Top US bishop worries Catholic border services for migrants might be imperiled by government action

Government officials would be infringing on religious freedom if they were to restrict the Catholic Church’s work serving migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border, says a top U.S. bishop.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, addressed the issue this week while in Louisville, Kentucky, for a USCCB meeting where migration issues, including the long wait for religious worker visas, came up repeatedly. He acknowledged recent targeting of faith-based border work by government officials, including the Texas attorney general’s attempts to shutdown a Catholic nonprofit that has operated a network of migrant shelters for decades.

“We obviously want to respect the law, but if that liberty is restricted, then yes, our religious liberty is being restricted because we can’t put into practice the precepts of the Gospel,” Broglio said during a news conference Thursday.

Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Texas, who chairs the USCCB’s committee on migration, echoed that worry: “We’re very concerned about our ability to continue to have the freedom to serve them.”

Leaders from numerous faith organizations have long shouldered most of the care for tens of thousands of migrants on both sides of the border.

American bishops overseeing dioceses along the border are trying to respect both the Gospel and law, Broglio said. But he is wary of election-year politics stalling any possible progress toward fixing migration problems.

“We cannot cease in our efforts to proclaim the Gospel from the rooftops and to see if we cannot influence those in power at the very least to improve the conditions in the countries of origin so that migration is not seen as a necessity for life,” Broglio said in his opening