c. 2000 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ The nation’s Catholic bishops reiterated their call for an end to capital punishment Wednesday (Nov. 15) and called for a host of reforms in the criminal justice system where “putting more people in prison and, sadly, more people to death has not given Americans the security we seek.”

Gathered here for their annual meeting, the bishops said criminals must not be warehoused in prisons with sentences that do not fit the crimes. “We are all sinners, and our response to sin should not be abandonment and despair, but rather justice, contrition, reparation and return or reintegration of all into the community,” the bishops said.

The bishops estimated that 30 percent of inmates in federal prisons are Catholic, and they bemoaned the fact that Hispanics _ one of the church’s fastest-growing segments _ make up 14 percent of the prison population, even though they are only 9 percent of the general population.

In their statement, “Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice,” the bishops also spoke out against mandatory sentencing guidelines and said rehabilitation must be a key component of any prison sentence.

“Punishment for its own sake is not a Christian response to crime,” the statement said. “Punishment must have a purpose. It must be coupled with treatment and, when possible, restitution.”

This was the first time the country’s bishops have made a broad statement on the criminal justice system, and the document was striking not in its treatment of crime but in its treatment of inmates.

Archbishop Patrick Flores of San Antonio said the prison population may be the church’s greatest mission field.

“I can’t think of any segment of society that needs our help more so than the incarcerated,” Flores said.

Bishops also renewed their call for an end to capital punishment, a policy they called unfair, ineffective and counter to the central message of the gospel.

“Capital punishment is cruel, unnecessary and arbitrary,” the statement said. “It often has racial overtones, and it fails to live up to our deep conviction that all human life is sacred.”

In other business, bishops unanimously approved a call upon the U.S. church to take stronger steps to welcome new immigrants, a population where the church is seeing its most phenomenal growth, particularly among Asians and Hispanics.

“Without condoning illegal actions,” the bishops said the church and the larger society must offer pastoral care, education and social services to all immigrants, legal or otherwise. Bishops were reminded that the modern church was built by waves of Irish, Polish and Italian immigrants of the last century who also were not always warmly received on American shores.

The bishops added that the church risks losing these new immigrants to “evangelical and Pentecostal churches” if they are not welcomed in their own Catholic parishes.

“We bishops must confess, as well, that recent immigrants have not always encountered welcome in the church,” they said. “Today immigrants of all sorts too often face prejudice within the church. At times, their legitimate desire to worship in their own language, according to their own traditions, has not been satisfied.”

The bishops also restated their vehement opposition to abortion and castigated the U.S. Supreme Court for its decision earlier this year striking down a Nebraska law that sought to ban what abortion opponents call “partial-birth abortion.”

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony said the court’s “dangerous and tragic” decision confirmed his fears in the 1970s that Roe vs. Wade had launched a “slippery slope” on abortion rights.

“The court has moved away from protecting human life to legalizing infanticide,” Mahony said. “The most ominous part of this decision is (the question of) what’s next? Where do we go from here? This is not the end, and it’s only going to get worse.”

The bishops said they support a constitutional amendment to reverse Roe vs. Wade and invited “people of goodwill to explore with us all avenues of legal reform.”

“Our legal system, and thus our national culture, is being pressed to declare that human life has no inherent worth, that the value of human life can be assigned by the powerful and that the protection of the vulnerable is subject to the arbitrary choice of others,” the bishops said.

DEA END ECKSTROM