Thread: Vatican agency calls US Immigration restrictions violent and

Originally Posted by AirborneSapper7

Seems the Vatican needs to answer why people are starving in the world and they have this wonderful setting to congregate in









Vatican City

history & facts
Vatican City is is the smallest independent country in the world and is the governmental capital of the Catholic Church.
In 1929, under the premiership of Mussolini, the Vatican became officially an independent state.
The size of the Vatican is about 44 hectares and about 932 citizens live inside.
Besides St. Peter's Square, the entire state is walled.

The St Peter's Basilica, erected over the tomb of St Peter the Apostle, is the largest religious building in the world.
The Head of the Vatican is the Pope. The current Pope is Benedict XVI, born as Joseph Ratzinger.

location
Vatican City is a bit out of the center of Rome on the other side of the river.
Two metro stations are near the Vatican: Ottaviano and Cipro/Musei-Vaticani.

St. Peter's Square
Everybody can walk here; entrance from the public street. No clothes regulation.
There is free admission to Basilica. Stairs to the dome 3.50€; elevator to the dome 4€.
When we visited the St. Peter's Square, there was a long queue for the Basilica.

The Vatican Museums
Be prepared to wait a long time before you can enter the museum (picture to the right).
After having an early breakfast, we took the metro to Ottaviano station and queued at 8.12.
It took us 1.5 hour to get into the museum.
The line behind us grew rapidly; the waiting time for those people would be at least 2 hours.
Besides the waiting time, the temperature is in the afternoon much higher than in the morning.
Our visit to the Vatican was July 24, 2006. Admission was around €11.

clothes regulation
To enter the St Peter's Basilica, people must first pass a security control and behind it is the control of your clothes. Shorts or a short skirt are allowed but must be 'decent'. Not too short and certainly not transparent.
Control in the Vatican Museum seems less strictly. I saw a woman inside with very long hair wearing a sexy hot-pants. The majority of the men however had changed their shorts for long trousers.

Well this shows how important their comfort is...wonder how many poor around the world that would of feed...sheez some of those funds going to Mexico could have prevented the illegal from having to sneak into America

I Wonder what GOD thinks of their priority's

932 citizens live inside.

I think we need to send them some reporductively prolific illegal aliens and watch the population boom.

Looks they have room, can afford to feed them and offer free medical services for them. I'm sure the Pope's doctor is not too busy that he can't be birthing children on the side and stitching up the day labors.

Dixie

Think how many beds that place would hold for the homeless!

Love your idea, Dixie! Every illegal we deport should automatically go to that little "holy" country. I would love my tax dollars to go to flights for millions that will have hope in the Vatican, when we are so beastly toward them.
I am so irritated about being scolded by a special interest group from abroad for being a law-abiding American. I am tired of the advantage the rest of the world takes of us while spitting in our face and robbing us. We have let this happen in the name of globalism to enrich a few on the backs of others. The rest of the world realizes it, so why don't many in this country even acknowledge it?

Today, Vatican City operates something like a miniature Monaco. Totally surrounded by Rome, the city-state is in no way self-sustaining. Yet it does have a large, unionized workforce, a highly professional diplomatic corps, and a fairly good cash flow (due to support from Catholic parishes).

What it does not have is any immigrants. Nor refugees. None. I tried to get the Holy See's official point-of-view on this question by contacting its official representative in the U.S., Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan, the papal nuncio. His assistant insisted she could answer no questions, and all official questions must be addressed to the archbishop himself in writing. I faxed a few simple questions over in April but received no reply.

So, is Vatican City too tiny to support even a few immigrants and refugees? If you just concentrate on the state's absolute size, 108.7 acres, it seems small indeed. But a cursory statistical analysis suggests that many cities in the United States of similar or greater population density are presently doing much more.

Take New York City, for example. It is huge, with a 1995 metropolitan-area population of 14,648,000, living on 1,274 square miles. That works out to 11,482.8 persons per square mile. If you isolate New York City proper, of course, the density grows much greater. In 1990, New York had a population of 7,311,966 residing on 308.9 square miles - that's 23,671 persons per square mile.9

Vatican City, meanwhile, with approximately 1,000 full-time residents10 sharing 108.7 acres, has a population density of just 5,900 per square mile - a fourth that of New York City.

In 1993, greater New York took in 128,434 legal immigrants, or .877 of its area population.11 (Illegal immigrants would have swollen that number considerably.) Against that standard, Vatican City should not object to taking a similar percentage of its population, especially with its relatively lower population density. That works out to just 8.7 persons each year (not counting illegals).

Since none at all are accepted, one begins to see a bit of a credibility problem. Namely, why should the Catholic hierarchy ask the United States to do (i.e., accept huge numbers of immigrants and refugees) what its own little country will not?

Perhaps the Vatican would argue that even 8.7 persons a year would eventually overwhelm its resources. In 50 years, after all, that would amount to 435 additional citizens, plus all their offspring. Accounting for the relatively high birthrates of refugee families, 50 years might well see a doubling of Vatican City's population.

Too much of a burden? Exactly. Vatican City will never have more acreage, but neither will New York.

The church, today as embarrassed by the idea of raw civil power as it was formerly enamored of it, has tried to extricate itself from these sorts of paradoxes and ironies by a number of means. The city-state's status as nation is generally played down. Ambassadors are neither sent nor received by Vatican City, for example - that is the function of the Holy See itself. Further, the church's representation at the United Nations is in the name of the Holy See rather than Vatican City.12

Writer Jerrold Packard, in his book Peter's Kingdom, analyzes the status of Vatican City this way

This minuscule enclave is more easily understood as a kind of headquarters compound for, say, a multinational organization doing worldwide business on the level of a greatly magnified IBM or a Boeing Company. Think of [Vatican City] as a legalistic formula designed to ensure that the Catholic Church - which until just over a century ago really did have its very own country - would assume parity

with all other sovereign nations....13

So, those wanting Vatican City to have it both ways - to be a state when helpful, and a mere administrative campus when not - want to keep the question of immigration fairly abstract.

The church's representatives counter that no private organization in the world is more involved in refugee work than is the Roman Catholic Church. The church spends millions helping to resettle new arrivals. The compassion of the church's hundreds of thousands of workers is legendary. All true - but eventually on someone else's tab, and not in their own backyard.

No one in Vatican City, or in the Vatican Curia, has to think about how to permanently feed, clothe, house, and employ people coming from other lands.

It's high time they did. The Vatican should start welcoming a generous complement of immigrants and refugees - both legal and illegal - for permanent settlement, or it should stop insisting that others do so.

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman ... _473.shtml

After 12 years of Cathoilic school and 75 years on the planet, I do not recall, in my missal or any religious tract where it said, "and Jesus saith do not as I do, but as I say".

I am one of millions of ex-Catholics driven away by the church due to its intrusion into matters of Caesar.

The church needs to remind itself that its mission is to save souls and to seek salvation of souls not amnesty for invaders.

The 12-page document charges that efforts to block illegal immigration from Mexico have "increased the number of persons killed while attempting to cross the border line, enriched human traffickers (smugglers), encouraged in total ambiguity employers who apply norms similar to those of dependence in a regime of slavery, strangle illegal workers with a starvation wage and massacring working-hours, under the blackmail of non-existence."

Really? How is that the US' fault? Seems it's a mexican problem if their own people are killing themselves to get out.

The wall will decrease the number of people who willingly choose to cross the border line, keep their families together, stop enriching smugglers and stop slave wages. So I ask, what's wrong with a wall? A wall like the Vatican's?