Archbishop Cupich is pro-illegal-immigrant-legalization. Does it do any harm?

Earlier today, I blogged on the two homilies given by the new archbishop in Chicago, trying to pick them apart as to what it portends for his future tenure here.

Just now, I flipped through the weekly paper put out by the archdiocese, and was inspired to look at their website.  Apparently, he’s big on “immigration reform,” though it’s not clear how far he goes (truly open borders?  just open for Mexicans, or Latin Americans generally speaking?).  Here’s the key quote from an article, “The plight of immigrants close to the heart of new leader.”

The vast majority of immigrants come here because they are poor and desperately need work to support their families. But they also come because we need their labor. Washington State ranks in the top 10 among states that rely on undocumented workers for their workforce. 

They harvest our produce and crops. They clean our hotel rooms and serve food in our restaurants. They care for our children, tend our lawns, and take on the manual labor we are unable or unwilling to do for ourselves. But they also are professionals — lawyers, physicians, technicians, priests, Sisters, mechanics, builders — and even soldiers serving our country. Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are employed in virtually every sector of our economy. …

Note that he simply discards any distinction between illegal and legal immigrants in his last sentence, and presumably in the penultimate sentence — one hopes that there aren’t lawyers and physicians working under false identities, and one presumes that the Catholic Church is able to bring in priests and sisters legally (though, really, I don’t know what kind of visa it would be — clearly, they’d be able to establish that they couldn’t find a sufficient number of Americans, but it wouldn’t be a technical skill).  And as you can imagine, it rankles me to say that it’s fine and dandy for illegal immigrants to break any number of laws, either working under the table or with falsified or stolen identitites.

This is also a far bigger plea than the usual claim that “illegal immigrants are so integrated into our communities that it would be unjust to uproot them” — it does not appear that he has a one-time legalization in mind.

So — given that — is it possible to say, “even if you disagree, what harm would it do?”  What are the implications of Cupich pursuing this as a key priority?  Could one just say, it’s no different than a hobby, something he pursues in his spare time, when not tending to the needs of his flock?

And I think it does have a real effect.  Already I’ve gotten e-mail invitations, from a list I’m on, to join in a march for “immigration reform.”  And back when the Gang of 8 bill was being debated, there was a letter that was required to be published in all church bulletins.  If Cupich goes further down this road, of being very active in the political arena, on a divisive issue, it sends the signal that he’s more interested in politics than ministry.  It also communicates to Catholics in the pews of suburban churches that they don’t really count — except when it comes time for the Annual Catholic Appeal, and they’d better not get any ideas.

And besides, this is Chicago.  Job 1 is the Catholic school system, and finding a way to end the annual rite of announcing school closings.

UPDATE:

I was thinking about this some more while driving my son to his climbing-wall class at the Y.

Here’s the thing:  do middle-class suburban Catholics “count” or should the archbishop focus on the needy in the inner city?  If  Church was a social service group, providing care for the materially impoverished, then asking for some attention to the middle class would be whiny and self-serving.  But it’s not — Cupich’s job is the care of souls, not the provision of food or housing or healthcare. 

And to say “you middle class folk have everything you need” kind of misses the point of church, which is about spiritual, not material welfare, and middle class people can be just as spiritually impoverished, or even more so.  After all, Jesus ate with tax collectors.  And in our “CFM” (Christian Family Movement) group at church, the empty-nester couples speak of hoping that their adult children might someday return to church.  Is the middle-class Catholic obliged to take a “do it yourself” approach to religion, because the “Church is about caring for the poor” approach communicates that their spiritual well-being doesn’t matter?