SOUL FOOD:Catholics, congressman set in own reform paths

During the 40 days of Lent, Roman Catholics are required to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday while abstaining from meat on Fridays. This year, the Most Rev. Tod D. Brown, Bishop of Orange, asked parishioners to do something more.

As part of a campaign called “Hunger for Justice,” Brown asked them to fast an additional day during the fifth week in Lent. The campaign -- intended to show solidarity with our nation’s immigrant poor -- was announced on Ash Wednesday, the onset of Lent.

Everyone who took part in it signed a pledge card that carried a message for his or her congressional representative, “I am fasting for immigrant families during the week of March 26-30, 2007. I urge you to enact just, comprehensive immigration reform.”

The cards listed five components for that reform: a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; timely unification of families; respect for due process; an effective temporary immigrant worker program; and a means for addressing the root causes of emigration from countries of origin.

The idea for the cards was this: The diocese would collect them then distribute them to the county’s congressmen and congresswomen during Congress’s spring recess to make its point.

On Friday, some four-dozen men, women and children from the 1.2 million Roman Catholics in Orange County, gathered in a sun-drenched breezeway at La Purisima Catholic Church in Orange. They concluded the week dedicated to the campaign for immigration reform with prayer then broke their fast with a traditional Lenten fish fry in the parish hall.

The Most Rev. Jaime Soto, auxiliary bishop of Orange, noting the group’s small size, gestured to a cardboard carton of “Hunger for Justice” pledge cards at his feet.

The cards, he pointed out, represented thousands of others who had also fasted and prayed. He urged the crowd to count them present in spirit.

And along with the pledges from the Diocese of Orange, there were thousands more elsewhere. In the early weeks of Lent, the campaign had spread to eight other California dioceses.

Several people came forward to share their reasons for joining the campaign. Among them was Paty Madueño, a member of St. Joachim Catholic Church in Costa Mesa, who immigrated from Tijuana 30 years ago.

She was married at the time, with a 3-year-old son. She had family in Stanton and Anaheim. She spoke English.

Yet she still felt isolated and unwelcome in the community, she recalled when I talked with her after Friday’s event. People often asked her, she said , if she was the nanny for her blonde-haired, green-eyed son.

She resisted becoming a citizen for 25 years because she feared in doing so she would lose part of her identity. Yet, when she finally became a citizen five years ago, she says it freed her instead. Voting, regarded as a chore by many, to her is “exhilarating.”

By sharing her story, she hopes to motivate others to become citizens sooner than she did. Making that easier is something Soto hopes immigration reform will do.

It’s not good for society or for immigrants when they live in “a kind of shadow society,” he told me before the prayer service on Friday evening. “I’ve seen the successes of people being able to integrate more and participate more actively in civic society,” he said. “We don’t serve ourselves well by not addressing the large undocumented population living in the United States.”

Full citizenship and good citizenship are essential, as he sees it. Facilitating them is something he believes the Catholic Church does “fairly well.”

The church’s Catholic Services plays a big role in helping immigrants become naturalized citizens. And its parish communities, Soto said, “are acculturating institutions [that] provide a place for young people to learn important Christian values.”

On Monday, Madueño was among a delegation from Deanery V — a cluster of nine Catholic parishes in Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa — to meet with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher to present him with their “Hunger for Justice” pledge cards, 263 of more than 10,000 total cards collected in the Diocese of Orange.

In a phone conversation after the meeting Rohrabacher said he does his best to keep his door open to advocacy groups in his district. Some, he said, have changed his mind on an issue or two.

The group from Deanery V didn’t. He described them as “really good people … very fine people” though, on the issue of immigration reform, also “wrong.”

They are also a minority, he believes, among his constituents, wanting, he said, “to make sure that the 15 to 20 million illegals who are here are given some sort of legal status” — something he believes would be a mistake.

In 1986, Rohrabacher says, we had three million immigrants without legal status living in the United States when we legalized their status. Then 10 years later we had another 15 million.

If we do the same thing again, he postulates that in 10 years we will have “50 million more illegals in the country and we will have made a bad situation even worse.”

And he sees no reason why, when so many “millions and millions in countries overseas” are waiting in a long line to immigrate to the United States legally, people who have come illegally should “skip the line.”

All the same, the Catholic Church might very well see its prayers for immigration reform answered this year.

With the Democrats controlling the Senate and the House, President Bush has allied himself with them in order to legalize the status of people who are here illegally. Just not, says Rohrabacher, for the same reasons as the Catholics pressing for reform.

“It’s because the people in Washington who agree with them are being manipulated by big business. And big business wants illegal aliens here in order to drive down wages.

“It’s an odd coalition between the greediest and the most generous,” the congressman said.

“Unless the people rise up in a righteous rage,” Rohrabacher predicts, “we will have an immigration bill that will be catastrophic for us in the next 10 years.”

Of course, the people from Deanery V and other Catholics like them think that Rohrabacher is as wrong as he thinks they are. They think much of what he believes is founded on myths, some of which the Catholic website www.justiceforimmigrants.org seeks to dispel.

They tried to tell him. But, said Mary Martin, a Huntington Beach Catholic who attended the meeting, “I’m not sure he heard anything.”