(HOLLY MEYER. AP).
Government officials would be infringing on religious freedom if they were to restrict the Catholic Church’s work serving migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border, says a top U.S. bishop.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, addressed the issue this week while in Louisville, Kentucky, for a USCCB meeting where migration issues, including the long wait for religious worker visas, came up repeatedly. He acknowledged recent targeting of faith-based border work by government officials, including the Texas attorney general’s attempts to shutdown a Catholic nonprofit that has operated a network of migrant shelters for decades.
“We obviously want to respect the law, but if that liberty is restricted, then yes, our religious liberty is being restricted because we can’t put into practice the precepts of the Gospel,” Broglio said during a news conference Thursday.