Statement from Bishop Jaime Soto, Sacramento, and president of the California Catholic Conference of Bishops:
The California Catholic Conference of Bishops supports SB 54, the California Values Act.
In the nation today, some are displacing trust and cooperation with fear and hatred. In our estimation, the majority of Californians, as well as the nation, desire rather to build a society where there is liberty and justice for all. SB 54 is attempting to address this situation directly as it grapples with the injustice of indiscriminant deportations while assuring public safety for all our families and neighborhoods.
“It is important,” says Pope Francis, “to view migrants not only on the basis of their status as regular or irregular, but above all as people whose dignity is to be protected and who are capable of contributing to progress and the general welfare.”
Many of us know someone — a vulnerable family member, a neighbor or, even a parent or child – who has been deported after years of living in and contributing to our communities. Our families and neighborhoods are being ripped apart by aggressive deportation directives.
We also know people who have been victims of violent crimes, particularly associated with drugs and gangs. All members of our community must be able to turn to law enforcement when their safety is threatened else the damage they suffer will be compounded and those responsible for the crimes will escape accountability. Local law enforcement must be able to use their limited resources to be good neighbors as well as watchful protectors of the communities entrusted to their care.
The unfair and fragmented immigration system is broken and threatens the public good. Over this past year fear and resentment has been sown in many homes, schools and neighborhoods. Local law enforcement should not collude with this harsh, ill-conceived tactic. Immigrant families are not the threat. Their health and welfare should not be threatened. Too many industrious immigrants suffer under the dual scourge of a broken immigration system and inadequate local policing. As a result, they are lost on the margins, left even more vulnerable to exploitive crimes because their lives are not valued by some in our political community.
SB 54 is threading the prudent path between respect for human dignity and sensible community-policing, while resisting a brutish nativist polemic heard in some quarters.
Full story at CACatholic.
Illegal = unwelcome = go back to your own country. The bishops are wrong to support illegal aliens remaining in the United States. They broke the law, they should face the consequences. What’s wrong with that? Why is that unacceptable to the bishops?
As one website says, “The world is a Magical Place full of people waiting to be offended by something.”
The “trasgenders, drag queens, trans drags and cis performers are all fighting over who should be allowed in a Pride Parade. Each is offended by the others. And now this. Normal people can be a drag and drag is certainly not normal. Immigrants complain about their families being torn apart while American families are torn apart arguing over this.
Ain”t it a drag?
Yes! one of my family members was molested by one when under aged.
Why do I only see articles supporting people leaving their homelands and how we must welcome and support them? Where are the leaders taking a stance on fixing the problems of those countries so that the people can thrive in their own land. What about those left behind? Must they live with those issues, or do we have to take in entire nations to protect them?
California Bishops are politicizing our Church, in the name of social justice. Hopefully, they can open their minds and hearts to see Americans as people too.
Some facts: SB 54 bars law enforcement from detaining a person due to a hold request, responding to federal immigration enforcement’s requests for notification or providing information about a person’s release date unless that’s already available publicly.
The bill contains some exceptions, allowing local agencies to transfer individuals to federal immigration authorities if there is a judicial warrant or if the person has been previously convicted of a violent felony. It also requires notification to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement of scheduled releases of people who…
have been convicted of violent felonies.
I traveled all over the world and did it legally with a passport and visas where required. I passed through customs and immigration and followed all the laws, customs and rules and I am called a racist by the liberals because I expect everyone else to do the same. Most of my travel was work related, there are places I would like to go to but I cannot afford it. I believe the “immigration system is broken” because past immigration laws were not enforced and I believe it is “unfair” that illegal immigrants get free healthcare that I cannot afford.
Why isn’t the Catholic Church worldwide helping the Catholic Church in Mexico to make life better for their citizens so there would be no need for them to come to the U.S. illegally. This seems to be a question that no one addresses. What is it in the U.S. that the illegals want. Answer that question and then do that in Mexico. Are there as many illegals coming from France, Germany, Spain, Ireland, etc. as there are from Mexico. Also, if the U.S government was not so generous in supporting the illegals, maybe the flow would stop. There surely has to be an answer to the problem of the illegals streaming over the border.
When will we build a wall along the border with Canada? :) We have a million fewer undocumented immigrants than before the 2009 Great Recession. Mexicans aren’t the majority immigrant population anymore. Central Americans, Koreans, Chinese and Indians make up a bug chunk of the “illegals.” Undocumented immigrants make up only about 5% of the workforce. From 2009-2017, over two million were deported, 97% of them convicted criminals. Most undocumented have been in the country about 10 years; they own homes, pay taxes, send kids to school and college. Their children are American citizens. Do you want to break up the families? What about the refugees who flee to safety in the US? WWJD?
US takes in 1 million legal immigrants every year on average, according to the INS, more than any other nation on earth—but that isn’t enough for Open-Borders-Bob, who wants no borders and unlimited immigration—pretty much what has gone on for the last 10 years. It is totally unsustainable.
Anon, “Open-Borders-Bob” doesn’t want open borders nor unlimited immigration. I do think, however, that Christian Americans should take into account where the immigrants came from and why they came. Too many are refugees from dastardly corrupt nations in Central and South America. If you think M-13 is bad on Long Island, they are nothing compared to the countries they came from. Many North American immigrants come from Mexico, which cannot provide for their people economically, causing them to come here for food and shelter. Why can’t Mexico provide jobs? Well, the corruption is too great, and we skewer US companies who want to build there to meet market needs.
The poor bishops lost their moral authority years ago. They no longer lead people to God thru the sacraments, but rather lead people away from God and towards their new age socialism. The bishops do not care about facts or faith but their own social programs. The bishops have failed in so many ways.
And when it came time to be vocal on homosexual “marriage”, these same bishops were completely
silent.
Rubbish! The Bishops were very active in opposing same-sex marriage. Read the court documents. Ever heard of Porp 8?
That was then (2008, Prop 8): different pope, different teachings, different church. (Have you noticed the teachings change now every 5-7 years?)
Now the US & CA bishops are, like Bob One, completely part of the Episcopal Church in the US—and will all march happily, arm-in-arm together, into extinction.
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. The federal laws regarding immigration enforcement may not be faultless, but they are not immoral. The proposed state law undermines the federal law. Odd that with all the problems begging to be addressed within the Church, the bishops choose to spend their time on problems outside the Church.
Clinton, to be fair when a bishop supposedly wrote to his parishioners and told them not to go to a homosexual parade, a priest gave a sermon castigating the bishop. I heard it myself. The priest was charitable confronted. He probably did that because one of the mothers in the congregation had a homosexual son, and hopefully the priest had no idea such parades were so decadent at that time until he was informed. It is uncharitable and a dereliction of duty not to warn people about the dangers of such activity.
I say “supposedly” because I never saw the letter of the bishop nor heard such a sermon from a bishop. All I heard was what the priest said in his sermon. My point is that sometimes priests do not back up their bishops and visa versa.
Of course, Clinton, as Anonymous said later, “That was under a different pope and POTUS. What I wrote about happened under Pope Benedict XVI, and I think President Bush the younger.
Hey, Bishops, there is a violent murderous group numbering 10,000 members nationwide that controls the streets and threatens minorities, why don’t you speak out against them?
It’s not the KKK, it’s not neo-Nazis, it’s MS-13 which on Long Island alone in 2017 has been held accountable for 20 murders. MS-13 is also involved in rapes, tortures, murders and ruthless video-taped beheadings. In Operation Matador, Trump’s ICE has rounded up over 50 of the worst MS-13 in New York state and plans to go nationwide. (Why was MS13 ignored fir 8 long years?)
Glad to hear that you support President Trump on this against the ultimate “brutish nativists.”
How long will it take until the bishops realize that their “California Values” are the values that harbor moslem terrorists who will not hesitate to take aim at Catholic clerics at the highest levels ?
“Vatican starting to look hypocritical on those ‘national security concerns” :
The Vatican has called an ISIS terrorist video from the Philippines threatening the life of the pope “worrying”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/08/vatican_starting_to_look_hypocritical_on_those_national_security_concerns_comments.html#disqus_thread