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Guest Column

Religion offers a hand to the least among us

By BISHOP ROBERT N. LYNCH
Published April 16, 2006

No one should have been surprised to open their Thursday St. Petersburg Times and see the headline Religious groups rally for immigrants. While it may have been my homily at the annual Mass I celebrate during Holy Week with my priests that started the reflection that culminated in Thursday's article, from the time of the civil rights movement in the '60s to the present moment, it has largely been religious leaders and religious groups that have taken upon themselves the task of prophetic leadership in addressing injustices in society. On this Easter Sunday for Christians and in the wake of Passover for my Jewish sisters and brothers, it is entirely appropriate to address several issues of injustice in present American life.

It is the historical as well as the present role and task of prophetic voices to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Christians this past week have prayerfully recalled the death of an innocent man, a man too poor to be afforded legal representation at his trial, a man unable to access the defenses that society in his time would have offered a wealthier and more powerful member of society standing accused, a man condemned to death in the darkness of night. The religious conscience aware that our national love affair with the death penalty has certainly condemned more than one innocent person to death and seen them executed must speak out against this evil. While I personally oppose capital punishment and my church under Pope John Paul II has narrowed the state's opening to such action to a bare sliver, a person whose conscience cannot accept the death of any innocent person should support vigorously during the next three weeks the proposed legislation in the Florida Legislature to make DNA sampling available to even the most indigent accused, require a unanimous jury verdict in capital cases where the death penalty can be levied, and to encourage new legislation that would no longer allow elected judges to overturn the recommendation of the jury for "life in prison." The events of this past week suggest that one innocent person condemned to death is one too many.

On the immigration issue, all of us feel that we need to secure our borders and control immigration. How exactly to do that is a political question that historically seems to have defied an effective answer. We can and should press our elected representatives in Washington to find and enact that solution. Having said that, however, a law that proposes to deport more than 11-million undocumented immigrants currently living and working in the United States is an affront to the spirit of this great nation. Additionally, a law that would make a crime any act of charity or ministry of mercy to an undocumented immigrant and would make guilty of a crime my volunteer doctors and nurses and aides who accompany our health care clinic bus into the camps of eastern Hillsborough County offering free basic health care is just plain wrong.

Last Sunday on Meet the Press I heard one sponsor of the House-passed legislation acknowledge that a hospital that treats an undocumented woman in childbirth would be guilty of breaking the law, but then he laughed and said that such an instance would most likely not be prosecuted. What kind of mockery of our legal system do we wish to create? I have watched INS (now Homeland Security) deport a husband back to Mexico, leaving his wife and four children to fend for themselves here in the United States until they, too, would be picked up and taken back. When I led a protest of that action, the feds backed off and ceased for a time the practice of raiding laundries and small grocery stores in search of those we would soon call "felons" but who are in reality those who make it possible for us to eat and live as comfortably and cheaply as possible. Who will acknowledge the gifts of these women and men, their contributions, to our American way of life if religious people do not?

Religious leaders and people with a religiously formed conscience need to lock our arms with the most vulnerable in our society to confront injustice. It worked in the '60s and most of us from that time are proud of what we accomplished for justice and equality among the races. It can and will work in the early part of this new century if we rediscover our prophetic mission to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, protect the vulnerable and assure justice to all. That is what this past week in two of the world's great religions is all about: Passover from death to life and endless new possibilities for living together in peace and justice.

Robert N. Lynch is bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg.

[Last modified April 16, 2006, 00:42:15]