Friday, July 2, 2010

Archbishop Charles Chaput on Immigration.

As a devout Catholic, I find that, whatever the issue, Denver's archbishop, Charles Chaput usually finds the most sensible solution to any particular problem or controversy. Reading his May 05, 2010 column in the Denver Catholic Register, I believe the Archbishop hits the proverbial nail on the head regarding illegal immigration.

In the above mentioned column, Chaput makes three salient observations;

"First, illegal immigration is wrong and dangerous for everyone involved. There’s nothing “good” about people risking their lives for the mere purpose of entering the United States. There’s nothing “good” about our nation not knowing who crosses our borders and why they’re here, especially in an age of terrorism, drugs and organized violent crime. There’s nothing “good” about people living in the shadows; or families being separated; or decent people being deported and having to start their lives all over again, sometimes in a country that they no longer—or never did—know.

Second, the new Arizona law, despite its flaws, does unintentionally accomplish one good thing. Thanks to Arizona, the urgency of immigration reform and the human issues that underlie it—deported breadwinners; divided families; the anxiety of children who grew up here but do not have citizenship—once again have moved to the front burner of our national discussions. Our current immigration system is now obviously broken. Congress needs to act.

Third, no credible immigration reform will occur if the effort becomes an exercise in partisan maneuvering. Both of our major political parties got our country into our current immigration mess. Both parties bear responsibility for fixing it. Neither will solve it alone. Unfortunately, the recent national health-care debate compromised public confidence in some of our key federal lawmakers. Having pushed through a deeply flawed national health-care bill in the face of serious concerns and widespread public displeasure, Congress now faces an equally hard task with an equally volatile issue. This will require a transparency, patience, spirit of compromise and bipartisanship rarely seen in Washington in the best of seasons, and too often completely missing in the recent health-care debate."

All of us, Catholic and non-Catholic as well, can learn quite a bit from the Archbishop's measured approach. Unfortunately, our country lacks a political leader with similar wisdom.

4 comments:

Al said...

Yes, Archbishop Chaput is usually right on with what should be done in a situation. How he started this out shows that: "First, illegal immigration is wrong and dangerous for everyone involved." How many others have you heard point out this obvious fact????

Al said...

Yes, Archbishop Chaput is usually right on with what should be done in a situation. How he started this out shows that: "First, illegal immigration is wrong and dangerous for everyone involved." How many others have you heard point out this obvious fact????

Robert Simms said...

For some reason Al, I received an email notification that you had made a comment on this.....but the comment was not showing up here.
So, I manually put in your comment. I hope this glitch straightens itself out.

Al said...

It looks like it finally did. I had a similar problem with my blog as did a lot of others.

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