By A.W. Morgan
07/02/2014
As a practicing Catholic myself, I would have thought Sean Cardinal O’Malley would be busy trying to rebuild the scandal shattered Boston archdiocese [Church allowed abuse by priest for years, by Michael Rezendes, Boston Globe, January 6, 2002]. But in fact he recently found time to lecture Americans about how hateful they are. His recent interview with The Daily Beast was an expression of that political overlap when Leftist reporters and representatives of organized religion can join forces to trash the historic American nation.
Let’s not mince words: the moral authority of the Catholic hierarchy has been all but destroyed because of the way powerful bishops protected child molesters, about as pure an expression of evil as can be imagined. [For Roger Mahony, clergy abuse cases were a threat to agenda, by Harriet Ryan, Ashley Powers, and Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2013]. But this isn’t stopping Catholic bishops from moral preening at the expense of their flocks.
Insultingly, O’Malley told Beastbot Christopher Dickey that opposition to immigration is driven by fear which is “not rational.” Citizenship for illegals is “essential.” “We need” eleven million illegal aliens in the country. He even threw in an attack on the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings of the 19th century. (Who ironically warned against the anti-American tendencies of the Roman Church — does O’Malley want to prove them right?). [Cardinal O’ Malley: Pope Francis Knows Immigrants Are the Future of the Church, by Christopher Dickey, The Daily Beast, June 4, 2014]
Dickey provided some softballs for His Eminence, helpfully opining that “the fear and hatred of foreigners is nothing new in the United States, nation of immigrants though it is.”
To hear this Treason Lobby propaganda echoed by a Prince of the Church reminds me of the horrifying egalitarian Pope from Jean Raspail’s prophetic 1973 novel Camp of the Saints,
The cardinals wanted a new-style pope. For the universal Church, they said. Well, they certainly got one! I knew him well when he was still a bishop, badgering Europe with his pitiful tales of Third World despair. I remember telling him one day that by wearing down the wayward mother he would only harm the children all the more. You know what he answered? That poverty is all there is worth sharing! Well, he’s keeping his promise. …“Camp Of The Saints”, Chapter 33
Speaking of which, Pope Francis is already talking about visiting the Mexican border. [Pope Francis Evaluating A Visit To the US-Mexico Border Area, Fox News Latino, June 20, 2014]
Needless to say, this simplistic Open Borders emoting is absolutely not required by Catholic teaching. According to the Catechism:
Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. 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. [Catechism of the Catholic Church — Participation in social life.]
For that matter, even the very liberal United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recognizes that countries have the right to safeguard their own borders. The Conferences recognizes “the right to move” but simultaneously says
“no country is bound to accept all those who wish to resettle there. By this principle the Church recognizes that most immigration is ultimately not something to celebrate. … [N]o country has the duty to receive so many immigrants that its social and economic life are jeopardized.”
The USCCB also warns that the federal immigration control is not to be viewed as “negative or evil.” [Catholic Social Teaching on Immigration And the Movement of Peoples.]
But this is simply ignored by open borders fanatics such as Bishop Eusebio Elizondo,(himself born in Victoria Tamaulipas, Mexico) who flatly says the United States is morally obliged to open its border — and O’Malley, who this spring staged that despicable profanation of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at the southern border.
The erudite Catholic writer John Zmirak notes that American Catholics are not obligated to follow the immigration politics of the bishops. He comments acidly, “[P]ardon me if I don’t expect the Vatican to write America’s immigration laws, or draw up its federal budget,” he wrote. “That’s not part of its job description.” “[N]o pope, and no pastor,” he correctly continued, “has a monopoly on rational thought. Christians can and should differ on how to resolve America’s immigration problems.” [Churches should cease pro-immigration push, The Blaze, June 17, 2014]
By closing the door on disagreement, O’Malley is not only forfeiting moral leadership, he is actively sinning. He is calumniating those who disagree with him and lying by substituting his Leftist politics for real Church teaching. More than that, he’s an accessory to another’s sin by excusing President Obama’s lawlessness and the casualties it has caused.
Unfortunately, Catholic clergy around the world seem to delight in this behavior. A correspondent reports from Australia:
We also have churchmen here…purporting to oppose xenophobia and to preach charity towards boat-borne “refugees” and “asylum-seekers,” in opposition to the present government’s policy that has succeeded in completely terminating the flow of boats to this country. Over a period of six years, the allegedly “humane” policies of the previous Labor government gave a massive boost to unscrupulous people-traffickers. The number of illegal boat arrivals exploded, as did the number of boat people lost at sea (more than a thousand), the number kept in detention centers, and the burden on taxpayers to maintain them. Yet the bishops and other lefties, in a display of moral exhibitionism that costs them nothing but costs everyone else (those who pay taxes) plenty, would still have us believe that the present policy is unchristian and that “refugees” should be made “welcome.”
As Christianity implodes in the west, the bishops provide able assistance by fostering its transformation into a tool of leftist propaganda. [Links added]
Similarly, Church officials in Italy allowed the transformation of churches into refugee centers. The mewling mandarins of the Italian Church would do well to remember Oriana Fallaci’scandid observations about Muslims: Their “yellow streaks of urine [have] profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery” in Florence, and they may one day “s### in the Sistine Chapel.” [The Agitator, by Margaret Talbot, New Yorker, June 5, 2006]
Final words from Raspail:
The Archbishop of Aix is offering to empty out his schools to house the refugees, and his seminaries too — which, between you and me, are empty already. …
And so they are today in the post-Christian West.
Having violated the trust of the innocent and sabotaged the Faith in its European homeland, the Church’s clergy is seemingly declaring a kind of reverse Crusade on the West. They are violating their own teachings, endangering the lives of immigrants as well as Americans, and ironically ensuring the irrelevance of their own institution in the European diaspora, as the links between the West and what was once her Church are severed forever.
Catholics need to confront their own leaders to save their Church–and the civilization She created.
A. W. Morgan is fully recovered from prolonged contact with the Beltway Right. He now lives in America.
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