they may feel depressed and resentful.
“ ‘Some of these kids arrive feeling very angry,’ said Rina Chavez, a counselor with the Montgomery County schools,” the Post story continued. “ ‘After years of living with their grandparents, suddenly here they are with mom and a new step dad and two younger siblings. Then they are expected in a heartbeat to sit down and learn, but they may not be ready.’ ”
Such stories are repeated around the nation, but the expense, chaos, and suffering apparently don’t cause bishops to reflect more seriously on what they’re encouraged for years.
Taking a recent look at Obama’s faltering foreign policy, liberal columnist Richard Cohen quoted from a 1982 article about avoiding public disorder by fixing the “broken windows”:
“Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.”
Cohen might as well have cited what has happened on the border, with the approval of the USCCB. A neglected barrier, with ever more violations. The violators break in, and become squatters demanding their “rights.”
The official Church these days may not be in a very good position to tell homosexuals that they can’t “marry” each other just because they want to. It has told illegal aliens for years that they’re perfectly fine when violating borders as often and as boldly as they please, and someday the law will get changed to suit them.
Laws? Follow the laws? Next thing you know, the racists will claim that Heaven has gates, and only people who follow the rules are allowed to get in.
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