Bravo, Cardinal. And about that pope of Hollywood tag ...

I may have to revise my somewhat irreverent description of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony as the pope of Hollywood in light of his sudden, and powerful, realization that immigrants are people too.

By labeling the anti-immigration movement sweeping the country as “hysterical” and by coming out in opposition to the civilian border watchers, he pretty much turned the other cheek to reveal a set and determined jaw.

That would have been profound enough, but the cardinal took it a step further in an interview on the eve of Ash Wednesday. Noting the pending congressional legislation that would require churches to determine the immigration status of their parishioners before providing social services, he pretty much said to hell with that.

He told a reporter that if the measure passed in Congress, he would call on priests in the 288 parishes of the L.A. Archdiocese to resist the law. “If you take this to its logical, ludicrous extreme,” he said, “every single person who comes up to receive Holy Communion, you have to ask them to show papers.”

Bravo.

I realize that nowhere in the preceding paragraphs have I used the term “illegal” to identify the targets of the strident, fist-shaking enemies of Latinos who are crossing our borders in search of a better life. The term flies in the face of human history and human tendencies.

Since the dawn of their awareness, families have braved oceans, mountains and deserts seeking food sources, water supplies, fertile land or better weather in an effort to simply exist. Then political boundaries slammed down like iron gates on the freedom to move, and the terms “illegal alien” and “undocumented worker” entered our vocabulary to isolate the victims of a new territorial imperative.

A response to their presence has been a slowly building antipathy in the U.S. toward any brown-skinned guy who stands on a corner looking for work or any brown-skinned woman who needs medical assistance or any brown-skinned kid who needs food. Cops were being urged to check them for green cards, and groups within organizations like the Sierra Club began urging limitations to any kind of immigration.

In case you’re wondering, amigo, none of this is aimed at Brits, Swedes or Canadians.

By shaking his ecclesiastic fist in the faces of bigotry, Mahony is marching in the shadows of priests who fought racial hatred in the 1960s civil rights movements. They went to jail so that blacks could vote or sit in a “white” restaurant or attend unsegregated schools, and so doing ennobled us all.

The Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip, were Catholic priests who were sentenced in that same decade to years in prison for protesting the war in Vietnam.

They chose civil disobedience to the silent acceptance of a war that essentially went nowhere and proved nothing. The lesson, taught in courage by priests such as the Berrigans, has, alas, failed to impress those who wage war today.

And now we face an addled Congress debating the righteousness of punishing churches and other social institutions that don’t demand proof of citizenship from those they’re helping.

In other words, “Bless a Mexican, go to jail” is about to become a new bumper sticker.

I’m always somewhat surprised, although I guess I shouldn’t be, at the level of vituperation spat by so-called Christians toward those with whom they violently disagree. My admiration for the movie “Brokeback Mountain” evoked an onslaught of open hatred not only directed at the film but at the gays themselves.

Sections of the Bible condemning homosexuality were piled before me like a new Mt. Ararat, as though this grand book of moral ethics was little more than a diatribe against a segment of humanity that followed different trails. One shudders to think what pogroms of violence and exclusion could be forthcoming if the misanthropes were given their way.

I see similarities to many of the responses that have come to me in the past on columns written against the hatred spewed upon immigrants coming from Latin America to the U.S., looking for ways out of poverty and willing to work to get there. I am doing nothing more, they say, than supporting “your people,” dismissing the notion that they are all our people, inasmuch as humanity is a family in a global village. We will know that someday.

By defining what Christianity ought to be, Mahony will surely bring down on himself the condemnation of the Bible-thumping right. It is not about establishing a world order at the point of a bayonet or protecting America’s border by threatening the rights of churches to administer acts of charity. If we eliminate that right in this era of suspicion and condemnation, we are supporting the forces that are trying to turn us into a rigid and unloving people.

Roger Mahony, the spiritual leader of 5 million Catholics, has clearly announced that he will not stand by to see that happen. He has displayed uncertainty and confusion on vital issues in the past, but not this time. I used to deride him as the pope of Hollywood. I don’t think I’ll be calling him that anymore.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.