By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of the Southern District of Texas delivered a stinging blow to Obama’s executive amnesty diktat known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
The program was born when Congress refused to pass immigration reform legislation for years. In 2012, Obama simply declared DACA to be law by fiat, legalizing over a million illegal alien minors.
Two years later, Obama threatened to expand DACA with DAPA (“P” for “Parents”), legalizing four million more illegals.
At that point twenty-six state attorneys general secured a nationwide preliminary injunction barring implementation of both measures.
That alliance was led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a pro-life conservative who has fiercely defended the people of Texas against a broad swath of constitutional infringements by the federal government. In Judge Hanen’s decision, the efforts of Paxton and his allies were ratified: Dismissing the procedural caveats, he declared that DACA was simply illegal on its merits.
Paxton has strongly defended Texans from immigration scofflaws. Since January, he has sued the Biden Administration at least five times for its unconstitutional immigration policies, and for good reason. Illegal aliens cost Texan taxpayers $850 million a year, Paxton argues. They raise the state’s crime rate and threaten the well-being of Texans in other ways (Biden officials do nothing to stop illegals from bringing COVID into Texas).
However, while Paxton has defended the rights of Texans, the Catholic bishops of Texas have championed the illegal aliens instead. And at times their efforts have profoundly failed the faithful.
Paxton Gets The Pastoral Touch
In 2017, Paxton and nine other state attorneys general, joined by Gov. Butch Otter of Idaho, wrote Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowing to challenge DACA once more in court if the Trump Administration didn’t move to phase out the program.
That’s when Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso launched a bitter attack on Paxton and his pro-life colleagues. His column appeared in USA Today and was carried in Gannett newspapers throughout the country.
“When I hear [the state officials’] legalistic insistence upon every letter of our broken immigration law being carried out to this cruel degree,” Seitz wrote, “I can hear Jesus’ indignant response: ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites’.”
As we reported at the time, Seitz often advocates breaking laws he doesn’t agree with.
To find out more, we talked to Beto O’Rourke (D., Texas), Seitz’s Catholic U.S. representative. O’Rourke told us that Seitz had never publicly criticized him for his 100 percent pro-abortion voting record, even though they often appeared together at rallies advocating illegal immigration.
And of course the bishop doesn’t follow the “legalistic insistence upon every letter” of Canon 915, either. He has never publicly criticized, much less forbidden, the scandalous reception of Communion by Mr. O’Rourke, or by his Catholic state senator, José Rodriguez, or by his Catholic state representative, César Blanco, although both have 100 percent pro-abortion voting records.
Mr. Paxton’s office later told us that Bishop Seitz has never apologized for his intemperate attack. Moreover, even though Paxton is not Catholic, he is one of the nation’s strongest pro-life state attorneys general. Yet Bishop Seitz, who insists he is pro-life, has never commended Paxton, in public or in private, for his valiant defense of the unborn.
In fact, Bishop Seitz is outraged at the number of pro-lifers who support the Church’s teaching on abortion and consider that issue to be more important than the Left’s social justice agenda.
In an anti-Trump screed in America Magazine a month before last year’s election, Bishop Seitz wrote that putting life first “has corrupted Christian political witness.” This was four months after a picture of Seitz kneeling reverently in prayer before a Black Lives Matter (BLM) placard went viral, eliciting a congratulatory telephone call from Pope Francis. [The Wanderer has asked the bishop’s office to let us know if he has ever condemned the Marxist organization’s pro-abortion, anti-family manifestos, or its financial scandals that followed they group’s riots and mayhem of last summer. At press time, we have received no response.]
Some Laws Are More Equal Than Others
Seitz’s political prime mandates are illegal aliens and racism. In that, his worldview represents in miniature that of the entire U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference. Laws they don’t like are “legalistic,” and can be disobeyed at will, so long as one invokes Jesus in breaking them.
Take the Church’s own canon law: Hundreds of bishops refuse to obey its straightforward rules regarding pro-abortion Catholic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.
But the defiance goes for U.S. law as well. Yes, our bishops support sanctuary cities, but their tolerance of illegality goes much farther: Seldom do we hear our shepherds admonishing illegals not to steal (Social Security Numbers), or to lie (on applications for welfare benefits). And of course, they are all strong supporters of DACA.
Yes, they venerate Black Lives Matter, but “most” whites are racists, even if we don’t know it. They pity powerfully the illegals who arrive destitute and abused at the border, but they never criticize the Coyote sex-and-drug traffickers who abused and impoverished them, charging them $5,000 and up apiece.
That’s because the Coyotes are in business to bring illegals to the border, where the bishops are in business to welcome their clients and “care for them” — at U.S. taxpayer expense.
America First? Or Illegals?
Does Bishop Seitz really prefer illegals to Americans?
Consider: Last month Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared an emergency at the Mexican border. Among other damage, Biden’s nonexistent immigration policy was flooding the Lone Star State’s foster care agencies with illegal minors.
In effect, Biden’s criminal negligence was fomenting a federal takeover of Texas’ childcare agencies.
To protect Texas children in need of such care, Abbott issued an Executive Order requiring that those facilities stop accepting illegals or lose their state license to operate.
And there was a lot of money at stake. According to the New York Post, “52 state-licensed residential operations and child placement agencies in Texas…have contracts with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and care for the [illegal] children.”
The result? Those agencies get federal money to house illegals, but not Texans.
And Catholic Charities is one of the primary agencies receiving those federal funds.
No illegals, no federal funds.
So last Sunday, Bishop Seitz took to the pages of the Dallas Morning News to oppose the governor’s policy — on the grounds of “religious liberty”!
Of course, the Executive Order had nothing to do with religion, but far be it from Bishop Seitz to base his Gospel-laced plea on his fear that secular Catholic NGOs in Texas could lose millions of taxpayer dollars
Weren’t we just talking about money-changers in the temple?
Well, for Bishop Seitz, it’s the bottom line: We get money for illegals but not for Texans.
So for Bishop Seitz, it’s “Illegals First!”
Who’s The Real Illegal? Those Catholic Spaniards!
Seitz’s animus against Americans goes a lot further than Texas. In a recent pastoral letter, he perceives the work of Catholic missionaries since the Spanish first arrived in the sixteenth century as partners in a “deployment of white supremacy and cultural oppression.”
He mentions Our Lady of Guadalupe, but presents her as a defender of the indigenous tribes against the Spanish colonists. He even laments the “sinful notions of civilized versus uncivilized and the invention of the savage” that followed Hernan Cortés’ victory over the Emperor Cuauhtémoc and the Aztec gods Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli.
Well, it’s fair to ask His Excellency: Wasn’t the cannibalism, torture, mass human sacrifice, and infanticide demanded by those gods pretty “savage”? Those indigenous innocents were butchering ten thousand captives a day on major pagan feasts, cutting out their beating hearts and drinking their blood in front of delirious, cheering crowds.
Isn’t that pretty “oppressive”?
Shame on those intolerant Spaniards, bringing Christ to destroy such a marvel of civilization at its peak.
Hypocrites! Pharisees!
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