Abp Lori: religious test for immigrants denies human dignity

(Vatican Radio) The Chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ ad hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, has added his voice to a growing chorus of Catholic Church leaders appalled by the suggestion – which came from a candidate for the nomination of the Republican Party in the United States in the 2016 presidential election – of using a religious test to exclude people seeking to immigrate to the United States.

In an exclusive interview with Vatican Radio, Archbishop Lori reiterated sentiments first expressed while he was attending a conference at the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome earlier in December - a conference specifically focused on the persecution of Christian religious minorities. “Certainly we have to guard our borders," Archbishop Lori told Vatican Radio, "certainly the government has to see to the security and the safety of its citizens – no one doubts that – but it raises the greatest of alarms when we do so on the basis of a whole religion.”

“To say, ‘You can’t come in because you are a Muslim,’ – that certainly is a denial of human dignity, it’s a denial of religious freedom,” Archbishop Lori continued, adding, “and it is, I think, very unfair in its characterization of Islam.”

Click below to hear Archbishop Lori's extended conversation with Vatican Radio's Chris Altieri