LCWR May Learn Their Fate From The IHM And Their Fate Under Cardinal Mcintyre

I have to admit I'm kind of at a loss to explain why the Vatican has taken such an interest in investigating US religious women and specifically the LCWR. On one hand the various diocesan bishops, Vatican Congregations and assorted USCCB committees have been at this process more or less non stop since Cardinal Mcintyre of Los Angeles went head to head with the Los Angeles Immaculate Heart of Mary Congregation back in the late 1960's. Some years it's just more of a hot war than other years. This must be a 'hot' year. Thankfully for me, the NCR has just posted a Ken Briggs piece which chronicles this long simmering stew of differences of opinion.

There's something about the IHM conflict though which struck me forcefully as having great relevance to what's happening now. After doing some research it became apparent that everything hurled at the IHM's in the 60's and 70's is still being hurled at nuns today. One can go back and read some of Cardinal Mcintyre's demands of the IHM and find the same demands of women religious today. Demands which seem to insist that religious women go back to medieval concepts of dress, behavior, community, submission to authority, regimented spiritual practices, and charisms restricted to teaching, nursing, and praying. Somehow, all the social change and upheaval since WWII--not to mention Vatican II itself--should have no effect women's religious vocations or how they are expressed.

In that sense the conflict between Cardinal Mcintyre and the IHM's was just the first battle in a war about what it means to be an adult religious woman in today's world. For all the good Cardinal Mcintrye accomplished for the Archdiocese of LA, he did demonstrate quite the blind spot to the idea of an 'adult' woman.

This particular blind spot did not work well with a congregation of women of whom over half had college degrees and many of that percentage had advanced college degrees. They weren't a bunch of stunted pre pubescent girls in habits. They were a bunch of highly educated adult professional educators in habits. Unfortunately for Cardinal Mcintyre, they also taught in 50 of his parochial elementary schools, 11 of his high schools, ran their own highly ranked college, as well as two hospitals and various other endeavors. Given such a high presence in his Archdiocese the outcome of this conflict, which resulted in the dissolution of the Congregation, was a disaster for his diocese.

Even though the IHM's were a pontifical congregation, and not a diocesan congregation, somehow the Vatican allowed Cardinal Mcintyre a great deal of latitude in his exercise of authority over the IHM's. In the end he essentially he gave the IHM's the choice of capitulation to all his demands including the rejection of their own charter for renewal, or dispensation from their vows. Faced with this choice, fifty returned to the old days, 136 chose dispensation from their vows, and 400 formed a non canonical religious community which still exists to this day. In the meantime the parochial school system in LA found themselves short some 300 or so teachers. How did it ever get to that end?

That depends on what you read and who you believe. One of the more 'interesting' accounts is that of Dr. William Coulson who takes credit for most of the mess. He, along with Carl Rogers, conducted a two year experiment with the IHM in 1965-67 in which sensitivity or T groups were used extensively as part of IHM formation and also as a core part of their teacher formation. According to Coulson this was an experimental project that had no real desired outcome except to see if group and individual techniques that worked well with neurotic clients would have any effect on normal people. As Coulson says in this article, the T group process was a product of the Navy's OSA and an outgrowth of the CIA's psychological warfare program of the fifties. Many of these same group techniques have been modified and used by current right wing religious cults, but apparently that's escaped Coulson's notice.

Coulson maintains the sensitivity sessions had a profound effect, but almost exclusively to the detriment of the women involved. They had no background from which to deal with the intensity of the experience. (Essentially he's saying they were not 'mature' enough, not 'properly grounded in their faith') Instead of enhancing their faith experience, it killed it because it opened them up to repressed sexual and emotional desires for which no firm pastoral guidance was given. They were left to decide on their own whether to act on their sexual proclivities, and once they acted, their faith died with the sexual expression.

In his scheme of things it seems faith in the God of Catholicism is connected to sexual repression. Remove the repression and there goes the Faith in the Catholic God. He actually may have a legitimate point here, but not for the reasons he gives. In any event he cites less than a half a dozen examples out of some 600 to support his theory that he and Carl Rogers killed the IHM's. Unfortunately, this view from one man, holds a great deal of sway amongst the conservative elements with in the Church. Which is why we hear so much about feminazi's, capitulation to the 'me' culture, and the infestation of New Age spirituality in these rebellious liberal orders.

For another view, the story as told by Sr. Anita Caspary, in her book "Witness to Integrity" is probably more enlightening. Sr. Caspary led the order at the time Cardinal Mcintyre took exception to their attempts at renewal. After reading the book I was struck with what an enormously difficult period this must have been for her and her order. They were caught between the Vatican mandate to renew themselves, and Mcintyre's insistence he determine their 'renewal' even though they weren't under his Canonical jurisdiction. The saddest part for me is when it becomes apparent to Sr. Caspary that their Vatican 'defender' has no desire to take on Mcintyre and the forces that supported him. Once this knowledge became common in the order, the mass exodus began. In the end it wasn't the too much 'sensitivity' of Carl Rogers that killed this order, it was the too much sensitivity for Mcintyre in the halls of the Vatican.

Nothing will change this time around. Those orders who followed the path laid out by the IHM in Los Angeles and adopted much of their renewal are most likely in serious of jeopardy of facing the same choice the IHM did. Only this time we won't be talking about an order of 600 and it won't have the devastating consequences for any particular diocese. It may be the Vatican has waited this long to investigate the LCWR because they learned their lesson with the IHM. They waited until the repercussions would be much less devastating and the pickings even more ripe.

We Don't Address Them As Mrs. Christ, We Address Them As Sister

Sometimes the most courageous and authoritative person resides in the body of the most humble.

The following is an edited excerpt from a longer article posted at Commonweal. It was written by a sister who has spent thirty years with an LCWR congregation. It was written anonymously for fear of reprisal for herself, her congregation, and her local bishop. The first part of the article dealt with the visitation and reasons for same. I have begun the excerpt with what I think is the meat of the article. Sister X's attempt to answer some of the unstated why's of the investigation.

Perhaps there exists a basic problem of communication. Perhaps the personal and interpretive language women religious speak to each other is not sufficiently “Vaticanese.” The theological worldview of women has evolved in ways that bishops may not understand, let alone accept.

When I entered religious life after Vatican II, it was already taken for granted in sister-formation that the traditional language and categories of theology, mysticism, and spirituality were not adequate to express and account for the development of the person within religious life. Traditionally, of course, women religious often described themselves as “brides of Christ.” Today, however, thanks to what we have learned from modern scriptural scholarship and the work of feminist Christian thinkers about the role of women in the early church, women religious have sought to reclaim their historical roles alongside “the twelve” as followers of Jesus, community leaders, and missionaries. Our directors introduced us to the basics of religious life: union with God in prayer, identity with the church, Scripture, the vows, mission and apostolate, community life. But we also read sociology, psychology, and literature. Along with our Vatican II documents and the Jerusalem Bible, we read Jung, historical novels, and poetry. Our retreats included the Psalms, but also meditative films about nature. There was a great effort to integrate our spiritual life with “real life.” We came to identify ourselves with Mary, whom Jesus himself called “woman” in John’s Gospel, and with Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the Resurrection; or with one of the healed women in the Gospel who goes out and tells others about her life-changing experience, and attracts others to come to Jesus too. It was a process that has served me and many others well, enabling women religious to create a whole body of self-explanatory narrative, reflection, and theological analysis.

Did it also accelerate a growing distrust between sisters and the episcopacy? That distrust has been present for a long time. In the late 1960s, after Los Angeles Cardinal James McIntyre ordered the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to get back into their habits and classrooms or get out of the diocese, the LCWR tried to address issues of women’s ministerial equality. Later, in 1976, came Inter insigniores, the CDF’s “definitive” rejection of the possibility of ordination for women. It shut down any formal discussion of women’s equality in the church. For many women religious, the emphasis shifted then to social-justice concerns.

Since then, Rome has been busy shoring up its doctrinal barricades, and in the process has seemed intent on casting feminism into the outer darkness. Under John Paul II, the Vatican became enamored with a reading of Scripture and the tradition as calling on every woman to understand herself spiritually as “spouse.” I find this at odds with the presentation of women in Scripture, and would point out that Jesus uses neither spousehood nor marriage as a model for discipleship. Quite the contrary. This reductionist anthropology, moreover, has become so arcane and removed from real life that much of what is written about how the church understands sexual symbolism has taken on a frankly gnostic character. (The idea of spousal relationships is not just part of a sexual gnosticism, it's also being used as the primary relationship definition for seemingly every relational possibility in the church.)

Do we really want to limit our notions of the essential nature and meaning of embodiment to little more than the physical function of father and mother and the social relationship of bridegroom and bride, husband and wife? Again and again in recent years, this seems to be Rome’s mantra. Particularly offensive was the 2004 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World, issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which demeaned feminist theory as inimical to the common good of the church, the family, and society, and as the logical outcome of this analysis argued against women’s ordination. In my opinion, his letter expressed a great deal of hostility to what women have attempted to say about themselves for the past forty years. It hardly encouraged dialogue.

(The idea was never dialogue. It was to stop the process of redefining the meaning of femininity because acceptance of any redefining in the feminine sphere would necessitate a redefining in the masculine sphere and relational boundaries between the genders. Most marriages in the West accommodated this rethinking of gender roles. Not so the Church.)

What I sense today is that the Vatican will not budge in how it thinks theologically about what it means to be a woman; nor will it consider opening positions of real ecclesial authority to women. There is simply no getting away from the fact that in the Catholic Church it is men who tell women how they should understand themselves as women. Rome wants women religious to accept such understandings not merely without dissent, but without comment. The Vatican doesn’t want independent-minded women theologians or biblical scholars, and seemingly won’t read or quote them unless the women mimic the Vatican’s—and that means men’s—voice and views. But we are not “men” or “mankind.” We are persons with minds and hearts and voices, who have lived lives of integrity and loyalty, and who remain loyal to this church, even when it treats us as second-class citizens and makes us beg for financial support in our old age.

Since Rome wants to know about the quality of my life as a religious sister, let me tell you about a common form of liturgical life in my community. At our cemetery we recently observed the gravesite rite for a deceased sister. No priest was there. One sister led the prayer, and another sprinkled holy water, while the rest of us made the responses. Few of sister’s family members—nieces and nephews living many states away—were able to attend. In the end, we sisters are in effect the family, enacting one of the rights—called “suffrages after death”—that women religious have as a result of taking vows. Taking end-of-life responsibility for one another means a Catholic funeral, burial with your community members, and the prayers and remembrances of those with whom you “persevered unto death.”

Earlier that day we had been lucky to find a kindly but frail eighty-plus priest to say the funeral Mass at the motherhouse. Priests’ numbers have dropped, even in a metropolitan area like ours, and it’s all “retired” priests can do to manage multiple Masses and pastoral services at some local parish. Consequently, women religious aren’t at all assured of having daily Eucharist—the practice that grounded their spirituality for most of their lives as religious and one that is fundamental to their congregational constitutions. (Cardinal Rodé and his consultors would do well to ponder the relationship between Vatican policy and the “quality of life” of women religious: the refusal to ordain women has created a shortage of priests, and the quality of nuns’ spiritual and sacramental life has suffered accordingly.)

Fortunately, despite the crisis in priesthood, there were men present to serve us in conducting our sister’s last rituals on earth. I’m referring to the unionized cemetery crew. Until “the job moment,” they awkwardly stood at the edge of our prayer circle. One in muddy Levis discreetly chewed gum. Another had a plastic water bottle jammed into a back pocket of his raggedy khakis. Not exactly vestments. Finally the “job moment” had come. Balancing on their grass-stained, thick-soled sneakers, the four men carefully coordinated the sets of tightly woven, three-inch-wide straps around the coffin. Two quickly pulled away the steel beams holding the coffin above the open grave. The coffin’s weight shifted to the straps, and letting out the strap length evenly, fist over wrist, they skillfully lowered the coffin till it touched bottom.

Like other nuns, our deceased sister had put in many years of six-and-a-half-day work weeks, with lots of walking in the days before we drove cars. She had been a hospital nun, which meant that after her own shift ended, she would fill in on the floor for nurses who were sick. I recalled her at our dinner table. In her retirement years she had been careful about her diet, obsessively cutting off all fat from her meat. Nuns are self-effacing, and you never know all they did until you read their obituaries; but at the motherhouse you could always tell which had been hospital nuns. They were the fastest eaters at any table—a speed developed over years of eating in hospital dining rooms. You didn’t linger when you had other nurses to supervise and patients to tend.

The cemetery crew didn’t have to strain, since in her last illness our sister’s body, always thin to begin with, had become weightless, like a ballet dancer’s. We threw flowers down into the grave. Mine slipped into the narrow space between the coffin and the wall of earth. By her side, I thought.....

The prospect of death and life in their full reach puts things in a frank perspective, and I end with the same question with which I began this essay: Is the Vatican visitation truly being done out of concern for American nuns? Here in the cemetery, I couldn’t help but think that the question Rome is really asking is, “Why don’t you have more nuns to bury? Why aren’t there more of you?”

Do they really wonder why our numbers shrink and shrink? They might ponder their own actions. The visitation and investigation continue; the doctrinal assessment will ferret out our patches of heterodoxy. Standing at our late sister’s grave I remembered, as if it were yesterday, a question she innocently asked me years ago in a group meeting. “Do we have rights?” she wondered. “What are they?”

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It's well worth reading the first part of this article if only to have the point driven home that Congregations of Sisters receive very little financial support from the Institutional Church. They are expected to fend for themselves--as they always have been. For the Church this situation is akin to me 'hiring' a baby sitter who I didn't have to pay for, demanded excessive hours from, and left them to rot in their old age with no health care or pension, having thrown them out of the housing I once provided.

The point Sister X makes about the Vatican's use of the paradigm of spousal relationship reflects my own observations. The New Testament does not obsess on this particular form of relationship at all. In fact Jesus tells us to be prepared to leave our spouses and parents and children, as that may be the price of following His way. He Himself was not married, did not have children, did not seem to overly value that whole notion. He certainly didn't define His relationship to us as groom to our bride. He referred to us as brothers and sisters, equal in the eyes of His Father.

I don't think it's an accident that the Institutional Church rarely uses that equally valid relationship between the genders--that of 'brothers and sisters'. That relationship carries with in it far more equality, especially in the Modern world. It implies a lot more give and take and a lot less knee jerk domination by one gender over the other.

Patriarchal families may have historically favored the first born son, but amongst the siblings themselves such primacy was not always recognized or honored. In my family when my eldest brother would pronounce on one thing or another, it was usually met by silence or laughter--usually depending on whether one was his brother or sister. It was rarely met with any kind of obedience unless we agreed with him. He had to earn our respect, which he finally managed to more or less do--mostly by default. Which leads me to another thought.

The LCWR sisters that I met after they shed their habits seem to me to have taken on a larger burden of authenticity. By this I mean, when they were in habit, the habit itself often times gave them an authority and authenticity they didn't have to earn. They had the authority of symbol. Once out of the habit, they had to earn this authority by the type of life they led. The habit no longer covered for a multitude of sins or occupational incompetence. They really had to walk their talk in a much more consistent and authentic way. I think they did this well, judging from the level of support American laity are extending them.

It may be this authenticity without visible sign that is also eating at the Vatican. Take away the trappings of their office, and I wonder how many of us would recognize their authentic Christ like behavior in the lives they lead. Would we instinctively acknowledge their personal authority to lead us? For instance I wonder how many Catholics would actually take Pope Benedict seriously if he dressed exactly like the bachelor professor he tends to be. I suspect his theology wouldn't be received from other professional theologians with quite the fanfare it has if he wasn't dressed in the clothing of the Papacy.

There is an aura around holy people that transcends their gender or manner of dress. I have met and identified members of the LCWR long before their status was made evident to me precisely because of this aura which surrounded them. That's true spiritual authority and it isn't based on being the 'bride of Christ'. It's based on living the way of Christ. One doesn't need to be male to effectively live the way of Christ or to represent His spirit to the world.

This kind of lived spiritual authority can be intimidating to those whose hold authority in the name of the Christ but whose personal spiritual authority is suspect. The list of the spiritually intimidated would probably include the American bishops and secret donors who instigated the CDF investigation. That's why we'll never know who they are and the secrecy surrounding this investigation will be maintained. This is also probably the reason Cardinal Rode tried to spread the blame by asking the entire USCCB to fund these investigations--more safety and more secrecy in more numbers.

I pray the bishops in the US who truly understand the gifts the LCWR have given their dioceses and this country tell Rode to bark up some other tree because this tree won't bend to hypocritical Vatican wind.

An Interview With Archbishop Gomez Of LA.

In LA it's the return of the 'old' in the guise of the new.

The following is an interview with LA's newly installed Coadjutor Archbishop Gomez. He will toe the Opus Dei line even if he has to use copious amounts of double speak to make it look as if he isn't.

Archbishop Gomez analyzes future of Hispanics in US Catholic Church
Los Angeles, Calif., May 28, 2010 / 06:02 am (CNA).-

CNA: What is your own background?

Archbishop Gomez: I grew up in Monterrey, Mexico. My father was a medical doctor in Monterrey. My mother was raised in San Antonio, Texas, where she completed high school. She also went to college in Mexico City, and although she completed her course, my mother married my father instead of graduating. Education was always very important in my family.

I am both an American citizen and an immigrant, born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico. Some of my ancestors were in what’s now Texas, since 1805. (At that time it was still under Spanish rule.) I’ve always had family and friends on both sides of the border.

CNA: As the next Archbishop of Los Angeles, you will be the most prominent Hispanic prelate in the Catholic Church in the United States. What is your view of the state of Catholicism among U.S. Hispanics?

Gomez: The number of Hispanics self-identifying as Catholics has declined from nearly 100 percent in just two decades, while the number who describe themselves as Protestant has nearly doubled, and the number saying they have “no religion” has also doubled.
I’m not a big believer in polls about religious beliefs and practice. But in this case the polls reflect pastoral experience on the ground.

CNA: What questions do you see as key for Catholic ministry to U.S. Hispanics?

Gomez: As Hispanics become more and more successful, more and more assimilated into the American mainstream, will they keep the faith? Will they stay Catholic or will they drift away—to Protestant denominations, to some variety of vague spirituality, or to no religion at all?
Will they live by the Church’s teachings and promote and defend these teachings in the public square? Or will their Catholicism simply become a kind of “cultural” background, a personality trait, a part of their upbringing that shapes their perspective on the world but compels no allegiance or devotion to the Church? Hispanic ministry should mean only one thing—bringing Hispanic people to the encounter with Jesus Christ in his Church. (Always the addendum about the Church and allegiance to it as equal to faith in Christ.)
All our pastoral plans and programs presume that we are trying to serve Christ and his Gospel. But we can no longer simply presume Christ. We must make sure we are proclaiming him.
We should thank God every day many times for the good things we have been given. But we also need to give thanks to God through service, through works of mercy and love.

CNA: What is the most serious problem Hispanic Catholics face in the U.S.?

Gomez: The dominant culture in the United States, which is aggressively, even militantly secularized. This is a subject that unfortunately doesn’t get much attention at all in discussions about the future of Hispanic ministry. But it’s time that we change that.
“Practical atheism” has become the de facto state religion in America. The price of participation in our economic, political, and social life is that we essentially have to agree to conduct ourselves as if God does not exist. Religion in the U.S. is something we do on Sundays or in our families, but is not allowed to have any influence on what we do the rest of the week. (Not true at all. Official religious leaders are not to use their positions to directly influence government. Big difference.)
This is all very strange for a country that was founded by Christians—in fact by Hispanic Catholics. Indeed, in San Antonio, the Gospel was being preached in Spanish and Holy Mass was being celebrated by Hispanics before George Washington was born. (Some parts of the country were dominated by Spanish Catholicism, others by French Catholicism, and others by the Protestant reformation. The US is a big country without the homogeneity of Mexico or Spain--or their influence by elitist monarchists and their clergy counterparts.)

CNA: You have said these secularizing forces put even more pressure on Hispanics and other immigrant groups. Why?

Gomez: Because immigrants already face severe demands to “fit in,” to downplay what is culturally and religiously distinct about them; to prove that they are “real” Americans, too. We might feel subtle pressures to blend in, to assimilate, to downplay our heritage and our distinctive identities as Catholics and Hispanics.

I believe that in God’s plan, the new Hispanic presence is to advance our country’s spiritual renewal. To restore the promise of America’s youth. In this renewed encounter with Hispanic faith and culture, I believe God wants America to rediscover values it has lost sight of—the importance of religion, family, friendship, community, and the culture of life.

CNA: What are other challenges facing Hispanics in the U.S.?

Gomez: In our Hispanic ministries, we must understand that we are preaching the Good News to the poor. The second and third generation of Hispanics are much better educated, much more fluent in the dominant language, and are living at a higher economic standard of living than the first generation.
But still about one-quarter of all Hispanics, no matter what generation, are living below the poverty line. Combine that with high school drop-out rates of about 22 percent, and a dramatic rise in the number of Hispanic children being raised in single-parent homes—both strong indicators of future poverty—and I worry that we may be ministering to a permanent Hispanic underclass.
We have moral and social problems too. Our people have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, abortion, and out-of-wedlock births, of any ethnic group in the country. These are things we don’t talk about enough. But we cannot write these issues off as just “conservative issues.” (These statistics are mirrored in the religiously conservative protestant South. Think there might be a message here?)

To my mind, these are serious “justice” issues. If we want justice for our young people, if we want what God wants for them, then we need to find ways to teach our young people virtue, self-discipline, and personal responsibility. (Birth Control and legitimate sex education would help and they too can be considered a personally responsible decisions.)

CNA: What do you tell Latino leaders?

Gomez: Don’t be intimidated by the truths of our faith. They are a gift from God. Let these truths touch your heart and change your life.
You should own copies of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. If you spend a few minutes each day reading these books and also reading from the Gospel, you will notice a change. You will look at the world and your own lives with new eyes.
“Be proud of your heritage! Deepen your sense of your Hispanic identity, the traditions and customs of our ancestors!” I tell them. “But you are Catholics. And ‘catholic’ means universal. That means you can’t define yourself —nor can you let society define you—solely by your ethnic identity. You are called to be leaders—not only in the Hispanic community, but in every area of our culture and society.”
As Catholic leaders and as Hispanics, we must reclaim this culture for God.
Being a leader means, first of all, accepting Jesus Christ as the ruler of your life. The martyrs of Mexico all lived—and died—with these words on their lips: Viva Cristo Rey! (“May Christ the King live!”) To be true leaders, the living Christ must be your king. ( Wow, just a tad bit of monarchist thinking in these statements.)

CNA: What is the role of the Church in the political debate over immigration?

Gomez: The Church is not a political party or interest group. It is not the Church’s primary task to fight political battles or to be engaged in debates over specific policies. This task belongs to the laity. (Oh my, you could have fooled me. Was the USCCB involvement in health care just my own personal delusion?)
The Church’s interest in immigration is not a recent development. It doesn’t grow out of any political or partisan agenda. No. It is a part of our original religious identity as Catholics, as Christians. We must defend the immigrant if we are to be worthy of the name Catholic.
For bishops and priests, our job as pastors is to help form our peoples’ consciences, especially those who work in the business community and in government. We need to instill in our people a greater sense of their civic duty to work for reforms in a system that denies human dignity to so many. (Does this include non Catholic immigrants and gay immigrants?)
While we forcefully defend the rights of immigrants, we must also remind them of their duties under Catholic social teaching. Chief among these duties is the obligation to respect the laws of their new country.
We need to help ensure that these newcomers become true Americans while preserving their own distinctive identity and culture, in which religion, family, friendship, community, and the culture of life are important values.
I’m not a politician. I’m a pastor of souls. And as a pastor I believe the situation that’s developed today is bad for the souls of Americans. There is too much anger. Too much resentment. Too much fear. Too much hate. It’s eating people up.
In this volatile debate, the Church must be a voice of compassion, reason, and moral principle.
The Church has an important role to play in promoting forgiveness and reconciliation on this issue. We must work so that justice and mercy, not anger and resentment, are the motives behind our response to illegal immigration.

CNA: How should Catholics respond to immigration?

Gomez: Unfortunately anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Hispanic bias is a problem today, even among our fellow Catholics. I don’t want to over-dramatize the situation. But we do need to be honest and recognize that racial prejudice is a driving factor behind a lot of our political conversation about immigration.
In the bitter debates of recent years, I have been alarmed by the indifference of so many of our people to Catholic teaching and to the concrete demands of Christian charity.
It is not only the racism, xenophobia, and scapegoating. These are signs of a more troubling reality. Many of our Catholic people no longer see the foreigners sojourning among them as brothers and sisters. To listen to the rhetoric in the U.S. and elsewhere it is as if the immigrant is not a person, but only a thief or a terrorist or a simple work-animal.
We can never forget that Jesus himself and his family were migrants. They were forced into Egypt by the bad policies of a bad government. This was to show us Christ’s solidarity with refugees, displaced persons, and immigrants—in every time and in every place.
We all know these words of Jesus: “For I was a stranger and you welcomed me . . . As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:35, 40). We need to restore the truth that the love of God and the love of neighbor have been forever joined in the teaching—and in the person—of Jesus Christ.
Many of these new laws on immigration are harsh and punitive. The law should not be used to scare people, to invade their homes and work-sites, to break up families.
I would like to see a moratorium on new state and local legislation. And, as the U.S. bishops recently called for, I would like to see an end to federal work-site enforcement raids.
The bottom line is that as long as workers can earn more in one hour in the U.S. than they can earn in a day or a week in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, they will continue to migrate to this country. Immigration has to do with peoples’ rights to share in the goods they need to secure their livelihoods. (The problem with this policy is the employers are let off free to hire more illegals and have the government break up even more families.)
We need to come together and find a solution to the complicated economic, national security, and legal issues raised by immigration. (Maybe you could also add a comment or two about the inherent injustice in the predominately Catholic countries from which all these illegal immigrants are coming.)

CNA: But how would you respond to those angered by illegal immigration? Shouldn’t those in the country illegally face punishment?

Gomez: As we stress the Church’s moral principles, we need to be more sensitive to people’s fears. The opponents of immigration are also people of faith.
They are afraid. And their fears are legitimate.
The fact is that millions of immigrants are here in blatant violation of U.S. law. This makes law-abiding Americans angry. And it should.
We have to make sure that our laws are fair and understandable. At the same time, we have to insist that our laws be respected and enforced. Those who violate our laws have to be punished.
The question is how? What punishments are proper and just? I think, from a moral standpoint, we’re forced to conclude that deporting immigrants who break our laws is too severe a penalty.
Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enforce the laws. It means we need to find more suitable penalties. I would suggest that intensive, long-term community service would be a far more constructive solution than deportation. This would build communities rather than tear them apart. And it would serve to better integrate the immigrants into the social and moral fabric of America. (And yet again the Archbishop does not deal with accountability for employers nor the social justice problems in the countries of origin.)

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Readers of this blog probably know that I strongly support immigration reform and am vehemently opposed to SB 1070 recently passed in Arizona. One of the reasons I am opposed to that bill is precisely because many Hispanic and Indigenous families have been in this area far longer than white protestant families have been in New England. It is at heart racist in it's implications. No different than the Irish laws of the 1800's.

What irritates me about Archbishop Gomez is his silence on addressing this massive immigration at it's cause, and that's the social injustice and oppression in the Catholic countries south of our border. What he is essentially proposing as a solution to poverty in the southern hemisphere is not social and economic change in those countries, but the helter skelter relocation of their poor to the North to be used as cheap labor for US employers and apparently kept that way by Catholic teaching about 'obedience to rulers' and sexual morality. The opposition to this plan is the US educational system which does not place a high value on mindless obedience and a US culture that considers sex education, female equality, and access to birth control critical components of a responsible sexual ethic--or in Vatican speak, secular relativism.

I am not impressed with any immigration plan which does not place a high priority on dealing with the issues at the source of the problem. The source of this problem is not a leaky US border with Mexico or poor US immigration law. To pretend that's the source of the problem is plain disingenuous.

As to the rest of this interview, I feel for LA Catholics. Archbishop Gomez could very well be an Hispanic version of Cardinal McIntyre with a more polished pastoral face.