A friend of mine who is a Roman Catholic and, despite his bishops’ best efforts, in favor of an immigration moratorium, forwarded me an e-mail exchange he thought I’d find interesting. He was right.
My friend follows a Catholic webzine called Crisis. It bills itself as “A Voice for the Faithful Catholic Laity” and focuses on social and moral issues and specifically Catholic matters about doctrine and what kind of padre the new Pope really is. It doesn’t look like immigration is a prominent concern, although the tone is pretty conservative overall.
On April 25th my friend got his daily e-mail about what was new on Crisis that day. It included this:
Crisis Today
04/25/2013
Bishops Take Clericalist Stance on Illegal Immigration
Apr 25, 2013 04:10 am | George Neumayr
The proper configurations of immigration law is clearly a matter on which Catholics can disagree. But one would never know that from the recent pronouncements of the U.S. bishops. What they call on their web page the "Catholic Church's position...
That got my friend’s attention: was Crisis publishing an article openly critical of the Catholic bishops’ slavish support for the Schumer-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge? Good stuff! But when he followed the link from the e-mail, it was a dead end. The title of Neumayr’s article was there, along with a message saying “that content does not exist on Crisis.” [VDARE.com note: For now, it exists in Google’s cache. UPDATE: Posted by a bloggger here.]
My friend didn’t know what to make of that. Being eager to read what Neumayr had to say, he sent an e-mail to the editor asking for help to find the article:
I was looking forward to reading George Neumayr's Bishops Take Clericalist Stance on Illegal Immigration when I got this message. Unfortunately, following the link takes me to a page that says that content does not exist on Crisis. Help!
Best regards.
[_________]
He couldn’t help but wonder if someone hadn’t censored Neumayr’s article.
And that’s exactly what had happened. My friend received this polite reply from Crisis’s editor:
Dear [___],
The powers that be pulled the article. It was thought to lack sufficient regard for the complexity of the issue and thus might cause offense in some quarters. Sorry for disappointing you. We will try to address the topic again but in a more acceptable manner.
Cheers,
Editor
That made my friend pretty angry, he says. Not at Editor Vella, [Email him] but at the shadowy “powers that be” who decided George Neumayr’s take on the bishops and immigration was unfit for Crisis. The teaser he had read did not look inflammatory at all, or even insulting to the bishops. So he wrote back
Dear John,
I'm very sorry to hear that George Neumayr's article for Crisis about our bishops and their illegal-alien advocacy was pulled.
I really was looking forward to Mr. Neumayr's analysis of why U.S. Catholic bishops seem so Hell-bent (this faithful Catholic chooses the expression deliberately) to flood the United States with all-too-often incompatible foreign nationals, including those who have already entered the country illegally or remained illegally, and to have them all whose numbers we cannot remotely begin to estimate—granted U.S. citizenship as quickly as possible. I won't delve into analysis of who benefits from such nation-destroying folly except to note that it is not ordinary Americans, Catholic or otherwise. Good shepherds do not betray their flocks by agitating for their displacement in their own pastures, and I know of nothing in Christian tradition or Magisterial teaching that justifies U.S. bishops' strident support for effectively unlimited mass immigration. On the contrary, their advocacy of such an unquantifiable transformation is irresponsible imprudence.
If U.S. Catholic bishops should want a primer in intelligent immigration law—which I rather doubt—they would with great profit study the immigration laws of Mexico. Those are laws written in Mexicans' national interest, and the Mexican government actually enforces them.
Given their reprehensible collective weakness in addressing the homosexual scandals that have disgraced too many of our bishops and priests (one, of course, is already too many) and their unedifying timidity in the face of recalcitrant "Catholic" pro-abortion politicians, it takes chutzpah—if one may apply that term to our prelates—for such compromised shepherds to advocate a radical transformation of the United States, about which we may be sure only that the America most of us Americans grew up in will be destroyed, to be replaced by…what? A colder Brazil? A more libertine Iraq?
I have lived and worked in Mexico; I quite enjoyed it and I've spoken Spanish almost all my life. Despite my personally being quite comfortable among Mexicans in Mexico, one thing living in Mexico taught me is that I do not want America to become more like Mexico. And how may Americans prevent that when the federal government allows millions of Mexicans per year to settle in America in violation of U.S. law?
Of course, America's illegal demographic transformation includes far more than just Mexicans, and many who are anything but benign. Yet our bishops celebrate all of this entirely unnecessary social disruption, as did Pope John Paul II. At least the late Holy Father was far away from the mess, not that that is an excuse. I'm pretty sure most lay Catholic Americans do not share our bishops' enthusiasm.
One of the loudest of our transformer-bishops is Los Angeles' Archbishop José Gomez, a Mexican immigrant to America. While Archbishop Gomez is more palatable than his predecessor, Gomez's relentless advocacy of deluging America with his countrymen is a personal conflict of interest that cries to Heaven.
American Catholics are enduring an unprecedented time of weak and in several cases actively bad bishops. It is not disloyalty to the Church or the Faith for concerned Catholics to call their straying shepherds to account when they insert themselves so irresponsibly into secular political conflicts—at the expense of their American flock, the very people who should be their first concern. It is a matter of great sorrow, and anger, for this Catholic American to watch the bishops of his Church acting as a fifth-column against our country.
I don't know if any of the above echoes what George Neumayr had written that "might cause offense in some quarters," but they are things that need to be said.
And I must say that I am very sorry to learn that Crisis, a publication I have long respected, is being censored in this way. I would love to know who the "powers that be" to whom you refer are; you, of course, are under no obligation to disclose that.
I thank you for your explanation. And I'm very grateful to you for replying to my query. But I hope Crisis is not being force-marched into the pro-amnesty camp. I suppose we'll have an answer to that when we see what Crisis's powers-that-be consider addressing this topic "in a more acceptable manner" to be.
Yours sincerely,
[____________] [Links added by VDARE.com]
My friend got a little wordy in his jeremiad, but it’s good to see that not all Catholics are marching in lock-step with their bad-news bishops down the primrose path to America’s destruction.
But I was still curious: what had George Neumayr written that was so potentially offensive “in some quarters” that Crisis’s powers that be decided to spike it after its title and teaser had gone up on their website?
I did a little rooting around and managed to get my hands on a copy. (But since I didn’t get it from Neumayr himself, I don’t think I have the right to quote from it directly).
Neumayr notes that the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops lobbies aggressively for what it calls “immigration reform” (we all know what that means) and comments the Main Stream Media would be howling if Catholic bishops ever lobbied for the conservative side of a political issue—such as cutting taxes. His main concern: Catholic bishops are squandering their moral authority by involving themselves in political issues such as immigration and, even worse, presenting dogmatic Open-Borderism as though it were doctrinal Catholic teaching, when it is anything but. Neumayr accuses his bishops of peddling “left-wing clericalism”—political control by priests—rather than teaching Christian orthodoxy. That is pretty strong criticism, but it sure rings true to me.
As always these days when resistance to amnesty and increased immigration is repressed, I wonder who is paying the censors. Is there a Catholic Sheldon Adelson enforcing a gag-rule on Crisis?
Crisis’s website says it is a “project of Sophia Institute Press,” which says on its own site:
Sophia Institute Press publishes faithful Catholic classics and new Catholic books by the enduring figures of the Catholic intellectual tradition. In 25 years, Sophia has published more than 200 Catholic books in conformity with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church by authors such as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Therese of Lisieux, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and many others.
All fine and upstanding, but nothing about who pays the bills.
As long as what looks like pretty moderate criticism of the anything-but-moderate Open-Borders activism of the American Catholic bishops is censored from Crisis, I’m going to keep wondering about that.
Henry McCulloch (email him) writes regularly for VDARE.COM.
