When Will U.S. Bishops Show Courage?
On November 10, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will hold its fall conference in Baltimore. With some notable exceptions, bishops’ response to the persecution and mass detention of thousands of their own parishoners has been limp.
It’s good to see that the “evolving situation impacting immigrants and refugees” is on their agenda, although one laments the awkwardness of the wording. One can only hope the discussion will be more frank and direct.
Up until now, even when bishops speak out, they don’t seem to believe their job is to mobilize their flock and educate their pastors to make protecting the lives of immigrants as urgent as protecting the lives of the unborn.
I started resuming attendance at my suburban Catholic parish the Sunday after election day. I wanted to be able to love and forgive the white Catholics — more than 50 % — who voted for the current president, despite the harsh and misleading rhetoric from him and his Catholic convert vice president that often demonized people fleeing oppression and unspeakable poverty in their own countries.
I’ve been able to do that, knowing that it’s not up to me to judge others. But what is unforgivable is that I have not heard one sermon at my church that links care for immigrants to the gospel, even when the gospel is about the Good Samaritan!
Get Celia Wexler’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Too often, Catholics in the pews are taught that our relationship to the divine is a purely personal experience — that our prayerful attendance at Mass, and strong faith is somehow divorced from the detention centers, the separation of families, the inhumanity of it all.
How many times have Catholics heard sermons about the evils of abortion? How often have pastors urged their flock to join the annual March for Life? And yet that zeal for life seems to end as soon as the pre-born child makes it out of the womb.
When bishops meet this November, Catholic women of The Dorothea Project — dorotheaproject.com — will be asking them to think now about revising their election-year guide to faithful citizenship, issued before presidential elections, to clarify that being pro-life needs a larger lens than opposition to abortion. As Pope Leo has stated, a pro-life position opposes capital punishment and also supports the human dignity of immigrants.
Bishops are supposed to be a community’s spiritual leaders. Even when they’re on the right side of the issue, they are not doing enough to assert their moral authority.
Even grassroots movements need courageous leaders. Remember Rev. Martin Luther King? Notre Dame president Rev. Theodore Hesburgh? Hesburgh was such a forceful proponent of civil rights he angered Richard Nixon and lost his job as head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Father Hesburgh also lamented the church’s growing single-minded obsession with abortion, proclaiming: “We cannot be loud in condemning abortion after being silent about napalmed Vietnamese or seemingly unconscious of the horrible present fact that 60 percent of the children already born in the poorest countries … die before the age of 5.”
Catholic laity — both men and women — are doing their best to fill this vacuum. But if bishops can’t speak truth to power at this perilous time, when can we expect them to speak out, loud and forcefully, with one voice?
