In 2003, the American Catholic hierarchy was exhausted by a year of fighting off critics of the abuse-and-coverup crimes exposed by The Boston Globe the year before. At that point, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a critical observer of the bishops’ conference, observed that the bishops were determined to change the subject.
Which they did. On Jan. 22, 2003, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) joined the Bishops’ Conference of Mexico to issue “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope,” a pastoral letter on immigration.
Buried in the copious banter of the document, the bishops demanded an easing of U.S. immigration laws. “We ask our presidents to continue negotiations on migration issues to achieve a system of migration between the two countries that is more generous, just, and humane,” it read. “We call for legislatures of our two countries to effect a conscientious revision of the immigration laws and to establish a binational system that accepts migration flows, guaranteeing the dignity and human rights of the migrant” (par. 104).
In their usual mode of “social justice” serving the Democratic Party agenda, the document conflated “migrant” and “immigrant” — and, as we have learned the term “illegal” was cast down Orwell’s “memory hole.”
Immediately, bishops throughout the United States resonated the message.
The Most Reverend Nicholas DiMarzio, bishop of Brooklyn, stated at theImmigrant Workers Freedom Ride on Oct. 4, 2003: “The reality is that our current system is immoral … This must stop, and this immoral system must be changed.”
In 2005, the Most Reverend Kevin Farrell, then-Cardinal McCarrick’s auxiliary bishop of Washington and member of the USCCB Committee on Migration, chose the Feast of St. Patrick to declare to Congress that, “From the viewpoint of the U.S. bishops, it has been apparent for several years that our immigration system is broken and badly in need of repair.”
The USCCB kept up the drumbeat as it sent its secular subsidiaries, Catholic Charities USA and Catholic Relief Services, to the federal trough to collect billions of dollars in the following years. Their efforts hit a wall during the first Trump administration (2017-2021), whose policies prompted virulent opposition in the USCCB to the reductions suffered by their subsidiaries. These “charities” were officially known as “non-governmental organizations,” even though they received the majority of their funding not from voluntary donations, but from the government’s taxpayer funding.
In 2021, the Biden administration immediately reversed the Trump funding reductions, resulting in a sigh of relief, as well as a silencing of criticism directed by bishops at the new occupant of the White House.
Nonetheless, the bishops saw in Biden a possible “agent of change” who might sponsor legislation permanently revoking the laws that had protected our borders for years. While the Biden administration had put programs in place that evaded those laws from day one, the bishops kept up the drumbeat. In a Dec. 15, 2023 letter to Congress on national security supplemental funding, the USCCB wrote: “Our immigration system is broken, as underscored by the current humanitarian situation at the U.S.-Mexico border and ongoing challenges faced by interior communities. Legislative solutions have been proposed, but achieving a comprehensive solution has repeatedly eluded Congress.”
The letter is curious. The USCCB was receiving hundreds of millions as Biden’s travel agency bringing in millions of illegal aliens a year, yet they recognized the chaos of the “current humanitarian situation” the policy produced.
While most Americans viewed the massive tide of illegals as detrimental to “humanitarian” concerns, the bishops evidently considered the enforcement of the rule of law as a violation of “human dignity” on its face.
Nonetheless, they persevered: “Broken! Broken! Broken.”
Enter Donald Trump
In his State of the Union Address on March 4, President Trump addressed the phenomenal success of his administration’s enforcement of the immigration laws that had been on the books for years, after noting that the Biden years had seen their evasion as de facto policy, declaring:
“Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded. Thank you. The media and our friends in the Democratic Party kept saying we needed new legislation. We must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president. Thank you.”
President Donald Trump knows all too well that Joe Biden, and not “The Donald,” was the darling of the American hierarchy. Yes, Biden was the most pro-abortion president in history, by a long shot — he and Kamala Harris were paranoid, perhaps even pathological, on the issue. Indeed, since the abuse-and-coverup crimes had been revealed in 2002, the bishops had championed immigration, with vastly more effort than it opposed abortion. Of course, they received millions of taxpayer funding for the former, but none for the latter.
Donald Trump is the most pro-life president in history, but the scandals have cost dioceses untold billions of dollars since 2002, and the conference’s immigration government contracts offered a legal means of continuing its operations, while pro-life efforts were left to the laity.
Yes, President Trump has fixed the nation’s “broken” immigration system — by enforcing the law. His success has brought considerable applause from the public, including millions of Catholics, but from our bishops he has received none. Indeed, just a month before Trump’s address, the Catholic bishops of Minnesota had issued a statement in which they lamented once more that, “Sadly, our nation’s immigration system is broken.”
We note that this statement appeared just two weeks after Trump was inaugurated. Perhaps the bishops hadn’t yet seen the fruits of Trump’s efforts to halt the inflow of illegal alien criminals carrying the deadly fentanyl across the state’s porous border with Canada. That’s quite understandable. But Catholic bishops haven’t added their voice to the plaudits. Instead, they have pulled the curtain back on their relationships with the various U.S. government agencies that have been financing their NGOs for years.
Will Donald Trump Go To Hell?
“If you believe the Scripture is the Word of God, the message is clear: Musk and Trump will go to Hell for defunding the corporal works of mercy,” writes a spiteful Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., a regular at the notorious Holy Trinity Catholic Parish in Georgetown so beloved by Joe Biden.
While complaints flowed into the chancery from Catholics who saw a scandal in Biden’s public reception of the Eucharist at Holy Trinity, Wilton Gregory, the now-retired Archbishop of Washington, dismissed them with a wave of the hand: Biden was a “Cafeteria Catholic,” he told an interviewer.
Fine for Biden, but not for Reese, S.J. He is seething with condescension, as usual, but also frustration, that Holy Trinity’s fawning over “Catholic Joe” had wrought nothing.
Bottom Line: After years of our bishops chanting “Racist!” and “Bigot!” at Trump supporters, Reese’s pet peeve signifies that the epithet factory of the Catholic left has finally gone out of business.
And it’s about time. It’s time to end the bishops’ cavalier declaration that Caesar’s secular political initiatives are the Holy Grail of Catholic charity. Under Obama and Biden, when these “development” programs required “family planning” and abortion as essential [programs] to every program they funded, Fr. Reese apparently had other fish to fry.
Perhaps our shepherds will now have time to devote to the Church’s Magisterial teaching on marriage, family, and children. Why not launch a national campaign for Humanae Vitae in the spirit of last year’s Eucharistic Revival?
Country’ll grow.
