At issue is Bishop Loverde’s mandate that all priests, seminarians, nuns, church employees and lay volunteers who work with children be fingerprinted for a criminal background check per the Dallas Charter. If undocumented, meaning illegal, aliens are forced to be fingerprinted, is this going to “dry up” Hispanic volunteer participation? I suppose we’ll see. I think the article is a fair treament of the issue by the Wash Times.
Some priests are objecting to the Bishop’s mandate. Others, it seems, are waiting to draw a line in sand.
The fingerprinting doesn’t trouble Leah Tenorio, director of Hispanic ministry at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Alexandria, as much as the requirement for Social Security numbers. She estimated that 40 percent of the Hispanics whom she ministers lack Social Security cards.
“If you can’t complete a background check, what do you do? Does it mean they can’t minister?” she said.
Ms. Tenorio should take the Bishop at his word. According the Bishop’s mandate, the answer is no, they can’t minister unless they’ve had a background check. Bishop Loverde clearly wants to follow the Dallas Charter to the letter. Let’s see what happens if parishes like Good Shepherd don’t comply with this mandate. If they are not forced to comply with the mandate and fingerprint all volunteers it could create a tremendous amount of liability for the Diocese if, God forbid, any future case of sexual abuse came to light.
Here’s another consequence the of Federal gov’t’s policy of more or less not enforcing immigration law regarding our southern neighbors, coming home to roost.
Both the Bush and Clinton administrations have allowed massive continued illegal immigration. Companies want cheap labor, and Democrats want illegal votes, so each party gets something. Neither party wants to throw illegals out, and neither party wants to explicitly make them legal.
Then we’d have to pay the immigrants decently, (social justice, anyone?) and they’d have to pay their taxes. I would argue that immigration is fine as long as it’s legal; the current situation simply breeds contempt for the law all around.
So the Diocese of Arlington gets caught in the middle. The fingerprinting plan risks exposing the illegal status of lots of people to whom the parishes minister. The illegals don’t want to be found out. The parishes don’t want to lose volunteers.
In the end, I’ll bet the diocese–and the USCCB–back down. The impression I’ve long gotten is that church bureaucrats tend to be very soft on illegal immigration. The civil government is failing to do one of its basic duties, and the Church gets caught wanting to minister, but not wanting to scare people away. The Orange County diocese practice mentioned in the article will probably come to Arlington.
So…
1. The bishops want to fingerprint everyone who has any duty in a parish, because somebody might be a sex offender.
2. Many church officials think we should look the other way for some people, lest they be exposed for breaking federal immigration laws.
So we’ve got a zero-tolerance policy for sexual sins, but an open-door policy for lawbreaking illegals who drive down wages for the poorest Americans, and drive up the cost of social services for local governments, and contribute very little to society in any way.
Do Christians have an obligation to help the poor? Of course. Does that mean we have to import more poor people, or abet their stay once they are in America? I don’t think that’s the case, and I think our prior obligation is to the poor who were here first.
Exactly, Eric. The reason illegals drive wages down for everyone else is because they are not covered by our wage and schedule laws. If their employers had to pay Social Security, disability, etc., the illegals wouldn’t be so much cheaper than everyone else.
That’s not social justice. The illegals don’t get paid fairly according to our laws. Poorer American citizens have a harder time looking for work *because they’re too expensive compared to illegals.* The illegals learn that we don’t care about the law if we can get their labor on the cheap. Which of course is still much better than they can do in Mexico, so they come here anyway. And our social services and medical programs get drained because illegals don’t get turned down at the emergency room, etc. And they don’t pay their fair share.
Instead, we ought to enforce immigration law vigorously, and decide just how many immigrants we want. Those who come in legally would do so under the full protection of the law, and learn that we take our laws and values seriously.
Those who come in illegally know it wouldn’t be worth their while to risk their lives with unscrupulous border-runners because they wouldn’t be able to get work.
I’m neither hispanic nor an illegal alien (nor do I play one on TV), but I object to having to be finger printed just to have the privilege to volunteer to read stories to my kid’s kindergarten class while the teacher (who has been finger printed and run through a background check) is in the room with me.
Most of the volunteers are stay-at-home moms with multiple children. This policy is just like the airport screeners strip searching granny and making her dump out all her prescription bottles while offering the guy behind her, a twenty-something syrian with smoking sneakers, a free upgrade to first class.
You would think that the USCCB would be aware that federal and local judges demand Church records, including private ones and ones that might compromise the confessional.
This fingerprinting plan would help if ‘they ever wanted to round up the Catholics’.