Pope enters US immigration fray, backs bishops’ statement

Speaking with reporters outside his villa in Castel Gandolfo on November 18, the Pope was asked what he thought of the “special pastoral message on immigration” issued by the US bishops six days earlier.

Pope Leo insisted that the dignity of all people, including immigrants, must be respected.

“When people are living good lives – and many of them (in the United States) for 10, 15, 20 years – to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful, to say the least”, is not acceptable, the Pope said.

He added that the bishops’ pastoral message is “a very important statement. I would invite especially all Catholics, but people of goodwill, to listen carefully to what they said”.

“No one has said that the United States should have open borders,” the Pope noted. “I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter.”

However, in enforcing immigration policy, “we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have”.

“If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that,” he said. “There are courts. There’s a system of justice,” but the system has “a lot of problems” that should be addressed.

In their pastoral message, the US bishops stated: “We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement . . . We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centres and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status.”

The bishops also said, “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people”, and they prayed “for an end to dehumanising rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement”.

The Associated Press reported that the bishops’ “special message” was rare – the first time since 2013 the bishops had penned such a single-issue statement at one of their meetings. It was accompanied by an Instagram video of individual bishops reading the text on camera, to hammer home its message.

FULL STORY

Pope calls treatment of migrants in U.S. ‘extremely disrespectful’ (By Cindy Wooden/CNS)

Pope strongly backs US bishops on immigration support, urges humane treatment (Associated Press/CruxNow)

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US ‘border czar’ Tom Homan calls US bishops ‘wrong’ after immigration statement (National Catholic Reporter)