The last thing I’d want to be in our time is an American bishop.
The recent letter from the USCCB to President Trump, on illegal immigration, was measured in tone, nor did it fail, implicitly, to recognize the duty of those in public office to provide for the common good, taking all circumstances into account. It was greatly superior to the moral posing and preening wherein the Episcopal prelate in Washington indulged herself at the service following the inauguration, to the predictable applause of her true audience and to the hardening of the president’s opposition to anything she had to say.
And yet, who will listen? I have heard some people say that the first thing the Trump administration did for Catholics who voted for him was to betray them, giving their bishops the stiff arm. That assumes that American Catholics, as a whole, like and admire their bishops. They do not. Whether they should is another question. It also assumes that when they see a missive coming from the USCCB, they think of their own bishop. Unless their bishop is one of the most vocal of the players, they do not.
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It is a thankless task to manage decline. When I was a boy, in the heady days following Vatican II, our bishop, Joseph Carroll McCormick, set about a diocesan campaign called Project: Expansion—and yes, the colon was in the phrase, as I saw on a billboard outside our town. Call it market-driven punctuation. The diocese was going to build. I don’t fault him for that. He wanted especially to build diocesan high schools, one of which I myself later attended. He did not see the disaster in store for the Church. That disaster came in several forms.
There was the sudden and calamitous collapse of the teaching orders among religious sisters. They donned a fancy feminism, which ended up ensuring that the children of the poor and the working class would never be taught within the haven of the Church. There was the revolution in sexual mores, or their near universal abandonment, which would, again, devastate the poor. It also gave the Church fewer children for the schools and fewer young men for the seminaries. Besides, sins of the flesh turn the eyes away from heavenly things, as people accept the lie that all real comforts to be had are in this world.
There was, in parish after parish, the self-inflicted wound of “renovation,” usually against the people’s wishes. I will not get into the new rite for the Mass, except to note here that it was the American bishops, or the translators they put in charge, who diluted or betrayed the prayers at Mass by excision, reduction, and distortion. Then the homosexual priests threw their party and invited many an altar boy to join in—for the sex abuse scandal was overwhelmingly homosexual. They turned many a seminary into a bathhouse, bidding, as Michael Rose puts it, goodbye to good men. We will be paying for those misdeeds for a very long time.
What’s a bishop, for an American Catholic? He’s the man who shuts down your school or the church you have attended all your life. He’s the man who imposes a year’s wait before you can get married, looking the other way if you are living already in the same house. He makes you leap bureaucratic hurdles before your children can receive First Communion. If you’ve got a parish full of people who actually believe that Christ is present in the Eucharist, and who kneel to receive the sacrament or line up for Confession before Mass, the bishop is, too often, a shadowy figure to keep at bay. He provides a cover for bad priests, while taking out his frustration against the good.
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As I say, much of this criticism is too harsh, and for many good but usually unrecognized bishops, it is flatly unfair, even calumnious. Now comes the Trump administration, determined to enforce immigration laws that target the eleven million people—though no one really knows the number—who are here illegally. A wide variety of considerations come into play.
First come the laws in question, passed by the people’s representatives in Congress. The bishops do not imply that these laws are unjust. If, given current circumstances, it would be a miscarriage of justice and a harm to the common good to enforce these laws after so many years of erratic enforcement or of conniving at their violation, the bishops should explain why. To set aside a law is itself a grave matter, as it gives people the sense that they are governed by caprice in the executive or in the vast and impenetrable administrative state.
Even so, the bishops may be right, that the repatriation of so many people would be a humanitarian disaster. But then they should consider other relevant circumstances: the wages of working class men, depressed by cheap labor in farming, construction, and factory work; overburdened social services in areas that can ill afford it; inequity committed against people who wish to immigrate to the United States legally; the enrichment of cartels trading in drugs and human beings; assimilation to American ways, hardly possible when you have admitted a huge class of people holding together as they must because their continued presence is uncertain and because their manner of entry has placed them in a moral and cultural contradiction.
