The Church’s Misguided Mercy | The American Spectator

Surprise, surprise: the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference (USCCB) is at it again, watering down the Catholic Church’s teachings to support its own (highly profitable) immigration agenda. Following Kristi Noem’s ouster as Homeland Security Secretary, the USCCB’s Migration Chairman, Bishop Brendan J. Cahill of the Diocese of Victoria in Texas, announced the bishops will press Noem’s replacement to implement “just immigration policies.” At issue, of course, is the sealing of the U.S. southern border and the mass deportation program promised by President Donald Trump.

“Without commenting on the qualifications of any specific individual, my brother bishops and I remain committed to dialoguing with all leaders in every administration, as well as Congress, in support of just immigration policies that recognize the God-given dignity of all involved,” Cahill said, according to EWTN News (formerly Catholic News Agency). “We will continue to urge an approach to immigration enforcement that is targeted, proportionate, and humane, always respecting each person’s inherent dignity, the sanctity of families, and religious liberty.”

Sounds good, right? But the USCCB and its members have consistently castigated the Trump administration’s efforts to secure an America for Americans. Does the Catholic Church actually teach that nations are to be nothing more than receptacles for the murderers, rapists, child molesters, drug dealers, fraudsters, and opportunists of the third world? Emphatically no.

Paragraph 409 of the Compendium of the Catechism nicely summarizes Catholic teaching on government policy, including immigration policy: “The most complete realization of the common good is found in those political communities which defend and promote the good of their citizens … without forgetting the universal good of the entire human family.”

The first human duty of rulers is to their people. This does not mean that rulers have a moral obligation to brutalize others, but it most certainly does not mean that rulers should allow their own people to suffer for the sake of strangers. Americans have a moral responsibility to offer refuge and aid to those less fortunate, when it’s possible to do so. They have no obligation to do so at the expense of their own homes, livelihoods, families, safety, security, and nation.

The nation is, in the words of Pope Pius XII, a “sacred inheritance.” Those who care for the nation have been given that responsibility by their ancestors, those who cared for the nation before, who in turn received that stewardship from their own ancestors, and it is up to those who currently care for the nation to preserve and safeguard that inheritance for their own descendants. There is an obligation that each generation owes to the next, stronger and weightier than any obligation owed to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse of far-flung lands.

Mass migration, as the past several decades, and past several years in particular, have demonstrated, is a scourge upon the nation, robbing citizens of the inheritance that their ancestors struggled and strove to preserve for them, and robbing future generations of the nation that their own forefathers built for them. The policy of the USCCB is not one of “justice,” it is not one of virtue. It is rather a policy of self-service, of robbery, of waste, and of harm. The bishops should be ashamed of themselves.

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