Why Can’t the Michigan Catholic Church be courageous like the Confessing Church was in Nazi Germany?

No institution can e silent in the face of oppression. Well, unless the institution is designed to either benefit from or be a buffer against resistance to oppression.

The Michigan Catholic Conference recently came out with a statement, which was signed by the Bishops from the diocese across the state. Here is the body of the statement that was sent.

After reading this statement I can see the appeal, where they use a biblical quote, “you were a stranger and you welcomed me.”  The Bishops also say they empathize with immigrant families over the fear of mass deportations and all the anti-immigrant rhetoric. The Catholic Bishops also say they pledge “unyielding support.”

The statement then calls on elected officials to support policies to keep immigrant families safe and together. 

The statement ends by saying that immigrants should not give up faith they in the face of hardships and they ask for the intervention of Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

As someone who was once studying to be a Catholic Priest, I understand the sentiment and the rhetoric. However, such sentiment and rhetoric is one of the reasons why I left the church around 1990.

No where in this statement from the Michigan Catholic Conference is there a sense of urgency or any concrete commitment to actively support immigrant families. More importantly, there is nothing in the state that would communicate to immigrant families that the Catholic Church would actively resist the threat of mass deportation by engaging in such practices as offering Sanctuary to those who are being terrorized with the threat of mass deportation.

This is not the time to be neutral or to offer nice words. Now is the time for action and resistance to the threat of mass deportation. My time in Latin America, from 1988 through 2006 certainly taught me that in communities of people and even faith leaders, took courageous action in the face of repression. When I say repression, I’m talking about brutal US financed counter-insurgency wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Chiapas. The risks from people of faith there were greater than what the Michigan Catholic Conference is having to deal with.

What we need from so-called Christians is to adopt the same kind of commitment that the Confessing Church did in Nazi Germany, which wrote the Bareman Declaration. Why can’t the Michigan Catholic Bishop model the Liberation Theology practice in Latin America, like Archbishop Oscar Romero? Then there would be no polite dancing around the issue of mass deportation, just unequivocal resistance and courage.