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The Board of Directors of the Knights of Columbus has called upon Congress and the president to “agree upon immigration legislation that not only gains control over the process of immigration, but also rejects any effort to criminalize those who provide humanitarian assistance to undocumented immigrants.”
It further calls for “providing these immigrants an avenue by which they can emerge from the shadows of society and seek legal residency and citizenship in the United States.”
The board addressed the issue in a resolution adopted at its quarterly meeting in Charleston, S.C., April 7-9. The statement noted that “the vast majority of undocumented Mexicans and other Latin Americans in the United States are simply trying to build better lives for themselves and their families, but must struggle to do so from the shadows of American society.”
The board declared that “legitimate concerns regarding sovereignty and the lawful and orderly control of cross-border travel must not be the only concerns addressed by a new immigration law.”
The resolution stated that the Knights of Columbus “is an international Catholic lay organization that has proudly included brother Knights in Mexico for more than a hundred years, and has thousands of members throughout the countries of Central America and the Caribbean.”
It recalls that at the 1997 Synod for America, held in Mexico City, the assembled bishops of the Catholic Church “stressed the solidarity and the common destiny of all of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere” and points out that in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), Pope Benedict XVI “stresses the centrality of charity in the pursuit of justice. And charity – the product of Christian love – is the first principle of the [Knights of Columbus].”
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