Pope Benedict XVI. Spoke of protecting immigrant families, not dividing them, even as he was flying to the United States.

On Wednesday, he raised the issue again in a meeting with President Bush and later that day spoke to the church’s “many immigrant children” in Spanish. He will end his visit in New York, where he will be sent off by a throng of the faithful, showing off the ethnic diversity of American Catholicism.”

The New York Times reports that, “of the nation’s 65 million Roman Catholics, 18 million are Latino, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and they account for more than two-thirds of the new Catholics in the country since 1960.”

Many parishes depend on priests brought from abroad to serve the flock. Millions of Catholics arriving into America are from Asia and Africa.

With care, Benedict has calibrated his stance on immigration. He pointed out the need to protect family unity and immigrants’ human rights, but avoided speaking of any specifics of the American immigration debate, such as the issue of whether to grant legal status to illegal immigrants.

To read the entire article from the New York Times, link here:

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it