A senior U.S. cardinal who was barred from public ministry for protecting predator priests is urging his fellow prelates to engage in civil disobedience against President-Elect Donald Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants.
Cardinal Roger Mahony, former archbishop of Los Angeles, who paid nearly $10 million to settle clergy sex abuse cases, said “the Church will not reveal any records” of illegal parishioners’ private information including “residence and other personal information.”
“The Church will remain vigilant if it appears that Border Patrol or other immigration authorities are making themselves present near our Churches and other Church program facilities,” Mahony told Catholic media outlet Crux in an interview published on Nov. 26.
“The pending ominous initiative to round up and deport some 11 million undocumented immigrants across the country is a chilling and frightening reality,” he warned. “Since the Church has many parishes serving particular immigrant groups, the Church must object if unwarranted intimidation appears.”
Precedent for Civil Disobedience
Mahony bragged about previously defying the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, which would have raised penalties for illegal immigration and classify illegal individuals and anyone who helped them enter or remain in the U.S. as felons. The bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives in late 2005, but died in the Senate.
“At a special Mass in our Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in 2006, I publicly declared that none of our parishes, schools, institutions, or clergy and lay personnel would abide by the provisions of HR 4437,” the cardinal said.
“What made this bill so frightening was that it specifically made aiding any undocumented immigrant either a misdemeanor or felony. For us in the Church, the broad interpretation included all and any aid or assistance,” Mahony explained.
The prelate argued that even offering illegal aliens sacraments, including Holy Communion or spiritual and pastoral aid, “could be construed as a misdemeanor or felony” with penalties for the priest or minister, according to the provisions of HR 4437.
In 2012, thousands of pages from the internal disciplinary files of 14 priests show Mahony and top clergy covered for those who were abusing children. Mahony and a key official shielded a priest who confessed to raping an 11-year-old boy and abusing up to 17 other boys.
“Effective immediately, I have informed Cardinal Mahony that he will no longer have any administrative or public duties,” Mahony’s successor, Jose H. Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles, announced in a letter dated January 31, 2013.
Immigration a Gospel Imperative?
Despite his scandalous record, Mahony insisted that his support for migrants is a Gospel imperative.
“I urged that our refusal to participate was based on our Gospel duty to see the image of God in each and every person, and to refuse to participate in any public effort to denigrate that dignity through punitive measures,” he noted, citing Jesus’s words in Matthew 25:35-36.
“Since so much opposition was growing in 2006 against such overtly punitive measures, many of us in Los Angeles organized the largest pro-immigrant March in the history of the country,” Mahony added. “Some 500,000 marched peacefully on March 26, 2006, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who were being threatened.
“The Church is not an instrument of the government to provide information to government officials concerning the immigration status of our parishioners.”
Mahony cited several California laws he considered unjust, such as the California Chinese Exclusion Act (1858) and laws that were passed in the 1930s forbidding Filipino immigrants from marrying anyone except other Filipinos.
Bishops Join Anti-Trump Chorus
Other U.S. bishops have expressed strong views on resisting the mass deportations to be led by Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, a committed Catholic who served in Trump’s first administration as the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“Many people thought that Hittler (sic) Era is was (sic) something of the past,” Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio, Texas, posted on X last Thursday.
“There are many people in fear. I have met with them. Their stories are meant to build up. Though, they are aware of the persecution against them. We want to assure people of their rights. Migrants and refugees need to know their rights in these turbulent times. We accompany you,” Garcia-Siller wrote.
In a Nov. 19 letter addressed to “our migrant brothers and sisters.” four bishops from the Iowa Catholic Conference said they would “advocate for your just treatment and dignity within the framework of the law.”
Signed by bishops Thomas Zinkula, Dennis Walsh, R. Walker Nickless, and William Joensen, the letter cited Pope Francis’s words emphasizing that “migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity.”
U.S. Bishops’ Conference Threatens Trump
At the plenary assembly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, during the second week of November, USCCB president Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio stated that the bishops would “never backpedal or renounce” their mandate to protect human dignity “from womb to tomb,” The Stream reported.
“We certainly do not encourage illegal immigration,” the archbishop noted, “but we will all have to stand before the throne of grace and hear the Lord ask us if we saw Him in the hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, stranger, or sick, and responded to His needs.”
Commenting on the new post-election milieu, Broglio emphasized the bishops’ efforts to combat “the evil of racism,” to “seek Christ in those who are most in need” and “to encourage immigration reform while we continue to care for those in need who cross our borders.”
When asked how he would respond if Trump used the military to carry out deportations, Broglio insisted that chaplains would work to defend conscience rights as best they could within the system, since “no one can be obliged to go against his or her conscience.”
The left-leaning bishop of El Paso, Mark Seitz, who chairs the USCCB migration committee, stressed that the bishops would speak up for migrants in the event of mass deportations. “This is going to be a test for our nation,” he said. “Are we in fact a nation based on law, on the most fundamental laws about the rights of the human person?”
Seitz, who knelt at El Paso’s Memorial Park while holding a Black Lives Matter sign in June 2020, said the bishops would raise their “voice loudly if those basic protections for people that have been a part of our country from its very beginning are not being respected.”
On June 29, 2022 — the day the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — Seitz issued a statement in English and Spanish, drawing a moral equivalence between the death penalty and abortion.
“One decision hands the administration the keys to the death chamber by clearing the way to the resumption of federal executions,” he wrote. “The message of Jesus is radically at odds with coercive justice exercised by the government whenever it forecloses the possibility of mercy and hope. Just so, the death penalty idolatrously robs God of the last word.”
“Abortion also idolatrously robs God of the last word and forecloses on mercy and hope,” he added, blaming unpaid leave for mothers and non-access to universal healthcare as a cause of abortion.
Immigration Is Cash Cow for U.S. Bishops
Catholic Charities USA (CCU), the largest social safety net provider in the country outside the federal government, has received nearly $1 billion from taxpayers via the Biden administration to facilitate illegal immigration, The Stream reported in September.
Among the beneficiaries is Catholic Charities San Antonio, which operates the Centro de Bienvenida Migrant Resource Center, and was awarded $10.9 million as part of a federal spending package in May.
The USCCB candidly admits on its website that it “engages with the federal appropriations process to obtain the maximum amount of funding needed to support the U.S. refugee program, which provides both overseas assistance and resettlement services to refugees.”
Each year, it advocates for “funding levels that maximize the number of refugees assisted overseas and resettled in the U.S., and that provide resettlement agencies sufficient resources to serve refugees in a comprehensive manner,” it states while appealing to private donors.
Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating Annunciation House, a prominent Catholic charity supported by the USCCB, for “systemic criminal conduct” in “planning and facilitating” illegal border crossings from Mexico into the U.S.
In May, Paxton said his office had “obtained sworn testimony indicating that Annunciation House’s operations are designed to facilitate illegal border crossings and to conceal illegally present aliens from law enforcement.”
Covenant House, an agency of Catholic Charities, also allegedly housed Jose Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela who entered the U.S. via El Paso in 2022, and murdered devout Christian nursing student Laken Riley in Georgia this February.
Bishops Follow Pope Francis’s Lead on Immigration
A few weeks ago, while addressing his general audience, Pope Francis declared opposition to mass immigration a “grave sin” and called for a “global governance of migration,” even as Italy’s bishops defied national law by financing a ship ferrying illegal immigrants in the Mediterranean.
The pontiff warned that “restrictive laws” and the “militarization of borders” would not help curb the tidal wave of illegal immigrants, who are predominantly Muslim men of military age flooding into Europe from Africa and Asia.
“The Catholic Church has always been a faithful member of society, but it has not hesitated to raise our voice when the least among us are singled out for undue treatment under the principles of Jesus and the gospels and our tradition of standing with the most vulnerable in our midst,” Mahony said.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.
The post Disgraced U.S. Cardinal Incites Civil Disobedience to Trump’s Mass Deportations appeared first on The Stream.
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