The Catholic League is highlighting the behavior of an anti-immigrant group called the San Diego Minutemen. After a local priest decided to help workers seek employment, this group of hyper-nationalists began protesting outside the church– by displaying an effigy of a priest in a devil mask, harassing a First Communion Mass, demanding that the Catholic Church be taxed, and denouncing priests as pedophiles.
Is Donohue finally waking up? For years now, Donohue has aligned himself with the Republican-linked political evangelical movement. And yet, despite Donohue, Neuhaus and their allies doing their best to look the other way, the old residual anti-Catholicism never really died. Is it any surprise that 63 percent of white evangelicals see immigrants as a “threat to U.S. customs and values,” as opposed to 48% of the population as a whole? Or that 90 percent of polled Family Research Council members favor deportation of all “illegal” immigrants? Or that figures like Tony Perkins talk about immigration in terms of “the cultural fabric of our nation”? Does it take a great leap to realize — like their forefathers in an era when immigrants came from places like Ireland, Poland, and Italy — that what many of these evangelicals dislike about the immigrant culture is that is a strongly Catholic culture?
Sometimes the guard slips. Here is influential “conservative” evangelical pastor Ted Haggard:
“… the nations dominated by Catholicism look back. They don’t tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs, inventors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren’t shooting people into space. Protestantism, though, always looks to the future. A typical kid raised in Protestantism dreams about the future. A typical kid raised in Catholicism values and relishes the past, the saints, the history. That is one of the changes that is happening in America. In America the descendants of the Protestants, the Puritan descendants, we want to create a better future, and our speakers say that sort of thing. But with the influx of people from Mexico, they don’t tend to be the ones that go to universities and become our research-and-development people. And so in that way I see a little clash of civilizations.”
I’ve criticized Donohue quite frequently in the past. But good for him for highlighting the issue in San Diego. Of course, he does make the following statement:
“Regardless of whether one is sympathetic or not to the plight of illegal immigrants…. there is no role for bigotry in this dispute.”
Whether one is sympathetic or not? Don’t Church teachings, following directly from Christ’s admonition, expressly demand such “sympathy”?
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