Bishop of San Diego Calls for American Society to Heal Its Wounds With Solidarity
Most Reverend Robert W. McElroy, Bishop of San Diego, delivered a moving speech at the 2016 Catholic Immigrant Integration Initiative Conference at San Diego University.
Acknowledging the current wounds and unsolved issues of the American political scenario, Bishop McElroy suggested the whole nation should pray for President-elect Trump and the new Congress as they take office, and to join efforts to make them “effecting instruments” in advancing human rights and development.
To heal the profound fractures within the U.S. society, Bishop McElroy called for a renewed sense of solidarity in any fabric of the nation, be it social, economic or political. “It is our responsibility to heal our nation through actions of civic engagement which lie beyond the boundaries of party structures, and indeed of government itself,” he said.
Bishop McElroy also appealed for a softer federal immigration policy, stressing that a massive deportation of more than ten million undocumented immigrants from their lives and families would be “an act of injustice which would stain our national honor in the same manner as the progressive dispossessions of the Native American peoples of the United States and the interment of the Japanese”.
Read the full speech on the Center for Migration Studies website.
