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Elizabeth502
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Amen, brother.
America's 'soul' at risk over immigration, Archbishop Gomez warns
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Amen, brother.
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Prodigal_Son1
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My views are formed by Christ, His Church, and the scriptures. My explanation is not usurping of authority. It is an explanation of how I arrive at my views. I do not think I have misinterpreted, and am happy to be able to explain how my words are misinterpreted. The Kingdom of God is not of this world, yet the Church is where the minister of Christ serves the king on earth. The Kingdom of God includes His Church, which He is the head of.
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Prodigal_Son1
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Christ spoke about poverty, wherever it existed. It was not confined by borders, but, as Pope Benedict noted, ‘wherever they find themselves in this moment.’
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Elizabeth502
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So are you waiting for the all the residents of the United States to be come Saints, including the government? Is that your expectation? Do you think your expectation will be achieved during your lifetime?
Fourth Question: Are your parents ex-Hippies from the late '60’s?
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Elizabeth502
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Just as others have complained about you, accurately, I will join the chorus:
The above post of yours is non-responsive to mine. I pointed out an utterly false assumption of yours, about immigrants, whom you define as “the truly poor.” You are factually incorrect, sir. You will find that it is difficult to be respected intellectually in this debate when you show that you are not in receipt of facts, or choose to deny facts or ignore facts.
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Prodigal_Son1
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Call it smug, or holier-than-thou. It’s not true. It’s one person’s attempt to subject themselves totally to Christ, and His will. That’s not saying I am without sin, or better than anyone else. I simply disagree with how this issue should be handled, and find agreement with what the men of the Church call for.I see you were right.
Would you recommend that one stop trying to imitate Christ as the Church calls us to do?
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Prodigal_Son1
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Would desiring all the residents of the US become saints be a bad thing? Would it be more than Christ could accomplish? We are called to hope and faith in Christ. I happen to think nothing is beyond his capabilities.So are you waiting for the all the residents of the United States to be come Saints, including the government? Is that your expectation? Do you think your expectation will be achieved during your lifetime?
Fourth Question: Are your parents ex-Hippies from the late '60’s?
Your last question seems to be an ad hominem and directly addresses me, and my family, personally. That is not allowed in these discussions, as far as I know. I don’t do this to other posters and would kindly ask for the same courtesy.
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Prodigal_Son1
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So far, I have not seen any factual statements that will sway me from my view. I don’t require intellectual respect, and will limit my responses only to those who address me with simple respect.
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Elizabeth502
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You have contradicted yourself. Earlier you said that the Kingdom of God refers to the earth. No, it does not. Jesus denied that repeatedly in the Gospels. Therefore, you misinterpret the Gospels, and that can be proven objectively.
Second, you now deny that you set yourself up as “the authority” for the Kingdom, yet earlier you said that you “speak for the Kingdom of Christ.” The Magisterium and the Pope speak for the Kingdom of Christ. Notwithstanding your lifting Benedict’s quote out of context, the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, Christ’s Church, does not hold the radical open-borders immigration policy that you do. Please stop misrepresenting Church teaching on immigration. Church statements on immigration are general principles and general warnings and general pleadings, to be applied conscientiously by Catholics and specifically by people who actually know what they’re talking about and have studied the complexities of the issue. Catholics have an obligation to inform themselves on the elements of all social doctrine and to consider, prudentially, how best those can be applied so that justice is served for all who need justice, not just for one group or another. You assume the issue is simple. The Church does not.
And if, on the contrary, you think the issue is simple, you differ from the Church in your clearly private interpretation of scripture, and private interpretation opposes the teaching from the Church.
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Frank_Drebin
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When your post could be a possible response to every topic on the board, you know it isn’t contributing anything. How is anyone in the world supposed to distill “Would desiring all the residents of the US become saints be a bad thing? Would it be more than Christ could accomplish?” into anything tangible? You render whatever point you are trying to make pointless. Retyping “Be like Christ, be like Christ, be like Christ!” is a goal, not an immigration plan.
Let me help you - just type “John 3:16” from now for every reponse. It is quicker and easier to remember.
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Tigg
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Can you, perhaps, speak in terms of practicality? I mean, with all due respect, do you ever think of the actual way society lives and the solutions to problems within that reality?
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Frank_Drebin
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Nor have you presented any factual statements to supoort your view, nor stated what your view is.
You just posted a bunch of nebulous bible themes and platitudes and called it a debate.
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Frank_Drebin
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Elizabeth502
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Prodigal_Son1
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You have misinterpreted what I have said, and I apologize if it’s my fault in that I cannot make myself clear for all to understand. I don’t believe the Gospels, or the teachings from the men of the Church are open to a legalistic approach. They speak so that all can understand. Christ did not call us to be ‘intellectual.’ He called us to be spiritual. That’s how I believe we are to view all things. The Gospels are not meant to be so complicated that some would not be able to understand.
The kingdom of God is on earth, in His Church. His prime minister sits on the seat of Peter, yet He is the King ruling from Heaven. His Kingdom is without borders, anywhere, and excludes no one. There is no contradicting what is His.
As for the Church’s teaching on immigration, it is not completely written down, but alive in what the men of the Church teach us today. The men of the Church speak on the issue of immigration, and confirm each other. What they say is confirmed in the Gospels. The context is confirmed by all.
There are no assurances, so as Paul called all to do, ‘I work out my salvation with fear and trembling.’ Again, it’s scriptures, and it’s how I form my faith based conscience to act on.
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Prodigal_Son1
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Every topic on the board is to be viewed spiritually. We are all called to the goal of attaining the promises of Christ, in heaven. That’s being a saint. That’s what the Church teaches us to strive for in this life. We should ‘be like Christ’ in all our decisions, as expressed in our views.When your post could be a possible response to every topic on the board, you know it isn’t contributing anything. How is anyone in the world supposed to distill “Would desiring all the residents of the US become saints be a bad thing? Would it be more than Christ could accomplish?” into anything tangible? You render whatever point you are trying to make pointless. Retyping “Be like Christ, be like Christ, be like Christ!” is a goal, not an immigration plan.
Let me help you - just type “John 3:16” from now for every reponse. It is quicker and easier to remember.
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Prodigal_Son1
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Submission to Christ, and all He taught us, is practical, in my honest opinion. The reality of our problems is of our own making, or the making of men.
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Ridgerunner
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Inconsistent is inconsistent, and has nothing to do with a personal view. You are staking out a moral position that the Church itself does not take and is, in fact, contrary to the Church’s position.
Livelihoods are indeed endangered. I realize many have the belief that illegal immigrants only pick fruits and vegetables seasonally. But that’s not true. Many, many, many illegals are working in industry. Were you ever in a meat-processing plant 20 years ago? If you were, you would have seen that virtually every worker was a native citizen. If you go into them today, you will see that few are, and those who are are usually supervisory. Why is that? It’s because the processing companies can draw on immigrant labor and keep line wages low because of it. Even if they didn’t want to do it, they would end up hiring illegals anyway because they are prohibited by law from questioning ID that’s valid on its face. It used to be that the only way to “catch” them was to raid the plants. But this lawless government now refuses to allow even that.
And it isn’t just in the food industry.
The very same thing is true in construction now. I know building contractors, and they have difficulty making successful bids if they don’t subcontract to the “bosses” of what everybody knows is illegal labor. The building contractors have no control over who those subcontractors hire.
Unskilled and low-skilled workers in the U.S. have a lot of competition from illegal immigrants. Would wages, and therefore the cost of what we buy be higher but for illegal labor? Almost certainly. But when we start moralizing about “social justice”, we ought to realize “social justice” can be owed to our own people too, a “social justice” in the form of a living wage.
It’s a different thing for a lot of illegal workers than it is for the native-born. Most of them I have known are young men, though some are women. They might live ten in an apartment and work various shifts. Many simply send the money they don’t spent on that spartan living back to their countries of origin. It’s a good thing for them, no question about it. They can accomplish things in their home countries with American dollars that their neighbors in their home countries could not aspire to.
But is that what our moral sense is all about? Is it about giving some person from another country a chance to be better off than his neighbors back home? Do our morals not extend any further than to make one person “rich” compared to his neighbors?
Undoubtedly one can feel a sense of “having done good” by giving away someone else’s livelihood. But in no way can that be properly called the moral thing to do.
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Elizabeth502
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Sorry, Howard. I was really jesting about hippies more than about or toward you. Was not intended as an ad hominem. Sorry about that.
The point is, I don’t think – and I think most of the posters agree with me here – that you have thought through your private goals – and you do concede that your goals are private interpretations of Gospels (not Catholic Church interpretations). Sometimes we can all be prone to caricature ourselves unknowingly. I made the comparison with 'hippies" because, similarly, they often spoke in the platitudes which Frank has mentioned your doing here, and hippies rarely had concrete plans, or thought in concrete, realistic terms, just as many here see you as also doing. It was just “Peace & Love, ya-know, man,” which did not earn them serious respect as activists unless they did indeed become committed activists. (Most of them did not.) Overall, they were impractical romanticists who had a lot of fun for a time being and accomplished little.
The idealistic model of The Kingdom is, yes, a model to strive for, and yes, you are of course correct that the Church strives herself to be that model. Nevertheless, the Church is realistic, far more than you have shown yourself to be here. The Church understands that she is the guide, the moral conscience. She has never recommended Open Borders. She has never recommended the eradication of territorial sovereignty. She has spoken specifically to and about sovereignty, in fact. It is one of many reasons she does not recommend One World Government,which is the logical result of a no-boundaries world.
You seriously misunderstand Church teaching on many topics related to immigration, and your repeated statements about how you supposedly represent Christ or the Gospels or The Kingdom more than others here is in itself, frankly, offensive in its result even if your intention is not to offend.
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Geist
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Either…
- only the lawbreaker is deported thus separating the family,
- you deport them all thus punishing the innocent as well but keeping the family intact
- you do not punish the lawbreaker to keep the family intact resulting in collapse of civil authority.
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