[Marxism] NYT: Pope Speaks Up for Immigrants (forwarded from ISN)

["Mike Friedman" <mikedf@xxxxxxxx>]

...About 4,000 church members from the Diocese
of Brooklyn, which includes Queens, will hold a prayer service in 29
languages at Kennedy Airport. About half will be immigrants, said
Msgr. Ronald T. Marino, the Brooklyn Diocese's vicar for migration.
Many will wear the costumes of their homelands. The pope will not
attend, but the crowd will bid him farewell...

...Monsignor Marino, for example, who also heads the Brooklyn Diocese's
Catholic Migration Office, said, "In my judgment, immigrants are heroes"

He applauded the pope's words. "The simple pointing to it as one of
his priorities, something coming out of his mouth, is real important,"
Monsignor Marino said. "For him to say one sentence means he knows the
rest..."

"...That's big news," said Teresa Gutierrez, a coordinator for the May
1st Coalition for Immigrant and Workers Rights. "Any decent comment
about the reality of what's really happening to immigration in the
United States coming from such a prestigious person as the pope is
extremely helpful."

...Bishop John Wester of Salt Lake City said the pope was "not going to
get into the specific points that our country has to hash out." Bishop
Wester, who is chairman of the Committee on Migration of the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the pontiff had told the
bishops "very clearly that we need to attend to the basic human rights
immigrants have..."


The New York Times

April 20, 2008

Pope Speaks Up for Immigrants, Touching a Nerve

By DANIEL J. WAKIN and JULIA PRESTON

Even as he was flying to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of
protecting immigrant families, not dividing them.

He raised the issue again in a meeting on Wednesday with President
Bush, and later that day spoke in Spanish to the church's "many
immigrant children." And when he ends his visit to New York on Sunday,
he will be sent off by a throng of the faithful, showing off the
ethnic diversity of American Catholicism.

The choreography underscores the importance to the church here of its
growing diversity ? especially its increasing Hispanic membership.

Of the nation's 65 million Roman Catholics, 18 million are Latino,
according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and they
account for more than two-thirds of the new Catholics in the country
since 1960.

Millions of other recent arrivals come from Asia and Africa. More and
more parishes depend on priests brought from abroad to serve the flock.

Benedict has calibrated his immigration stance with care, stating the
need to protect family unity and immigrants' human rights, but
pointedly avoiding any specifics of the American immigration debate,
like the issue of whether to grant legal status to illegal immigrants.
Yet last week his visit quickly stirred the crosscurrents of the debate.

His comments drew a rebuke from Representative Tom Tancredo, a
Republican from Colorado who has been a leading opponent of illegal
immigration.

Accusing the pope of "faith-based marketing," Mr. Tancredo said
Benedict's comments welcoming immigrants "may have less to do with
spreading the Gospel than they do about recruiting new members of the
Church." Mr. Tancredo, a former Catholic who now attends an
evangelical Christian church, said it was not in the pope's "job
description to engage in American politics."

On the other side of the issue, some members of the Catholic hierarchy
said they were shocked that on the same day that Benedict and
President Bush affirmed in a joint statement the need for a policy
that treats immigrants humanely and protects their families, federal
agents were conducting raids at five chicken plants. They arrested
more than 300 immigrants accused of being illegal workers.

The timing was coincidental, immigration officials said, and it was
not clear whether the pope had known about the arrests when he met
with Mr. Bush.

But the raids surprised some American Catholic leaders, who are often
on the forefront of advocacy for immigrant rights.

"I was stunned," said Cardinal Roger Mahony, the archbishop of Los
Angeles, the nation's largest Roman Catholic diocese and one with many
Hispanics. "I just feel these raids are totally negative. I thought it
was very inappropriate to do it in such a blatant way when the pope
was coming, when he has been so outspoken in defending the rights of
immigrants."

The American bishops have been consistently outspoken in favor of
legislation to give legal status to illegal immigrants and expand
legal avenues for immigrants to bring their family members from abroad.

They and other Catholic activists were among the most visible
supporters of a broad bill, supported by Mr. Bush but not enacted by
Congress last year, which included a path to legal status for 12
million illegal immigrants.

They took Benedict's statements last week as affirmation of their
work. For while the immigration theme has been overshadowed during
Benedict's trip by his denunciations of the sexual abuse scandal in
the church, it was the second issue after the abuse cases that he
addressed on the plane from Rome, when he responded to reporters'
questions that were submitted in advance and picked by the Vatican.

The separation of families "is truly dangerous for the social, moral
and human fabric" of Latin and Central American families, the pope
told reporters aboard his plane. "The fundamental solution is that
there should no longer be a need to emigrate, that there are enough
jobs in the homeland, a sufficient social fabric," he said. Short of
that, families should be protected, not destroyed, he said. "As much
as it can be done it should be done," the pontiff said.

[...]


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