Would you agree that the Catholic Church has an image problem? The causes aren't just third-rate novels like "The Da Vinci Code" or the "discovery" of "The Gospel of Judas," as if spurious ancient writings about Jesus Christ were something new under the sun.
No, the image problem is largely self-imposed these days. The Church's enemies magnify the flaws of her members, to be sure, but they did not instill those flaws, nor do they install those members into positions of power.
Primarily, the Church's reputation has suffered because of the priest sex scandals. I would argue -- I have argued -- that the laity share the blame, for insisting that their clergy be "nice," non-judgmental, and non-dogmatic. But the primary responsibility rests with the bishops who did very little to stop the problem, beyond moving offending priests into therapy or reshuffling them into different jobs.
The scandal, then, stemmed from bad governance. (If you think the problem was because priests can't get married, you came to the wrong blog.) Instead of confronting the problem and causing a temporary disruption, bishops opted for a "soft" approach that would not cause grave scandal to non-Catholics. The result was an even more grave scandal when the facts came to light. To those outside the Church, it looked like bishops were doing what was good for their "tribe" instead of doing what was right. And there was much truth in that assessment.
In light of that, non-Catholics will be forgiven if they think the bishops' defense of illegal immigration is just another cynical ploy. In this case, the prelates want to continue the flow of immigrants so they can increase the size of their flocks and wield more influence in society.
I do not pretend to know what goes on in the heads of the bishops, whether individually or collectively. Personally, I doubt that they are that coldly calculating, and they genuinely believe that legal and illegal immigrants should all be granted citizenship, showered with various forms of public assistance, and receive a gentle kiss on the forehead before going to sleep every night. But you can't blame the public at large for harboring doubts.
What's wrong with the bishops is their penchant for translating the social teaching of the Church into a kind of naive, knee-jerk, nanny-state liberalism. This kind of clericalism breeds contempt for the Church - even on the part of those who find it politically convenient to exploit the bishops' naivitee.
I've said myself that the greatest damage The Scandal has done to the Church is that its secular credibility is completely gone. "Secular credibility" is not the same thing as "credibility in secular circles," but rather "worldly trust in its prudential judgments." For the foreseeable future, no non-Catholic will take the Church's word for anything and even plenty of Catholics will not take its word on quite a few things, primarily in matters secular.
No, I'm not beyond thinking that the US bishops want open borders as a quick way of increasing the size of their flocks. Whether this is from "cold calculation" or from distrust of sovereignty (particularly that of a secular republic) or from the naivete that surrounds leading a 2,000-year-old multinational institution with divine guarantees, or reflects laziness or despair about converting the populations they have, or simply reflects the sorts of people that surround them and their construction of the immigration debate in the public sphere -- all those possibilities are not for me to know or decide among.
They are epistmologically indistinguishable from the outside though.
For the foreseeable future, no non-Catholic will take the Church's word for anything ...
For example, I think The Scandal is one factor (among others certainly) for why THE DAVINCI CRAP has proven so popular and so many people are taking it seriously. The "Catholic Church lies and covers-up things" meme is so well set in the public mind that even something as silly and indefensible as Brown's fantasies get a hearing.