How times have changed: Cardinal Gibbons demanded assimilation; Archbishop Gomez rejects it.
This week, Nicholas DiMarzio, retired bishop of Brooklyn, suggested in OSV News that the U.S. legalize “as many as possible” of the millions of illegal aliens now residing in the United States.
The title of his article, “Compromise: An Essential Element of Politics,” was somewhat misleading, because the bishop wasn’t advocating compromise at all. “The best way to fix our broken immigration system,” he writes, “is to examine it holistically, and repair all parts of it…including legalization of the undocumented” (“Never call them illegal,” reads the USCCB’s Eleventh Commandment).
Bottom line: Bishop DiMarzio embraces the doctrine of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.): there aren’t enough Americans, so we need to import new ones.
Of course, Schumer applauds a major cause of America’s stagnant population growth — the sixty million abortions since Roe v. Wade. When DiMarzio, appeared with Cardinal Dolan last month to discuss immigration, they didn’t mention abortion; instead, they identified a different cause: the fact that New York’s Catholic population was declining because nobody was having babies.
They both went on to advocate more immigrants, legal and otherwise, to fill all of those empty pews.
In reaching that conclusion, both Dolan and DiMarzio agree with Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, a tireless advocate for illegal aliens. A native of Mexico, Gomez has an ardent love of his homeland and his people. He has testified frequently on Capitol Hill in favor of various amnesty-related issues, always in the name of the Catholic Church. He promotes the same theme before various groups of wealthy Catholics around the country.
In 2012, he described his vision of “The Next America” at a conference in Napa Valley.
For Archbishop Gomez, the “Next America” will be decidedly better than the current one: “Our culture is changing,” he said. “We have a legal structure that allows, and even pays for, the killing of babies in the womb…. Our courts and legislatures are redefining the natural institutions of marriage and the family. We have an elite culture…that is openly hostile to religious faith.”
All too true. So, what is to blame for this travesty? Pope Benedict XVI identifies the “Dictatorship of Relativism.” In Gomez’s view, however, the culprit is Old America, specifically “the idea that Americans are descended from only white Europeans and that our culture is based only on the individualism, work ethic and rule of law that we inherited from our Anglo-Protestant forebears.”
For Gomez, our national heritage somehow encourages “a wrong-headed notion that ‘real Americans’ are of some particular race, class, religion or ethnic background”; it smacks of “nativism” and “bigotry.”
Such prejudice, he continues, primarily harms not Catholics, but Mexicans — the majority of whom are illegal aliens. “America is in need of renewal,” says Gomez.
The solution? Amnesty, and more Mexican immigration. Mexican immigrants “will bring a new, youthful, entrepreneurial spirit of hard work to our economy.” They “are not afraid of hard work or sacrifice [and] the vast majority of them believe in Jesus Christ and love our Catholic Church. They share traditional American values of faith, family and community.”
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