Cardinals join voices in fight for immigrants
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES—Standing beneath the wooden panels of a church in the San Gabriel Valley, Cardinal Roger Mahony delivered a message that has over decades become a refrain.
“Immigrants are our brothers and sisters,” he said, celebrating Mass in Spanish on a recent Sunday. The government may demonize them, but “they aren’t our enemies.”
He told parishioners of their responsibility to fight for reform. The pews erupted with applause.
A politically sophisticated clergyman whom Pope John Paul II nicknamed “Hollywood,” Mahony was raised among California’s immigrant farm workers. Named archbishop of Los Angeles in 1985, he became a powerful voice supporting those who were in the country illegally at a time when California was a pioneer in anti-immigrant measures.
Then came the fall, when he was relieved of public duties over his mishandling of clergy sex abuse of children. Once a shining star of the American church, his reputation suffered as a result of the devastating scandal, which led to the largest settlement by any archdiocese: $660 million.
“It became very difficult to look at him, to listen to him, without thinking this is a guy who messed up on dealing with abuse in the archdiocese,” said Father Thomas J. Reese, a senior analyst at Religion News Service. “It clouded his reputation.”
The cardinal who once filled Dodger Stadium gave way to a successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez, with a more subdued style but a growing voice. On the day before Mahony’s recent sermon, Gomez spoke to thousands of faithful at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, near the hill where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared. He shared the story of a Salvadoran boy who tried to cross the U.S. border three times before finally reuniting with his mother.
Both men have played key, but very different, roles in the fight for immigration reform.
“Cardinal Mahony was very outspoken, and the public policy debate was something that he would jump into with great vigor and ease. It was something he totally enjoyed,” Reese said. “Gomez, on the other hand, is your classic pastor. … He’s a warm person, he’s personable, he wants to be with his people.”
While Gomez has stepped into the spotlight, Mahony has continued to work on the cause he adopted in his youth— sometimes through a personal blog.
“I was so happy because I no longer had administration, personnel problems, budgets and all that stuff,” Mahony said of turning his official duties over to Gomez. “I was free to do just ministry things. One of my biggest focuses, then, was to continue working with our immigrants.”
Mahony’s views on immigration, once considered radical in a state that backed Proposition 187, are now in the mainstream of California politics. Immigrants today are the main force preventing a sharp decline in church membership nationwide. Some estimates put the U.S. Catholic population at about 70 million. American bishops oppose “enforcement only” policies and support comprehensive immigration reform, a stance that stems from their belief that migration is a humanitarian issue rather than a politically partisan cause.
Faced with the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, Gomez has amplified his advocacy. His increasingly public stance comes at a time when Catholics are divided over immigration. About 77 percent of Latino Catholics favor allowing immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally an opportunity to become citizens, compared with 55 percent of white Catholics, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
“The angry things people today are saying about Mexicans are the same things that were said about earlier generations of Catholics coming to this country,” Gomez said.
The highest-ranking Latino in the U.S. Catholic Church, Gomez recently visited the border in Texas to meet with children separated from their families under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and has assembled an immigration task force that includes representatives from the Dioceses of Orange and San Bernardino.
He has reached out to fellow Latino Catholics, who comprise more than 70 percent of the archdiocese and 52 percent of Catholics under the age of 30 in the U.S., through a monthly Spanish-language radio and television show and popular gatherings such as the annual procession honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe in East Los Angeles.
“I have been working on this for 30 years,” Gomez, 66, said. “I want to be more vocal.”
For the archbishop, immigration is “the reality of my own family.” The head of the largest and perhaps most diverse archdiocese in the country is himself a naturalized U.S. citizen.
He regularly traveled across the border as a boy, moving between his home in Monterrey, Mexico, and his uncle’s house in San Antonio, Texas. He would go fishing with his father at South Padre Island, using his passport and la mica, a border-crossing card needed to make the journey at the time.
His family has lived in Texas since 1805, when the area was still under Spanish rule. His grandparents were married at the cathedral in San Antonio in 1917.
Two weeks ago, at a special Mass dedicated to immigrants, Gomez delivered a forceful message to more than 3,000 congregants inside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.
“Year after year, they keep telling us, ‘Manana, manana.’ Next year,” he said, referring to calls for immigration reform. “It makes no difference which political party is in power, there is always some excuse.”
The need for reform can no longer be ignored, Gomez said.
“The inaction of our government is breaking up families and hurting children—and doing it in our name, in the name of America,” he said.