William F. Buckley rouses himself in order to expose a particularly stupid bit of nonsense from LA's cardinal.

If I may be so bold, Cardinal Mahony, to suggest your time would be better spent keeping as many of these immigrants Catholic as is possible. I believe that is in your job description. If you haven't noticed, the schismatics are making inroads south of the border.

The situation has come to a boil. Immigration policy is the top concern of candidates running for office in the border states. In December, the House of Representatives passed a tough bill designed to tighten the border. It calls for criminal penalties for those Americans who collude with the illegal enterprise. A response came from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. This body assails aspects of the House bill as excessively punitive and lobbies for a tenderer bill from the Senate, but it is not yet clear just what sort of provisions the Conference would endorse.

Meanwhile the nation has heard from Roger Mahony, who is the cardinal of Los Angeles. Cardinal Mahony has taken the extraordinary step of enjoining his flock simply to defy any congressional act that incorporates the features of the House bill — on the grounds that to comply would be to collaborate with injustice.

Now the good cardinal, whose motives we must as a matter of Christian forbearance accept as humanitarian, has got to be sharply rebuked by the Conference of Bishops. Begin with the basic question: The writing of the law is a democratic exercise. To call for disobedience to the law is acceptable behavior when such law transgresses upon the city of God. The laws that called for the annihilation of the Jewish race violated the city of God. Proposed laws that would punish citizens who deliberately help to defeat or to circumvent immigration laws aren't inherently defiant of the prerogatives of a democratic community. Cardinal Mahony's contumacy has to be rejected for what it is, never mind what the Senate ends up doing in the matter of formulating fresh rules to enforce policies which have not been enforced.

President Bush endorsed the House bill and asks the Senate to act on it. He hardly understands himself to be rejecting the canon of Christian behavior towards our fellow men by making the point that free and independent societies have the right to prescribe immigration codes, and need especially to reject such distortions of Christian dogma and practice as invite the wrong kind of attention to appropriate divisions between church and state. (Thanks to NRO for the heads up.)