April 12, 2006, 7:20 a.m.
The Bishops’ Borders
A question of principles and practicalities.

By John O'Sullivan

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the April 24, 2006, issue of National Review.

Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles recently proposed that Catholics begin the Lenten season by fasting and praying to defeat a bill just passed by the House of Representatives to tighten up the enforcement of immigration control and border security. It sounded like a new sort of progressive penance for recalcitrant pre-Vatican II Catholics — but the cardinal was apparently in earnest. He warned his archdiocese that "hysterical" anti-immigrant sentiment was sweeping the nation, argued that the House bill was tantamount to "punishing people who help immigrants," suggested that it could mean the Church would have to ask for documentation before serving communion at the altar rail, called for "humane" reform of immigration law more or less identical with the McCain-Kennedy bill (amnesty, guest workers, more family-reunification visas, etc.), announced that he would instruct his priests to ignore and even defy the rules if they became law, and declared that he himself would go to prison if necessary to make the point.

There were a number of oddities about this heroic defiance of impending tyranny. To begin with, nobody was asking Cardinal Mahony to report any illegal aliens at the altar rail or even at the soup kitchen. Yes, the bill at that legislative stage was impermissibly broad (partly as a result of Democratic votes aiming to discredit it), but everyone knew that it would be amended at later stages. The provisions that provoked Cardinal Mahony were aimed at organized gangs of people-smugglers (sometimes known as "coyotes" or, in Asia, "snakeheads") rather than at nuns and social workers. Nor were these aspects of the legislation very new. It has been against the law for decades for people to assist the smuggling and hiding of illegal aliens — and yet comparatively few cardinals have been dragged off to prison during this period. Maybe the cops, notoriously respectful of the cloth, have been turning a blind eye.

Not only was the cardinal safe, he really ought to have felt safe — since, according to one of the bill's co-sponsors, Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), "no one has ever, ever gone after any church or religious organization for that. And we've told that to the Catholic Conference." Mahony's martyrdom had been indefinitely postponed. Even if the cardinal had been facing a real threat, it would still have been somewhat unseemly for him to strike a pose of civil disobedience and to urge the sheltering of fugitives from the law — urgings he repeated in a New York Times op-ed — at a time when the American Catholic Church was only just recovering from the sexual-abuse scandal. At the very least, in the worldly-wise words of Rick Blaine in Casablanca, "It's poor salesmanship." . . .

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