The children at our border…

…are a prolife issue every bit as much as children in the womb.  The bad news is that some politicized Christians are perversely playing the part of Dives to their Lazarus, and some are absurdly claiming that helping children at the border is somehow supporting abortion. If there was ever a living laboratory demonstration of the moral catastrophe of the right’s rejection of the Seamless Garment, this is it.  Anti-abortion-but-not-prolife Christians demanding that children be remanded to rape, poverty, sex slavery and death is a classic example of what I call Truth Cancer–the weird process whereby movements that fixate on one aspect of the Church’s teaching at the expense of the rest tend to mutate, over time, into their opposites.
On the other hand, The good news is that, though the hostility to these defenseless children is coming almost entirely from the right, I would say that the majority of my readers here and on Facebook (who hail almost entirely from the right) are breaking with the inhuman responses of the “send them back” crowd and opting for the response of Jesus to desperate human need. That’s purely anecdotal, of course.  But I do get the sense that, in Catholic circles at least, this is proving to be a clarifying moment and that most people simply can’t bear to hear slanderous claptrap like “Catholics are trying to help these kids in order to increase their tithe revenues” or “We can’t help children in desperate need if it might benefit our political enemies” or all the similar ugly swill being ladled out by culture warriors bent on justifying the inexcusable.
God bless our pope and our bishops for speaking the truth here!  I have to believe that “my sheep hear my voice” will be borne out by rank and file Catholics who can