Cardinal McElroy puts on a flawed protest suggesting a 'right' to immigrate illegally
By Monica Showalter www.americanthinker.com
Ahead of his new mission in Washington, D.C., presumably to harass President Trump over his stance on illegal immigration, San Diego's left-wing Cardinal Robert McElroy put on migrant protest, cloaked in moral trappings.
The archdiocese's newspaper, Southern Cross, ran a front pager on this Feb. 9 protest, called, "We Must Speak Up," and an interior headline of "You Are Not Alone," which came in the mail yesterday, while local television news stations continued the big buildup of McElroy and all he would do to scold Trump.
I sense the hand of a public relations agent in this sudden wave of coverage of events new and old.
The Southern Cross item began this way:
SAN DIEGO — “We understand that God created all of us. We are all children of our God. When misery, fear and terror are unleashed upon the land, we cannot stay silent,” said Cardinal Robert W. McElroy.
He led the local Catholic Church in standing with immigrants and speaking out against Trump Administration orders to massively deport undocumented men and women.
The cardinal joined leaders of other faiths at an afternoon prayer service on Feb. 9 at St. Joseph Cathedral, where the faithful jammed every one of the 900 seats and overflowed onto Third Avenue. The event was titled “The Church Stands with Immigrants,” which was co-sponsored by the San Diego Organizing Project.
Afterward, the faithful, estimated to have swelled to 1,500, walked to the federal building in a procession led by altar servers, deacons and priests. They carried signs in English and Spanish with references to Scripture, such as “I was a stranger, and you gave me shelter” (Matt 25:35) and “I am my brother’s keeper” (Gen 4:9).
The Church’s teaching calls on the faithful to uphold the sacredness of human life. This means that the care of immigrants and refugees is part of the same teaching that calls on them to protect the most vulnerable, especially unborn children, the elderly and the infirm.
Nationwide, the Catholic Church has called the new executive orders a violation of the rights of undocumented immigrants and “contrary to moral law.” In statements, the U.S. bishops noted that Catholic teaching says that the country has a right to protect its borders and regulate immigration.
“But what we are witnessing is far different than that,” Cardinal McElroy said in his remarks. “It is not a targeted effort to secure the border. It has become an indiscriminate campaign to bring fear into the hearts of every undocumented person – man, woman, mother, and child – in our society; those who are our coworkers, those who are our neighbors, those who worship with us, those who have lived here for so long, helping to build up our society.”
It's called enforcing immigration law, a valid purpose of government. What he is suggesting is that enforcement isn't valid because everyone in the world has a "right" to enter the U.S. illegally with no consequences whatsoever. Whatever our law says, it doesn't mean what it says on paper.
And most of us who aren't naive, would know that Catholic Charities of San Diego, which took $56 million from the Biden administration to fly in, house, feed, provide medical care for, educate, transport, and give legal advice on how to battle U.S. immigration law to illegal border crossers and those flown in with fake asylum claims under the now-defunct CBP One app, know that McElroy's got a financial interest here, in keeping the vast NGO complex continuing the migrant pipeline as usual in the service of Democrat aims of replacing the electorate.
But the obnoxious thing here is how this is packaged, starting with the inability to distinguish legal from illegal immigrants, which normal people know how to do, amid claims that President Trump's enforcement actions are creating "misery, fear and terror."
Well, yes, if you have broken immigration law voluntarily, the inevitable consequences will probably be distressing, even as you wave the flag of the country you are desperate not to be sent back to.
Worse still, it included Unitarian and Episcopalian ministers, as if Catholics, deep down, really want to join their version of "religion," the one going off into all sorts of theological directions including atheism, and the other superciliously saying it plans to become an NGO. No thanks. What a sad specter to see McElroy unite with them against over half of Catholics, who voted for President Trump.
Worse still the procession event was "co-sponsored" by a far left NGO called the "San Diego Organizing Project," whose funders are listed here, and the funders of those funders include the Ford Foundation and the Soros-led Open Society Foundations, just as one would suspect. Why did McElroy need to pair up and take orders from these highly partisan freaks?
The procession was framed in the lofty language about the "dignity" of migrants, a total straw man argument.
Are Americans in the streets or is the government running around beating migrants, abusing them, or verbally harassing them as they cross illegally? Of course not -- if they were, there might have been fewer illegally crossing over. But that isn't the way of Americans, nor should it be.
While they are here, we are showing illegal migrants every kindness, which stands in stark contrast to what the cartels the migrants pay to cross illegally do and I am not talking about NGOs shoveling out public money for luxury hotels.
Every kindness to migrants is individual, a product of our Judeo-Christian culture. Nobody is advocating for the abuse of migrants or violating their dignity, yet this is the narrative McElroy and of course his NGO and foundation allies promote.
When a clearly illegal Chinese illegal immigrant asked me to help read the gas station buttons because his cellphone translator would not work and he didn't know how to operate the gas station pump -- I helped him just the other day, getting his car pumped full of gas. When an illegal immigrant from Turkey was selling food at the side of the road, I bought to help him out. I helped the young illegal immigrants from Venezuela working at the local grocery store's meat counter get legal help so they could get legal, because they do come from a death squad regime. When those of us who are Trump voters and Catholic as well as many other faiths meet people and they need immediate help, we help them. We Catholics even give to the Annual Catholic Appeal even though we can't approve of the migrant packages they've got going, solely in the interest of helping the truly needy.
But the abuse-of-migrant dignity argument stands, even though the only thing they've got is that the government is lawfully sending them back to their homelands.
The tone of the protests and the false accusations of Trump and his supporters violating migrant dignity and not 'welcoming the stranger' suggests that Americans are the bad guys here for wanting and voting for a lawful immigration process instead of the "anything goes" shambles we have seen, making a mockery of rule of law and order. If being repatriated to one's homeland in an orderly and legal way (instead of getting caned and then repatriated as they do in Singapore, or getting raped, robbed, and abused by cartels on the way in), is against migrant "dignity," then it's obvious they've got preserving the Biden status quo of open borders in mind.
The approach is a smear against Americans, including the majority of Catholics who voted for President Trump because no one else would listen, and it's disgusting to see as a public relations spin tactic, cloaked in religious language.
Instead of abusing migrants and their dignity, Americans did what they typically do, which is vote for change at the ballot box which included a legal removal process for those who have crossed illegally, thumbing their noses at our laws.
The failure of this rally-procession, which drew a whopping 900 to recognize that huge election result signals a sort of contempt for representative democracy, as well as an obnoxious effort to turn illegal immigrants into a lobbying special interest group, so that the six-figure NGO salaries can flow.
McElroy right now leads an embarrassingly divided Church, with a leftist pope championing foreign migrants along with enabling NGOs desperate to keep them flowing in on one side, and ordinary churchgoers who voted another way on the other. The cardinal should focus on uniting the Church including the ordinary churchgoers who have the real grievances as a result of the connivings of sleazy Democrats looking to import a new electorate and far-left dictators anxious to throw out all the potential revolutionaries and troublemakers in their home countries and reap migrant cash remittances instead. Where is the dignity for migrants in any of that?
