But as multiethnic as this parish is, it is not ultimately multicultural.

All who belong believe in the same basic things: the same natural law, the same justice, the same God. They all would agree, I believe, on the indispensable elements at the heart of American culture.

So, too, would their neighbors at the Evangelical church, the Episcopalian church and the Jewish synagogue down the road. For at the core of our culture are words carved in stone for Moses and the Word made flesh in a baby born to Mary -- and it doesn't matter whether you first learned of these things in Lagos, Seoul, Mexico City or New York.

To be sure, there are important secondary things that also define our specifically American culture. These include our enduring constitutional tradition, our reverence for the Founders of that tradition and our respect for other heroes who through the years maintained that tradition, often at great cost. It includes our English language, our prose and poetry, and our pop, folk and rock 'n' roll music.

It includes our love for the American land itself, its unmatched beauty, and the honor we pay our parents (and, in some cases, their parents, and their parents' parents) for the blood and toil they invested to keep this land free and make it a better place for us and our children.

As long as they do not overwhelm us with sheer numbers coming from any single country or foreign-language tradition, new immigrants who share our basic values can over time join us in our love for the particular things that define us as a nation. They can assimilate. Balkanization, fostered by the multiculturalist mindset, is a threat to American culture, but there is a greater threat behind the current drive to amnesty all illegal aliens and maintain a flow of new, exploitable, unskilled foreign laborers.

This is the ideology that wants to write into law -- in this nation founded on the principle that God created all men equal -- that there shall be a resident subclass of laborers constrained by government to work for wages so low no American would accept them. This ideology is a form of materialism that puts the pursuit of profit above all else. It is the inordinate love of money.

It would dissolve what is best about America in a culture of greed.