Church in the World

Bishop blames US border policy

Americas

for immigrants' deaths The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a statement blaming America's 'flawed and inhuman' border policy for the death last week of 18 would-be illegal immigrants, writes our correspondent Richard Major from New York. A locked truck, packed with more than 100 Latin Americans, overheated on a highway in Texas and was abandoned by the smuggler and by many survivors, leaving the police and Spanish-speaking local priests and nuns to deal with the dead.

Thomas G. Wenski, auxiliary bishop of Miami and chairman of the conference's committee on migration, denounced the 'blockade strategy' America has been pursuing on the Mexican border since 1993. 'While their hard work helps fuel the US economy, they must risk their lives to obtain work here', he said. Once inside the US, 'they have to live without legal protection, healthcare or educational rights,' he added.

Activists opposed to the present 'militarised' frontier estimate that illegal labour contributes $350 billion annually to the economy. Thousands have died attempting to join 7 million or so people who are in the US illegally, most of them Mexican or Central American Catholics. Hundreds die every year attempting the crossing in the harsh landscape along the border.

America's Catholic bishops called for a thorough reform of the immigration system in January. But negotiations with Mexico on a conditional amnesty have stalled since the 11 September terrorist attacks, and the administration and popular opinion remain strongly in favour of well-policed frontiers. A recent estimate by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service that 350,000 people flood into the US each year has strengthened the case 'that America has lost control of its borders'. |snip!|Was Padre Pio a plagiarist?. An influential Jesuit magazine in Rome has defended the Italian saint and mystic Padre Pio da Pietrelcina against charges of plagiarism. The Capuchin stigmatic was declared a saint in June last year.

The mid-May article in Civilt? Cattolica, subtitled 'Plagiarism or identification?' looked at 10 letters Padre Pio wrote to his spiritual directors in 1911-13. The letters contain sections copied exactly or only slightly changed from published letters and texts written by St Gemma Galgani (1879-1903), a mystic and stigmatic who was miraculously cured of her spinal tuberculosis. The letters were written by St Gemma between 1899 and 1902.

According to Civilt? Cattolica, the choice of St Gemma's writing indicated 'that he wanted to identify himself with a precise model of holiness which was in harmony with his own and was marked by an expressive simplicity which he felt he was lacking at that dark phase of his life.'

As with Padre Pio, the process leading to St Gemma's canonisation was interrupted by doubts over the more unusual phenomena associated with her spiritual life.

The 'unexpected phenomenon of a saint who explains the state of his own soul to his spiritual directors by copying sections of letters' written by another saint deserves investigation, the magazine said. It admitted that he never attributed the sections he quoted from her letters.

'Having overcome the initial understandable reaction of surprise and perplexity, the phenomenon of copying a few letters enters within the realistic boundaries of the humanity of saints,' it concluded.