MYOHB*
Pope wants us to respect human rights, not divide families, etc., in the matter of illegal border crossing. NYT:
Even as he was flying to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of protecting immigrant families, not dividing them.
He raised the issue again in a meeting on Wednesday with President Bush, and later that day spoke in Spanish to the church’s “many immigrant children.” And when he ends his visit to New York on Sunday, he will be sent off by a throng of the faithful, showing off the ethnic diversity of American Catholicism.
The choreography underscores the importance to the church here of its growing diversity — especially its increasing Hispanic membership.
Of the nation’s 65 million Roman Catholics, 18 million are Latino, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and they account for more than two-thirds of the new Catholics in the country since 1960.
Millions of other recent arrivals come from Asia and Africa. More and more parishes depend on priests brought from abroad to serve the flock.
Benedict has calibrated his immigration stance with care, stating the need to protect family unity and immigrants’ human rights, but pointedly avoiding any specifics of the American immigration debate, like the issue of whether to grant legal status to illegal immigrants. Yet last week his visit quickly stirred the crosscurrents of the debate.
What could be more humanitarian than uniting families in their homes … wherever those originally were. Someone needs to tell the pope that massive illegal border crossing creates rampant abuse in the form of shakedowns, robberies, sex slavery, substandard working conditions, not to mention the risk that any particular panel truck full of illegals might suffocate, bake in the sun, roll into a ditch, etc. The abuse of human rights in this business is perpetrated mainly by its facilitators, aided by advocates. Concern for human rights starts with the supposed victims of heartless American authorities obeying the law and staying out of hazardous situations. The notion that U.S. authorities enforcing immigration laws constitutes any kind of human rights violation is not only absurd, but offensive.
The article goes on to note that Tancredo, ex-Catholic evangelical, is making it a Catholic recruitment thing. Maybe. For the moment, I have to look at it as more of the usual America-bashing. I have to assume one of the leading moral figures in the world wouldn’t be encouraging dangerous, traumatic upheaval of populations just to pack the pews.
But it’s a fair point. The answer there may be, where’s the pope on the uncontrolled flood of Muslim migrants into Europe? This Radio Free Europe commentary makes the connection:
Catholic social teaching on immigration has traditionally sought to reconcile the rights of migrants with rights of nations to defend their distinctive cultures and national identities. During the 1970s, for instance, Father Theodore Hesburgh, a prominent Catholic theologian who headed the University of Notre Dame, was the chairman of an official commission that recommended quite stringent controls on immigration. No one considered this at all odd.
In recent years, however, migrant rights have trumped most other considerations in the pastoral letters of the U.S. Catholic bishops and, quite coincidentally, in the policies of the Bush administration and the opinions of political and business elites.
At the same time, a clear majority of Americans — and a smaller majority of Catholics — now fears that the United States is harmed by uncontrolled immigration. And, quite coincidentally, Italian bishops are concerned that large-scale Muslim immigration is further weakening the already ailing Christian culture of Europe.
So the the pope will almost certainly support the U.S. bishops by calling for the United States to respect migrant rights during his visit. (In addition to other factors, Hispanic immigration is strengthening the American church.) But it will be interesting to see if he qualifies this obligation by acknowledging the rights of nations, including the United States to defend its particular national cultures.
On that last point, if he did, the NYT report doesn’t mention it, unless you count his touting of the American tradition of immigration. The article does give the bishops and their support for this massive abusive and deadly illegal enterprise a lot of law-enforcement-bashing ink, though. So maybe the way this works is, Europe doesn’t have a warm and fuzzy tradition or national cultures of welcoming immigrants, therefore is free to give the Muslim mobs the boot. Some people think that’s what Regensburg was about. Here’s someone else who suggests great papal concern about the swamping of Europe with Mohammedan family values. I’m poking around on the Internet, looking for more of Ben’s thinking on Europe’s immigration issues. Let me know if you’ve spotted any.
Separate matter, here’s an interesting example of Euro-bashing America touting, though Ben can hardly be faulted for pushing the agenda in the process. National Post:
“It strikes me that here in America, unlike many places in Europe, the secular mentality has not been intrinsically opposed to religion,” he said, praising America’s tradition of religious liberty and tolerance. “Within the context of the separation of Church and State, American society has always been marked by a fundamental respect for religion and its public role, and, if polls are to be believed, the American people are deeply religious.”
At the same time, such religious tolerance can “subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator” in which faith is separated from everyday life, and “each person believes he or she has a right to pick and choose, maintaining external social bonds but without an integral, interior conversion to the law of Christ. … We have seen this emerge in an acute way in the scandal given by Catholics who promote an alleged right to abortion.”
Related: Michelle Malkin, anti-Catholic bigot!
* Mind Your Own Holy Business.
Topics: Islam, illegals, religion
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:31 am on Sunday, April 20, 2008
2 Responses to “MYOHB*”
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April 20th, 2008 at 8:59 am
[...] to say anything different, notwithstanding the inane ramblings of a Colorado Congressman or some random bloggers. [...]
April 20th, 2008 at 10:18 am
And Tancredo really needs to STFU (I don’t think I need provide a translation).