The Catholic Church has clapped back at Steve Bannon, who slammed the church in an excerpt from this Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” over their response to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) sunset, calling his remarks “so ridiculous” they don’t even “merit a comment.”
“You might imagine I was rather befuddled to see it,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan in an interview on Sirius XM Radio Thursday. He said he hadn’t heard Bannon’s comments, but read a transcript.
“The Catholic Church has been terrible about this,” Bannon told Charlie Rose during a discussion about DACA’s end. “To come to grips with the problems in the Church, they need illegal aliens, they need illegal aliens to fill the churches.”
“I don’t really wanna care to go into what I think is a preposterous and rather insulting statement that the only reason we bishops care for immigrants is for the economic because we want to fill our churches and get more money,” Dolan said. “That’s insulting and that’s just so ridiculous that it doesn’t merit a comment.”
Instead, Cardinal Dolan drew on the words of Jesus Christ, saying it’s a “Biblical mandate” to treat immigrants with respect and love.
“This is not an issue of Catholic doctrine because it comes from the Bible itself, and we Catholics are people of the book,” Dolan went on. “And the Bible is so clear — so clear — that to treat the immigrant with dignity and respect, to make sure that society is just in its treatment of the immigrant, is biblical mandate. It’s clear in the Old Testament — my Jewish neighbors remind of that all the time — and it’s clear from the lips of Jesus when he said: ‘Whatever you do to the least of my brothers you do to me. And when I was a stranger’ — meaning an immigrant or a refugee — ‘you welcomed me.’”
Listen to Cardinal Dolan’s full response below: