It is important at this moment in our public life to remember that the Church has always claimed the right to speak on moral issues in the public square. There are areas where morality and politics overlap and in such cases the Church has always spoken out. No one is surprised to hear Catholic Bishops and priests speak against abortion from the pulpit. Nor should you be surprised when Bishops and priests condemn the federal policy of family separation at the border as part of the zero tolerance policy. Cardinal Dolan has called it “Unjust, un-American and unbiblical.” Cardinal DiNardo, the President of the Catholic Bishops said last week, “Our government has the discretion in our laws to ensure that young children are not separated from their parents and exposed to irreparable harm and trauma….separating babies from their mothers is not the answer (to protecting our borders) and is immoral.”
Since last Sunday’s Gospel was a parable about the kingdom of God, I decided to write my own as a way of pointing out a reality that is clearly not in accord with the kingdom of God proclaimed by the Lord Jesus:
There was once a beautiful land with spacious skies, a land of milk and honey. Its people were generous, good and committed to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So good were these people, that when they defeated their enemies in war, they would help that ‘enemy’ to rebuild and become prosperous. One of the country’s leaders even referred to it as shining city on a hill.
Eventually, the country, as most do, built walls and moats to protect it from enemies and to keep it from being overrun by people looking for literal milk and honey. Still, it had at one of it’s major entrances an immense statue at whose base it proclaimed “send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”
It so happened that a time of great upheaval came upon the world. There were wars and rumors of wars, there were civil wars, and refugees fleeing those wars. There were drug cartels forcing boys and girls to join or be killed. Darkness was upon the world.
So great was the international turmoil that the current leader of this great county became fearful. He said in these dangerous days “the end justifies the means.” So, to stop desperate people fleeing evil and attempting to enter this land of milk and honey, he decreed that from now on he would arrest parents who sought refuge, even going so far as to take their infants and children from them, and put them in tent cities in the southern heat, cut off from love and all human touch. The cries of the first 2,000 children were heard throughout that good land and even the God who saved the Jews from slavery wept from his high throne.
