Bp. Finn speaks common sense

…offends conservative pieties again.

Last time, it was his observation that the death penalty should be abolished.

Now it is the advocacy of the fact that, since we have already chosen to integrate illegal immigrants into our economy and exploit them, we should also go ahead and make them citizens via the DREAM act.

Much high dudgeon in the comboxes about this extremely common sense position, with the usual huff-puffery about how the bishops should only talk about abortion, as well as rubbish about “failure to go through proper channels” means illegal immigrants are open to being exploited in perpetuity and never given citizenship and so forth. Jack Smith articulates the common sense reply:

Please don’t equate the immigration experience of our ancestors with current immigrants. Our millions of ancestors spent between 2-5 hours on Ellis Island and only 2 percent were rejected. We intentionally steal decades of cheap labor from current immigrants and cost them thousands of dollars and decades of grief to become legal.

If you would like to afford current immigrants the legal pathway my Irish and Italian immigrant ancestors had, I’m all for it. They’d all have been legal a few hours after they arrived.

All in all, the response of several readers is a fairly typical sample of the “ignore bishops except for abortion” mentality of the Right, which maps pretty closely with the “ignore bishops except for when they are useful for Democrat talking points” mentality of the Left. Happily, some readers do get that the teaching of the Church is not simply a grab bag of useful adornments for one’s pre-existing political committments.

Keep up the struggle, Jack!