Look beyond racist clichés, Irish-American cardinal urges

A prominent Irish-American cardinal has used St Patrick’s Day to hit out at anti-immigrant rhetoric, and called on Catholics to look beyond stereotypes to see people as they truly are.

“In the 1870s, the code images for Irish people were drunken apes,” Cardinal Joe Tobin wrote on Twitter. “The same sort of calumny is used today, when immigrants are called rapists and drug dealers. When we speak about immigrants as less than human, we become something less than what God intended us to be.”

Speaking to The Irish Catholic, the cardinal, who heads the New Jersey diocese of Newark, said: “I believe that a great deal of anti-immigrant rhetoric is based on caricatures, hence the tweet.

“Our task is to ‘restore people’s faces’ by seeing them as they really are,” he continued.

Born into an Irish-American family in Detroit, Michigan, the cardinal is a former Redemptorist Superior General. As Archbishop of Indianapolis in 2015 he famously clashed with Indiana’s then governor, Vice-President Mike Pence, over welcoming and settling Syrian refugees.