Thread: Pastors, Flocks At Odds Over Issue

Published Saturday, May 26, 2007
Pastors, Flocks At Odds Over Issue
Leaders want gentler acceptance; many Christians disagree.

By DANIEL BURKE
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON - Lifelong Roman Catholic Raymond Ross and his church agree on one thing: The U.S. needs to change its immigration policies. From that point, their views sharply diverge.

Strapped with a pistol and binoculars, Ross, 69, and a posse of fellow Minutemen spent four days last month patrolling an Arizona valley they say is heavily trafficked by illegal border-crossers from Mexico. When they spied a group of suspected undocumented immigrants, they called the U.S. Border Patrol, Ross said.

"We're just people who got tired of our government not doing anything," Ross said of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps.

Arizona's Catholic leaders - as well as Catholics nationwide - are also pushing hard for changes to U.S. immigration laws. But whereas Ross and other Minutemen want to see a bulked-up border, the Catholic Church advocates a more welcoming approach to undocumented workers, including an earned path to citizenship.

With Congress preparing to take up immigration policy in the coming weeks, a number of prominent religious leaders - from all shades of the theological spectrum - have called for a "comprehensive and compassionate" reform of existing laws. It's part of what they see as their biblical mandate to care for the stranger.

But it's unclear if their flocks in the pews agree. More than 60 percent of white evangelicals said immigrants are a "burden" to the U.S. because they take jobs, housing and health care, according to a 2006 poll conducted by the non-partisan Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Fifty-six percent of white Catholics and 51 percent of white mainline Protestants agreed, according to the survey.

John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Center, said religious leaders - particularly evangelicals and Southern Baptists - are sometimes caught between the law-and-order conservatives who fill their pews and the Latino immigrants who populate their mission fields.

"There really is a tension there. They know that many of their parishioners are skeptical - if not actively opposed - to (immigration reform). On the other hand, this is a group that puts an imperative on evangelization," said Green.

Ross, who considers himself a faithful Catholic and attends Mass six days a week, reflects that tension. He says his church is "kind of confused" on the immigration question.

"There is compassion," he said, "but there is also misguided compassion as far as I can see it."

But Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, an outspoken supporter of immigrants, said the issue is clear.

"As a Christian, there are no prior commitments that can overrule, or trump, this biblical tradition of compassion for the stranger, the alien and the worker," Mahony said at a May 8 lecture in Philadelphia.

The Rev. Jim Wallis, a best-selling author and head of Sojourners/Call to Renewal, a progressive Washington-based social justice group, agreed, arguing that clergy sometimes need to be ahead of their churches.

Wallis said, "You've got to love your congregation enough to preach the gospel."

On May 7 in Washington, Wallis and others launched the group Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, a coalition of mainline and evangelical Christians, including the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the United Methodist Church's General Board of Church and Society, and Church World Service.

Around the same time, a consortium of 12 faith traditions launched a "New Sanctuary Movement" to protect illegal immigrants in danger of deportation.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is lobbying lawmakers behind the scenes as well as pushing grass-roots efforts in about 100 dioceses, according to J. Kevin Appleby, the U.S. bishops' director of migration and refugee services.

Appleby said the debate on Capitol Hill "may be best chance in a generation for legalizing" the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. But he acknowledged there are some Catholics who disagree.

"There is a feeling that, you know, why are the bishops putting so much at stake in newcomers outside the law and they're not standing up for me?" Appleby said.

Like the Catholic Church, Ross, the Minuteman, thinks a guest-worker program may help prevent the exploitation of undocumented workers by unscrupulous employers. But he disagrees with his church's advocacy of an earned path to citizenship.

"You can't do that with 12 million people," he said

http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ ... 60400/1326

B 5

Follow the word of God in the Bible and there will be no confusion.

Illegal aliens are sinners if they are in America. God will provide for them in their land so they lack faith. Anyone wanting to "help them" and be chairtable, can do it in their home country. They do not and should not be in America. Lastly, they will be held accountable for the bad feelings and strife they are causing Americans.

I'm all for those churches filling up and offering sactuary. Everytime you do something against the word of God, bad things happen. They will learn the lesson the hard way.

Dixie