Anyone looking to see the best and worst of America all in one place should stand outside St. Francis Assisi Church in Mount Kisco on Sundays at around 1:15 p.m. It is a remarkable sight.

There you will see multi-generational families — a couple of hundred at least — in their Sunday best, waiting to enter 1:30 mass. It’s St. Francis’ weekly Spanish-language service and it is a standing-room-only event, every week.

The scene is the stuff of Norman Rockwell. From grandmothers to infants — girls in ribbons and boys with spit-polished hair — gathered to worship as families. It is a custom we so often lament as lost in an increasingly secularized America. But there it still is, on glorious display, each Sunday on East Main Street.

The problem, of course, is that about half the families assembled probably aren’t supposed to be there. They are illegal immigrants. There, the Rockwell portrait is marred…

The rest of this piece is available on Newsday Westchester. Thanks for reading.