ROME – Shortly after Donald Trump was elected anew to the presidency in part due to strong support from Catholics, the U.S. bishops put the incoming administration on notice regarding the possibility of mass deportations of immigrants.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the military archdiocese, president of the bishops’ conference, said he and his fellow prelates have pledged “to see Christ in those who are most in need, to defend and lift up the poor, and to encourage immigration reform, while we continue to care for those in need who cross our borders.”
“We will all have to stand before the throne of grace and hear the Lord ask us if we saw him in the hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, stranger, or sick and responded to his needs,” Broglio said, to applause from the conference.
Some observers, especially on cable TV news and on social media, have taken the bishops’ pro-immigrant stand as indicative of an anti-Trump, left-leaning bias within the conference on social issues. Presumably, that’s because for the broader political culture in America, immigration usually is a left/right issue.
History, however, teaches that for America’s Catholic bishops, the defense of immigrants is hardly the exclusive hobbyhorse of the hierarchy’s left wing.
Take, for instance, Bishop Michael Gallagher of Detroit, who was confronted with a sudden influx of Maltese immigrants in the 1920s, mostly drawn to work in the auto industry. Gallagher incardinated a priest from Malta to minister to the community, he allowed Maltese immigrants to use the diocese’s Knights of Equity Hall not only to worship but also to organize in defense of their rights, and he approved efforts to build a Maltese parish.
This was the same Bishop Gallagher who appointed Fr. Charles Coughlin as a pastor in Royal Oak, Michigan, where he launched a radio ministry and went to become known as America’s “radio priest.” Despite Coughlin’s increasingly anti-Semitic edge and his ferocious attacks on President Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal Liberalism, Gallagher stood by him.
Once, when the pope’s apostolic delegate in American asked Gallagher to muzzle Coughlin, he flatly refused: “I made no mistake, and I have never doubted my judgment in putting him before the microphone,” Gallagher is said to have replied.
Or, consider Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, one of the most ardently anti-Communist prelates American Catholicism ever produced.
“I believe that every real American, if he but knew the truth, would strive to defend this nation from Communists who, wielding their weapons of intrigue and infamy, are imposing on our country their profane pattern of serfdom,” he once wrote in a 1946 essay for The American Legion Magazine.
Yet Spellman warmly welcomed Puerto Rican migrants to New York City, among other things instructing local clergy to learn Spanish so that they would be able to minister to the Puerto Ricans in their own language. Spellman also became a major sponsor of celebrations around New York of the feast of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Puerto Rico.
To round out the picture, let’s recall Archbishop Robert Lucey of San Atonio, Texas, who was a steadfast friend of the area’s burgeoning population of Mexican migrants. He insisted that all construction projects in the archdiocese use unionized labor, at a time when most construction workers were Mexicans. He was an outspoken opponent of what he considered the abuses under the bracero program that brought Mexicano farm workers into the U.S., so much so that in 1950 he was named to President Harry Truman’s Commission on Migratory Labor. He also desegrated all Catholic schools in the archdiocese in 1953.
Yet Lucey would also become a close friend of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, and an ardent supporter of the war in Vietnam. He opposed the introduction of sexual education into public schools, and he was blasé about the reforms unleashed by the Second Vatican Council. Lucey was an old-school authoritarian as a bishop, expecting absolute obedience, and his relationship with his priests deteriorated to such a point that in 1968 his own clergy sent a letter to Pope Paul VI demanding that he be removed.
Absolutely no serious historian would classify Gallagher, Spellman and Lucey as political or theological “liberals,” but their support for immigrants is a matter of record.
What drove such solidarity? Aside from a concern about human rights and dignity rooted in faith, there’s also the basic fact that Maltese, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans are all overwhelmingly Catholic, and so their growing presence in Detroit in the 1920s, New York in the 1940s and San Antonio in the 1940s and 50s bolstered the Catholic footprint in those communities, something that any bishop generally would appreciate.
Much the same logic applies today.
Famously, a 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that one in ten adults in America today, or 10 percent is an ex-Catholic, while only 2.6 percent of American adults converted to Catholicism after having been raised something else. Given those numbers, one would expect that the Catholic share of the American population should be in free-fall. In fact, it’s held fairly steady at around 20-25 percent because of the impact of Hispanic immigration.
A large part of the reason that American bishops have been so enthusiastic about immigration in the 20th and 21st centuries, while their European counterparts have been more ambivalent (especially before the advent of Pope Francis), is because most immigrants to the U.S. have been Catholic, while in many European nations, their most rapidly growing immigrant communities are Muslim.
The raw fact of the matter is that when a pastor says Mass for a group of people, when he hears their confessions and marries their young and buries their old, when he watches some of their sons become priests and some of their daughters become nuns, he’s likely to recoil at seeing that group mistreated, oppressed or expelled, whatever his politics in other arenas.
Thus, for all those tempted to perceive an “anti-Trump” thrust to the bishops’ warning on immigration, context is important. It wouldn’t matter who was in the White House, because immigration is one of those rare questions where the American bishops, if not so much the rank and file, are largely united … and for reasons both prophetic and practical.
