Originally published at National Catholic Register
Cardinal Robert McElroy, the new archbishop of Washington, says he wishes success for President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration but that he’ll be watching closely to see how Trump deals with immigrants who are in the country without legal status.
“The Catholic Church teaches that a country has the right to control its borders. And our nation’s desire to do that is a legitimate effort,” Cardinal McElroy said Monday, shortly after being introduced as Washington’s eighth archbishop during an online press conference at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle amid an unusually heavy snowstorm in the nation’s capital.
“At the same time, we are called always to have a sense of the dignity of every human person. And thus, plans which have been talked about at some levels of having a wider indiscriminate massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine. So we’ll have to see what emerges in the administration.”
The Vatican announced Monday that Pope Francis has appointed Cardinal McElroy, 70, as archbishop of Washington, a high-profile see that includes about 667,000 Catholics in the District of Columbia and five counties in southern Maryland.
Cardinal McElroy, widely seen as a progressive
