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20\u00a0<\/sup><\/strong>Then the\u00a0Lord\u00a0said, \u201cThe outcry against Sodom\u00a0and Gomorrah is so great\u00a0and their sin so grievous\u00a021\u00a0<\/sup><\/strong>that I will go down\u00a0and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.\u201d<\/p>\n
22\u00a0<\/sup><\/strong>The men\u00a0turned away and went toward Sodom,\u00a0but Abraham remained standing before the\u00a0Lord.[b<\/a>]<\/sup>\u00a023\u00a0<\/sup><\/strong>Then Abraham approached him and said: \u201cWill you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?\u00a024\u00a0<\/sup><\/strong>What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare[c<\/a>]<\/sup>\u00a0the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it?\u00a025\u00a0<\/sup><\/strong>Far be it from you to do such a thing\u2014to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous\u00a0and the wicked alike.\u00a0Far be it from you! Will not the Judge\u00a0of all the earth do right?\u201d<\/p>\n
26\u00a0<\/sup><\/strong>The Lord said, \u201cIf I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We know that Abraham continues on by step by step, and rather tediously (especially as a Sunday reading) bargaining God down to accepting not destroying the city of Sodom if there are only 10 righteous people in the city, though even this threshold wasn\u2019t met and the city was destroyed after all.\u00a0 And the theme of the homily you\u2019ll hear may or may not be something about Abraham daring to bargain with God and how we shouldn\u2019t be afraid to ask for things from God.\u00a0 But it\u2019s interesting how Abraham\u2019s negotiation was not the \u201ctypical\u201d norm of \u201cmake far-reaching demands in order to meet in the middle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now consider the demands being made by Cupich and other American bishops and immigration activists generally speaking.\u00a0 Their operating principle is \u201cno one should be deported, ever\u201d and \u201ceveryone has a right to come here, morally even if not legally.\u201d\u00a0 They concede that deporting criminals might be OK, but only in rare circumstances if their crimes are harsh enough and the conditions of their deportation are humane enough, such as their home country being willing to accept them and if they have lived in the US for a short enough time and only as an adult, so that they can re-integrate easily.\u00a0 (Heck, not long ago in the Washington Post<\/em> there was an article sympathetically portraying as a suffering deportee a man who was a pot dealer and deported to Jamaica after serving his prison sentence, where part of the hardship he endured was the social stigma of having been jailed in the US.)<\/p>\n
This is clearly absurd.<\/p>\n
So many people are tripping over themselves to be the ones fighting Trump with the very most righteous fury.<\/p>\n
Why can someone like Cupich not do the sensible, Abraham-like thing and ask for mercy?<\/p>\n
No, I am not saying that Trump is God.\u00a0 But the principle of it is the same.\u00a0 Cupich has very weak cards to play, his best card is moral suasion, and absurd demands don\u2019t persuade someone to come to a \u201cmoral middle ground.\u201d<\/p>\n
He needs to start by acknowledging that these immigrants have no legal right to live in the U.S., only rarely meet the political-persecution conditions for asylum (and the system has been so abused it\u2019s no longer capable of achieving its goals), and that many of them have committed crimes such as identity theft, driving without licenses\/insurance, etc., even if not more heinous crimes, and often the \u201chard cases\u201d of long-time residents are being deported because they have standing deportation orders, even if under a previous set of bureaucrats, those deportation orders were not implemented.<\/p>\n
But then he needs to address Trump (preferably without the smug artificially-pastoral tone he generally has): \u201cWould you, out of mercy, grant residency to those illegal immigrants who have been here for decades, have learned English, and are able to support themselves or receive family support, without welfare?\u201d<\/p>\n
Not for everyone. Not for all migrants except criminals, though perhaps over time Cupich and others could bargain, Abraham-like, for a widened group of eligible people.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, if I were to speak of Pritzker rather than Cupich, there might be some further negotiation: a commitment that as long as the Trump administration provides waivers for longtime residents, even for those who would otherwise be the first to go because the \u201cdue process\u201d has been completed and they have unenforced deportation orders, the state will resume cooperation with ICE, eliminate housing and other subsidies for recently-arriving migrants, etc.<\/p>\n
But right now many elected officials, activists, and church leaders are playing a game of \u201cchicken.\u201d Or maybe their decisions could be described as keeping these most sympathetic cases as hostages, knowing that they could advocate for a limited amnesty but would rather they be the victims who could be used to garner public support for a wide-scale amnesty.\u00a0 Or are they perhaps so convinced that it is morally wrong to deport anyone, that they believe it would in fact be nearly sinful on their part to advocate for a partial rather than complete amnesty?\u00a0 Is Cupich unable to more away from his extreme demand because he cannot comprehend that it is unreasonable? Is he truly convinced that church teaching compels universal amnesty and open borders and that Catechism statements to the contrary are really merely stating the permissibility of having an orderly process for unlimited immigration?\u00a0 Would he even, in the event of a legalization program for long-time residents, deem false affidavits and fraudulent \u201cproof\u201d of longtime residency, to be morally good, and support his priests being witnesses for people unknown to them, in the name of enabling them to stay in the U.S.?<\/p>\n
Inquiring minds want to know.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Next Sunday\u2019s reading, it turns out, is a timely one: the first part of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, when God told Abraham he was going to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham negotiated with him to try to get him to spare those cities, as follows:. 20\u00a0Then the\u00a0Lord\u00a0said, \u201cThe outcry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":6036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[463],"class_list":["post-19250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-illegal-immigration"],"yoast_head":"\n
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