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"Fred Goodwin, CMA" <> wrote in message
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Is the Catholic Church pro-immigrant? You bet.

<http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-20-faith-edit_x.htm
>
http://tinyurl.com/novcp

Updated 8/20/2006 7:45 PM ET
By Paulette Chu Miniter

The Catholic Church - an unrelenting opponent of abortion and
homosexuality and troubled by its own priest-abuse scandals - has
been called many things, but fashionable isn't often among them. Yet
fashion is why some critics now speculate the church has involved
itself in today's third rail of politics: immigration reform. The
chorus has been steady and building. A sampling:

·Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., a Roman Catholic and chairman of the House
of Representatives' Homeland Security Committee, told Fox's Bill
O'Reilly earlier this year, "This has become the politically correct
tune. ... Too many people in the Catholic Church have signed onto this.
It's fashionable."

·Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a leading opponent of illegal
immigration, has blamed the church's stance on "left-leaning religious
activists."

·CNN's Lou Dobbs has accused the church of avidly looking south of
the border just "to add a few folks to those pews."

Where does the church stand on the current debate? While the Vatican
has articulated a broad vision of immigration through the years, it has
largely deferred to the bishops' conferences in each country on
specific public policy efforts. In the USA, the church favors the
Senate's more moderate legislation over the House's heavy-handed
enforcement-only approach. Both bills are stalled, but immigration is
expected to be a prominent issue once Congress returns from its summer
recess.

History tells the story

A snapshot of today's immigrants quickly reveals their significance to
the church: 42% of all legal immigrants to the USA are Catholic. And by
2020, the church projects that more than half of its members will have
Spanish surnames.

While Tancredo Republicans and Dobbs protectionists speculate that the
church wants immigration reform simply because it is fashionable
politics or is a way to put more people in the pews, there is a much
larger and longer standing Catholic case for migration. The U.S.
Catholic Church was founded by and for immigrants, and it sees today's
nativist grumblings as the same that confronted the American church in
its earliest years.

"We are relearning what it means to be an immigrant church," says Mark
Franken, head of migration and refugee services for the U.S. Conference
of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). "There are just a lot of people unaware of
both the theological dimension for migration, and also our history in
this country."

Brought to America by Spanish and French explorers, Catholicism
accounted for 1% of the population in the 13 colonies in 1776,
according to the Archdiocese of St. Louis. By the end of the 19th
century, the Catholic population had swelled, and anti-immigrant
sentiment had emerged as Irish and other newcomers had dramatically
changed the church's face. In 1920, three of four U.S. Catholics were
immigrants, and it is for these immigrants that the church created its
vast network of schools, charities and hospitals.

Today, the Catholic Church is America's largest with 69 million
members, roughly four times the size of the second-largest, the
Southern Baptist Convention. It credits the vast majority of its growth
in the USA over the past four decades to this nation's ever-increasing
Hispanic population.

For the church, the migrant's plight is a universal one tracing back to
the Holy Family. Pope Pius XII, in 1952, declared the Holy Family of
Jesus, Mary and Joseph to be the archetype of every refugee family. He
based this on their flight into Egypt, calling them "the models and
protectors of every migrant, alien and refugee of whatever kind who,
whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave
his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends,
and to seek a foreign soil."

The church has emphasized the duty of Christians to "welcome the
stranger," citing the commandment in the book of Leviticus that "you
shall treat the stranger no differently than the natives born among
you." The church also points to Jesus' description of the final
judgment, when those who welcomed him in the form of a stranger inherit
the kingdom of heaven.

"The biblical tradition puts the migrant and exile at the very center
of concern. Therefore, we, as believers and followers of Jesus, can do
no less," the USCCB's Franken told a Lutheran gathering in 2004.

Even the church's language is rooted in migration. The word
"parishioner," for instance, is related to the Greek word paroikos,
which means "wayfarer" or "sojourner." A parish, then, is a community
of migrants, and migration itself is a metaphor for humanity, as all
people pass through life on the way to their final destination back to
God.

Consistent advocacy

The bishops' call for "just and humane" immigration reform is no
different from what the church's leaders have advocated: from Pope John
XXIII - who said, "Every human being has the right to freedom of
movement" - to Pope John Paul II, who in an annual message for World
Migration Day in 1995 said, "The illegal migrant comes before us like
that 'stranger' in whom Jesus asks to be recognized," and Catholics
must help these strangers "whatever their legal status with regard to
state law."

If the Catholic Church has wound up on the politically correct side of
today's debate, it certainly took a more principled and traditional
route than its skeptics avow.

Paulette Chu Miniter lives in New York and is a fellow at the Phillips
Foundation, a non-profit public affairs organization.