Recently there was a provocative editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch written by Thomas Finan.  He is a renowned history professor at Saint Louis University.  Ever since his editorial, there have been almost daily Letters to the Editor responding to his comments.

He noted, as Catholics, “we are taught to see the face of Christ in the suffering of the imprisoned, the migrant child, the asylum seeker chained and voiceless.”

About the same time as his editorial, our government passed a bill that reinforces militarized immigration arrests by masked men, mass detention in cages, harsh removals, blanket asylum denial, and new bureaucratic hurdles that ensure millions of the neediest Americans will lose their healthcare and food financial help.

Mr. Finan observed that there has been mostly deafening silence from U.S. Catholic leadership. Bishops have offered statements so carefully worded as to not offend anyone. A Cardinal calls our president “a great friend” while children are being separated from their families.

The editorial asks, “Where is the outrage?  Where is the moral accountability from the pulpits?”

I share his anguish about the lack of a strong opposing voice from my church, as have many of the letter writers who responded to his editorial.

More recently, I attended Mass when the weekly Scripture readings focused on hospitality. One reading was about the story of Abraham insisting three strangers stop so he could serve them a meal. The prior week, the Gospel reading was about the Good Samaritan who cares for a Jewish victim of robbery and violence even though Jews despised Samaritans.

The pastor presiding at this Mass addressed immigration issues in his sermon.  He noted that virtually all of us are descendants of people who came to this country, uninvited, to flee violent persecution and/or economic destitution. There is nothing today any different than the past 400 years.

What particularly struck me was his observation that how we respond to the flood of desperate migrants is not about politics, it is about Christianity.

It was a courageous sermon that directly reminded me of how I’m supposed to love God and my neighbors. I also thought it was an example of the Christian leadership Mr. Finan was deploring more clerics to provide.

Some editorial letter writers excuse what our government is doing. They stand on the need to get violent people out of our country. It’s a false problem that is already constantly addressed. 

That’s what the “protect” in our police’s “serve and protect” motto is about.  They immediately hunt and imprison anyone who commits a violent act. No one is waiting around for ICE because the offender was an immigrant.

Another excuse is that immigrants need to go through proper channels for documentation. I personally know a Mexican who married an American citizen. It took her three years to get her documentation for something that was a legal right from her marriage.  

Fortunately, her family had the means to support her for those three years. Millions cannot survive the violence or economic deprivation they are fleeing, especially over a period of three years. 

Another excuse is that our economy cannot handle the flood of immigrants; we have to save those jobs for Americans. The reality is several key industries are highly dependent on the undocumented workforce to keep their businesses going.  That’s why they are lobbying President Trump to except their industry from his deportation program.

We have the need for population growth, we have the need for a growing workforce, and there is no evidence undocumented immigrants are any more violent than the American citizenry. 

We have more wealth than any country in history.  Why can’t we open our arms and show Abraham’s hospitality to people who are desperately seeking a chance at life they don’t have for the accident of where they were born?

Between 1936-1938, Josef Stalin ordered the Great Purge (also known as the Great Terror) in the Soviet Union. Over 1 million political dissidents, at least so accused, were murdered.  There are over 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.  How is any such deportation purge American, much less Christian?

In order to have my own dissident voice, I don’t need my pastor to tell me that what we are doing is wrong. But if our faith leaders, from the top down, had one voice opposed to this American purge, I believe most people of faith would join them.

This very well could make our leaders in Washington more afraid of us than they are of Donald Trump. The result would be something far more Christian than what we are