He revealed a globalist, anti-borders theology in his 2013 book Immigration and the Next America, as quoted in La Times:
“Do we really believe that America is one nation under [...]]]>
He revealed a globalist, anti-borders theology in his 2013 book Immigration and the Next America, as quoted in La Times:
“Do we really believe that America is one nation under God, made up from every other people?” he writes. “Or is America instead a nation that is essentially white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, but permits the presence of peoples of other races, colors, and religions?”
It does not appear that America’s founders imagined the nation to be a test tube for diversity. But extreme diversity — including historic enemies like the followers of hostile Islam — is certainly what we have gotten through immigration, although Americans never voted for an influx of unfriendlies, polygamists and jihadists.
Indeed, the American revolution can be seen as an outgrowth of the Protestant reformation, particularly when among the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, only one was catholic. A religious scholar notes, “ ‘There is no King, but King Jesus,’ a rallying cry in the colonies during the American Revolution, had its roots in the Reformation.”
We can be sure that Gomez will use his new office to campaign for a mass amnesty benefiting millions of foreign lawbreakers — he pledged to in an article that appeared on the Los Angeles Times front page on Wednesday.
Interestingly, the Times’ front page visually connected its Gomez article with the DACA case that went before the Supreme Court last week.
Meanwhile, a search for news of Catholic Priest Sex Abuse for the last 30 days gets over a million results, yet the archbishop believes he is qualified to lecture us Americans about the law and fairness of our immigration policies. Perhaps getting his own house in order would be a more appropriate project than shredding American sovereignty.
Of course it’s obvious that the US has millions of loyal citizens who are also catholics, but the Vaticrats have harbored a den of corruption for centuries.
The Times article was reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, posted below:
]]>Archbishop Jose Gomez becomes the first Latino elected to lead U.S. Catholic bishops, Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2019
LOS ANGELES — On the eve of his election as the new leader of U.S. bishops, Archbishop Jose Gomez had a message for the faithful back home: It was well past time for immigration reform.
“In this great country, we should not have our young people living under the threat of deportation, their lives dependent on the outcome of a court case,” the archbishop of Los Angeles said in an email to his flock Monday evening.
Alluding to Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court arguments on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Gomez continued: “We pray tonight that our president and Congress will come together, set aside their differences, and provide our young brothers and sisters with a path to legalization and citizenship.”
Already the highest-ranking Latino in the U.S. Catholic Church, Gomez on Tuesday marked another milestone when he became the first Latino elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Born in Monterrey, Mexico, Gomez has in recent years evolved into a high-profile and authoritative voice in the American church, advocating for policy reforms that would include a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally. The soft-spoken 67-year-old will begin his three-year term as president just as his tenure as vice president comes to an end.
His election, which kicked off the second day of the bishops’ fall meeting in Baltimore, was regarded by many observers of the Roman Catholic Church as a fait accompli, a historic moment set in motion in 2016 when he was elected vice president of the national conference. Some within the church hope that Gomez will utilize his experience fighting for immigrant rights in his new post, leading the conference to be more outspoken in advocating for immigration reform.
“I am overwhelmed. It is a big responsibility,” Gomez said in a phone interview Tuesday. “I am grateful to the bishops for their support and confidence in me, and I think this is a great lesson for the archdiocese, for Los Angeles and Latinos in the country.”
Gomez’s rise comes amid Latinos’ shifting relationship with the Catholic faith. U.S. Latinos are no longer majority-Catholic, according to a Pew Research Center survey released last month. Some 47% describe themselves as Catholic, the survey showed, down from 57% a decade ago. At the same time, 23% of Latinos say they are religiously unaffiliated, up from 15% in 2009.
Gomez’s ascendance could help shore up or even replenish the number of Latino Catholics.
“This is huge,” Father Thomas J. Reese, a senior analyst at Religion News Service, said of the election. “Having a Mexican American as the president of the bishops conference sends a real message to Hispanics across the country, showing that not only are they part of the church, they are also part of the leadership of the church at the highest level.”
Gomez, a naturalized U.S. citizen, will take up his new position at a time of bitter division over the Trump administration’s immigration policies, Reese added.
“This is a Mexican immigrant who is going to be the leader at a time when immigrants are demonized,” Reese said. “This is a symbolic message from the bishops on the importance of the immigration issue to them, and the importance of immigrants to the Catholic Church and in American society.”
L.A.’s archbishop is at once a conservative and a progressive: staunch in his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage while tenacious in his advocacy for immigrants and the poor.
“He knows we have a very divided church today and one of my hopes with him as the head of the conference is he will find ways to bring us together,” said Father Thomas P. Rausch, a professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University. “He’s conservative, but his impulses are pastoral.”
As the archbishop of the San Antonio archdiocese before coming to L.A., Gomez emerged as a leading advocate for doctrinal conformity, determined to stave off what he saw as creeping secularism in the church.
But in 2013, Gomez published a book that voiced his support for a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country without legal status. His advocacy aligns with efforts by Pope Francis to raise awareness about the challenges immigrants face. (Continues)
Indeed, the money sent [...]]]>
Indeed, the money sent back as remittances is a lifeline to the poor country: Guatemalans abroad, mostly in the US, sent $9.5 billion home last year — 12 percent of the country’s GDP.
The local priest is quoted as supporting illegal immigration because “it serves a fundamental human need to survive.”
That’s right — stealing jobs from poor American citizens and generally driving down wages in the whole low-skilled sector in the US is sanctioned by the Catholic church which calls such Marxist views “Liberation theology”, and the church supports such lawbreaking because it benefits their own people.
Of course, the article has no mention of the harm caused by the influx of millions of Third-Worlders into the United States. The economy is booming, but wages are not rising because of the millions of foreign workers who compete against citizens by working cheap.
Plus, the Guatemalans now work as “menial laborers” but when automation becomes more widespread in a few years, they will not be cheap enough as the smart machines become even less expensive. At that point, their advantage as cheap illegal labor will evaporate and they will become jobless.
The foreigner invasion is also harmful to American students because schools are forced to reallocate their budgets to serve often illiterate, non-English-speaking foreigners.
As an example of the Guatemalan effect, the New York Times reported earlier this month:
Last year, the Palm Beach County school district enrolled 4,555 Guatemalan students in kindergarten through 12th grade, nearly 50% more than two years earlier. Many of the students come from the country’s remote highlands and speak neither Spanish nor English. The number of elementary school students in kindergarten through fifth grade more than doubled to 2,119 in that same period.
But the Los Angeles Times thinks that we Americans should celebrate the Third World invasion because it is a big benefit to Guatemala. The United States as the World Welfare Office is not questioned, nor is homemade reform abroad even considered.
]]>To folks in this Guatemalan town, success stories start with a trek to the U.S., Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2019
This mist-shrouded mountain town in northwest Guatemala exudes a bustling air of good fortune, even prosperity, that may seem at odds with the landscape of subsistence cornfields and vegetable plots.
Concrete and stucco houses of three and even four stories tower over traditional dwellings crafted from adobe bricks and wooden planks.
The source of the housing boom isn’t income from crop sales or occasional tourism. Rather, Todos Santos runs on savings sent home from the United States.
“The United States helped me more than the Guatemala government ever did,” said Efrain Carrillo, 40, outside the three-story house he built with three years of savings from working in the north as a laborer a decade ago. “I was deported, but I am grateful to the United States.”
The house features a ground-floor grocery store to provide income, while Carrillo and his wife live upstairs and their two teenage children live with relatives in the United States.
Fluttering from a balcony is the Guatemalan flag, and next to it another common sight here: the Stars and Stripes.
The proliferation of U.S. flags is a testament to the importance of illegal migration here — and the difficulty of curtailing it.
For the moment, Mexican authorities, under pressure from the Trump administration, are cracking down on U.S.-bound migration from Central America, deploying Mexican National Guard troops along roads leading from the country’s southern frontier and stepping up deportations.
The effort appears to be yielding results, with apprehensions in June along the U.S. Southwest border down 28% compared with May.
But in the long term, such campaigns may do little to stop the exodus from places like Todos Santos.
Gang violence and political persecution — two of the most common reasons that Central Americans give when they claim asylum at the U.S. border — are not major problems here. The migration is driven by economics.
It has become deeply ingrained in the culture and a rite of passage for many young men and increasingly for women and children. Seemingly every family here has a close relative in el norte, from California to Florida, Oregon to Virginia.
“What would we do without the United States?” asked Julian Jeronimo, a 49-year-old teacher who spent four years in the San Francisco Bay area — working in restaurants and a fertilizer supply store while sharing an apartment with a half-dozen other migrants — before returning in 2004 to build a home. “We understand that the United States wants to control immigration. Of course, Trump is worried about criminals coming into the country, about terrorists. But people from Todos Santos go north to work.”
Estranged from Guatemala’s central government, the town seems closer emotionally to Oakland — a popular destination — than to Guatemala City. There is deep respect, even reverence, for the United States.
In recent years, Jeronimo has watched as parents have systematically taken their children north, diminishing enrollment in his rural school.
“This year we lost six children who left for the United States,” he said, adding that others plan to leave once they complete elementary school.
“They see that their brother has a new house or new car and they say, ‘I want that too.’ That is a very difficult mentality to change.”
In the United States, migrants from Todos Santos have traditionally been menial laborers — toiling in agriculture, landscaping, restaurants, and in meat- and poultry-processing plants.
But back home, they are something else: Pillars of the community, success stories to be emulated, trend-setters who finance lavish homes, sometimes with gated entrances, driveways and even lawns, mimicking suburbia USA in a grandiose style known as remittance architecture.
“There’s not a lot for people to do in Todos Santos to make a living,” said Jennifer L. Burrell, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Albany who has studied the town for more than two decades. “So if you have aspirations, if you want to send your children to school, to educate them, to buy land and so forth — the only way you can accomplish that is by migration.”
The sprawling municipality of 33,000 people, nestled in the cool embrace of the Cuchumatanes mountain range, 8,000 feet above sea level, qualifies as a “transnational village,” Burrell says.
Residents marvel at the U.S.-reared sons and daughters of expatriates who return for visits.
“They are all grown up and they tell us they are still going to school, to the university!” said Fortunato Pablo Mendoza, a 67-year-old retired teacher. “Imagine that! Here there was nothing to do after finishing primary school but working in the fields.”
In Todos Santos, even tombs in the cemetery bear U.S. flags.
: :
Many Guatemalan migrants hail from rural outposts like Todos Santos, where most residents are of indigenous heritage and speak Mam, a Mayan tongue, while still donning traditional dress — embroidered skirts and blouses for women, striped pants and shirts and straw sombreros for men.
Officially, nearly 90% of Todos Santos residents live in poverty, but those statistics don’t take into full account the substantial income from remittances. Last year, Guatemalans abroad, mostly in the United States, sent home $9.5 billion, or 12% of the country’s gross domestic product.
People here expressed contempt for the Guatemalan government, which is notoriously corrupt and, according to the World Bank, spends less on health, education and other social services that most other Latin American countries.
Migration is the social safety net: Older migrants return as younger ones head north.
[. . .]
Father Edgar Tarax , who presided over the Mass, later expressed skepticism that Mexico’s current enforcement efforts — which have prompted some residents to put emigration plans on hold — could slow the movement north in the long term.
“How can emigration be stopped when it serves a fundamental human need to survive?” the priest asked in the church courtyard as worshipers nodded in approval. “Our people go north and work day and night, to send money back to build homes, to buy land, to help their families. That is the life of Todos Santos.”
ISIS and other mass-murdering jihadists couldn’t ask for a better friend in the Vatican. Pope Francis refuses to [...]]]>
ISIS and other mass-murdering jihadists couldn’t ask for a better friend in the Vatican. Pope Francis refuses to identify Islam with its followers’ daily slaughter for allah, even though the religion’s scripture is full of it.
In response to the pope’s statement of Islamic innocence (just a few days after a French priest was murdered in his church!), jihad scholar Robert Spencer remarked:
The Pope is once again ignoring a simple distinction: while people of all faiths and backgrounds commit acts of violence, Islam is unique among world religions in having a developed doctrine, theology and legal system mandating warfare against unbelievers. Unless and until that is confronted, Muslims will continue to commit acts of violence against non-Muslims, including Christians. The Pope is betraying the Christians of the Middle East and the world, and all the victims of jihad violence, by repeating palpable falsehoods about the motivating ideology of attacks upon them, instead of confronting that ideology and calling upon Muslims to renounce and reform Islam’s doctrines of violence.
In addition, the pope has been personally targeted for a live-streamed beheading in St. Peter’s Square in the near future as part of ISIS’ schedule to defeat Christianity. Despite jihadists’ recent war on Christians in Iraq and other historic homelands in the Middle East, Pope Francis has recommended that Europe accept the Islamic invasion.
The pontiff’s attitude on the matter of Islam goes beyond naivete — whatever is he thinking?
Below, during a papal visit to Istanbul in 2014, the Grand Mufti displayed a koran to the pope. Francis has said that true Islam is not violent and the koran and the Bible are the same.
Here’s a video of the pope’s interview to the press during the flight returning to Rome after a visit to Poland.
It’s also disturbing that Pope Francis blames terrorism on the poor economy and lack of jobs, rather than Islam’s commands to “slay [the infidels] wherever you find them” (4:89). As a man of faith, he should understand the power of belief, but he instead prattles the Marxist silliness that economics is the sole impetus for behavior.
]]>Pope Francis defends Muslims and blasts ‘Islam is NOT terrorism’, Express (UK), August 1, 2016
POPE Francis said yesterday it was wrong to identify Islam with terrorism and that social injustice and idolatry of money were among the prime causes of terrorism.
Speaking aboard the plane taking him back to Rome after a five-day trip to Poland, he said: “I think it is not right to identify Islam with terrorism.
“It is not right and it is not true.”
Francis was responding to a question about the killing on July 26 of an 85-year-old Roman Catholic priest by knife-wielding attackers who burst into a church service in western France, forced the priest to his knees and slit his throat.
The attack was claimed by ISIS.
He said: “I think that in nearly all religions there is always a small fundamentalist group.”
He then added: “We have them,” referring to Catholicism.
The Pope continued: “I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence because every day when I look at the papers I see violence here in Italy – someone killing his girlfriend, someone killing his mother-in-law. These are baptised Catholics.
If I speak of Islamic violence, I have to speak of Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent.”
He said there were various causes of terrorism.
The Pope said: “I know it dangerous to say this but terrorism grows when there is no other option and when money is made and it, instead of the person, is put at the centre of the world economy.
“That is the first form of terrorism. That is a basic terrorism against all humanity. Let’s talk about that.”
When he started the trip last week, Francis said the killing of the priest and a string of string of other attacks were proof the “world is at war” but that it was not caused by religion.
He told reporters on the plane that lack of economic opportunities for young people in Europe was also to blame for terrorism.
He said: “I ask myself how many young people that we Europeans have left devoid of ideals, who do not have work. Then they turn to drugs and alcohol or enlist in ISIS.”
Funny how the professional do-gooders regard America as the world’s flophouse and full-service social service agency. Meanwhile, the influx of millions of low-skilled oppression-accepting foreigners harms our own poor people the most. But the pope doesn’t care about American poor; job #1 for him is virtue display with a thick religion overlay.
Anyway, America is a traditionally Protestant nation (being diminished, as a result of immigration) and the pope is all about boosting the welfare of his people the catholics by encouraging them to move north. And he wouldn’t mind if the US becomes more catholic as a result.
Cassock elites believe national law and sovereignty take a back seat to church tenets. Those supremacist beans were spilled by border priest Michael Seifert when he observed, “Any family in economic need has a right to immigrate, that’s our posture, if a family is hungry and the family needs work, then society should provide a way for people to do that.”
Meanwhile, polling shows that catholic parishioners agree with the rest of Americans that the government should be doing more to bring illegal immigration under control.
On Thursday, the big front-page photo on several major newspapers, including the New York Times (shown below), Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, was of the pope endorsing open borders to benefit poor people to the south. Those emotional images will stick with illiterate third worlders, giving them permission to illegally enter America and steal citizens’ jobs.
Interestingly, the pope denounced corruption in Mexico during his trip, yet he wants America to admit millions of criminals to our country. Since the DoJ reported several years ago that Mexican drug gangs operate in more than 200 US cities, we appear to have plenty of Mexican crime diversity already.
As it happens, Mexico is rich, consistently ranking around #15 in world GDP, and could well afford to take better care of its citizens. But it pretends to be poor, because the position offers advantages for begging in Washington.
CNN gushed with foretgner love in its coverage:
CNN HOST WOLF BLITZER: He’s now being taken to the border fence and is getting ready to offer a very, very special blessing. This is a moment that will have great significance along the US/Mexico border for Pope Francis as he walked over there. You see the cross. I want to bring in Father Edward Beck, our CNN religious commentator, the host of the Sunday mass. Explain the significance, Father Beck, of this moment in the pope’s trip to Mexico.
PRIEST EDWARD BECK: Well, it kind of is the hallmark of his whole papacy thus far, Wolf: immigration, welcoming the stranger, the refugee. Here on this border of the Rio Grande, where so many lives have been lost, Mexican lives, of those fleeing to the United States, this pope is offering a blessing for those on both sides of that border. And it is symbolic because he is standing there in prayer right now saying, we have to do better. It’s not about chastising and punishing people for fleeing to something more prosperous, something more safe. So he is saying that by being here right now and offering this blessing that we are all strangers. Remember when he came and spoke before Congress he said, I am the son of immigrants. We were all once foreigners in a strange land, and this pope thinks that we need to welcome those who flee political and social oppression.
That’s a strange kind of religion, where third-world poor stealing jobs from first-world poor is considered virtuous. Maybe it’s the Marxist liberation theology seeping through.
CBS reported recently that US black unemployment was nearly twice that of whites in the final quarter of 2015, and more than 90 million working-age citizens are not participating in the workforce. So it’s not like there are spare jobs laying around for illegal alien pests. The jobless recovery continues, even if pundits have stopped talking about it.
If Mexicans et al put half the energy they invest in illegal immigration into political reform at home, a lot might be accomplished. But it’s easier for them to play the victim and sniff out American jobs and welfare offices.
CNN also promoted the papist view that the US should be a world rescuer of those facing “forced migration” and forget about the mean-spirited national sovereignty stuff intended to protect the American people.
]]>At Mexican-U.S. border, Pope delivers a stinging critique of both countries, By Daniel Burke, CNN Religion Editor, CNN, February 18, 2016
For much of his five-day trip in Mexico, Pope Francis played the role of friendly pastor, smiling for selfies, kissing babies and encouraging the youth not to fall prey to the drug trade.
On Wednesday, Francis unleashed another aspect of his complex public persona: The disappointed prophet who excoriates world powers for mistreating the poor and marginalized.
Celebrating Mass in Ciudad Juarez, a city just across the border from the United States, Francis delivered a stinging critique of leaders on both sides of the fence, calling the “forced migration” of thousands of Central Americans a “human tragedy” and “humanitarian crisis.”
“Being faced with so many legal vacuums,” the Pope said during his homily before a congregation of more than 200,000 people, “they get caught up in a web that ensnares and always destroys the poorest.”
“Injustice is radicalized in the young,” the Pope continued. “They are ‘cannon fodder,’ persecuted and threatened when they try to flee the spiral of violence and the hell of drugs.”
The Bible readings at the Mass, which are tied to the church calendar, told the story of Jonah, another angry prophet. It was the kind of coincidence that a man of Francis’ faith might consider the work of a watchful God. The Bible passages set up the Pope to blister injustices in Mexico and indifference in the United States, casting both countries as modern-day Ninevehs.
‘No more death! No more exploitation!’
“Go and tell them that injustice has infected their way of seeing the world,” the Pope said, describing Jonah’s mission to rouse the city of Nineveh from the morass of moral decay. “Go and help them to understand that by the way they treat each other, ordering and organizing themselves, they are only creating death and destruction, suffering and oppression.”
In case the message was lost on his audience, the Pope drove the point home:
“Let us together ask our God for the gift of conversion, the gift of tears, let us ask him to give us open hearts like the Ninevites, open to his call heard in the suffering faces of countless men and women. No more death! No more exploitation!”
Before the Mass, Francis prayed and blessed a makeshift memorial to migrants who have tried to cross into the United States. He then blessed a group of about 400 people across the river in El Paso. Included among these “Francis VIPs” were families seeking asylum in the United States, according to El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz.
It was a grand geopolitical gesture from the Pope’s political playbook, mirroring his prayer at the wall separating Palestinian territories and Israel in 2014. It also thrust Francis into the polarized debates over immigration in both the United States and Mexico.
Vatican responds to Trump’s charge
Even before the Pope arrived in Mexico, GOP front-runner Donald Trump called Francis a “very political person” and suggested he was a tool of the Mexican government.
The Vatican scoffed at the latter charge but pleaded guilty to the former.
“The Pope, with his moral and spiritual ministry, may have a political impact. That is clear to the whole world by now, ” Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Tuesday night when asked about Trump’s accusations.
Look at Francis’ role in encouraging renewed relations between the United States and Cuba, for example, the spokesman said, adding that the Pope has also encouraged Europeans to care for the refugees at their borders.
Trump, arguing that immigrants are bringing drugs and crime across the southern U.S. border, has pledged to build a big wall to keep them out.
Bishop Daniel Flores, who has been traveling with Francis during his five-day trip in Mexico, said the central themes of the Pope’s sermon and papacy are the same: a call to conversion. “No one is exempt from this; it is addressed to everyone: government leaders, politicians, bishops, clergy, young people, families, prisoners, business leaders.”
It is unclear, though, whether American Catholics or politicians will heed the Pope’s call. GOP candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, who are Catholic, have openly disagreed with Francis on the environment and may be anxious to align themselves with his stance on immigration, too.
Meanwhile, half of Catholics in the United States say they agree with Francis on that issue, according to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute. But a majority of conservative Catholics (54%) say that Trump, whose signature issue is buttressing the border between the United States and Mexico, would make a “good or great” president, a Pew poll found.
Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, was one of thousands of Catholics who gathered in El Paso to watch the Pope bless the memorial and celebrate Mass in Juarez.
“I hope that every single politician takes note of this trip and thinks of it before they take action,” Pimentel said. “I hope they consider the dignity of all people.”
An exuberant welcome
While the Pope’s Mass on the border was the political highpoint of his trip to Mexico, for the most part, Francis’ speeches were notably apolitical. He condemned corruption and drug cartels, but the deeply unpopular Mexican government escaped with hardly a scratch.
As he did in the United States and elsewhere, the Pope encouraged his huge audiences to adopt more merciful approaches to the poor, elderly and the young, but offered no policy prescriptions.
Still, his agenda spoke volumes. He went to the heart of the cartel’s dark territory in Morelia, Michoacan, and told the young crowd that Jesus wants them to be disciples, not “hitmen.” And in Chiapas, in the country’s far south, where many people have indigenous heritage, he said the world needs their culture and asked for forgiveness for those who had contaminated their lands.
There, and nearly everywhere Francis went, the crowds’ response approached rapturous. It was “an overwhelming outpouring of spontaneous affection,” said Flores.
Many Mexicans cried in his presence; others cheered like a soccer crowd, “Viva el Papa!” and “You can see it, you can feel it, the Pope is here!” At times the crowd was too exuberant, as when Francis was pulled down on top of a boy in a wheelchair.
At the end of the Mass in Juarez on Wednesday, the Pope thanked Mexicans for opening their doors and their lives to him.
“At times I felt like weeping to see so much hope in a people who are suffering so much,” Francis said.
In fact, the cassock brigade has amassed more than $1.6 billion since 2012 from [...]]]>
In fact, the cassock brigade has amassed more than $1.6 billion since 2012 from federal coffers, a stunning figure. Did we citizens vote for that? Many Americans don’t appreciate Catholic meddling, like the millions of dollars they have spent to promote amnesty for illegal aliens. Elite Catholics undermine American law and sovereignty, yet their snouts have free range in the federal trough.
Catholic Charities gets around two-thirds of its budget from American tax dollars, so big government is very agreeable to the church.
The Catholic bishops recently lobbied for America to admit 100,000 Syrians, despite warnings from many security experts that Middle Eastern refugees cannot be vetted and would present a serious danger to national safety. Maintaining job security is apparently more important to Catholic enterprises than normal caution about historic enemies.
Below, a dinghy full of all-male “refugees” approaches Greece from Turkey.
And even if a jihadist refugee doesn’t explode a nuke in an American city, there are no jobs for them. Currently a record 94 million Americans are not working, a 38-year low. Senator Jeff Sessions reported this month that 90 percent of recent Middle Eastern refugees get food stamps and 68 percent receive cash assistance. Can Washington please stop importing poor people — and harming our own disadvantaged by doing so?
Remember that the subvert-America agenda is a project of Catholic elites, while a majority of citizens of the faith prefer immigration enforcement to amnesty.
]]>Catholic Church collects $1.6 billion in U.S. contracts, grants since 2012, By Kelly Riddell, Washington Times, September 24, 2015
Not to be lost in the pomp and circumstance of Pope Francis’ first visit to Washington is the reality that the Catholic Church he oversees has become one of the largest recipients of federal largesse in America.
The Church and related Catholic charities and schools have collected more than $1.6 billion since 2012 in U.S. contracts and grants in a far-reaching relationship that spans from school lunches for grammar school students to contracts across the globe to care for the poor and needy at the expense of Uncle Sam, a Washington Times review of federal spending records shows.
Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York once famously noted in 1980 that the government funded 50 percent of Catholic Charities’ budget, commenting “private institutions really aren’t private anymore.” Today, those estimates remain about the same, according to Leslie Lenkowsky, who served as the chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service under George W. Bush.
Catholic Charities USA, the largest charitable organization run by the church, receives about 65 percent of its annual budget from state and federal governments, making it an arm of the federal welfare state, said Brian Anderson, a researcher with the Manhattan Institute.
The federal government came to increasingly rely on the church to help it with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and the charities “imbued with their new faith in the government’s potential to solve social problems, eagerly accepted government money,” Mr. Anderson wrote in an essay for the Manhattan Institute.
Catholic Charities received nearly a quarter of its funding from government by the end of the 1960s, more than half by the late 1970s and more than 60 percent by the mid-1980s, the level where it has remained ever since, Mr. Anderson said.
Today, Catholic charity work is a large part of this nation’s social safety net, according to Mr. Lenkowsky, now a professor of practice in public affairs and philanthropy at Indiana University.
“A lot of the charity is distributing food, running homeless shelters, most things considered charitable,” said Mr. Lenkowsky. “So what we’re not talking about is federal money being paid for priests and religious activities.”
Fifty-seven government agencies are now contracting with the Catholic Church. If the church were a state, its $1.6 billion in funding would rank it about 43rd out of the 50 states in total federal funding, according to analysis by Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com. The majority of those funds are dedicated to refugee services and rehabilitation.
“Churches have generally looked to find common cause with secular goals, adapting their activities to the secular philanthropic model, if only to benefit from grants from the U.S. government,” Olivier Zunz, a social historian, wrote in his book “Philanthropy in America.” “Catholic Relief Services and federated Protestant charities have acted not as missions but as humanitarian institutions combining taxpayer money with their own for carrying out modernizing projects in many theaters around the world.”
However, Mr. Anderson argues, because the Catholic Church and its charities are so ingrained in the U.S. government’s welfare system, it’s hard to reform and better it. For example, in 1996 Catholic Charities lobbied heavily against welfare-reform law and met with then-President Clinton to help derail it. At the time, a Jesuit priest, the Rev. Fred Kammer, who is now the director of the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University, said the welfare-reform law would be “a national social catastrophe. No one will be spared the consequences.”
There’s also friction between state and church, with Catholic charities taking on such a prominent role in the government’s welfare system.
Conservative Christians, unlike Catholics and some other religious charities such as those run by Lutherans, have resisted taking federal money to do charitable work, insisting proselytism and good works go hand in hand and can’t be separated from one another — which most federal and state grants require.
“If a religious institution is required to do something that is in conflict of its religious views, it may opt out from receiving federal funding or make the pragmatic decision to stay in to get the funding,” said Mr. Lenkowsky.
For example, most of the Catholic charities in Illinois have decided to close down their adoption programs rather than comply with a state requirement that says they can no longer receive state funding if they turn away same-sex couples for adoptive services or foster care.
“On one hand the government can’t make any laws infringing on someone’s civil liberties, but it also has to protect free expression of religion, and those are in tension in the age of the welfare state, where you are contracting with a religious organization to deliver secular social services,” Mr. Lenkowsky said. In many of these cases, it will be up to the courts to decide, he added.
Georgetown University, the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit University, broke with church doctrine in order to accommodate for civil rights.
When faced with the decision to officially recognize a student homosexual group on its campus, it decided to formally recognize it for fear it would be in violation of Washington, D.C.’s civil rights law and anti-discrimination protections. The school wanted to build a new dormitory at the time and needed municipal bonds to secure it.
For Catholic Charities USA, the priority of helping those in need trumps all, and they can’t fulfill that mission without financial assistance from the government.
“While Catholic Charities agencies, and many other faith-based non-profits, will continue to work with families and individuals on the brink, we know that in order for our nation to truly make a significant change in the numbers of those in poverty, we need support and commitment from the for-profit sector and from government. We cannot do this alone,” the group said in a statement to The Times.
The nation is better off having Catholic charities participate in the federal welfare system than the alternative of having only secular organization and the government do it, Mr. Lenkowsky said.
“Not only would Catholic charities be hurt, but our society would be much worse off because these services would be provided by government employees and secular service agencies run by social workers,” Mr. Lenkowsky said. “There’s certain things Catholic charities can do that social workers can’t do, like pastoral counseling — a minister trained to give counseling to people facing critical issues like substance abuse.”
If Catholic charities were cut out of the federal system, secular social workers may determine that pastors may not be qualified to give counseling, eliminating a helpful avenue for some in need, he said.
It’s a favorite theme for him. He recently called upon European Catholics to [...]]]>
It’s a favorite theme for him. He recently called upon European Catholics to shelter refugees, as thousands of illegal aliens swarm into the continent. He said each church should provide a place to stay for a family, which would spread out the foreigners into every catholic parish. It wouldn’t solve the problem when hundreds of thousands are crowding in: churches providing shelter for a relative few is just empty symbolism that the press will love.
Perhaps the pope thought he should act as a good example, and accordingly he announced that a Syrian family would be welcomed into housing in the Vatican mini-country. Conveniently, the family is Christian, while the great majority of the hordes breaching Europe are young Muslim men who are very demanding about how they should be treated.
Below, during a papal visit to Istanbul last fall, the Grand Mufti displayed a koran to the pope. Francis has said that true Islam is not violent and the koran and the bible are the same.
The latest figures from Eurostat reveal that only 20 percent of recent illegal entrants are Syrian, with the rest being economic opportunists from Bangladesh to South Sudan. So the great majority flooding to Europe now are not war refugees at all. Nevertheless, the lefty pope believes that law and sovereignty should be thrown out and replaced with utopian do-gooder fantasies.
]]>Pope Francis puts up Syrian refugee family, The Local (Italy), September 18, 2015
Pope Francis is putting up a Syrian refugee family from Damascus in a Vatican apartment, aides revealed on Friday.
The Christian family is the first of two that the Catholic leader has promised to find space for as part of a broader Church effort to help shape Europe’s response to the ongoing migration crisis, partly caused by the conflict in Syria.
The family arrived in Italy on September 6th, the day the pope called on every Catholic parish across Europe to find space for at least one family of refugees.
The family arrived in Italy on September 6, the day the pope called on every Catholic parish across Europe to find space for at least one family of refugees.
The family being housed in the Vatican is to remain anonymous until Italian authorities have ruled on their asylum request.
As Christians who have fled a Syria wracked by a deadly civil war and the persecution of minorities, they are highly likely to be quickly granted leave to remain in Italy.
The processing of their application could however take months, possibly years, unless they are made a special case.
In his call for the Church to take a lead on the migration issue, Francis urged local communities of believers to make a “concrete gesture” ahead of a Jubilee Year of Mercy starting in December.
He said “every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary in Europe,” should take part.
“Faced with the tragedy of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers fleeing death (as) victims of war and hunger who are hoping to start a new life, the gospel calls on us and asks us to be the neighbour of the smallest and the most abandoned, to give them concrete hope,” he said in a Sunday address in St Peter’s square.
The Argentinian pontiff has made the fate of society’s weakest, including the hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in Europe, the dominant theme of his papacy.
His call for a grassroots response to the crisis has been widely praised and he acknowledged that initiatives across Europe had inspired him, comparing them to a biblical miracle in which which Jesus heals a deaf and mute man.
“We have been healed of the deafness of selfishness and the silence of retreating into ourselves,” he said.
“The closed couple, the closed family, the closed group, the closed parish, the closed country, that comes from us, it has nothing to do with God.”
The fate of migrants is also expected to be a theme in the pope’s visit to the United States next week.
Since taking office in 2013, Francis has also stepped up the Vatican’s support for the homeless living within its walls and across Rome, notably by having showers installed in public toilets in St Peter’s square.
And he has personally eschewed the Vatican palace and summer residence he could have occupied in favour of a modest boarding house.
The [...]]]>
The appearance was a typical show of arrogance on the part of the Catholic church, which is arguably as culpable as all the city officials who created and maintained the sanctuary policy of protecting foreign criminals. The church has a history of supporting open borders, even to the point of rejecting pro-safety policies — like the successful Secure Communities program — in order to protect the millions of illegal aliens who reside in this country and steal American jobs.
The great majority of illegal aliens are from Latin America and are catholic. Therefore, the Catholic elites mean to protect their new pew-fillers, particularly after many Americans left the church following the voluminous priest sex scandals. In fact, 13 percent of Americans describe themselves as “former catholics.” (Incidentally, priest sex abuse stories continue to show up in local news: a Google news search for Catholic Priest Sex Trial on July 8 got 22,800 results for the previous 30-day period.)
Thought experiment: if the millions of illegal borders crossers were Protestants, would the Catholic church be fighting so energetically for their “rights”?
Of course not. Vaticrats want to increase their market share in America and make the nation more Catholic.
The cassocks have spent millions of dollars to promote amnesty. Every January, the Conference of Catholic Bishops presents its National Migration Week, which erases the line between legal and illegal immigration. New York City Cardinal Timothy Dolan has characterized support for immigration enforcement as “not American.”
The bishops have worked to redefine immigration lawbreaking as religious freedom. In a 2005 article titled Church organizing anti-Minuteman campaign, (Brownsville Herald, Sept 3, 2005), priest Michael Seifert stated, “Any family in economic need has a right to immigrate, that’s our posture.”
It must be emphasized: the open-borders project is an endeavor of elite churchmen, not parishioners. Citizen Catholics do not like immigration anarchy any more than the rest of us.
But Catholic elites campaign against American interests to promote their own issue of preserving and expanding the church via demographic conquest. They are willing to sacrifice public safety to further their own power.
The top Catholics have tried to destroy Secure Communities for years because it was successful in deporting illegal aliens. ICE describes the program as an “information-sharing partnership between ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that helps to identify criminal aliens“ so it provided a vital connection between feds and local police that is absolutely necessary for enforcement to happen away from the border.
Sanctuary cities are based upon disobeying federal law and disregarding Secure Communities, which has anyway been ended by Obama. The cassocks must be happy that an anti-enforcement scheme has been substituted, the Priority Enforcement Program.
In 2012, the San Francisco Archbishop opposed Secure Communities in a rally held in a major cathedral attended by 2,000, because happy job thieves and criminals are a top priority of the church. “We cannot rest until the laws of our country reflect the laws of God,” opined the Archbishop.
Actually, Jesus said, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:21), which means to obey the laws of the land. Jesus never said to rob Paul to pay Pedro.
See my blog about the event, San Francisco Archbishop Campaigns against Public Safety. The crime-friendly confab crudely took place on January 28, 2012, several days into the trial of MS-13 thug Edwin Ramos, who was eventually convicted of murdering Tony Bologna and his two sons (pictured below) because the gangster thought the family members were crime rivals.
The timing for the anti-enforcement rally was rather insensitive, to say the least. The catholic church was appalling in its arrogant disregard toward crime victims of illegal aliens then, as it is today toward the Steinle family.
Last Wednesday the catholic monarch complained that Europe was insufficiently welcoming to the people of Africa (population 1 billion) and beyond who are invading by the thousands. (One estimate is over 130,000 illegals have arrived uninvited to Europe [...]]]>
Last Wednesday the catholic monarch complained that Europe was insufficiently welcoming to the people of Africa (population 1 billion) and beyond who are invading by the thousands. (One estimate is over 130,000 illegals have arrived uninvited to Europe so far this year.)
Below, the anti-borders pope visited the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2013 to “highlight the suffering of migrants.” The island has been overrun with African illegal aliens because of its proximity to Tunisia and Libya.
Pope criticizes nations that close doors to migrants, Reuters, June 17, 2015
Pope Francis on Wednesday called for respect for migrants and suggested that “people and institutions” who close doors to them should seek forgiveness from God.
The pope’s appeal, made at the end of his weekly general audience, came amid growing debate in Europe on how to deal with an immigrant crisis that has included clashes at the French-Italian borer between police and migrants.
“I invite you all to ask forgiveness for the persons and the institutions who close the door to these people who are seeking a family, who are seeking to be protected,” he said in unscripted remarks delivered in a somber voice. [. . .]
“Out of curiosity, how many immigrants are there in the Vatican State?” northern Italian broadcaster Radio Padania Libera quoted [Northern League leader Matteo] Salvini as asking.
Then on Sunday, the pope went ballistic against weapons manufacturers, calling them un-Christian.
Whoa. The pope has a substantial Vatican army, the Swiss Guards who, despite their silly medieval outfits, are well armed professional soldiers. Columnist Charles C.K. Cooke noted in a tweet, “His bodyguards use SIG P220 and Glock 19 pistols, Steyr TMPs, and H&K MP5A3 submachine guns. Where do they get them?”
So the pope is adequately guarded, but he objects to the tools by which others protect themselves. His complaints represent typical liberal hypocrisy and the same old claptrap about guns.
If Francis gets his open-borders fantasy and Europe is opened to unrestricted millions of Africans and Middle Easterners, many of whom are unfriendly Muslims, a lot more weapons will be needed.
]]>Pope says weapons manufacturers can’t call themselves Christian, Reuters, June 21, 2015
People who manufacture weapons or invest in weapons industries are hypocrites if they call themselves Christian, Pope Francis said on Sunday.
Francis issued his toughest condemnation to date of the weapons industry at a rally of thousands of young people at the end of the first day of his trip to the Italian city of Turin.
“If you trust only men you have lost,” he told the young people in a long, rambling talk about war, trust and politics after putting aside his prepared address.
“It makes me think of … people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit a distrust, doesn’t it?” he said to applause.
He also criticized those who invest in weapons industries, saying “duplicity is the currency of today … they say one thing and do another.”
Francis also built on comments he has made in the past about events during the first and second world wars.
He spoke of the “tragedy of the Shoah,” using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
“The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb (the railway lines)?”
Discussing World War One, he spoke of “the great tragedy of Armenia” but did not use the word “genocide”.
Francis sparked a diplomatic row in April calling the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians 100 years ago “the first genocide of the 20th century,” prompting Turkey to recall its ambassador to the Vatican.
By “Mexicanization” he meant the spread of drug gangs and violent crime. In [...]]]>
By “Mexicanization” he meant the spread of drug gangs and violent crime. In response, Mexican authorities promised Monday to send a firmly worded letter protesting his telling the truth about their crime-ridden country.
Pope Francis is generous with other people’s countries. In 2013 he greeted fleebag Africans on the Italian island of Lampedusa and invited them to Europe.
Funny, Pope Francis wouldn’t mind turning the United States into a diverse criminal barrio filled with Mexicans. He routinely urges a more liberal approach from the US regarding our borders and sovereignty. Last summer he complained about the “racist and xenophobic attitudes” of Americans when the border was being flooded with tens of thousands of Central American illegals.
Around the same time, the Pope railed against “people who only see in immigration a source of illegality, social conflict and violence.”
In January, he said he might enter the United States across the Mexican border as “a beautiful gesture of brotherhood and support for immigrants.”
But when it comes to his beloved country of Argentina, invasive criminal Mexicans are a problem to be stopped.
]]>Mexico Complains About Remarks Attributed To Pope Over Drug Image, Reuters, February 23 2015
(Reuters) – Mexico said on Monday it would send a letter to the Vatican to complain about remarks attributed to Pope Francis about the risk of Argentina suffering a criminal “Mexicanization” due to the spread of drug gangs there.
Mexico’s Foreign Minister Jose Antonio Meade said his government had expressed concern that the country was being “stigmatized” as a land of drug traffickers in an email attributed to Francis published in Argentina over the weekend.
“We had a meeting with the (papal) nuncio and we will indeed send a note, and what worries us is that the drug trafficking challenge is a shared challenge. It’s a challenge that Mexico is undertaking massive efforts on,” Meade said in Mexico City.
Published by Argentine human rights group La Alameda, the email showed the Argentine-born pope making apparent reference to the risk of Mexican-style drug violence reaching Argentina.
“Hopefully we’re in time to avoid the Mexicanization. I was talking to some Mexican bishops and it’s a terrible situation,” the organization quoted the pontiff as saying in a message sent to Gustavo Vera, the head of La Alameda.
A spokeswoman for the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico said she was still trying to confirm whether the pope had made the comments. An official at the Mexican Foreign Ministry said he believed the papal nuncio had confirmed their authenticity.
Vera said the remarks were made by the pope during an exchange the two were having on crime.
“In the letter he simply gives expression to a longstanding concern about drug trafficking getting worse and taking root inside (Argentina),” Vera told Argentine radio.
More than 100,000 people have died in drug cartel violence in Mexico since the start of 2007. The September 2014 abduction and apparent massacre of 43 Mexican students by police in league with a drug gang seriously embarrassed the current government.
Mexican politicians have long argued that the problem is the shared responsibility of Mexico and its neighbors given that the United States is a massive marketplace for illicit drugs.
For a taste, here is the [...]]]>
For a taste, here is the final paragraph:
“Dear migrants and refugees! You have a special place in the heart of the Church, and you help her to enlarge her heart and to manifest her motherhood towards the entire human family. Do not lose your faith and hope! Let us think of the Holy Family during the flight in Egypt: Just as the maternal heart of the Blessed Virgin and the kind heart of Saint Joseph kept alive the confidence that God would never abandon them, so in you may the same hope in the Lord never be wanting. I entrust you to their protection and I cordially impart to all of you my Apostolic Blessing”.
You might think that the Pope would focus on endangered Christians, who are being removed from the Middle East by murderous Islamic jihad, demanding that non-Muslims “Convert or die.” But no, he apparently believes that all refugees should be welcomed in the West, including hostile Muslims who promise to destroy Christianity and the other non-Islamic religions.
Below, the Pope’s first official trip outside the Vatican was to the island of Lampedusa (long besieged by thousands of demanding foreigners), where he welcomed Africans to Europe.
As noted here earlier, refugees are largely created by Muslim wars: World Refugee Day: Jihad on the March. There is no reason to infect the West further with the Islamic pathology of violence and supremacism. Muslim refugees should go to other Islamic societies.
The Pope has written that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” Perhaps he should stick to interpreting Catholicism, since the Koran is full of admonitions to Muslims that they commit violence on infidels who will not submit.
Nevertheless, the Pope recommends a borderless world, straight out of the liberal playbook.
]]>Pope calls for ‘globalization of charity’ to protect migrants, Catholic News, September 23, 2014
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis called for the “globalization of charity” through an international network to fight human trafficking and ensure the rights of migrants and refugees.
The pope’s words appeared in his annual message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, which in 2015 will be observed Jan. 18. The Vatican released the pope’s message, “Church Without Frontiers, Mother to All,” Sept. 23.
“Large numbers of people are leaving their homelands, with a suitcase full of fears and desires, to undertake a hopeful and dangerous trip in search of more humane living conditions,” the pope wrote. “Such migration gives rise to suspicion and hostility, even in ecclesial communities, prior to any knowledge of the migrants’ lives or their stories of persecution and destitution.”
Pope Francis called on all to honor the “biblical commandment of welcoming with respect and solidarity the stranger in need.”
“Jesus Christ is always waiting to be recognized in migrants and refugees, in displaced persons and in exiles, and through them he calls us to share our resources, and occasionally to give up something of our acquired riches,” he wrote.
But individual and even national efforts to help migrants are insufficient, the pope wrote.
“Migration movements, however, are on such a scale that only a systematic and active cooperation between states and international organizations can be capable of regulating and managing such movements effectively,” he wrote.
According to the United Nations, there were 232 million international migrants in 2013, representing a rise of 50 percent since 1990.
At a news conference to present the pope’s message, Bishop Joseph Kalathiparambil, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers, said that in 2013 the number of refugees, asylum seekers and displaced persons exceeded 50 million for the first time since World War II.
“A more decisive and constructive action is required, one which relies on a universal network of cooperation, based on safeguarding the dignity and centrality of every human person,” Pope Francis wrote. “This will lead to greater effectiveness in the fight against the shameful and criminal trafficking of human beings, the violation of fundamental rights, and all forms of violence, oppression and enslavement.”
“It is necessary to respond to the globalization of migration with the globalization of charity and cooperation,” he wrote.
Pope Francis has made migration a signature issue of his pontificate. In July 2013, less than four months after his election as pope, he traveled to the southern Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, a major entry point for undocumented immigrants to Europe, to commemorate those who had died attempting to cross the sea from North Africa.
The pope has met with international refugees in Rome and, during a May visit to the Holy Land, in Jordan. He has also frequently denounced human trafficking, calling it a “crime against humanity.”