https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/07/archbishop-trump-hate-racism-el-paso-twitter/?utm_source=reddit.com
San Antonio Catholic Archbishop becomes vocal too.
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As the eldest of 15 children, Garcia-Siller said he grew up in a lower middle-class family in the central Mexican city of San Luis Potosí, where he attended 6 a.m. Mass every day, according to the Vision Vocation Network. Serving as an ordained priest for almost 15 years in California and Oregon, he became a U.S. citizen in 1998 shortly before his 42nd birthday. After Pope John Paul II appointed him as auxiliary bishop of Chicago, Pope Benedict XVI named Garcia-Siller archbishop of San Antonio in 2010.
Garcia-Siller isn’t the only religious leader to speak out against Trump in recent days, with liberal church officials denouncing Trump for his recent broadsides against Democratic minority lawmakers. Pope Francis has been open about his disdain for Trump’s immigration policies, namely his wall at the southern border, saying that a fear of migrants “makes us crazy.” In July, 11 leaders of Catholic and Protestant groups in Maryland, including two Baltimore bishops, issued a public letter imploring Trump to “stop putting people down,” according to the Associated Press. Earlier this month, Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Washington, the only black archbishop in the U.S., accused the president of “diminishing our national life.” Last week, Washington National Cathedral, the seat of the Episcopal Church, condemned Trump’s racist rhetoric in a statement entitled, “Have We No Decency? A response to President Trump.”
“We feel compelled to ask: After two years of President Trump’s words and actions, when will Americans have enough?” the Cathedral’s leaders wrote.
[Washington’s new Catholic archbishop slams Trump for ‘diminishing our national life’]
But prominent figures on the religious right have either remained silent on the issue or maintained that Trump’s rhetoric reflects politics rather than racism. “He does not judge people by the color of their skin,” the Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of the Southern Baptist megachurch First Baptist Dallas, told the AP. “He judges people on whether they support him. If you embrace him, he’ll embrace you. If you attack him, he’ll attack you. That’s the definition of colorblind.”
Ahead of Trump’s Wednesday visit to El Paso, Garcia-Siller had the border city on his mind. Months earlier, the archbishop preached empathy during a February visit to El Paso, coming to see for himself what Trump had described as a “humanitarian crisis.” Instead, he said he found that claims of a “national emergency” were “a lie,” according to Catholic News Agency, and that the real crisis was in supporting the migrants and “how we are going to take care of those who are discriminated against, and those who are disadvantaged.”
He echoed that sentiment on Tuesday.
“There is growing fear and harassment, and at times American public discourse uses rhetoric that instigates fear against foreigners, immigrants and refugees,” he said. “We must pray fervently for peace amidst all of the violence, which seems to be overwhelming our society. We must be lights in the darkness.”