Here's a rebuke from Pope Benedict XVI
As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the 'logos'". God acts with “logos.” “Logos” means both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the “logos,” and the “logos” is God, says the Evangelist.
I would recommend you read "Render Unto Caesar" by Archbishop Charles Chaput. You will learn a lot. The Catholic Church is not a law enforcement entity nor exclusively an American institution. It has a higher mission. It is an organization answerable only to the source of our rights, not those who seek to restrict or ration them. It is an institution that is a collection of citizens with a right to speak out on any issue like any other organization. As citizens, we will not abdicate our shared civic life to a political or economic elite or vocal crowd. Frankly, we Catholics are a little tired of hearing outsiders tell us to keep quiet about our religious and moral views in the big public debates that involve all of us as a society.
A nation's political life, like Christianity itself, is meant for everyone, and everyone has a duty to contribute to it. A democracy depends on the active involvement of all its citizens, not just lobbyists, experts, think tanks and the mass media. For Catholics, politics and the pursuit of justice and the individual good in the public square, is part of our history of salvation. No one is a minor actor in that drama. Each person is important.
Tolerance is not a Christian virtue, but charity, justice, mercy, prudence, and honesty. Tolerating evil and injustice within a society is itself a form of serious evil.
Our form of pluralism does not mean that Catholics should be quiet in public about moral issues because of some misguided sense of good manners. A healthy democracy requires vigorous moral debate to survive. Real pluralism demands that people of strong beliefs will advance their convictions in the public square, peacefully, legally and respectfully, but energetically and without embarrassment. Anything less is bad citizenship and a form of theft from the public conversation.
You mis-spelled your screen name, mad_as_ole
From the article: “It also recognizes the right of persons to migrate so that they can realize their God-given rights.”
I hope I read that quote wrong, but didn’t the Catholic Church’s Bishop’s Statement on Immigration just take the position that people have the RIGHT TO IMMIGRATE TO AMERICA?
If so, the Bishops are arguably over the theological line and into the territory of sedition/treason.
I suspect the Catholics, being a monarchical structure, have difficulties with America being a republic of sovereign citizens. Because we are sovereign citizens, we need not accept “authority”, not do we tend to accept the interpretation of the word of G*d, having Bibles of our own.
America is, at its core, Protestant. Catholicism is authoritarian in a way which must give the Catholic Bishops acute dyspepsia at times - times like this debate.
Personally, I find any specific religious “authority” claiming that God commands us to cede any portion of the Constitution to Mexicans to be ill advised, and eventually likely to cause a rejection of the Catholic Church.
No man has the “right to migrate to America” as I don’t have the right to migrate elsewhere.
I can apply for permission to move to another land, but to claim a divinely approved right for me to so do is assinine, if not overtly Liberation Theology.
PS Liberation Theology is communism with a churchy renaming plastered over the same old ancient evil.