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Reform for God, not for Country
Q: Illegal immigrants are flouting U.S. laws, but does affluent America (or Arizona for that matter) have a larger moral or spiritual obligation to help illegal immigrants who are trying to better their lives? What about religious obligations to welcome the stranger? Are we our brother's keeper?
Some of the annoying sloganeering that peppers debate about immigration reform comes from those who complain that the Catholic Church defends Latin American immigrants in an effort to fill the pews with new American Catholics. "More members means more dollars," they say. The Catholic bishops' principled moral stance is shoved aside in order to allege a merely pecuniary motivation for immigration reform. This cant often comes from some non-Catholics. Of course, a reply in kind would say that Protestants oppose Latin American immigrants because they want to keep up their fading membership so as to continue to claim that the United States is a "Protestant nation."
The schoolyardish taunting aside, there is an underlying issue of national identity that often goes unexplored in debates about immigration reform. The idea of "Protestant nation," it would seem, is much more than a sociological statement about the religious affiliation of the majority of the population. Almost from the first moment of English Protestant presence in the Americas, there was a growing sentiment that the colonists were about "God's work." When the colonies became a new nation, America became the "New Israel" in popular culture. This equation of God and country is writ deep in our collective psyche.
This presumption is threatened in the 21st century, however. Immigration today, when coupled with the higher fertility rates of people of color, has produced the inevitability that the population of the USA will be a majority of non-white, non-Protestant persons within two score years. I think it is impossible to understand today's embrace of anti-Latino legal measures without taking account of the deep-seated fear from white Protestants, Evangelicals and many Christian groups that they are about to lose hegemony in America. Hence, the cry of "Take our country back!" has the implied echo, "...and keep THEM out!"
To combat this quasi-Messianic feeling about the Christian, i.e. non-Catholic, non-Jewish, non-Muslim, identity of the United States, it is up to people of faith to speak out more forcefully. There must be refutation of the concept that the United States has a manifest religious destiny that is linked to maintaining Protestantism as the majority religion and the descendants of white Europeans as the bulk of the population. Once we can lift a fear against people of color and dissipate the resistance to non-Protestant religions, then the debate about immigration reform can be conducted based on the facts rather than sentiment.
Put another way, immigration reform must be conducted in a climate where secular realities are not tinted with theological assumptions. Contrary to the intimations of Mr. Glenn Beck, the United States Constitution is NOT divinely inspired. The border between the United States and Mexico is the result of an immoral 1848 war of military invasion and commercial cupidity: there is nothing sacrosanct about preserving it as an abstract definition of national identity. The recent attack on Ethnic Studies in Arizona and the new fabrication in Texas of a new right-wing revision of history is disturbingly anti-American because a white-washed notion of "our country" replaces the morality that makes us all God's children.
Catholics have generally avoided the temptation to equate the U.S. with God's creation. Perhaps because we have - and still do - suffer from forms of discrimination in today's society, there is very little in the popular culture of Catholic America that consecrates the nation-state. For us, as for other right-thinking people, we set our priorities as "For God and Country," with God coming first.
Immigration reform will be easier when it is viewed as an issue about human rights and family values. Rather than elevate legalities and man-made political divisions to the realm of inviolate doctrine, we need to set about demythologizing the supremacy of the nation-state. Instead, let us decide issues based on the common good of a humanity in which we all have participation.
Once we strip away outdated religious presumptions, reform will begin. What it will finally look like is hard to predict, but rationality will at least enable us to see the light at the end of the immigration reform tunnel.
By
Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo
|
May 26, 2010; 3:24 PM ET
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Posted by: barferio | May 30, 2010 11:04 AM
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Stevens-Arroyo dost protest too much and Americans are too literate. If you have any doubts as to the RCC's agenda re Catholic immigrants, see
National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry (Publication / Office of Publishing and Promotion Services, United States Catholic Conference, No. 199-7) (Paperback)
Author: The National Council of Catholic Bishops
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The full text is available at Amazon and at many libraries. Excerpts have been published all over the web.
Read it, and weep.
Unlike Jews and Protestants, the goal of the RCC is precisely along the lines Arroyo-Stevens' propagandistically dismisses: Bring in more Catholics.
It is so offensively sectarian, one does not even know where to begin. Again and again, the RCC and its apologists unselfconsciously attempt, often succeed, at manipulating both the law and the public. Almost pathetically, the place at the head of their Catholic immigration appeal, Cardinal Roger Mahoney, currently under investigation (and, hopefully, soon under indictment) for protecting scores of pedophiles, including one Fr. O'Grady, whose pederast career spanned decades, who raped an infant. He raped a baby.
Ain't no sham in the Vatican's game.
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And for those of us deeply concerned, on humanitarian grounds with the plight of ALL immigrants, more's the pity that the Vatican cannot, just this once, allow the public to strive for justice.
Posted by: farnaz_mansouri2 | May 28, 2010 5:09 PM
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The Spanish Roman Catholic Church has a terrible history of how it treated the "Indians" in what is now the USA before those areas became US States.
Because I was a Spanish major as a college undergraduate, I know how the Spanish Catholic priests treated the Indians in California during the days of the missions.
The Spanish soldiers would round up the local natives (who couldn't speak Spanish) and take them to the mission chapel were a person at the door would escort them to the altar where the priest would "baptize" them.
After that, someone would escort the new "converts" to a side door and soldiers would escort them to a location behind the mission where they were shot.
On that day in their daily reports, the soldiers would claim they killed so many enemies, sending a copy of that back to Spain... AND the local mission priest would send a copy of his report to the Roman Catholic Church leaders in Spain claiming the VERY SAME NUMBER of converts that the Spanish Army put in their daily report.
The Roman Catholic Church has a very poor history when it comes to promoting the Gospel before Southwestern US territories became US States.
Posted by: joe_allen_doty | May 28, 2010 3:07 PM
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The Catholic Church in the United States has stonewalled the whole issue of priests abusing little children. The leading Catholic voice on immigration Cardinal Mahony found disclosing what he knew all the way to the Supreme Court where he lost and many believe that he still has not come clean. I might well note the scandals that are hitting the church in Ireland and Germany. Simply put, after the Catholic Church's position to hiding child abuse for years and years, it is difficult to give it a moral voice on anything. In addition, one might well add that if it were not for immigrants, legal and illegal, the Catholic Church would be facing a declining membership. Simply put, the Catholic Church's views on immigration are self serving and nothing more.
Posted by: jeffreed | May 27, 2010 4:56 PM
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Mr Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo.
You are a good and faithful Roman Catholic and Hispanic.
Posted by: KSoze | May 27, 2010 3:09 PM
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People should stop demonizing the illegals and add a have a more human perspective to the problem. In the town where I live I see many of these immigrants (I am not sure if they are illegals or not), playing sports every evening (soccer or volleyball) after I guess work, mothers they go to the park and let their children play around. On Sundays, many of them attend catholic churches or evangelical churches, etc. One day a saw a local police talking to the kids, (kids spoke English) while the guys where just playing; the point is they look to me just like regular people with darker skin not, they did not look to me like murders, rapist, drug dealers with AK-45, or guns or gangs tattoos.
Posted by: Immabeliever | May 27, 2010 3:01 PM
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The comments to this entry are closed.
Tell us more about these catholic bishops having a principled stand.
Principles? They've show time and time again that their number one principle is protecting their job, their church. Above and beyond protecting the children in their care.
This is indisputable.
So really, you should stop using the words "principle" and Catholic Bishops in the same sentence.