Posted on 03/15/2025 4:43:53 PM PDT by ebb tide
In an interview five days before he would be installed as the new archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Robert W. McElroy expressed concern about the personal impact of the Trump Administration’s controversial policies of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and the widespread firings of federal workers.
When asked what his message would be to the immigrant community at this time, Cardinal McElroy said, “Sorrow. Love, embrace, compassion. Advocacy and solidarity. And all done in God’s name.”
In the wide-ranging March 6 interview with the editors of the Catholic Standard and Spanish-language El Pregonero newspapers of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, the cardinal also addressed his initial approach to leading the archdiocese, what he sees as the Church’s main pastoral challenge in today’s world, and what he has learned from Pope Francis’s example.
Asked about the firings of federal workers, Cardinal McElroy said, “That is going to be a deep wound and a growing wound, I fear, within our parishes and for individuals, because so many of the people who are being fired are people who have been in jobs, where they require talents and skills and, also (they) have had a sense of security in those jobs. So it’s particularly harsh when this comes down on them so abruptly.”
The day before, Washington’s archbishop-elect had celebrated an Ash Wednesday Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, and he greeted people afterward.
“I can’t tell you the number of people as they were coming out, I was saying hello as they were coming out, they would ask me to pray for them, for various things, (and) how many said, ‘Please pray for me. I’ve lost my job,’ or ‘my wife has lost her job,’ or ‘I think I’m going to lose my job.’ It’s much in the consciousness of people now, and I fear the ripple effects it will have, not just within the economy of this area, but also within the culture of the area,” Cardinal McElroy said.
The cardinal said federal workers are facing “a difficult situation. And my concern is that there has to be a clear set of criteria for establishing what’s necessary and what’s not within the federal government. And it doesn’t seem to me that these firings are proceeding from a coherent sense of that. And I think that makes it particularly troublesome, because it’s one thing to let people go when you have to, or because the job isn’t needed or so forth. But always every person is sacred, and should be looked upon in that way, so that at least it’s done in a way that’s thought out, and not kind of as a reactionary process. And I fear we’re falling into that, and I fear there will be a diminishment of the identity of the culture here in Washington. I think it’s going to be very hard.”
From 2015 until Pope Francis named him as the new archbishop of Washington on Jan. 6, 2025, Cardinal McElroy led the Diocese of San Diego, which runs the length of California’s border with Mexico. He noted that undocumented immigrants are woven into the fabric of life in San Diego, just as they are in the Washington area.
Cardinal McElroy said the Church must stand with undocumented immigrants as they face the threat of mass deportations being carried out across the country.
“In San Diego, our Catholic population is about 1.4 million Catholics, and we probably have 180,000 undocumented men, women and children in families. And so many people in our parishes and our communities are people who live family lives, building up their communities, are people of faith, people living good, solid lives, moral lives, and yet this fear has been unleashed on them because of their undocumented status, and so it is critical for the Church that we stand with these communities at this time, and not only with words… but with our actions too, to stand with those who are undocumented,” the cardinal said.
Washington’s new archbishop said this situation has developed because “for the past more than 20 years, our nation’s immigration laws have been broken. The system is broken. The Congress has been unable to address a whole series of dysfunctionalities in our laws, about who we let in and why we let them in, what is asylum, how we secure the borders, how we deal with people who really need to be let in because their plight is so difficult, how we deal with people who should never be let in, because they have criminal backgrounds… (and other issues including) how do we balance employment law, (and) how do we balance giving status over time to those who are undocumented, living within our midst?”
Pope Francis in his recent letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops calling the program of mass deportations a crisis “put his finger right on the problem and the conversation that we’re having on immigration in the United States right now,” Cardinal McElroy said. He noted that the pope in that letter said a country has a right to control its borders, “but he said the core of what’s going on now that is so contrary to the most fundamental Christian beliefs is the effort to label all of these men and women and children who came here without documentation from these terrible conditions, to label them all perpetually as criminals.”
Cardinal McElroy said that when you label immigrants as criminals, “you dehumanize them, you say they’re the other, they’re not like us. And thus it is all right to treat them as lesser, as less human than us. That’s a very dangerous thing. I think he (the pope) was absolutely correct in pointing to that as the problem. And that’s what I think is at the core of the danger we face as a country now. And that’s why we as Christians have to stand up and say, ‘These are our neighbors. These are men and women and children who we know, and they live good lives. They’re not criminals.’”
The majority of those immigrants, the cardinal said, “are men and women and children and families who have often had to flee terrible situations of injustice or economic degradation or danger to their person from gangs… These (are) people who have had to flee here and are living among us in such an exemplary way.”
Cardinal McElroy said earlier waves of immigrants, like the Irish and Italians and Poles, also faced opposition and arguments that “they should not be let in because they’re lowering the stock in the United States.”
Echoing the pope in decrying the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants now underway in the United States, Washington’s new archbishop said the idea “that we would go after them and in a mass, indiscriminate deportation, eject them from our country, would be a grave stain upon the United States in my view.”
“It was considered settled [in favor of McKnight (as new archbishop of D.C.)], ready to make the call, and then it suddenly wasn’t.”
The official said that the appointment of Burch (as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican) was perceived at the Secretariat of State as “aggressive” and “undiplomatic.”
“It ended expectations for a kind of ‘new beginning,’” he said. At the same time, sources close to the process told The Pillar, Cardinal Cupich privately represented the nomination as antagonistic towards Pope Francis personally, requiring an appointment for Washington in response.
The result was Pope Francis reversing his previous decision and opting for McElroy, The Pillar was told.
If Bergoglio and his frankenbishops want to pick a fight with Trump on U.S. internal politics, they're in for a big surprise. They no longer have their "devout Catholic" puppet, Slow Joe Biden, whose strings they were pulling.
Frankencardinal McElroy Barf Alert
Well it is just to bad cardinal McElroy, Catholic leadership can not longer quietly support abortion through the Biden regime and no longer violate our immigration laws for financial gain.
May I suggest you go back and read James to learn that being poor is not an inherent virtue, we are treat all equally as brothers and sisters in Christ, not ascribe virtues to the poor because they are poor, nor favor the rich for their support.
“federal workers”
They can get jobs in the private sector, like most American adults do.
“undocumented immigrants”
They can migrate back home on their own accord, but if they don’t, we’ll assist.
Millions can build American-style houses. Take my word for it, or use your own eyes.
Can others grow and pick food? Yes!
Taking our employment opportunities and leaving us to sleep in sidewalk site tents is not acceptable.
Fix your chuch, McElroy.
Stick to your knitting, please.
Go try to steal some more of our tax money phonies
Cardinal McElroy should also be considered a foreign enemy and deported.
Time to eliminate the 501(c)(3) status for these leftist churches—whatever denomination.
There’s going to be an epic earthquake if the College of Cardinals miraculously elects a Catholic as the next Pope.
If this guy doesn’t recognize that the identity of the culture of DC needs to change from one of corruption and sloth, then he has no business pretending he speaks the Word of God.
Let the Cardinal put to use his own resources to minister to the illegals in their own country of origin, after they are deported en masse.
Illegal invaders are not my problem and they are not my responsibility. They are criminals and must be rooted out and removed .
Such hypocrisy from that frocked freak. No shits given about the 1,000,000 (give or take) children murdered in the womb every year in the USA?!!!
Priorities, it seems, more $$$ in it for him to condone murder and lawlessness.
Catholic, my ass.
And read the whole Old Testament to see what God says about stealing and preferential treatment in the courts.
Also about false shepherds (both civil and religious) who devour the flock they’re supposed to protect.
I don’t give a damn what any Bishop, any other Catholic priest or Pope has to say. If they want to help the immigrants, use some of the Vaticans enormous wealth and try to improve the countries from which they come instead of hoarding the wealth. Put your money where your mouth is or keep it shut hypocrites.
Tending to the salvation of people should be independent of their geography or employment status.
Follow the money!
That’s fine. How will he pay for the federal workers? And is he endorsing criminality?
Or the bankrupting of the entire country or basic immigration LAWS or all the children trafficked and raped or the bloated make-work and cause-trouble federal workforce or suffocating American business under millions of regs or the most massive graft and corruption in the nation’s history or, or, or, or...
Screw him!
The esteemed archibishop can go to hell.
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