Cardinal decries Trump's comments on immigration

July 31, 2015

Writing in the New York Daily News, Cardinal Timothy Dolan said that presidential candidate Donald Trump's comments on Mexicans entering the United States recalled 19th-century anti-Catholic nativism.

In June, Trump said, "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

"We need to control our borders, fairly regulate immigration and be prudent in our policies and laws, but we are wise to consider the immigrant as good for our beloved nation," Cardinal Dolan wrote. "To welcome them is virtuous, patriotic and beneficial for the economic and cultural future of our country."

"I am not in the business of telling people what candidates they should support or who deserves their vote," he added. "But as a Catholic, I take seriously the Bible’s teaching that we are to welcome the stranger, one of the most frequently mentioned moral imperatives in both the Old and New Testament."

The prelate concluded:

Walt Whitman called my predecessor Archbishop John Hughes a “mitred hypocrite,” because the prelate defended his poor Irish immigrant flock — the Mexicans of his day — from the nativists. The same Whitman called the immigrants “these dregs of foreign filth, refuse of convents, scullions from monasteries ...” Thank God Walt Whitman stuck to poetry, and did not run for President.

 

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Further information:

• Nativism rears its big-haired head: Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric is a sad return to a terrible American tradition (New York Daily News)
• Donald Trump Transcript: ‘Our Country Needs a Truly Great Leader’ (Wall Street Journal)