Your tax dollars
January 6th to the 12th was the big week when the US Conference of Catholic Bishops ginned up its pro-amnesty political indoctrination campaign with National Migration Week.
Mind you, the Bishops can pressure the Catholic flock however they wish, it’s a free country (for now!), but it’s when they take taxpayer money to do their “charitable” and political work then it becomes every taxpayer’s business.
Before you read the excellent discussion of their latest parishioner indoctrination campaign by Dominique Peridans at the Center for Immigration Studies please visit this comprehensive review of the Bishops finances by Thomas Allen at VDARE.
Allen:
….in fact USCCB independently raises only about 2% (two percent) of its $72.1 million total revenues. The rest comes from contracts, grants and earnings from federal programs.
Also, we have written extensively here (see our archive!) over the years about the USCCB as one of the top nine federal contractors resettling refugees to your towns (and their lobbying for other issues as well, including global warming) while feeding from the federal trough.
Ecclesiastes offers a rather honest and blunt appraisal of human life, and seeks to articulate basic human truths. Chapter 1, verse 9 of the book in the Hebrew Bible reads “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!” Now, human truth, if indeed truth, is trans-situational, that is to say, can be applied to host of situations.
The situation in this case to which this truth can be applied is that of National Migration Week (January 6-12), sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops through its Migration and Refugee Services Offices. I perused the promotional materials, almost naively hoping to find a few nuggets of newness, some refreshing insight, a slightly more holistic perspective being put forth. “Nothing is new under the sun” here.
In fact, it is striking to read how the American Catholic Church’s pastoral proposals regarding immigrants display how hardened the Church’s “official position” is becoming: presented as a given. There is no acknowledgment whatsoever that the issue is complex and there is no margin of freedom granted to the laity to discern varying responses to the issue.
Against the spiritually magnificent, yet concretely vague backdrop of “welcoming Christ in the stranger” (drawn from Christ’s own exhortation in Matthew 25:35), the document restates the American Catholic Church’s presumption that any perspective different from that which it articulates is characterized by in-hospitality. The document then invites the reader to labor for a “conversion of hearts and minds” in those who hold these differing perspectives.
To what one must convert? Comprehensive immigration reform. In this campaign (and beyond it), the bishops hope to help Catholics at the parochial level to enact local expressions of such reform and to incite Catholics at the national level to promote such reform.
Bishops: Border enforcement is “meanness.”
Not only are the bishops very concrete and very specific in their proposals, they are unabashedly political. They are in the business of a “broad legalization program”. In their minds, charity can only and must work this way. An enforcement-only approach (which no one is really proposing, but which they confuse with an enforcement-first approach) they decry as antithetical to charity – and, according to their expertise, a failure. So much money is being devoted to meanness!
There is more! Read it all.