I’m from a Lutheran & Catholic family, and believe that there are sound, religious reasons to support immigration, and especially to support Dreamers’ continued residency in America. (Indeed, the are sound reasons of free markets in labor to support an immigration policy as open as possible.)
For today, though, let’s consider – as a purely political matter – the huge break that Steve Bannon has offered the Catholic Church in America. The American church has faced all manner of self-inflicted moral and political wounds in the last generation, abuse scandals primary among them. (I would not look aside or set aside any of those inflicted injuries – each one should be redressed, so much as one can redress any grievous harm.)
Now, along come the modern-day Know Nothings, looking to keep out as many non-whites as they can, Steve Bannon and Breitbart being in the vanguard of that group. A report this morning contends that, in an upcoming 60 Minutes interview with Charlie Rose, Bannon will hit the Church on immigration:
Bannon: The bishops have been terrible about this. By the way, you know why? You know why? Because unable to really – to – to – to come to grips with the problems in the church, they need illegal aliens, they need illegal aliens to fill the churches. That’s – it’s obvious on the face of it. That’s what – the entire Catholic bishops condemn him. … They have – they have an economic interest. They have an economic interest in unlimited immigration, unlimited illegal immigration. And as much as –
Rose: Boy, that’s a tough thing to say about your church.
Bannon: As much as I respect Cardinal Dolan and the bishops on doctrine, this is not doctrine. This is not doctrine at all. I totally respect the pope and I totally respect the Catholic bishops and cardinals on doctrine. This is not about doctrine. This is about the sovereignty of a nation. And in that regard, they’re just another guy with an opinion.
(Obvious point: the Church does point to doctrine on immigration, clearly, exhaustively, and repeatedly. Bannon surely knows this – he’s simply lying.)
But consider this politically for a moment: if one had to pick an adversary, right out of central casting, what better foe than a broken-down bigot with a horde of lumpen followers?
Jennifer Rubin was right about Trumpism, and that these times are about Trump vs. an America that works:
….We don’t think it is a coincidence that in the election Trump lost the most economically productive areas of the United States. Brookings found,“The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output—just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.” To be clear, Clinton carried the most diverse, most cosmopolitan and most successful parts of America. (“Her base of 493 counties was heavily metropolitan. By contrast, Trumpland consists of hundreds and hundreds of tiny low-output locations that comprise the non-metropolitan hinterland of America, along with some suburban and exurban metro counties”)….
A reasonable person wouldn’t want a fight over immigration, knowing that free markets in labor are beneficial to society. A fair person wouldn’t displace children.
If one had to face a fight with nativists, however, one could not have found more desirable opponents. A fight with Bannon puts the Church squarely in the camp of the most dynamic parts of the country, against stagnant ones. Bannon and his ilk have forced this issue, but on terms favorable not to themselves, but favorable instead to the pro-immigration forces of which the Church is a key part.
The Catholic Church certainly has not got their act completely clean, yet. I’m a huge fan of the current pope, but he has yet to deal effectively with the overwhelming issue of child abuse among his clergy.
He has picked some long over-ripe low-hanging fruit, like restructuring the IOR (Vatican Bank), which had devolved into a mob money laundering operation, and curbing some of the more majestic impulses of his cardinals (particularly in Germany). He got rid of most of the hyper-conservative bishops that had been dragging the church back to the good old days of the reformation.
He also has returned the church to the principles of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits and Liberation theologians had been pretty much exiled under the previous two popes. His symbolic return to ministering to the poor and incarcerated makes for terrific optics for a church that badly needed some.
It is refreshing, and something that I didn’t ever expect to see, to have a pope with some un-cloistered experience. Francis used to be a bouncer in a night-club, so has seen some of life that most popes haven’t. He has a MS in chemistry, so when he speaks of chemical-induced climate change, he can cite equations to back up his entreaties.
But the pervie issue hangs over all of this. It is so embedded in the Catholic church that one elderly pope is not going to be able to fix it. Francis has appointed a blue-ribbon commission to investigate it all and report back to him, proving that the church, as a political institution, knows how to kick the can down the road as well as our congress does. He has been weeding out some of the more egregious molesters and enablers, like most recently, Mueller, but has a long way to go.
If you were an alien green-man that just arrived on earth with no preconceived notions, and studied the history and currency of the Roman Catholic church, your would not be way off to postulate that the Catholic clergy comprise a 2000-year old pedophilia fraternity. There are mountains of evidence to support the notion. The rituals of the church, particularly the confessional and teaching of absolute obedience to the “father” priests, seem custom designed to facilitate abuse.
None of this is easy, or maybe even possible, to fix. I give Francis a lot of credit for doing what he can.
It was a Lutheran immediate family in which I was raised, with an extended Catholic family just beyond. Like many Protestant families, of a certain high-church, mainline upbringing, one’s outlook came, like it or not, with a conviction that (in so many ways) one had left older ideas and traditions behind. These decades later, that doesn’t seem true to me. There’s much in Catholic social teaching that I find admirable, indeed, more than that: simply right and true. In politics, I would be called a bleeding-heart libertarian (one who wants to combine libertarianism with social justice teachings). That’s a secular, political position, but I have been drawn to it not merely for political but also, to be sure, for religious reasons.
There is much risk in any collection of people. My late father (who was always generous toward other faiths and supportive of comparative religious study) often said that there was no worse politics than the politics of the church (in his case, Lutheran). Excusing nothing about the scandals of our era, perhaps we’ve no assuredly safe structure with human participants.
I recently heard a Catholic bishop answer the question of salvation with the response, “The Lord and I are working on it.” It’s an answer few Protestants, and presumably no fundamentalist ones, would offer. Yet it feels to me now a sensible one, to the very slight extent that a layperson’s assessment matters in this regard.
Far from being doubtful, the answer seems to me a source of confidence and hope.
I must be careful, for the perception may be that I am self-righteous, trust me when I write that it is a daily struggle to consistently apply my faith – it is a journey; I am on not at a destination to which I have arrived.
As I grow older I am beginning to realize that faith in man alone to solve every problem is flawed, thus the need to have a spiritual faith in a greater good. It seems now more than ever that there are challenges to which man is looking to solve without any spiritual guidance and I ask myself if these individuals who claim to know God and have an answer ever read Luke 10:25-37, the parable of Good Samaritan – show mercy or James 2:14-17 – faith without action is dead.
I enjoy reading and listening to Fr. James Martin. He’s controversial with conservative Catholics, I know, but if their criticism of him were persuasive to me, then I wouldn’t be reading and enjoying his work. I have been. These days, I’ve replayed often a short video he recorded about respect for strangers, and it’s served – as many good words are – as an inspiration to read more deeply.
(Elsewhere, Martin’s noted that, regarding Dreamers, they’re not truly strangers at all – they are what we are.)
Here below are his concise remarks on immigrants, offered in the hope that they are as inspiring and motivational as they are to me.