Cardinal Robert McElroy, who’s on the point of take over as archbishop of Washington, D.C. in March, called for compassion and dignity for migrants Thursday.
Speaking at a news conference on the Diocese of San Diego, where he has served as bishop for over a decade, McElroy acknowledged that he’ll head the Catholic Church within the nation’s capital because the country grapples with what it means to be a compassionate society.
The removal of immunity for houses of worship from immigration enforcement is especially problematic, and a “deep moral query,” he said, evoking the role of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the Trump administration’s crackdown.
“When these places change into targets of ICE raids, it strikes fear in everyone’s hearts, and it acts as a deterrent to people going to church and freely worshipping or going to colleges,” he said. “That’s why it is so deadly.”
The Trump administration order giving immigration agents more leeway to make arrests at churches is a “wider cultural attack on all those that are undocumented,” a lot of whom are fleeing persecution, violence or terrible economic conditions, McElroy said.
“A nation must secure its borders and a powerful immigration policy, but what we’re seeing is an effort to categorise all of those people as criminals,” he said. “That casts them as the opposite or not having the identical dignity.”
McElroy has previously stated that Trump’s threats of mass deportations of immigrants are “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”
Yet he said his role as archbishop of Washington is not going to be political, but pastoral. McElroy, 70, replaces the retiring Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who steps down after having navigated the archdiocese through the fallout of the 2018 escalation of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
The diverse Catholic community in Washington is one-third Hispanic, largely people from Central America, McElroy said, adding that he’s looking forward to visiting parishes and attending to know the priests and the people.
“An additional pastoral challenge is that many federal staff are losing their jobs, and so they are members of our community, too,” he said.
The church’s role just isn’t to resolve political or policy issues, but it surely does have “an ethical role to comment on policies and directions in society in light of the Gospel and Catholic teaching,” he said.
McElroy’s appointment as archbishop got here in January. He is taken into account one in all Pope Francis’ most progressively like-minded allies. McElroy said Thursday that Francis has broached the subject of the border in nearly every conversation that they had.
“He has a knowledge of the vibrancy of the church here (in San Diego),” he said. “The border and the situation of the migrants is and has all the time been an awesome concern for him.”
McElroy said he’s praying that Francis, hospitalized in Rome with double pneumonia, has just a few more years to press on along with his vision for the church. He described Francis as “a person of joy and a person of deep prayer” who works tirelessly and does so with a humorousness.
“He is a person who listens and truly engages with other people and believes that others have something to show him,” McElroy said.
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