Pope Francis offers support to El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz for George Floyd memorial
Posted on 05/02/2024 12:17:23 PM PDT by ebb tide
“Texas Bishop Taking on Greg Abbott Gets Pope Francis’ Protection” is the curious title of an April 30th article in Newsweek. Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso needs “protection” from Greg Abbott? Are there Texas state troopers surrounding his house? Is he in imminent danger of arrest?
There are bishops in the world in imminent danger of those things and worse. A retired bishop in Mexico was just released by his kidnappers. Bishops in Africa face the constant threat of martyrdom. And Bishop Mark Seitz? He lives in a comfortable residence in El Paso, travels freely, and shows up regularly on podcasts and in the mainstream media.
Does he need “protection,” or is this just another example of progressives pretending they are being oppressed when they enjoy the favor of the mainstream media?
Bishop Seitz has been “taking on” Greg Abbott in the sense that he has been sharply critical of the governor and his efforts to stem the tide of illegal border crossings. I don’t recall the governor “taking on” Bishop Seitz or saying much of anything about him. Has he told people not to go to church? Has he demanded that the Vatican remove him as bishop? Of course not. This isn’t China. We don’t have that sort of cozy relationship with the Vatican. It’s easy to “stand up” to someone when there are no consequences for doing so.
Bishop Seitz claims that Texas officials’ efforts at the U.S.-Mexico border are “transparently political” and part of a “broader, brutal, historical project in Texas to criminalize and police people who migrate.” That’s an interesting claim. I’d like to see the historical evidence to back it up. It’s also an odd claim given that 40.2% of Texas’s population is Hispanic, while only 39.4% are non-Hispanic whites. The only state that comes close to that is California, whose population is 40% Hispanic. Houston, in fact, is demographically the most international city in the country, surpassing even Los Angeles and New York.
I teach at a small Catholic university in Houston, and our student population is filled with students from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. I always have to laugh when “top” schools brag about having successfully achieved 15% minority student population. To us, that’s like bragging about your rowboat next to someone’s naval destroyer. We haven’t seen minority numbers that low for decades—although we may need to redefine the category. As the population figures indicate, non-Hispanic whites are now the minority. If Texas has been engaged in a long, brutal project to keep out immigrants, they have failed spectacularly.
I have several objections to the bishop’s claim that Texas officials’ efforts to secure the border are “transparently political”. The first is the basic wish that people would not use the term “political” to mean something dubious and cynical. The philosopher Aristotle said that human beings are by nature “political animals” (politikon zoon), that is, they live in a polis, in cities, and they engage in acts of collective deliberation about the common good. We need to be more authentically political, which means developing the skills of public deliberation and dialogue rather than public posing and virtue signaling.
Second, on the proper understanding of the term “political,” of course the governor is, and should be, “transparently political.” Would the bishop prefer that the governor was “secretly political”? Someone needs to tell the bishop that the Texas governor’s office is not the Vatican: we actually like transparency here.
Greg Abbott is an elected official—elected, by the way, by double-digit margins, whereas the bishop was appointed by a distant, autocratic pope. If the bishop proposed legislation to leave the border open and let whoever desires it to come into the country, does anyone imagine it would pass? Would it gain even 35% approval in a state with a Hispanic majority that has elected and re-elected Greg Abbott three times by wide margins?
But the third problem with Bishop Seitz’s whole approach is the way he looks down at those who disagree with him, as though someone couldn’t possibly have good, legitimate reasons to oppose the current mess at the Texas border and that the only reason anyone could have a view different from his is because they are cynically using the issue for political gains. Some politicians probably are. It’s not as though politicians on the other side aren’t using the issue for political gains. For those of us who care about the immigrants at our southern border, it was disappointing to see the constant drumbeat about their treatment disappear the moment Joe Biden was elected. It makes one think that it was never about the treatment of immigrants per se, but always and only about “getting Trump.”
There used to be daily reports about the horrors at the border. Now, almost nothing. Things aren’t any better; they’re much worse. Why the silence?
Perhaps people like Greg Abbott and others are worried about immigrants. Perhaps they’re worried about the trafficking, worried about the war going on across our border that is empowering the cartels, worried about the miserable situation of poor people in Latin American dictatorships, like Venezuela, or in a failed state like Haiti. Does the bishop wish to speak “truth to power” to those groups? If so, let him cross the border and “take on” the cartels in Mexico, Maduro in Venezuela, and Ortega in Nicaragua. Good luck with that. We’ll see how far Pope Francis’s “protection” gets him there. The bishops in those countries would be able to enlighten him.
I tend to be a person who favors more immigration. There would likely be more agreement between Bishop Seitz and me than he might imagine. But on this matter, we might say something similar to what C. S. Lewis once said about marriage. Societies have disagreed over how many wives a man may have, but no society has said that a man should have any woman he wants. So, too, I would likely disagree with many people over how many immigrants should be licensed to enter the country yearly (I prefer more), but I think it unreasonable to claim that the border should be open to anyone who wants to enter. What number would be best and what kind of “permitting” should be required are matters of prudential judgment on which people of goodwill can disagree.
In such dialogues about matters requiring judgments of prudence, it is rarely a good idea to claim that your interlocutor is not only wrong but arguing with bad intentions. It is no better—usually worse—to argue not only that one’s interlocutors are arguing with bad intentions, but that they are also bad Catholics. “There still might be a lot of people who end up being angry” at this position on immigration, says Bishop Seitz, “but they better be ready to take on the Holy Father as well.” Really? Am I a bad Catholic if I’m not sure that what the pope says about this issue applies perfectly to the specific problem we face on the Texas-Mexico? So are all those Catholics who disagree with the pope on homosexuality bad Catholics? Or just those who disagree with Bishop Seitz? There’s a word for that sort of special pleading by bishops: it’s called clericalism. Pope Francis has had harsh words to say about the problems it has caused.
What can we say about bishops who insist on condemning Greg Abbott for his efforts to staunch the flow of illegally trafficked immigrants at the border but refuse to condemn Joe Biden publicly? Even though he supports killing unborn children, something categorically condemned in the strongest terms from the early Church until now, a condemnation repeated in the strongest terms in the Second Vatican Council and by Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis? This is a man who literally made the sign of the cross at the mention of “abortion rights.”
Perhaps we can repeat something Bishop Seitz is quoted as saying: “Frankly, in this secularizing age, even people who consider themselves Christians are more formed it seems in their thoughts, in their behaviors, by the political sort of thinking than by church teaching. They want to make their Christianity fit their political outlook rather than the other way around.” Thank you, Bishop Seitz, for that clear statement of the problem.
I pray that we will treat immigrants better. But beating up on Greg Abbott isn’t helping them; it’s just alienating people from the Church who have a different view of how to help them. Stick with the basic principles—state them forcefully and with passion, if you wish—but leave the prudential politics to the politicians. And for heaven’s sake, you might consider actually talking with these people instead of merely heckling them from atop the ecclesiastical white tower.
Likewise, just prior to the last presidential election, Francis implied Trump wasn't a christian for wanting to "build walls".
Ping
They’re both heretics.
Archdiocese of San Antonio is acting rather corrupt of late.
ps: the 2023 and 2024 Solar Eclipses intersected right there.
Marxism and marxist disinformation and misinformation are the core of “social justice”, including “Catholic social justice”.
It is the problem with confused people like Pope Francis and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, et al. Barrett is strong on life issues, but like the Pope and Chief Justice is completely upside down with true justice.
There is only one real justice, which is justice based in Christian values and the whole truth.
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