Commentary: Catholic Church embraces Trump’s mass exodus policy. This is a start

When millions of European immigrants came to the United States in the 19th century only to be scorned by the native community, it was the Catholic Church that accepted them, taught them that it was not wrong to preserve the traditions of their homeland, and created systems of mutual aid and education for the newcomers that did not rely on the government.

The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish-American Catholic, showed that the United States was ready to expand its definition of who could be president. Labor organizers such as Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day and Mother Jones have emphasized the dignity of workers while frequently using Jesus’s words of awakening—the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes among the disciples—as fuel for their spiritual fire.

Catholicism is the faith in which I was baptized, the one I embraced as a young man and it is the basis for my moral code of comforting the afflicted and comforting. My work desk covered with statues and devotional cards of Jesus, Mary and saints is a physical testament to this.

But I’m also one of the 72% of U.S. Catholics who a Pew Research Center survey found earlier this year don’t attend weekly Mass, which we’re obligated to do.

I stopped going in my early teens because church became something I didn’t recognize.

Bishops and cardinals who preached we should follow Jesus’ admonition that we should preside over child abuse cases in the 1990s and 2000s that cost parishioners billions of dollars in legal settlements and their moral high ground. The enthusiasm that many of the same church leaders had about abortion and homosexuality—which Christ never spoke about—disappointed me with social justice issues during the Obama administration. Their constant condemnation of pro-choice Catholic Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for taking communion while remaining silent on Donald Trump’s continued violations of the Ten Commandments was hypocritical.

The Pew Research Center found that 55% of my fellow loyalists voted for Trump. Key Catholics have blessed Trump’s bad tendencies: most of them dominate our reformed Supreme Court while the president’s team presents the vice president with a converted and influential gallery of insiders with surnames from the previous generations of the Catholic diaspora – Kennedy, Rubio, Bovino, and Hurst among them.

Yet I remain a Catholic because you should not so easily turn your back on the institutions that created you and you do not surrender your identity to infidels. The election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American to lead the Holy See, and the success of Pope Francis made me realize that things might change for the better as our country deteriorates.

Now, without naming him, the US Catholic delegation has condemned Trump on his signature issue and shows a way close to my heart that my hope is not in vain.

Priests attend the 2021 fall general session of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, Md.

(Julio Cortez/Associated Press)

This week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a so-called “special message” slamming Trump’s leviathan of deportations, its “immigrant desecration,” its “indiscriminate mass deportation” and how hundreds of thousands of residents have “arbitrarily lost their legal status.” Arguing for the human value and sacred order of the Bible, the Old Testament, Paul’s letters – the Bible, Paul’s letters – non-scriptures that we should care about, it was the first time since 2013 that the American bishops jointly wrote such a statement.

Even as most US Catholics moved to MAGA, support for the special message was overwhelming: 216 bishops voted in favor, 5 opposed, and 3 abstained. Their memorial even ended with a shout-out to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the brown, pregnant Virgin Mary who is America’s patron saint for Catholics.

Talk about someone who gets ripped off if the immigrant She saw him on the road.

The cruelty this administration has shown in its deportation campaign – families separated as easily as the Constitution; American citizens arrested; Unlawful federal violence that a federal judge in Chicago described as “shocking.”[ing] Conscience” – has become one of the most serious moral issues of our time. The voice of the Catholic bishops against this error is very important – so, like a voice crying in the wilderness, the Church must set an example for the rest of the country.

This precedent has already been set in parishes in Southern California.

Priests and deacons marched in processions and prayed for those detained and deported from Orange County to the city of LA and beyond. Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights has allowed local activists to hold awareness-your-rights workshops since Trump won last November. While L.A. Archbishop Jose H. Gomez and Orange Bishop Kevin Van Diocese, two of the top Catholic prelates in the region, have spoken out against the immigration attacks, some of their local brother bishops are pushing harder.

Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Diocese of San Bernardino let Catholics fear the immigrant Since July, after immigration agents detained migrants on church property, Moss has argued that “this kind of fear is a big problem for his flock”. In San Diego, Bishop Michael Pham — who had been in his seat for just four months — helped launch a program that encouraged religious leaders to accompany immigrants to immigration court to testify about the injustices inside and participated himself.

Expect to hear the gnashing of teeth from the conservative side of the church about how everyone should respect the rule of law and render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s as if there was a Pope Donald. Earlier, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan lamented that the bishops were “wrong” to publish their pro-immigration letter and suggested they focus on “reforming the Catholic Church.”

But Homan’s dismissal and the bishop’s admonition of his fellow travelers against Trump’s policies do not make it any more prophetic. The president’s immigration decrees are beyond Herod — a lesser authority than Pope Leo — describing them as “inhumane” in October, telling a delegation of U.S. bishops that “the Church cannot remain silent” about these outrages and, in a separate speech, saying that such abuses “are not a legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but a crime or crime committed by the state.”

The Catholic Church will never be as progressive as some would like it to be. Even as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued its message, the group named Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley as its next president of the diocese, whose public politics have so far aligned with his deep red state. But on the issue of the dignity of immigrants during the Trump era, the US bishops are on the right side of history — and God. They have criticized Trump’s Muslim ban and his first administration’s move to separate undocumented parents from their children, and are eyeing his efforts to repeal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows some people who came to the country as children to stay in the U.S. legally.

We’re about to enter the season of Christmas, a holiday based on the story of an impoverished family seeking shelter in an era when their kind have been rejected by the powers-that-be and eventually run away from home. This is also the story of the United States, a lot of Americans left and that Trump wants us all to forget.

May Catholics remind their fellow Americans once again how powerful and righteous it is to be a stranger.