The US Conference of Catholic Bishops(USCCB) is one of the largest of the Top Ten (now nine) federal refugee resettlement government contractors. Most people are shocked when they first learn that US taxpayers give tens of million of dollars to the ‘religious’ organization each year to bring impoverished immigrants to their towns. We have addressed the USCCB, its funding and its progressive politics on many occasions at RRW, see here, here, here, here, and here just for starters.
Yesterday, Cliff Kincaid, writing at Accuracy in Media, has another hard charging article about the role of the Bishops in pushing Obamacare and Amnesty.
Calling health care a “right” to be guaranteed by the federal government, America’s Catholic Bishops are trying to save ObamaCare at a time when the legislation has been pronounced in limbo, dying or dead by most of the media.
The evidence of intensive Catholic Bishop lobbying activity suggests that liberal Congressional leaders are going to give the legislation a temporary respite so that liberal Catholics can be persuaded to pressure Congress to pass both national health care legislation and “comprehensive immigration reform” in the form of H.R. 4321, the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity” Act.
As AIM has documented, lobbying by the Catholic Bishops and their representatives, who worked closely with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, guaranteed passage of the health care bill in the House.
In a January 13 conference call and briefing, Kevin Appleby, a representative of the U.S. Catholic Bishops, explained in frank language why the Bishops are so desperate to pass the health care and immigration bills. He said that the Bishops want a federal health plan to absorb the costs being borne by the nation’s 600 Catholic hospitals to cover illegal aliens.
I continue to be amazed at refugee resettlement agencies that are lobbying for the legalization of immigrants who came here illegally because the millions of new legal immigrants that would be created overnight would be in direct competition with the tens of thousands of legal refugees desperately looking for work. The only explanation, as I said yesterday in my report on a posting at New Zeal, is that it is all about politics and Democratic Leftwing voter rolls, not about the well-being of the immigrants themselves.
Kincaid goes on:
In addition, the Bishops openly state in their letter that they want “undocumented persons”–illegal aliens–to be able to purchase insurance in the new health care exchange established by the federal government.
Gabino Zavala, an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for the San Gabriel region, has written an article noting that the religious left, which he describes as “religious leaders and faith-based organizations,” have been pushing for a national health care system “for decades.” He adds, “Catholic bishops have been leading advocates for universal health care as a fundamental human right, not simply a luxury for the privileged few.”
The religious left, led by the Catholic Bishops, may represent the only way that liberals in Congress can ultimately succeed in passing ObamaCare. But that assumes that conservative Catholics will not resist the push to use church resources to give amnesty and federal benefits to illegal aliens as a way to take Catholic hospitals off the hook for many of their health care costs.
Left-wing Huffington Post blogger John Gehring notes with pride and pleasure that the Catholic bishops have “signaled they will play a leading role in pushing for comprehensive immigration reform this year by using the power of their pulpits and bipartisan political influence on Capitol Hill” and that the recent briefing was designed “to outline plans for persuading the public and wavering members of Congress that fixing a broken immigration system is a moral and practical priority.”
Look for postcards in your churches soon! I wonder how much federal taxpayer money is going into a lobbying campaign to work against the taxpayers?
The Huffington Post’s Gehring said that Bishop John C. Wester of Salt Lake City and Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany, New York, who are respective chairmen of the U.S. bishops’ committees on migration and international policy, have announced that over a million postcards “touting the need for immigration reform have been ordered by dioceses and parishes across the country” and that the cards will be sent to congressional offices.
The campaign is being run by the Justice for Immigrants campaign, an official project of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The pre-written postcards say, “I am a concerned constituent and agree with the U.S. Catholic bishops that the U.S. immigration system is broken and is in need of repair. I ask that this year you support immigration reform legislation that keeps immigrant families together, adopts smart and humane enforcement policies, and ensures that immigrants without legal status register with the government and begin a path toward citizenship. Our families and communities cannot wait!”
Please read the rest of Kincaid’s article. There is more, although I took a lot above because it was so packed with information I could hardly figure out where to cut it!
The Catholic Church has every right to whip up its members on issues before Congress, but their needs to be a federal audit to try to discover if they are using tax dollars to influence Congress! It has been our view at RRW, that churches resettling refugees should be funded by their own members and not the general public because frankly it is difficult to keep the pots of money separate. We also know refugees have been neglected by their resettlement agencies so this lobbying activity makes us suspicious about whether there exists an appropriate firewall between funding sources.
Just a reminder it was only a few weeks ago that we learned that the Epicopal Church was balancing its books with refugee resettlement funding.
LOL! Coincidentally I just saw this blogger, an Angry Catholic, disavowing the connections between the Bishops and Progressives and Far Left political activities, here. In light of what we know now, that is a stretch.