The Pope issues support for amnesty, U.S. Catholic Bishop's pro-illegal immigration efforts

Pope Benedict XVI has come out in support of not just comprehensive immigration reform (aka amnesty), but the U.S. Catholic Bishop's self-interested support for illegal immigration.

At a meeting in Vatican City, he said (link):

"I would begin by praising your unremitting efforts, in the best traditions of the church in America, to respond to the ongoing phenomenon of immigration in your country... ...The Catholic community in the United States continues, with great generosity, to welcome waves of new immigrants, to provide them with pastoral care and charitable assistance, and to support ways of regularizing their situation, especially with regard to the unification of families. A particular sign of this is the long-standing commitment of the American bishops to immigration reform... ...This is clearly a difficult and complex issue from the civil and political, as well as the social and economic, but above all from the human point of view. It is thus of profound concern to the church, since it involves ensuring the just treatment and the defense of the human dignity of immigrants."

That could have been written by the Mexican government: referring to illegal immigration as a "phenomenon" is a something they've done repeatedly: here, here, here, here, and more.

The "dignity of immigrants" is also similar to things they've said, but here's an example of the Wall Street Journal saying the same.

Those using variants of "regularization" as a codeword for amnesty include: Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and Vicente Fox, Rudy Giuliani, an author at a Newt Gingrich site, the NCLR (which told Vicente Fox to use that term), and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.

It could just be an incredible coincidence that the Pope is using the same terms as the Mexican government and U.S. loose borders hacks, or someone could have written that for him.

The fact is that comprehensive immigration reform would have highly negative impacts both on the U.S. and on sending countries; see the link. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops are enabling bad parenting: they're encouraging people to put their children in a precarious situation rather than encouraging them to remain in their home countries and reform their systems. The Bishops are in effect encouraging people to try to cross the desert, with some dying along the way (see false compassion).

What the U.S. Bishops are after is abundantly clear. If it isn't, imagine how they'd react if most potential illegal aliens were non-Catholics.

If you're Catholic and you want to do something about this, let me suggest doing so indirectly: help discredit Jim Wallis by asking him tough questions on video using the Question Authority plan. Doing that would send a message to all religious leaders.