Daily Inspiration Quote by Roger Mahony

There is a quiet brag hidden inside Mahony's measured praise: America, he suggests, has flirted with nativism but ultimately kept choosing openness. The phrasing does heavy lifting. "By and large" is clerical diplomacy, a moral judgment delivered with an escape hatch. It allows him to acknowledge ugly chapters without naming them, while still positioning the national story as one of restraint and basic decency. "Temptation" reframes exclusion as a sin of impulse rather than a policy program backed by institutions, economics, and racial hierarchy. That is pastoral rhetoric at work: it treats fear as something you can be talked down from.

The line also betrays the Church's own stake in the argument. A Catholic archbishop speaking about "doors to the world" is implicitly defending immigrants as neighbors, parishioners, and moral claimants on the national conscience. The subtext is not only "don't panic" but "your identity is already entangled with the outsider". In an era when immigration debates are often staged as security theater, Mahony reaches for a vocabulary of character: resisting temptation is what a good people do when they are scared.

The context, likely the late-20th to early-21st century cycles of restrictionist backlash, matters because it makes the compliment tactical. It's less a victory lap than a nudge. By crediting Americans with past restraint, he tries to make future openness feel like continuity rather than concession. The sentence is an appeal to live up to a self-image before it curdles into a wall.