A fine letter which mirrors what many Americans are feeling. The disconnect between politicians and American citizens with regard to illegal immigration is absolutely appalling. I’m convinced that the only effective counter to the problem of illegal immigration will be a grass-roots effort. Politicians will listen (eventually) if we only shout as loud as the illegals begging for “rights”.

My thanks to Mr. Auster for linking to the letter. Maybe Cardinal Egan will never read it, but I got more e-mail comments about on the day it went up than I have about all the rest of my (rather modest) VDare oeuvre put together. Almost all has been positive. There are a lot of angry Catholics out there.

The American Catholic hierarchy is criminally irresponsible when it comes to immigration, preferring foreign trespassers over their American flocks. Catholics who disagree with them about this should say so. Non-Catholic Americans have every right to criticize them for their thoughtless meddling in an issue of importance to all Americans. The more criticism they hear, and from as many directions as possible, the better. HRS

This is the key problem. Religous, Business, Educational, Political, Media, Etc, leaders prefer “foreign trespassers over their American flocks,” as Howard puts it.

The Catholic Church’s endorsement of the federal policy of permitting limitless illegal 3rd-world immigration into the U.S. is all the more shameful in view of the fact that, as Ed Rubenstein has proven in a recent Vdare.com piece, the government’s adoption of this policy amounts to an attack on working Americans for the benefit of the business owners who profit when U.S. workers are displaced by lower-wage ones. The Catholic Church is in effect helping to throw American workers out of work so that owners may shamefully make more money by employing foreign workers instead. (But you see, black American workers aren’t Catholics, and neither are about half of white American workers, while *all* imported Mexican scab-workers are Catholics. Shame on you, Catholic Church!)

Mr. Rubenstein writes,

“In effect, it appears that the government has decided to use immigration policy to attack American workers [by replacing higher-wage black and white Americans with lower-wage Hispanic workers].”

( http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/unemployment.htm )

Here’s a brief remark on the same problem from from my 1997 pamphlet Huddled Clichés:

——————-
In the rhetoric of some Christian conservatives, Third-World immigrants are agents of salvation, even though we (white) Americans don’t seem to be worth saving. Here is the way Fr. Benedict Groeschel of the New York Diocese responds to the problem of irreligion in America:

“The only hope is the growing number of non-Anglos who, in the United States, are much more religious. In 1983, fewer than 50 percent of Americans felt that religion was ‘very important’ in their lives. Now it’s up to 57 percent. That reflects the decline in the numbers of upper and middle-class Anglos and the influx of Hispanics, Asians and Philippinos.” [Italics added].

The only hope for sinful America is—more non-white immigrants! Instead of trying to save the souls of his fellow Americans, Groeschel simply wants to replace them with Third-Worlders—a very strange idea of Christian charity.

——————-

Rather than “illegals” they should be referred to at every opportunity as scabs, first, because that’s what their role amounts to — that’s what they are — and second, in order to better drive home to people the real reason they’re being brought in: the Wall Streeters who back the GOP want bigger profits through cheaper labor.

Rather than “illegals,” I’m going to call them scabs from now on.

A fine article indeed. Congratulations to Mr. Sutherland and thanks to Mr. Auster for sharing it.

Also disturbing is Fr. Groeschel’s complicity in rabble-rousing, which aptly describes his open advocacy of refusing to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Why doesn’t Father take them all in? He certainly eats enough food for two people. Low blow? No. I am not talking to Father’s face. I am pointing out hypocrisy, which seems to define liberal thinking.

Fr. Groeschel is a fine example of what ails the Roman Catholic Church in America and throughout the West - and I believe he is considered conservative or at least doctrinally orthodox. He succumbs to the universalist temptation inherent in Christianity.

The Lord cares equally for all men’s souls, so we must welcome equally everybody from anywhere for any reason. We must deprive ourselves of the ability to discriminate on any intelligent or practical basis. To preserve what is good and particular about our own country and culture is just bigotry. But these requirements do not follow from the (true) premise; to believe they do reduces a great and complex Faith to a series of simple-minded slogans. In the case of Fr. Groeschel and Card. Egan (and, I would add, Pope John Paul II on immigration), the situation is worse, because they go beyond insisting on treating those who do not belong to our nation perfectly equally with those who do when it comes to their entitlement to that nation’s bounty. To achieve the equality of condition that their marxified vision of Christianity compels, they must discriminate against legitimate inhabitants in favor of interlopers. But Christian charity does not mandate national suicide.

Fr. Groeschel and the U.S. Catholic hierarchy also succumb to the Wattenberg Fallacy: anybody from anywhere who thinks he can have it better in America is already an American, because he subscribes to the American Proposition. Those who happen to be native to the land America sits on are no more worthy to be called Americans than the Somali who said, still in Nairobi when he heard he would get to go to America, “I am an American already.” Indeed, Americans who do not subscribe to the Proposition in all its particulars are less deserving of America than that Somali and should get out of his way.

The American Catholic Church is self-consciously, even defiantly, an “immigrant church.” Even though there was British Catholic settlement in the Thirteen Colonies from the time the Ark and the Dove landed Catholic Englishmen in 1634 to found Maryland, the Church sees its heritage as post-independence immigration and its posture as opposition to the original WASP establishment. Old resentments inform and distort current policies. Add the fallacious belief that immigrants and illegal aliens (already presumed to possess moral virtue that natives do not) are better Catholics than the natives, and you have completed the recipe for our Catholic bishops’ ecclesiastical treason.

Re Unadorned’s ideas about what to call illegal aliens, while I like scabs, I have a few of my own. I had been calling them invaders for a few years, but my wife got sick of it. So I started calling them orcs. I realized after a while that was pretty harsh; I am angriest at the American fifth-columnists who help them. So it’s back to invaders, although orc still slips out from time to time. HRS

One policy failure leads to another; one past problem leads to future problems. Howard Sutherland points out that the American Catholic Church thinks of itself as the outsiders who oppose the old WASP establishment. Given that massive Catholic immigration was treated as a negative event and grave concern by the WASP establishment, eventually leading to the backlash that greatly reduced immigration in the 1920’s, this is not too surprising. As with today, the problem was that the rate of immigration was too high in the first place, prompting the concern and backlash, leading to divisiveness. Just more evidence that immigration is only acceptable in moderation.

Here is an article from yesterday’s NYT by Frank Bruni —

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/international/europe/13CHUR.html

Mr. Bruni write about the decline of faith in Europe but tells us — you guessed it — that it may be the immigrants who save Christianity. Only one study (concerning London) is cited for the proposition that immigrants practice their faith more than the natives.

A lot could be said about all this. But one point is the rise of pro-immigrant theology in the Catholic Church appears to have coincided with the Church’s current obsession for ecumenicalism. Even among many orthodox Catholics, pluralism seems to be the working hypothesis. John Paul II has held ecumenical confabs at Assisi at which even Voodo priests have been welcomed. “God is a god of dialogue” JP II once said.

” ‘God is a god of dialogue’ JP II once said.”

“A god of dialogue”? I don’t know which god he’s talking about there. Jehovah certainly isn’t. Yes, yes, Jehovah had “dialogue” with Jonah and with one or two others. But it wasn’t as if he was giving his interlocutor any real leeway. When our God — we’re talking here about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — yes, THAT one — “dialogues” with us it’s to explain to us what we must do. It’s not to meet Islam half-way or give the OK to ordain openly homosexual “priests” as Episcopalian bishops who left their wives and children sixteen years ago because of a “love affair” with another man and have been brazenly living with that man in sin ever since.

Frustrating, isn’t it? Phenomenalism seems to entail taking trite everyday truths - God is after all the God of everything, not just dialogue (which some take to mean respectful evangelization and others take to mean religious indifferentism) - and drawing quasi-profound emotional modern-liberal sounding implications from them in order to make the Church seem “nice”.

AN OPEN LETTER TO ARCHBISHOP EDWARD EGAN

Your Eminence,
Before supporting Immigration/assylum from asian countries to the West read this :
[Note by LA: This is a discusssion forum, not a place to post 1000 word articles. If you have a link to your letters or articles at another site, you may post the links. In any case please desist from posting long documents here.]