This from an interview with the Los Angeles eminence by John Allen of the lefty National Catholic Reporter:

NCR: A recent piece titled “Cardinal Errors” in National Review suggested that you are overstepping your bounds by opposing particular pieces of legislation and proposing others. How do you respond?
Mahony: Basically, by saying that there is no such thing as a purely political piece of legislation. If it affects people, then it has ethical and moral dimensions. Nothing has more dramatic moral implications than immigration policy. It greatly affects people living in our midst, people whom we serve. So it is not just a political issue, or civic issue. It’s very much who we are. Go back to Jesus. Go back to the 1700s. … The Catholic church in this country has always been consistently with the immigrants, always having these battles. We opposed “Irish Need Not Apply,” and even when the Jews were being attacked in the cities, we’ve always been there with them. I think that’s a wonderful tradition.
What gave me the impetus to come out and say we’re not going to do it is that this bill, Sensenbrenner Bill 4437, got passed just before Christmas … and nobody was focused on it. Everybody was focused on the holidays and nobody was paying much attention. National Migration Day was the first weekend after Jan. 1 in the United States, so we had a big Migration Mass, and I brought this up. I said there’s a sleeper out there, this bill. If you tease it out to its absurd finality, it means that giving many kinds of aid to immigrants makes you a felon.

Later in the interview, Cardinal Mahony says that it’s “absolutely” the case that giving an illegal immigrant a sandwich could be considered a “criminal act” under the Sensenbrenner bill, for which a Catholic legislator could not “in good faith” vote. And when asked how his activism appears to show that the “muzzle” is off Church leaders following the “sexual abuse scandal” (otherwise known as the pederast priest scandals), His Eminence unfolds the Democrat Party Platform:

Absolutely. What has happened in the last few years is that we as bishops have had opportunities to have a public voice and role, but have been very hesitant, and just kind of sat out a number of these things. I’m thinking of local things — for example, police abuse and overreactions in certain communities. We’ve had a lot of that across the United States. I think bishops normally would have said something, saying police are overreacting and categorizing people in ethnic groups, but in many cases they just remained silent. The gap, the chasm, between the wealthy and the middle class … the fact there’s almost no middle class left. The minimum wage, affordable housing, we just kind of sat it out, because we were afraid to appear above the sandbags. We were hiding. … Had this come up two years ago, three years ago, I don’t know what the reality would have been then. I just know that in our archdiocese, this issue is so important that even during these years I always spoke up.

Wow! No middle class. Police abuse – across the country! Maybe someone left the incense burning in the Cardinal’s rectory? Anyway, having read the interview, I can safely say my Lenten penitential obligations have been fulfilled.