Welcome the Stranger (Catholic theology & Church history against illegals)

Inside Catholic ^ | 5/5/2010 | John Zmirack

[markomalley]

One thing we Catholics have known since almost the beginning: Most statements in the Bible can be misread, misapplied, and torn out of context to serve as the pretext for hysterical balderdash. Martin Luther famously used his private reading of St. Paul's Letter to the Romans to invent a whole new theology of salvation, personalized to soothe his aching scruples. Before that, poor Origen, the first great theologian of the Church, applied "If your hand causes you to sin, then cut it off" (Mk 9:43) to his problems with chastity . . . bless his heart! Today some of our bishops are telling us to do the very same thing to our country.

 

The subject is mass, unskilled immigration, and the phrase its enablers like to use (they titled one of their interminable, inevitable USCCB documents after it) is "Welcome the stranger" (paraphrasing Matthew 25:31-46). As someone who has actually studied the empirical effects that two million or so mostly uneducated immigrants are having on poor and working-class Americans, I am constantly confronted with this scrap torn from the New Testament, which earnest, otherwise orthodox Catholics wave around like snake-handlers justifying their latest romp in the piney woods with an ice cooler full of copperheads.

 

Marshal a series of rational arguments that demonstrate that our current immigration policy (designed by that great Catholic thinker Edward Kennedy) is a sin against prudence, and out will come the proof-text. Show that Catholic nations have for centuries, with the acquiescence or encouragement of the Church, restricted the influx of aliens in accord with the common good of their societies (St. Augustine, for instance, wanted the barbarians kept out of the Roman empire), and slurp -- somebody whips it out again. Point out the fact that one of our once-richest states, California, has essentially been bankrupted by the tidal wave of undereducated non-English speakers -- and whoop, there's that hoary paraphrase. I've gotten so sick of this Bible abuse that I've lost every scrap of patience. Instead of engaging such proof-texts, I counter with my own. "'You shall not suffer a witch to live' (Ex 22:18). That's in the Bible, too. Come on, let's pass a law!"

 

But the goal of argument by Bible scrap isn't rational discourse. People who wield autistic scripture snippets aren't trying to further the conversation; they want to end it. Whatever rational processes were going on in your mind are supposed to screech to a halt the moment they chant the mantra, as you blush and admit that the "call of the Gospel" is meant to "bring us to a place beyond narrow calculations" of the common good, justice, patriotism, or prudence. Instead of using the brains God gave us, you're meant to swoon, feel guilty for thinking in the first place, and secrete a miasma of vaguely generous sentiments -- which reward you by making you feel really good about yourself. Aren't you being charitable . . . not like those nasty, hateful fill-in-the-blanks: "rednecks," "bigots," "Arizona voters." I call this phenomenon the "pink cloud," and it's the main pollutant emitted by the Amazing Catholic B.S. Generator.

 

 

Let me huff and puff once more in the hopes of dissolving this smog. A majority of Americans, as every survey taken on the subject indicates, believe that it simply isn't prudent to admit millions more unskilled workers into a country that has outsourced its factories to Asia, mechanized its farms, and otherwise dried up opportunities for unskilled native workers to earn what the Church calls a living wage. The evidence bears this out: Adjusted for inflation, wages for working-class Americans of every race have stayed flat for more than 30 years -- while Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the entertainment industry have multiplied salaries for even their mid-level workers. The law of supply and demand says that when you flood the market with something, the price goes down. We flooded the market, and the price went down -- and American workers are suffering.

 

At the same time, our taxes and deficits are rising, as communities struggle to care for uninsured hospital patients, to expand or maintain their infrastructure to accommodate rising populations, and to offer bilingual education in up to 15 languages (as in Los Angeles). As Harvard economist George Borjas documents, the only social class gaining from mass, unskilled immigration is . . . the investor class. That is, the people who make their livings by clipping stock coupons. The upper-middle class is not much affected (they can move to gated communities with private schools), while the middle class and the working poor are suffering. It's that simple. (If you want the long form with all the links to exhaustively support these claims, check out my two previous detailed articles on this topic.)

 

The case is proved. Nobody argues that a mass influx of cheap labor is helping America's poor, making our society more cohesive, or in any other substantive way benefiting America. Open-borders types are typically reduced at this point in the argument to pointing out how much they enjoy eating out at ethnic restaurants and paying somebody $2 an hour to mow their lawns.

 

Since they have no rational case, proponents of de facto open borders, such as Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop Jose Gomez, and Archbishop Charles Chaput are reduced to Bible abuse. They chant, "Welcome the stranger" as if this were one of the Ten Commandments -- not that even those can be rightly read out of context . . . unless you agree with the Iconoclasts, and want to rip all the images out of our churches.

 

 

So let me challenge theologians on their home turf. What would it mean to take this biblical mandate seriously? Instead of conducting an elaborate thought experiment, let me turn to the riches of Church history to show how it really has worked. I've written before of the dangers involved in trying to pervert the evangelical counsels (poverty, chastity, and obedience) into universal commands -- and the toxic side-effects of using the rhetoric of the theological virtues to violate the natural ones.

 

But there is one group in the Church that has made its business living out the evangelical counsels to the letter and pursuing the theological virtues rigorously: monastic communities. Indeed, the Church holds up religious as the very people called by God to witness to the next life through their embrace of the "hardest sayings" that came from the mouth of Our Lord. The first major monastic order in the West, which preserved Western culture through the Dark Ages, was the Order of St. Benedict. Conveniently for this case, the Benedictines did more than simply embrace poverty, chastity, and obedience. They also took literally the very mandate we're considering here: "Welcome the stranger." Across the world, the Benedictines are famous for offering hospitality to visitors -- who, to this day, can drop in unannounced at Benedictine communities and receive a warm bed and hot meals, no questions asked.

 

You know what the Benedictines don't do? They don't let large groups of strangers move in permanently, flout the rules of the community, claim the status of monks, and help elect a new abbot. Had that been part of Benedictine hospitality, the Vikings wouldn't have needed to batter down the walls of places like Lindisfarne in order to steal all the sacred vessels. They could have simply turned up, moved in, eaten the monks' food and drunk their wine, and waited till they had the numbers to vote in Bjorgolf as abbot. Sure, he might change all the monastery's rules, loot its treasury, and divide its land among his warriors . . .

 

But that's the price of "welcoming the stranger" in the style that's being demanded of us today. In a mass democracy where new citizens can vote to raise our taxes, confiscate our property, subject us to discrimination through affirmative action, force us to adopt bilingual laws, and otherwise remake our life as a community, mass immigration threatens to transform America against the wishes of its citizens. And foreign governments are complicit in the process -- as Mexico purposely shoves across our borders the citizens with whom it doesn't wish to share the wealth. It's as if a mischievous fraternity had decided to flood a Benedictine abbey with its pledges, until they could vote in one of their members as the abbot, and turn the monastery into a really awesome gothic tequila bar.

 

Convents have historically proved even more reluctant to offer unconditional and permanent welcome to strangers. Especially males. When a band of helmeted, undocumented Scandinavian migrants in search of hospitality arrived at the women's abbey of Coldingham, England, in 879 -- and announced their proposed changes to the community's rule of chastity -- the abbess Ebbe gathered the nuns and told them about this proposal. Then she sliced off her nose in the hope that it would deter the Vikings from raping her. All the other nuns did the same, and Ebbe led them through the gate to confront the ruddy warband. Appalled, the Vikings didn't rape the nuns but sent them swiftly, en masse, to heaven. She is now known as "St. Ebbe."

 

So when people tell me that Arizona voters have cut off their nose to spite their face, it reminds me of good St. Ebbe. Let's invoke her intercession for the citizens of that state under siege. Viva Arizona! Sancta Ebbe, ora pro nobis.

 

[markomalley]

Pity it takes a member of the laity to point this out.

Greater pity that none of our shepherds (or their staffers) will read it.

[Honorary Serb]

....[Blessed] Augustine, for instance, wanted the barbarians kept out...

That says it all, doesn’t it?

[J Edgar]

Beautiful post indeed! Thank You.

[Leoni]

The US has always needed/wanted the hard working Mexicans (no people work like them!) to do all the hard labor that Americans don’t want to do (and are not cutout for anymore.). Therefore,the policy of the US with regard to Mexicans has always been to scare them, so that they won’t come here, because if they knew that they could come hear, they would all come. This way they only get the ones that are intrepid enough to come, the young and the strong.

The anti- Mexicans immigration thing, it’s all a show to scare the Mexicans! Then every 10 years they give them amnesty and let them stay.

The problem is not with those that come, the problem is that once their children are raised here, they get together with the rotten apples here, learn, and become just like all the other criminals in the hood.

[ansel12]

The US has always needed/wanted the hard working Mexicans (no people work like them!)

You ignore American history and it's people, and you evidently have not looked at Mexico.

[Freedomlibertyjustice]

A very powerful and persuasive article. The leftists inside and outside the Church try to brow-beat opponents of unchecked illegal immigration as racists and nativists. But supporters of a unified national culture have an ally the left didn’t count on: the late Pope John Paul II. As I wrote in a recent article at www.intellectualconservative.com:

Conservative and patriotic American Catholics need not feel ashamed of loving their country and wanting to protect and preserve her institutions and culture. This is neither racist nor nationalistic. It is entirely proper. In his book Memory and Identity, the late Holy Father Pope John Paul II referred to patriotism as “a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, and its natural features.” Concomitant with that love of country goes a desire to protect and preserve it as the Church Herself protects, preserves, and hands on the Deposit of Faith. Theologically speaking, he described a healthy patriotism as an example of fidelity to the Fourth Commandment of the Decalogue “which obliges us to honor our father and mother.” Clearly American Catholics can express their patriotism by opposing amnesty consistent with magisterial teaching.

[Minab]

Leoni
You are so off the mark in your comments and so misinformed rather than insult you I will make one simple reply to point out to you just one of the many misnomers you iterated , pertaining to the U.S. need for Mexicans to fill jobs that Americans won’t do. When I left high school and was unsure of the direction I might take for my future my first job out of school was a landscaping job, and then I moved onto plumbers helper.
Believing it was my All American duty to service my country I entered the service to serve in Vietnam, and then planned on returning to becoming a Journeyman Plumber. Two unfortunate and ill timed accidents while in Vietnam rendered me unable to ever return to Plumbing and so instead I took up the study of law on the G.I. bill part of the governments promise for my service. The point here is that I most probably would have been just as content being a Plumber. Lord knows I would have been making fair money. My son who is now in the same boat I was upon leaving high school can no longer find work such as I did after graduation because his willingness is their but the jobs have all been stolen by illegal immigrants who no longer pick lettuce but instead leave that type of work up to the Indio’s who also come across from deeper in Mexico while they, the opportunists work for wages that were prevalent as far back as the 1960’s in the now Latino saturated jobs of construction. Even his high school sweet heart cannot get a summer job at McDonalds because illegals have stolen the youth jobs of the part time world. So sit down study your facts somewhat more before you accuse others of things I fear you are not educated enough to truly understand.

[RobbyS]

Yes, indeed. They are simply irrational on the subject of immigration. Mahoney is positively insane.

[RobbyS]

Mexico has to have the worst government of a potentially rich country in the world. They have to encourage migration,. or else the people would rise up and slaughter the few thousand families that own the wealth of the country.

[Alex Murphy]

Since they have no rational case, proponents of de facto open borders, such as Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop Jose Gomez, and Archbishop Charles Chaput are reduced to Bible abuse. They chant, "Welcome the stranger" as if this were one of the Ten Commandments...

Ouch. That's going to leave a mark on some.

[RobbyS]

While in college I worked for the state highway department as a rodman for a surveying crew. This was in East Texas and then only whites worked for the contractors who built roads and highways. Recently the highway department was widening a local road in my town. Every worker save the occasional heavy equipment worker was Mexican, even the foreman. No one not speaking Spanish would have been able to get a job on that crew. They have taken over almost all the construction jobs. Ironically, this cuts out the blacks as well as the Anglos, even thou the blacks are, oh, so supportive of the immigrants.

[ansel12]

No one not speaking Spanish would have been able to get a job on that crew.

That is true everywhere, once they get in the door, then only Mexicans will be tolerated, they will drive out whites and blacks, and then keep them out.

[Biggirl]

America should learn from Israel and built itself a wall! Best example of protecting a country’s border’s.

[Biggirl]

Be thankful LA is getting a new Archbishop soon.

[Biggirl]

http://www.mideastweb.org/thefence.htm

Israel’s security wall.

[bboop]

Mahoney is a self-aggrandizing adoration seeker. Not insane, but evil. Flouting civil laws, flouting basic Church teachings — what else would you call that?

[Leoni]

American history is history.

Americans today are spoiled, fat, cigarette smoking, unreliable, hungover at work, don’t work on Saturdays, and complainers all day, when it comes to hard labor at say $12 an hour. A Mexican will work without any of those drawbacks.

[Alex Murphy]

Americans today are spoiled, fat, cigarette smoking, unreliable, hungover at work, don’t work on Saturdays, and complainers all day, when it comes to hard labor at say $12 an hour. A Mexican will work without any of those drawbacks.

....they're so hard working and resourceful, that some manage to work 60-80 hour weeks without those drawbacks and dodge immgration laws at the same time!

[Leoni]

You miss the point completely. The point I was trying to make was that:

If you study the actual practice (not what the politicians tell you) of controlling immigration from Mexico, it has always been just a lot of scare tactics on the Mexicans (as to the danger of getting swindled, robbed, raped, and murdered on the Mexican side, AND caught and deported in the US), and then almost like every 10 year amnesty is given to the ones that make it here. You will have to conclude as I did. It's a farce! They have no intention of stopping the Mexicans from coming here.That is THE POINT.

As an aside, I doubt that Mexicans have taken more than 2% of the good jobs, versus the 98% of the good jobs that were sent overseas. I don't see the popaganda minstry (the media) or the sheep that follow the propaganda slant, complaining about that. All that is left is low paying service jobs, like McDonald's and Walmart, not because of Mexicans, but because of government regulations that are not applied against overseas manufacturers (read unfair competition), that sent US manufacturers away, or put them out of business. Greedy trade unions that finally chased business away. and greedy aberrant capitalists with only loyalty for profit. In short, the “global economy” became more important than helping your neighborhood. Now there are Chinese living a tad better (getting 3 meals a day), while our neighborhood is full of welfare recipients and potential future criminals just trying to find a dignified job. THE JOBS ARE GONE to the world.

[Albertafriend]

Interesting analogy—makes it really simple to understand the problem.