The bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Tucson, Arizona, is urging President Obama to use executive action to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants if Congress fails to do so.
According to Crux, Bishop Gerald Kicanas, a major voice for amnesty for illegal immigrants, said in an interview that “there is a paralysis existing right now, and in the meantime, people are hurting; families are being separated.”
“It may be necessary for the President to step up and to act in a way that addresses the needs of families,” he said.
According to Crux, Kicanas added he “hopes Pope Francis’ leadership molds how the bishops conduct their business.”
“We live in a wounded world with many people hurting and struggling, and the Church has to be there with those people, has to be accompanying those people,” the bishop said.
Kicanas reportedly also addressed “criticism” from Cardinal Raymond Burke, former head of the Vatican’s highest court, that the Church is now “a ship without a rudder,” calling it “worrisome.”
As Breitbart News reported in June, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston and other Catholic bishops, including Kicanas, celebrated Mass on the border in Nogales, Arizona, to bring attention to the needs of illegal immigrants. The bishops distributed communion through the slats of the border fence to individuals gathered on the other side.
In an interview on EWTN’s The World Over with Raymond Arroyo, papal biographer George Weigel criticized O’Malley and the other Mass celebrants for politicizing the Mass. Weigel said:
It’s not clear to me how holding a Mass in these circumstances can be anything other than politicized … and I’m not sure that that is the kind of discussion we need in the Church or the country about a problem that everyone is concerned about. No one is unconcerned about this. People have different views as to what the ultimate resolution of this should be, but to turn the Mass into an act of essentially political theater is something I thought we had gotten over in the Church no matter how noble the cause might be.
Weigel went on to state:
I’ve said for years that the bishops of the United States should clarify whether they believe borders have any moral meaning, or whether they wish to take the position, for example, that The Wall Street Journal has taken for years, that there should be simply open borders.
“If you want to make that argument, you can make it … but it’s not clear to me that the principles behind a Catholic approach to the problem of immigration reform have been well articulated at all,” he added.
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