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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Same Catholics on here preaching away! This may be our first total agreement moment Steve. I'm 150% anti immigration.

Can this also be blamed on Vatican II?

Unlikely, as the theological foundations for the Catholic Church’s activism predate Vatican II by at least a decade. In 1952, Pius XII published Exsul Familia Nazarethana, which started off,

The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth, fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil.

The church’s efforts were initially focused on providing priests, churches, seminaries, schools, hospitals, orphanages, etc., for Catholic populations that had already emigrated on their own to new places—all reasonable and positive efforts. However, political activism to encourage increased immigration started almost immediately after World War II, and increased dramatically in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Pius XII wrote the following to the American bishops on Dec. 24, 1948:

You know indeed how preoccupied we have been and with what anxiety we have followed those who have been forced by revolutions in their own countries, or by unemployment or hunger to leave their homes and live in foreign lands.

The natural law itself, no less than devotion to humanity, urges that ways of migration be opened to these people. For the Creator of the universe made all good things primarily for the good of all. Since land everywhere offers the possibility of supporting a large number of people, the sovereignty of the State, although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations, provided of course, that the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid this.

Informed of our intentions, you recently strove for legislation to allow many refugees to enter your land. Through your persistence, a provident law was enacted, a law that we hope will be followed by others of broader scope. In addition, you have, with the aid of chosen men, cared for the emigrants as they left their homes and as they arrived in your land, thus admirably putting into practice the precept of priestly charity: “The priest is to injure no one; he will desire rather to aid all.” (St. Ambrose, “De Officiis ministrorum,” lib. 3, c. IX).

Even if the Catholics’ efforts hadn’t started off this way, it would only have been a matter of time before the Catholic refugee agencies started advocating for near unrestricted immigration, as the trajectory of the various Protestant churches’ refugee agencies demonstrates.

To give just one example, after WWI, the Lutheran churches in America established welfare agencies to provide aid to their coreligionists in Europe and to help resettle a small number of Lutherans in the United States. They did the same again after WWII, then began helping eastern Europeans (again, mostly Lutherans) who were fleeing persecution at the hands of the Soviets. Through the 1970s, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) shifted to hooking up anti-communist refugees from Cuba and Vietnam with local Lutheran congregations, so the latter could help them find housing, jobs, etc. After the end of the Cold War, many Lutherans kind of forgot that the organization existed, and evaporative cooling meant that die-hard immigration supporters were the only ones still invested enough to keep things running. With little financial support from congregations, they turned to the federal government for funding (made possible thanks to George Bush’s push for the government to partner with religious non-profits), and they used those funds to help bring in Africans, South and Central Americans, Afghanis, and others. In 2019, they hired a Hindu Democratic apparatchik (former Policy Director to First Lady Michelle Obama) as CEO, and earlier this year, with the skinsuiting of the organization complete, they eliminated “Lutheran” from their name and rebranded as “Global Refuge.”

All of which is to say, no matter how reasonable and uncontroversial these organizations’ actions may have been at the start, eventually they were all taken over by activists after their original mission had been accomplished. To prevent that, people need to learn to formally abolish organizations they are involved with once they have completed their original purpose, rather than step down from positions of leadership with the organization still intact.