What Cardinal McElroy Gets Wrong on Immigration – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

One of America’s most progressive prelates is pushing an open borders interpretation of Holy Scripture, in direct defiance of both the longstanding teachings of the Catholic Church and President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. At an event entitled “Catholic Social Teaching and Work with Migrants and Refugees at a Time of Uncertainty,” Cardinal Robert McElroy, who was elevated to both the College of Cardinals and the archbishopric of Washington, D.C. by Pope Francis, offered an interpretation of the well-known parable of the good Samaritan that was equally innovative and incorrect.

“We’ve got to remember the call of Jesus is constant, to always be attentive to the needs and the suffering that lie around us, to perceive it, and then to act,” McElroy said, comparing illegal immigrants and self-declared refugees to the man in the parable who is assailed by robbers. He claimed that “each of us victimizes others consciously in a variety of different ways” and that “when we place our own interests and well-being ahead of others and cause harm, we must be in touch with that side of ourselves with the darkness, which is the robber inside every one of us.”

Not content with subtlety, the newly-consecrated archbishop of Washington explicitly compared the Trump administration’s immigration policies and efforts to eliminate government waste to the villains of the good Samaritan parable. “If we look at the figure of the robber at this moment,” McElroy said, “I think we must say to ourselves quite clearly and categorically, the suspension of the U.S. Agency for International Development monies for humanitarian relief is moral theft from the poorest and the most desperate men, women, and children in our world today.”

Never mind that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has spent hundreds of millions — even billions — of American taxpayer dollars on far-left pet projects that benefit no one but extreme progressive ideologues. Far from aiding “the poorest and the most desperate men, women, and children in our world today,” USAID’s activism has put $1.5 million towards diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in Serbian businesses; $2.5 million toward a climate-hysterics-driven electric vehicle push in Vietnam; $2 million towards transgender surgeries “LGBT activism” in Guatemala; millions towards a program to 3D-print personalized contraceptives in Third-World countries.

And USAID dedicated plenty of funding towards such projects as a “DEI musical” in Ireland, a “transgender opera” in Colombia, and a “transgender comic book” published in Peru. How anyone could claim that ending these multi-million dollar efforts is “moral theft from the poorest and the most desperate men, women, and children in our world today” is baffling, to say the least.

Yet McElroy continued to condemn not only the drying-up of the funding programs which have poured hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and its affiliates, like Catholic Charities, but further took aim at the president’s mass deportation program, which he said “generates fear … which uproots everybody’s understanding of the bonds which so many undocumented men, women, children, and families have formed in our society in the often decades that they have been here.” The cardinal added, “The undocumented are the victims of this moment and of these policies.”

McElroy did admit that efforts to secure national sovereignty and protect the nation’s borders are “legitimate,” nominally supporting efforts to “change our laws so that they have secure borders and dignity for the treatment of everyone at those borders and a generous asylum and refugee policy,” but called mass deportations an “effort to undermine the rights and dignity of the undocumented” that comes “from the blackest parts of our history.” The cardinal pejoratively called mass deportations a “crusade, which comes from the darkest parts of our American psyche and soul and history.” He added, “The pathway of crusade and mass deportation cannot be followed in conscience by those who call themselves disciples of Jesus Christ.”

If he is to speak publicly on such matters, McElroy may want to examine the etymology of the word “crusade” (which comes from the Latin term “cruciate,” meaning “marked with a cross”) and the Church’s own history with the crusades, which were ordered by popes and led by Saints.

Beyond this, President Trump’s mass deportation program is not a means of “undermin[ing] the rights and dignity of the undocumented,” but is a means of protecting the people who have been entrusted to his care. While Trump’s presidential predecessor, the self-professed Catholic Joe Biden, oversaw the wanton slaughter of innocent unborn children, American bishops like McElroy were content to offer a prayer or two for the president’s leadership but rarely confronted or even spoke out against the grave and unequivocal moral evil of abortion.

Now, McElroy and his left-wing episcopal compatriots have themselves become “crusaders” fighting not for unborn babies who are being ripped apart in their mothers’ wombs, but for those who flagrantly violated the nation’s laws, whose first act in this country was a criminal one: illegal entry.

The hypocrisy has a foul stench which will, no doubt, rise all the way to Heaven, imperiling the souls of those who stink so. But this is no mere matter of upholding the Church’s teachings in one instance and ignoring them in another; McElroy and his ilk are simply incorrect on immigration; their arguments undermine, subvert, and contradict the established teachings of the Catholic Church on the subject, always under some thin veneer of warped charity or compassion, of course.

I have written extensively on the Catholic Church’s teachings on national sovereignty, cultural identity, immigration, and border control in The American Spectator (here, here, here, and here) but it is worth repeating, in brief, that the Catholic Church has long held that nations have the right to protect their borders and preserve their cultural and national identities. The first responsibility of a nation’s leader is to his own people, not to strangers from foreign lands who spend months and years evading legitimate law enforcement agents and efforts — just as the first responsibility of a father is to his own family, not to strangers who break into his home under the cover of night.

It is worth noting also that, at least so far, President Trump’s deportation efforts have focused on ridding the nation of violent offenders — the gang members, murderers, rapists, and human slavers who have penetrated into the heart of the country and wreaked havoc for years. In the parable of the good Samaritan, the story’s victim is waylaid by just such violent men as he traverses the roads between cities. That parable would have a much different point and much different meaning if the “victim” had broken into another man’s home and proceeded to kill his wife, rape his daughters, sell fentanyl to his son, steal his money, and eat his food. Such a parable would be much more akin to the situation that McElroy is trying to address.

READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy:

Fewer Priests Reflect Lack of Masculine Role Models

How the Sons of St. Patrick Preserved the West