Mahony-Inspired Sanctuary Movement

California Catholic Daily ^ | April 6, 2007

[Alex Murphy]

In the early 1980s, Our Lady Queen of Angels church (“La Placita”) in downtown Los Angeles offered not only perpetual adoration of the Eucharist in its 188-year old chapel but sanctuary for refugees from Central America in its basement. These refugees faced deportation because in their home countries they belonged to political (in some cases, liberation theology) groups opposed to governments backed by the United States government.

Today, with deportations of Hispanic illegal immigrants from the United States splitting families, La Placita is again offering sanctuary. Los Angeles’ mother parish is constructing a new addition that will provide a haven for a family with members facing deportation for violating federal immigration laws. Part of the earlier sanctuary movement, Father Richard Estrada, a priest at La Placita, told the Los Angeles Times that the new movement will be different. Then, "we had about 100 people sleeping and eating in the church basement," Estrada said. "That was unacceptable. We're not going to do it like that this time."

Estrada and other California priests are part of what is dubbed the New Sanctuary Movement. The movement was born Jan. 29 at a gathering in Washington, D.C. of representatives from 18 cities, 12 religious groups (including Catholics, Episcopalians, Unitarian-Universalists, United Methodists, Evangelicals, Muslims, and reformed Jews) and seven denominational and interdenominational organizations. These last include the group Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice of California, which says it “aims to end low-wage poverty in California by building a faith-based movement for economic justice” in the state.

The Los Angeles-based New Sanctuary Movement’s web site ascribes to Cardinal Roger Mahony an “awakening” of the “general public and legislators to the moral and human dimensions” of immigration, “effectively changing the terms of the public debate.” Mahony did this when, last year, he instructed his priests and lay employees to ignore provisions of a bill in Congress that would have criminalized giving humanitarian aid to people without checking immigration status.

The New Sanctuary Movement wants to help individual religious congregations publicly provide hospitality and protection to an immigrant family under the following criteria: the family is in the deportation process, has children who are U.S. citizens, its adults have good work records, and its case has potential to prevail under current law. The participating congregation agrees to host the family for a period of time, either on church-owned grounds or other real estate or in the home of a family that belongs to the congregation. The congregation will help provide material support for the family (some congregations will only provide such support) and will be willing to make its support public.

The New Sanctuary Movement has, of course, its critics. Lupe Moreno, spokeswoman for Latino Americans for Immigration Reform, told the Times, the Sanctuary folks “talk about preserving family unity, but illegal immigrants leave wives, husbands and children in Mexico all the time --- and sometimes never see them again. I've met lots of people who remember being abandoned by parents who left them behind in Mexico."

[Tax-chick]

Maybe Mahony’s Go’a’uld symbiote is Huitzilopochtli. It would explain a LOT ...