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Notes -
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 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:
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.
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