A Catholic Defense of Enforcing Immigration Laws
Levan Ramishvili
A Catholic Defense of Enforcing Immigration Laws
By Edward Feser
While progressive Catholics conclude that Vice President Vance and other Catholic defenders of administration policy are flatly at odds with Church teaching on immigration, I will argue that that is not the case. Indeed, it is clear that Vance is not only well within those boundaries, but is in fact on much stronger ground than those who advocate a virtually “open borders” position in the name of Catholicism.
The Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to enforce U.S. immigration laws have been controversial, not least in Catholic circles. On one hand, Vice President J. D. Vance has defended the administration’s restrictive immigration policy by appealing to the theological notion of the ordo amoris (or order of charity), according to which our strongest obligations are to those closest to us, such as our fellow citizens. But others note that the Church’s Catechism teaches that a prosperous nation is obliged “to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin” (2241). In a February letter to the American Catholic bishops, Pope Francis indicated his “disagreement” with the administration, and appeared to criticize the vice president for an “ideological” distortion of the ordo amoris (while refraining from mentioning Vance by name).
Yet while progressive Catholics conclude that Vance and other Catholic defenders of administration policy are flatly at odds with Church teaching on immigration, I will argue that that is not the case. In fact, the progressives rely on simplistic platitudes and selective quotations from authoritative documents. But when the entirety of the Church’s teaching is taken into account, it is clear that—within certain clearly defined boundaries—there can be reasonable disagreement about the contours of immigration policy among faithful Catholics. Indeed, it is clear that Vice President Vance is not only well within those boundaries, but is in fact on much stronger ground than those who advocate a virtually “open borders” position in the name of Catholicism.
The Nation in the Ordo Amoris
In order to properly understand and apply Catholic teaching on the moral stakes at issue in debates over immigration policy, it is absolutely crucial to be aware of the importance that Catholic social teaching attaches to the nation and national identity. Secular Western political thought since the Enlightenment tends to conceive of human beings either as atomized individuals, or as mere cells in a single collectivist blob. It is blind to the middle-ground social formations of the family, the local community, and the nation. But the Church has always insisted that it is precisely in these intermediate orders that our nature as social animals finds its primary expression.
In his book Memory and Identity, Pope St. John Paul II gave eloquent testimony to this traditional theme. He noted the modern Western tendency toward “supranational structures [and] internationalism” and “reservations” about the notion of “national identity as expressed through culture,” to the point that “modern Western European countries have arrived at a stage which could be defined as ‘post-identity’” (pp. 66 and 86). In opposition to these trends, the pope wrote:
Yet it still seems that nation and native land, like the family, are permanent realities. In this regard, Catholic social doctrine speaks of “natural” societies, indicating that both the family and the nation have a particular bond with human nature, which has a social dimension. Every society’s formation takes place in and through the family: of this there can be no doubt. Yet something similar could also be said about the nation. (p. 67)
In particular, says John Paul II, the nation and the cultural heritage defining it cannot be replaced by political institutions or mere legal ties between citizens. For these in fact presuppose the nation, which is the more fundamental social reality:
The term “nation” designates a community based in a given territory and distinguished from other nations by its culture. Catholic social doctrine holds that the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention. Therefore, in human history they cannot be replaced by anything else. For example, the nation cannot be replaced by the State, even though the nation tends naturally to establish itself as a State. . . . Still less is it possible to identify the nation with so-called democratic society, since here it is a case of two distinct, albeit interconnected orders. Democratic society is closer to the State than is the nation. Yet the nation is the ground on which the State is born. (pp. 69–70)
So essential is the nation to human well-being that patriotism or love of one’s nation is a moral duty implicit in the Ten Commandments. John Paul writes:
If we ask where patriotism appears in the Decalogue, the reply comes without hesitation: it is covered by the fourth commandment, which obliges us to honor our father and mother. It is included under the umbrella of the Latin word pietas, which underlines the religious dimension of the respect and veneration due to parents. . . .
Patriotism is a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features. It is a love which extends also to the works of our compatriots and the fruits of their genius. Every danger that threatens the overall good of our native land becomes an occasion to demonstrate this love. (pp. 65–66)
Accordingly, the Catechism too teaches that that the fourth commandment “extends to the duties of . . . citizens to their country, and to those who administer or govern it” (2199), and that “the love and service of one’s country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity” (2239). By no means does this entail hostility toward other nations or indifference to their needs. Such jingoism or chauvinism would be a vice of excess where love of one’s nation is concerned. Still, a radical cosmopolitanism that eschews any special regard for one’s own nation would be a vice of deficiency. Patriotism is the middle ground between these vices.
Patriotism does entail, however, that one’s strongest obligations are to one’s own nation, just as one has stronger obligations to one’s own family than to other families. This is where the notion of the ordo amoris comes in. St. Thomas Aquinas expounds it as follows:
Augustine says, . . . “Since one cannot do good to all, we ought to consider those chiefly who by reason of place, time or any other circumstance, by a kind of chance are more closely united to us.” . . .
Now the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it. . . . But the bestowal of benefits is an act of charity towards others. Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us. Now one man’s connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters in which men are engaged together; (thus the intercourse of kinsmen is in natural matters, that of fellow-citizens is in civic matters, that of the faithful is in spiritual matters, and so forth): and various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, because we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he is most closely connected with us. . . .
For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succor those rather who are most closely connected with us. (Summa Theologiae II-II.31.3)
Note that Aquinas teaches that, all things being equal, we have stronger obligations to “kinsmen” and “fellow-citizens.” This is exactly the point Vice President Vance was making. Note too that this by no means entails that we have no obligations to others, nor does it entail that we are not social animals by nature. On the contrary, the ordo amoris is a consequence of our social nature—because as John Paul II notes, it is precisely in the contexts of the family and the nation that our social nature is most immediately developed.
Apparently intending to counter the use Vance made of the notion of the ordo amoris, Pope Francis’s letter says that “the human person . . . [has] a constitutive relationship with all” and is not a “mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings.” But Vance said nothing that implied otherwise, and certainly Aquinas does not. The point is not that we don’t have duties to people of all nations, but merely that one’s first duty is to his own nation, just as it is to his own family. As Aquinas goes on to say, there can certainly be particular cases where the needs of strangers trump those of people closer to us. But “it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection: and the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man” (Summa Theologiae II-II.31.3).
Immigrants in the Ordo Amoris
Let us turn, then, to what the Church has to say about immigration and immigrants. We can begin with what the Catechism states—including the parts that progressives tend not to quote, which I have put in boldface:
The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.
Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying civic burdens. (2241)
The Catechism does teach that nations ought to welcome immigrants—and this makes perfect sense given that we do indeed have obligations to people of other nations, who are part of the common human family of which all nations are members. In fact, this is just a further extension of the ordo amoris. But precisely because it is, the Catechism also puts qualifications on the obligation to accept immigrants. It is not absolute. Nations need accept immigrants only “to the extent they are able.” The authorities that govern a nation, precisely because they are responsible for the common good of its own citizens, may put “conditions” on immigration. Immigrants seeking to enter a country must “respect [its] spiritual heritage” and “obey its laws.” Even just from the Catechism, then, it is clear that the Church does not teach that a nation must accept all immigrants, or that it must tolerate illegal immigration, or that it must acquiesce in the destruction of the cultural inheritance that defines it. These qualifications too make perfect sense, given that in the ordo amoris, our obligations to foreigners—while real—are weaker than our obligations to our own nation.
Other magisterial documents make this clearer still. The 1988 document The Church and Racism: Towards a More Fraternal Society, issued by the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, acknowledges that:
It is up to the public powers who are responsible for the common good to determine the number of refugees or immigrants which their country can accept, taking into consideration its possibilities for employment and its perspectives for development but also the urgency of the need of other people. The State must also see to it that a serious social imbalance is not created which would be accompanied by sociological phenomena of rejection such as those which can occur when an overly heavy concentration of persons from another culture is perceived as directly threatening the identity and customs of the local community that receives them.
Here the Church acknowledges that a nation’s concerns about the economic well-being of its own citizens, and about preserving its own culture and identity, may be among the considerations that guide public authorities in deciding how many immigrants to take in. Recent popes have said the same thing. For example, in a 2010 address, Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged that nations have a “legitimate concern for security and social coherence,” so that “states have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers,” and “immigrants, moreover, have the duty to integrate into the host country, respecting its laws and its national identity.”
Similarly, notwithstanding his well-known concern for migrants, Pope John Paul II agreed that there are limits to how welcoming to them a nation can be, consistent with its own well-being. In his 2001 World Migration Day message, John Paul acknowledged that even “highly developed countries are not always able to assimilate all those who emigrate,” and that while the Church strongly affirms the right to emigrate, “certainly, the exercise of such a right is to be regulated, because practicing it indiscriminately may do harm and be detrimental to the common good of the community that receives the migrant.” In his 1995 World Migration Day message, John Paul acknowledged that “migration is assuming the features of a social emergency, above all because of the increase in illegal migrants,” and that the problem is “delicate and complex.” He affirmed that “illegal immigration should be prevented,” and that one reason it is problematic is that “the supply of foreign labour is becoming excessive in comparison to the needs of the economy, which already has difficulty in absorbing its domestic workers.” And he stated that in some cases, it may be necessary to advise migrants “to seek acceptance in other countries, or to return to their own country.”
Naturally, that is not to deny that John Paul II, like Pope Francis and the Church’s bishops more generally, have nevertheless put special emphasis on welcoming migrants. But everybody already knows that. What many people do not know is that the Church has, all the same, explicitly rejected an “open borders” policy; explicitly acknowledged that governments have the right to prevent illegal immigration; explicitly said that public authorities may limit the number of immigrants a nation takes in; and explicitly affirmed that concerns about security, the economic needs of its own citizens, and the preservation of its own cultural identity are among the considerations a nation’s public authorities can take into consideration when deciding on immigration policy.
It would be intellectually dishonest, and indeed contrary to justice and charity, to accuse Catholics who appeal to such considerations in defense of enforcing U.S. immigration laws of somehow dissenting from the Church’s teaching. The truth is that the entirety of that teaching—not only what it says about the obligation to welcome the stranger, but also what it says about the limitations on that obligation—must inform our judgments about how many migrants to allow in and under what conditions. And as Aquinas teaches, here “it is not possible to decide, by any general rule” but requires the exercise of the virtue of prudence. As to what prudence calls for, Catholics of good will can reasonably disagree. Those who demand mercy toward immigrants should afford the same courtesy to their fellow Catholics who simply express a legitimate difference of opinion about a matter of public policy.
Levan Ramishvili
As Catholic philosophers and fellow disciples of St. Thomas Aquinas, I would guess that Ed Feser and I are on the same page about many things. Even in his recent take on Catholic teaching on immigration, there is one point on which we are wholly in agreement: namely, that in evaluating policy decisions about immigration and immigration enforcement, we must consider “the entirety of Church teaching” on the subject.
Taken in its entirety, however, the Church’s teaching does not weigh, as Feser suggests, in favor of the Trump administration’s “restrictive immigration policy.” That claim is made to seem plausible only because Feser presents critics of the administration’s policies as consisting exclusively of “advocates of virtually open borders.” In reality, the very Church documents that Feser cites illustrate how it is possible both to criticize specific immoral forms of regulation and enforcement and defend moral forms of regulation and enforcement. Indeed, the whole point of Church teaching on immigration is to enable Catholics to assess whether specific policies are moral or immoral.
Feser’s essay does not properly reflect how this assessment works, however, because it misunderstands the role of prudence in applying moral principles.
Feser’s Relativistic Portrayal of Prudence
There is a puzzling disconnect between the beginning and end of Feser’s essay. Titled “A Catholic Defense of Enforcing Immigration Laws,” it opens by taking the position that “the administration’s restrictive immigration policy” is “on much stronger ground” vis-à-vis Catholic social teaching than the alternative that he presents as “virtually open borders.” He then identifies relevant principles from Church documents for the administration’s defenders to embrace: First, that the government ought to regulate immigration; second, that in doing so, it should consider immigrants’ potential impact on the well-being of its citizens, including with respect to employment, overall development, and cultural heritage.
(I should pause to note that this second point does not quite align with what the cited documents actually say. The point of section 2241 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, about respecting cultural heritage, is phrased in terms of the immigrant’s duties to the host, rather than as something governments should consider in admitting immigrants. The 1988 document Church and Racism introduces “[a country’s] possibilities for employment and perspectives for development” as criteria that justify more limited intake. As the reference to development illustrates, however, this passage is evidently meant to justify a proportionately more limited responsibility for poorer countries in the developing world. Moreover, it takes a more open-ended perspective on the good of society as including that of the potentially admitted refugees, rather than being a one-sided consideration of the “economic well-being of its own citizens” as Feser suggests. Feser takes this same text to justify considering “preserving cultural identity” as a reason for restriction. In reality, what the text actually says is that governments should avoid creating “serious social imbalances” that would impel the home population to reject newcomers due to the perception that their identity and culture are threatened. The Church’s concern, again, is for the good of the newcomers taken together with the preexisting population. I set these observations aside for the sake of argument, though, and simply address matters the way Feser presents them.)
Now none of this yet makes a case for the essay’s opening position—everything is still too abstract. In the concluding paragraph, however, Feser seems to think that the existence of these principles already settles the question in his favor:
It would be intellectually dishonest, and indeed contrary to justice and charity, to accuse Catholics who appeal to such considerations in defense of enforcing U.S. immigration laws of somehow dissenting from the Church’s teaching. The truth is that the entirety of that teaching—not only what it says about the obligation to welcome the stranger, but also what it says about the limitations on that obligation—must inform our judgments about how many migrants to allow in and under what conditions.
After presenting this position as objectively preferable in light of Catholic teaching, though, he veers into surprisingly relativistic territory:
And as Aquinas teaches, here “it is not possible to decide, by any general rule” but requires the exercise of the virtue of prudence. As to what prudence calls for, Catholics of good will can reasonably disagree. Those who demand mercy toward immigrants should afford the same courtesy to their fellow Catholics who simply express a legitimate difference of opinion about a matter of public policy.
Two moves occur in this paragraph. First, although Feser is right to emphasize the need for prudence, he relies on an essentially relativistic notion of prudence—one in which objective moral principles only get us so far, and the rest of the work is done by prudential judgment in a personal realm of mere “difference of opinion,” shielded from objective moral scrutiny. Indeed, the phrase “legitimate difference of opinion about a matter of public policy” places public policy outside the realm of things one can objectively morally evaluate—a view commonly found in company with relativistic notions of prudence, as I have argued elsewhere.
I am not sure why Feser makes this move. It seems at odds with his judgment that Catholic social teaching positively favors “the administration’s restrictive immigration policy.” What makes such a judgment “legitimate”? If it is because the judgment correctly reflects the action’s objective moral status, then Catholics cannot reasonably disagree. But if it is because one has the right to apply moral principles prudentially as one sees fit, then this can only be true if the action has no objective moral status or its true status is for some reason undiscoverable—and then one prudential judgment cannot be “more in line” with Church teaching than another.
Moral Considerations Are Not Moral Justifications
But there is a second problematic move as well. Feser is at his strongest when he reminds us that many considerations must inform moral analysis of immigration policy—considerations that his conclusion divides roughly into the good of the host society and the good of the immigrant. But the point is (or should be) that all those considerations should inform every moral judgment in this domain. Instead, the conclusion treats social good and welcoming the stranger as separable justifications for irreconcilably opposing moral judgments, one justifying “restrictive” policy and the other justifying “merciful” policy.
Why is this problematic? Here’s an analogy: In morally evaluating a medical treatment, many considerations are relevant, including expectation of success, the patient’s health and age, the procedure’s cost relative to family and community resources, the absolute wrongness of intentional killing or forgoing ordinary lifesaving means, etc. But the mere fact that age is a relevant factor does not mean that anyone can legitimately appeal to it to sufficiently justify a particular moral judgment. For instance, when my grandmother with Alzheimer’s starts refusing food, I cannot legitimately conclude, “She is old; therefore we can stop feeding her.” Or, if my task is to demolish old buildings, I must take possible outcomes into consideration: a vagrant who may be sleeping inside would be killed or seriously injured. But that does not mean that I am justified in refusing to demolish any buildings on the grounds that a vagrant might be inside. Obviously, instead I should look inside and see if there is a vagrant actually sleeping there or not.
In other words, an item’s being on a list of relevant factors does not automatically make it into a plausible moral justification in an actual case. Otherwise, I could simply pick the factors that give me the answer I want and ignore the others. Rather, through prudence, I need to identify which factor actually does morally determine the case—or, to use more Thomistic language, to identify which moral form “specifies” the particular act, making it right or wrong.
Consequently, different factors may morally determine different cases. But it is not true that different people may legitimately appeal to different factors to justify opposing judgments of the same case. The principle of noncontradiction applies just as much to moral judgments as to any others. And prudence is the light that illuminates an action’s moral status.
An Authentically Thomistic Account of Prudence
These two problems are symptoms of something gone awry in the underlying picture of moral reasoning in Feser’s essay, which I want to contrast with an authentically Thomistic view of prudence.
Consider: Feser cites Aquinas saying that “it is not possible to decide by any general rule” whether in a given situation I should aid a less needy family member versus a more needy stranger. Instead, one must decide by prudence. This can sound as though I must make my decision, not by considering a rule, but by something else: prudence.
But the English translation is misleading. What Aquinas actually says is that “a general rule cannot determine” which person I am obliged to aid in this situation, something that only prudence can do. The difference sounds innocent, but it is important.
What does Aquinas mean? Here are three important characteristics of Thomistic prudence.
First, Thomistic prudence is objective, not relativistic. For Aquinas, deliberately chosen actions are always objectively either good or evil. Prudence is the virtue for discerning that moral status. Disagreement is legitimate when prudence fails, not when prudence is operating normally. For instance, my options may be equally good and thus morally indistinguishable. Or poorly informed agents may reach different judgments where one or both are unwittingly wrong, but they disagree “legitimately” in the sense of both acting in good faith.
Second, prudence judges in accord with the moral law, not outside it. Prudential reasoning is supposed to identify the features defining a concrete action as good or evil, thus uncovering which moral law the action falls under. Aquinas’s point in the passage above is that there are many relevant rules that might govern aid: e.g., I should aid those nearer to me, and I should aid the needy, both as a general matter. But there is no overarching rule adjudicating between them—i.e., a rule that dictates “in cases of conflict, always prioritize proximity” or “always prioritize need.” Indeed, as Aquinas observes, need and proximity come in degrees, so one can’t know which will be morally defining without having a particular situation in mind.
Different situations, then, have different “features” that make them fall under different morally defining rules. By examining an action in its particular circumstances, then, the prudent person can discover which rule objectively morally specifies it. In one situation I should prioritize, say, buying a thoughtful gift for my sister to strengthen family ties. In another, I should prioritize, say, buying food to stock the kitchen of a newly arrived refugee to alleviate her hunger and loneliness. (Incidentally, that’s why Aquinas’s ordo amoris isn’t a priority rubric or moral triage principle for allocating aid. Rather, it is one moral principle among many others, and prudence’s task is to detect whether a given action falls under this principle or a different one.)
Third, Thomistic prudence relates principles to particular actions. The reason Feser can make the choice between “restrictive” versus “merciful” policy seem legitimately open is that it remains so abstract. No morally defining features have yet come into view. One cannot morally evaluate “health care procedures” any more than one can morally evaluate “immigration policy” or “enforcing laws” in the abstract. What can be analyzed is a specific law or policy or enforcement activity—e.g., the six-month waiting period for work permits for asylum seekers, or ending refugee admissions in the U.S. in 2025, or the policy of ceasing to consider humanitarian impact when determining whom to deport, or the specific actions that agents of the state take to enforce a law or policy. These are not morally neutral, and the virtue of prudence should enable us to detect their true moral status.
Thomistic Reasoning on Immigration
With this picture of Thomistic prudence in mind, let us now examine how one might exercise moral reasoning on questions pertaining to immigration policy and enforcement. Since there is no room here for full-fledged analysis of any of these actions, I will instead examine how the considerations Feser identifies intersect with the particular circumstances of America in 2025.
As noted earlier, Feser suggests that the good of the host society has been neglected in previous Catholic discussions—for example, “concerns about security, the economic needs of its own citizens, and the preservation of its own cultural identity.” It is notable that he assumes these factors must count on the side of limiting immigration—one could just as well point to lower crime rates by immigrants and their positive economic impact in favor of expanding immigration. (This illustrates, again, how such abstract considerations are meaningless without reference to particular circumstances.)
In any case, let us take cultural identity as an example. In the abstract, cultural identity looms large as a problem for immigration policy to address. But I want to suggest that when considered in connection with concrete facts about U.S. history, society, and politics—which is how prudence must consider it in order to reach concrete judgments about particular policies—there is little reason in our present circumstances to think that cultural identity will be weighty enough to become a defining moral factor in this domain at all.
In order to understand why, we need to see that in a Thomistic account, a human community is not a mere collective or agglomeration of individuals, but something much more like a living organism capable of self-maintenance. In other words, a community is not like a cake mix made up of various ingredients, which could be easily unbalanced by putting in too much baking powder. Instead, a community is like a tree that is continually taking up nutrients and incorporating them into its own life—reshaping what was once outside itself to make it be part of itself.
In this framework, communities are normally strong enough to carry out this work of incorporation—which is a basic task they must constantly perform, not just with foreigners, but also with newborn children and even with internal movements of people. A community must be unusually fragile, or take on an unusually large number of incomers, or set up unusually strong barriers to integration, in order to fail in this vital activity. Indeed, this task is not essentially a threat to, but precisely part of, the good of a society (as the example of children illustrates)—just as any living thing stays alive precisely by taking up new material into its life.
Historical examples amply illustrate how most societies are fully capable of incorporating newcomers. American culture has absorbed Irish, Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Polish, Chinese—and each group has gone on to be “digested” into American culture. This is not to say each group of immigrants did not have and even retain unique identifying features. But these did not displace American culture; instead, they became part of the life of American culture. The nation did not become less American after incorporating a wave of Jewish refugees after World War II. Despite initial panics about each new wave of immigration, ultimately, these fears have proved to be unfounded.
(Compare the widespread fear of conceiving a second child in case one cannot love her as much as one’s first. In reality, the family, being a living entity, expands to take up the new child into its life, making her just as loved and indispensable as the others. Is the family permanently shaped by her presence? Of course. But does the family thereby cease to be what it was, and become something else? Of course not. Instead, the new child is taken up into the family’s identity. Later, one can no longer imagine the family without her.)
Indeed, concerns about the fragility of American culture are hard to maintain in the face of its vigorously self-exporting nature. Wherever it goes, it recruits. So in terms of concrete fragility, it is hard to find any culture on earth whose identity is less fragile. But the U.S. is not unique in its capacity to absorb newcomers. My point is rather that this is what communities essentially do by their nature: like an organism, a community takes up incoming “material” into its own life.
Of course, there are examples of cultures that were instead overrun and destroyed by newcomers. Generally, these are extreme cases involving extraordinary disparity in numbers or resources, such as in the near-annihilation of Native American cultures by a vastly larger number of better-armed European incomers. Some cultures, too, are uniquely fragile because they are already under pressure from a dominant majority. In the Canadian province of Quebec, the only French-majority enclave in a majority-English country, for example, there is a policy of preferring Francophone refugees—a policy that seems defensible specifically because French speakers are already under significant cultural pressure. (Notably, this policy manages to balance protecting Francophone heritage with obligations to the vulnerable, illustrating that attention to one need not exclude the other.) In contrast, there is little evidence that recent waves of immigrants, large as they have been, pose any kind of special threat to American culture and identity.
My point is not to dismiss social-good factors. National identity (or security for that matter) is just as much a factor for moral reasoning as humanitarian need—in the abstract. But in a concrete set of circumstances, not all the factors may be morally relevant. In the abstract, there is simply no answer to the question whether national identity matters “more” or “less” than humanitarian need (or migrants’ right to pursue their own safety). But in the concrete, there are determining facts of the matter. This is equally true of humanitarian need: one cannot appeal to humanitarian need in defense of a “merciful policy,” without first showing that there is actual humanitarian need, and that such need is morally determinative in the situation at hand.
Thus Feser is right to say that all factors must be “taken into consideration.” But this only gets us as far as laying out the materials for the project of moral reasoning. It certainly does not mean that anyone who selects one of those considerations as morally determinative is right to do so. One can “legitimately” appeal to those factors if they are in fact morally determinative in the concrete case at hand. If they do not apply, or do not apply in a morally defining way, then one cannot appeal to them in defense of anything.
In short, it is meaningless to talk of the morality of “restrictive” versus “merciful” immigration policies. Prudential reasoning has an important role to play, yes—but that role is to illuminate the objective moral truth about specific immigration laws, policies, and enforcement activities.
In this response, I haven’t sought to make the case that the specific immigration policies pursued by the Trump Administration fail to align with Church teaching. But that work practically does itself, as soon as we allow ourselves to evaluate concrete policies and the people affected by them in light of the Church’s entire teaching—rather than cutting off discussion at an abstract level and putting further reasoning into a box marked, “Prudential matter! No moral scrutiny required.” It’s the same sort of thing we already do when we stand by a hospital bed, evaluating the morality of specific treatment options for a loved one. And by the light of prudence applying all the principles that Catholic social teaching urges, we can do so in the domain of immigration too.
Levan Ramishvili
Modern politics is overburdened with rights. With a flawed understanding of human nature’s relationality, rights discourse turns us inward away from others. One’s relationship with other persons and communities is centered around an obsession with mine. Too many, according to Pope Benedict XVI, are “concerned only with their rights, and they often have great difficulty in taking responsibility for their own and other people’s integral development.” Ever deepening our concern with rights, the modern person “closes in on himself”—losing track of the fundamental relationality between self and other, between us and them. We need to recall that “rights presuppose duties, if they are not to become mere license.” We need the necessary grasp of their interrelationship—but also, as Christians, we need to sincerely prioritize what we, in justice, owe others. The name for what we owe is caritas. Caritas is shaped by the need of others and our capacity to give. It is only within this context that we can understand a Christian approach to immigration—one that requires getting the emphasis right between rights and duties, while understanding that giving the love that is owed to the stranger does not detract from our common good, but rather enriches it because it integrates the stranger into our community.
What Feser Gets Right
Edward Feser in his recent Public Discourse essay offers a robust account of the rights of a country to secure its borders and to have and enforce immigration laws. His essay is an important reminder of the need for balance in understanding the question of immigration. The political community is a real expression of the fundamental sociality of the human person. We ought to love the us that we are part of. We rightly prioritize our own communities, and we have a legitimate role in determining who can join this community and how. It is because of this reality that a nation has a right to its borders and “governments have the right to prevent illegal immigration.”
To show this, Feser quotes several passages from the Church’s magisterium and places in boldface the parts that emphasize the right to territorial integrity. He is right to emphasize this right. Those who advocate “a virtually ‘open borders’ position in the name of Catholicism” should indeed read Feser’s article, because such positions are incompatible with a Catholic stance. Countries have a legitimate right to regulate the who, how, and how many of immigration.
But quite a lot depends on what one emphasizes. Feser emphasizes that countries have the right to manage immigration, but forgoes much emphasis on the duty to welcome migrants. For him, balancing between these two realities is simply a matter of opinion. Immigration is something about which “Catholics of good will can reasonably disagree.” For Feser, the question of immigration is fundamentally a prudential matter; those arguing for the exclusion of the oppressed, suffering, and impoverished are merely reminding us that America has rights too. But this misses a great deal of the point of Catholic moral teaching and what ideas we should be putting in bold. Feser may be using boldface to remind those who have allegedly forgotten the Church’s moral teaching, yet this is still emblematic of a misreading of Catholic teaching that turns clear moral teaching into optional counsels.
Those who seek to turn away migrants consistently emphasize our rights such that what is mine shapes my relationship with others. All that seems to matter is our borders and our rights. Feser writes that “John Paul II, like Pope Francis and the Church’s bishops more generally, have nevertheless put special emphasis on welcoming migrants. But everybody already knows that.” Does everyone know this? Do we make it the special—dare I say preferential—emphasis of our approach to migrants and refugees? When we balance welcome for migrants and our rights to our borders, we need to get that special emphasis on our duty to the stranger right. The fundamental problem with Feser’s argument is that he acknowledges no special emphasis duty to the needy stranger, and instead especially emphasizes only our rights.
Scriptural Emphasis
The Church’s understanding of the treatment of the xenos, the stranger or foreigner, goes back to the Exodus understanding of the people of God. The alien who resides with you should be treated “no differently than the native born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). Furthermore, we must store up our goods to share with “the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows in your towns so they may come and eat and be satisfied” (Deuteronomy 14:29). For Ezekiel, the promised Land is to be allotted among the Tribes of Israel “and for the foreigners residing among you,” who are to be treated “as native-born Israelites” (47:22). As a result, less money and land might be distributed to those in the nation as resources are distributed to others.
Christianity continues this tradition, especially in Christ’s teaching that “I was a foreigner [xenos] and you invited me in” (Matthew 25:34). For Pope Pius XII, Christ’s self-identity as a foreigner is grounded in his family’s having been refugees. The Holy Family is “the archetype of every refugee family;” they are “protectors of every migrant, alien, and refugee of whatever kind.” Considering our refugee God, St. Paul tells the faithful to live out philoxenia—a brotherly love, for foreigners to whom we owe hospitality (Romans 12:13). Augustine—in the context of his understanding of the Church as a city of foreigners or migrants (civitate peregrinus)—explains why the Apostles did not recognize the Resurrected Christ on the road to Emmaus: “He became a foreigner (hospes).” For Augustine, the lesson to be taken from Christ’s identification with the foreigner is the obligation to welcome them in from the outside. “Learn to welcome foreigners (hospites), and there you can recognize Christ.” Our hospitality to the stranger is our hospitality to Christ.
The whole emphasis is on welcoming and giving to the foreigner. These passages lack bold-able words that say that we should welcome the stranger only if we are able, or that we should only distribute to the foreigner if it does not decrease what is owed to our own, or that philoxenia should be less than our love for our fellow citizens. Instead, these central texts only highlight gift, duty, and caritas to the stranger.
The Emphasis in Catholic Social Thought
We should also turn to Catholic Social Thought to see how it structures its emphasis. For Pius XII, we are to welcome migrants, aliens, and refugees of any kind who come to our country “whether compelled by fear of persecution [refugees] or by want [immigrants].” Because of this, he wrote to the American bishops about U.S. regulation of migration (just as Pope Francis did). Pius told them that “the natural law itself, no less than devotion to humanity, urges that ways of migration be opened to these people.” Considering this, we must understand that “the sovereignty of the State, although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to the land is denied to needy and decent people.” Pius XII admonished Americans that the right of the nation must not be exaggerated in the face of outsiders’ needs. Thus he told American senators that they should “administer as liberally as possible” the American immigration laws that he thought were “overly restrictive.”
Pius XII does hold that there is a limiting principle to this, in that “the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid” aiding the foreigner. But the burden of proof lies on those who would restrict, because the emphasis is the need of the stranger. The fundamental aim must be helping the needy whose way of migration should not be restricted unless a very careful consideration identifies harm in that migration for the public good. There is a right to territorial integrity, to determining the process for managing immigration, and to an order of love that prioritizes our citizens. But more importantly, there is a duty to refugees fleeing oppression and to migrants suffering from want. This duty corresponds, for Pius XII, with the “natural rights of people to migrate.” If grounded in sincere need, this right mitigates—sometimes completely—the wrongdoing of illegally immigrating just as such need can mean that it is lawful to take “the property of another.”
Our personal and political lives should center on caritas “given and received,” as duty and right. This is the problem with Feser’s reading of Catholic Social Thought. We get truth in his essay, but what is needed is “caritas in veritate in re sociali.” To write about how we ought to treat migrants and emphasize our rights while neglecting the emphasis of Scripture, and deemphasizing what Catholic Social Thought emphasizes, is to lose that intimate connection of love in truth. When one speaks of the truth of one’s rights and speaks less, or not at all, of the truth that we owe our caritas to the needy migrant as an act of justice, one forgets caritas and thus does not fully get to the veritas. Neglecting caritas transforms the ordo amoris from a principle that expands our loves and broadens our duties to those outside our order to a principle that reminds us only of our own rights and prioritizes borders over persons.
More than Just Rights and Prudence
For Pope Leo the Great—known for his welcome of refugees into Rome—since God is love, “charity should know no limit, for God cannot be confined.” Our caritas cannot be limited to what is our own; while it must include that, it must also extend beyond it. Importantly, love of others and prioritization of the common good is not a zero-sum game. Solidarity with others and the common good itself constitute expansive principles. The common good grows in our sharing it. As Pope St. Leo teaches, “In all this activity, there is present the hand of Him who multiplies the bread by breaking it, and increases it by giving it away.” This is a claim grounded not only in metaphysics and theology, but also in the way economics works—especially in a market economy. When we welcome strangers, we not only benefit them, but we also benefit ourselves. This is the whole history of the United States. Our country’s greatness and public wealth have always been elevated and expanded by the arrival of migrants.
I am the grandchild of immigrants, the husband of a daughter of immigrants, the neighbor of immigrants, in a nation of immigrants. Patriotism welcomes others into the good that is this nation because we love that good. Such love does not only insist on its rights, but also insists on sharing this good. John Paul II writes (quoted by Feser) that “patriotism is a love for everything to do with our native land.” One of those things that has to do with any native land, but especially this native land, is philoxenia toward those here and at our borders. Real love communicates itself and so welcomes others into our native land in a way that benefits our common good. For those who fear that an expansive welcome to migrants will hurt our country, they can be assured by both economic research and by America’s history of integrating immigrants from every country.
Integration involves all kinds of prudential approaches to this question, including robust foreign aid to make it easier for people to stay in their native land, comprehensive immigration reform, and a due process approach to deporting criminals. Feser’s reminder of the validity of immigration laws is a service to making this possible. But we need more than just rights, and more than just prudence. Rights must be united to duties, prudence must be at the service of caritas in veritate, and caritas must be at the service of both the native citizen and the needy stranger if we are going to get the emphasis right.
Levan Ramishvili
As I showed in a recent article in Public Discourse, the Catholic Church teaches that prosperous nations have a duty to welcome immigrants, but only to the extent they are able, and that governments may restrict immigration out of concerns about security, economic impact, and the prospects of assimilation. In a pair of recent essays, Therese Cory and Terence Sweeney have criticized my article. What follows is a response.
“Relativism” and Other Straw Men
Having documented in my article what Church teaching says about both the duties nations have to immigrants and the qualifications on those duties—along with the duties immigrants have to their host countries—I concluded:
The truth is that the entirety of that teaching—not only what it says about the obligation to welcome the stranger, but also what it says about the limitations on that obligation—must inform our judgments about how many migrants to allow in and under what conditions. And as Aquinas teaches, here “it is not possible to decide, by any general rule” but requires the exercise of the virtue of prudence. As to what prudence calls for, Catholics of good will can reasonably disagree.
Commenting on this passage, Cory writes:
Feser . . . relies on an essentially relativistic notion of prudence—one in which objective moral principles only get us so far, and the rest of the work is done by prudential judgment in a personal realm of mere “difference of opinion,” shielded from objective moral scrutiny. Indeed, the phrase “legitimate difference of opinion about a matter of public policy” places public policy outside the realm of things one can objectively morally evaluate—a view commonly found in company with relativistic notions of prudence.
The bulk of her article then goes on to criticize this “relativistic notion of prudence.” The problem is that I hold no such notion. Nor, frankly, does Cory have any basis for attributing it to me. She has rashly read it into what I wrote, not out of what I wrote. It is a straw man.
Cory herself acknowledges that when making moral decisions in light of a variety of relevant considerations, “my options may be equally good and thus morally indistinguishable. Or poorly informed agents may reach different judgments where one or both are unwittingly wrong, but they disagree ‘legitimately’ in the sense of both acting in good faith.” But, as a charitable reading of my article should have made evident, that is all I meant when I wrote that “as to what prudence calls for, Catholics of good will can reasonably disagree.”
Nowhere do I say, nor would I say, that differing prudential judgments about immigration should be “shielded from objective moral scrutiny.” In no way would I place this area of public policy “outside the realm of things one can objectively morally evaluate.” My point was simply that because the relevant concrete circumstances to which we have to apply moral principle in this area are so complex, it is possible in some cases for there to be “options [that are] equally good and thus morally indistinguishable” (to borrow Cory’s words). And it is also possible for there to be other cases “where one or both [people] are unwittingly wrong, but they disagree ‘legitimately’ in the sense of both acting in good faith” (once again to use Cory’s words).
In fact, Cory and I are essentially in agreement on the general philosophical question of the nature of prudence. So, most of what she has to say is simply misdirected. Nor is this the only case where she attacks a straw man. Criticizing the use I make of the magisterial documents I cite, Cory writes, with respect to one of them:
[The] document . . . takes a more open-ended perspective on the good of society as including that of the potentially admitted refugees [emphasis in the original], rather than being a one-sided consideration of the “economic well-being of its own citizens” as Feser suggests. . . . The Church’s concern, again, is for the good of the newcomers taken together with the preexisting population.
But I never said or implied otherwise. It is true that I emphasize the legitimacy of a government’s taking account of the economic needs of its own population, because that is a consideration that routinely gets ignored in recent discussions about Catholicism and immigration. All the same, I did not deny that the good of immigrants must also be considered. On the contrary, I explicitly acknowledged that “there can certainly be particular cases where the needs of strangers trump those of people closer to us,” and that “we do indeed have obligations to people of other nations, who are part of the common human family of which all nations are members.”
Sweeney attacks a straw man of his own when he alleges that my article “emphasizes only our rights” and neglects “our duty to the stranger.” “Ever deepening our concern with rights,” Sweeney laments, “the modern person ‘closes in on himself’—losing track of the fundamental relationality between self and other.” The unwary reader might imagine from this that my article is grounded in a rights-based libertarian or individualist political philosophy.
But like Cory, Sweeney is attacking a figment of his imagination. There is in my article no emphasis on rights over duties, nor any commitment to individualism. On the contrary, the article explicitly emphasizes that we are “social animals” rather than “atomized individuals,” and that “it is precisely in the contexts of the family and the nation that our social nature is most immediately developed.” And again, I explicitly say that “the needs of strangers [can sometimes] trump those of people closer to us,” and that “we do indeed have obligations to people of other nations, who are part of the common human family.” My point was precisely that we have duties (not just rights), and that our first duty is to those closest to us.
Immigration and Culture
Cory takes issue with my claim that the Church allows that when formulating immigration policy, governments may take account of potential impact on the cultural heritage of a nation. She objects that “the point of section 2241 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, about respecting cultural heritage, is phrased in terms of the immigrant’s duties to the host, rather than as something governments should consider in admitting immigrants.” But in fact, what that passage says is this:
Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying civic burdens. (2241)
The Catechism says here that governments may put conditions on immigration “especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption.” And it says that among these duties are “to respect with gratitude the . . . spiritual heritage of the country that receives them.” So, contrary to what Cory claims, the Catechism is not talking only about the duties of immigrants, but also about what governments may consider when deciding on immigration policy. Indeed, the Catechism says that governments may consider the country’s “spiritual heritage” precisely because immigrants have a duty to respect it.
Even apart from this particular passage from the Catechism, it stands to reason that governments may take account of a nation’s culture when determining immigration policy. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church notes that:
A nation has a “fundamental right to existence,” to “its own language and culture, through which a people expresses and promotes . . . its fundamental spiritual ‘sovereignty,’” to “shape its life according to its own traditions,” . . . [and] to “build its future by providing an appropriate education for the younger generation.” (157)
Now, a nation’s government exists precisely for the sake of promoting the common good of its people, which can hardly exclude protecting a nation’s rights. Hence, if a nation has a right to its own language, culture, spiritual sovereignty, and traditions, then it follows that a government can consider what is conducive to protecting these things when deciding on immigration policy.
The Church has also acknowledged that grave social problems can arise when a cultural minority does not respect the cultural heritage of the nation in which it resides. In the encyclical Pacem in Terris, Pope St. John XXIII wrote that such minority groups must always be treated justly, but also warned:
It is worth noting, however, that these minority groups, in reaction, perhaps, to the enforced hardships of their present situation, or to historical circumstances, frequently tend to magnify unduly characteristics proper to their own people. They even rate them above those human values which are common to all mankind, as though the good of the entire human family should subserve the interests of their own particular groups. A more reasonable attitude for such people to adopt would be to recognize the advantages, too, which accrue to them from their own special situation. They should realize that their constant association with a people steeped in a different civilization from their own has no small part to play in the development of their own particular genius and spirit. Little by little they can absorb into their very being those virtues which characterize the other nation. But for this to happen these minority groups must enter into some kind of association with the people in whose midst they are living, and learn to share their customs and way of life. It will never happen if they sow seeds of disaffection which can only produce a harvest of evils. (97)
Similarly, in a 2003 address, Pope St. John Paul II advised governments facing such problems:
If the gradual integration of all immigrants is fostered with respect for their identity and, at the same time, safeguarding the cultural patrimony of the peoples who receive them, there is less of a risk that they will come together to form real “ghettos” in which they remain isolated from the social context and sometimes even end by harbouring a desire to take over the territory gradually.
Pope Francis too acknowledged the problem in some remarks made in 2016:
In theory, hearts must not be closed to refugees, but those who govern need prudence. They must be very open to receiving refugees, but they also have to calculate how best to settle them, because refugees must not only be accepted, but also integrated. . . . [A] political price can be paid for an imprudent judgement, for accepting more than can be integrated. What is the danger when refugees or migrants—and this applies to everybody—are not integrated? They become a ghetto.
A culture that does not develop in relationship with another culture, this is dangerous. . . . I talked with an official of the Swedish government . . . [who] told me of some difficulties they are presently facing, . . . because so many are arriving that there is no time to make provision for them, so that they can find schools, homes, employment, and learn the language. Prudence has to make this calculation.
Culture and Religion
Now, Cory herself acknowledges that “in the abstract, cultural identity looms large as a problem for immigration policy to address.” But she argues that given the actual concrete facts in the American context, “there is little reason in our present circumstances to think that cultural identity will be weighty enough to become a defining moral factor in this domain at all.” She notes that assimilation normally can, and in the American context historically has, occurred in an organic way that has served to enrich rather than disrupt the culture of the nation receiving immigrants. In particular, she notes that Irish, Italian, German, Hungarian, Polish, Chinese, and Jewish immigrants “did not displace American culture; instead, they became part of the life of American culture.”
In fact, I am in agreement with Cory about that much. But it would be fallacious glibly to extrapolate from this example to other contexts, including future immigration into the United States. The crucial factor here, I would argue, is religion. The reason Irish, Italian, German, Hungarian, and Polish immigrants ultimately assimilated so smoothly into American culture is that they shared the same Christian religious view of the world that already prevailed in the United States. And while Chinese and Jewish immigrants did not, they could nevertheless assimilate smoothly as well, because their religious traditions were not missionary in character. For example, Confucianism does not require that the entire world become Confucian, and Judaism does not require that the entire world become Jewish. It was easy, then, for new Chinese and Jewish Americans to “live and let live” with their predominantly Christian fellow citizens, and for Christian citizens to adopt a similar attitude toward them.
But things are by no means guaranteed to go as smoothly with religions that are aggressively missionary in character. Of course, Christianity and Islam are both missionary religions. Both have the conversion of the entire world as their goal. Historically, both have also held that state power can legitimately be used to facilitate the realization of this goal. Hence, the governments of Christian countries have traditionally given special favor to Christianity, and the governments of Islamic countries have traditionally given special favor to Islam.
There is today a crucial difference, however. In modern times, Christians have tended by and large to abandon the use of state power to uphold Christianity. I put to one side for present purposes the question whether this change was theologically sound or practically advisable. The point is that this is, as an empirical matter, how most (even if not all) Christians today view relations between Church and state. But no parallel change has taken place in Islam. While there are some Muslims who have adopted Western attitudes on this matter, the majority have not. As the Pew Research Center has reported, “overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land.”
To be sure, there are varying attitudes among Muslims about what, specifically, this should entail. Some want Islamic law to govern the Muslim minority communities within a nation, but not necessarily the whole country. Some want only certain aspects of Islamic law to be enforced. Some might hold that while it would in theory be best for Islamic law to be the law of the land, in practice this is not a reasonable goal in a country while Muslims remain a minority. The point, though, is that Muslim attitudes about the relationship between government and religion are in general very different from those that prevail among modern Westerners.
Now, in light of this fact, one would expect that social tensions of the kind warned about in the remarks from popes John XXIII, John Paul II, and Francis quoted above, would exist in Western countries that have taken in large numbers of Muslim immigrants. And indeed, that is what we find, as others have pointed out here at Public Discourse.
Whatever one thinks about this situation, two things are evident. First, for the reason I’ve explained, one cannot with confidence extrapolate from the example of immigration into the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hence Cory is jumping to conclusions when she says that “there is little reason in our present circumstances to think that cultural identity will be weighty enough to become a defining moral factor in this domain at all.” Second, it is therefore reasonable to include these difficulties of assimilation among the factors governments may consider when deciding on immigration policy—as even Pope Francis acknowledges, as the remarks quoted above make clear.
A Matter of Emphasis
Sweeney, for his part, acknowledges that I was correct to raise the considerations I did in my original article. Indeed, he writes:
[Feser’s] essay is an important reminder of the need for balance in understanding the question of immigration. The political community is a real expression of the fundamental sociality of the human person. We ought to love the us that we are part of. We rightly prioritize our own communities, and we have a legitimate role in determining who can join this community and how. It is because of this reality that a nation has a right to its borders and “governments have the right to prevent illegal immigration. . . .”
He is right to emphasize this right. Those who advocate “a virtually ‘open borders’ position in the name of Catholicism” should indeed read Feser’s article, because such positions are incompatible with a Catholic stance. Countries have a legitimate right to regulate the who, how, and how many of immigration.
But he should have stopped there, because the rest of what he says conflicts with this acknowledgment. Sweeney’s main complaint is that the emphasis in scripture and tradition has been on the obligation to welcome the stranger, whereas the emphasis in my article is on the qualifications on this obligation.
He is correct that scripture and tradition put emphasis on welcoming the stranger whereas my article puts emphasis on the rights of nations and the duties of immigrants. But my article was not intended as a comprehensive, stand-alone presentation of Catholic teaching on immigration. It was intended, rather, to correct an imbalance.
Most people historically have tended too strongly to favor their own families and nations, at the expense of our duties to the stranger. That is arguably why scripture and tradition put the emphasis on the latter. But in modern Western nations, there is a strong tendency toward the opposite extreme vice—toward what the philosopher Roger Scruton has called “oikophobia” or hostility toward one’s own nation, indeed toward the very idea that one has any special duties to one’s own nation. This is in part precisely a consequence of the individualism and neglect of our social nature that Sweeney rightly decries.
As I noted in my article, when Vice President J. D. Vance appealed to the ordo amoris or “order of charity,” he was simply calling attention to a longstanding theme in Christian moral theology, one given classic expression by thinkers of the stature of Augustine and Aquinas. He was merely noting that while the Christian tradition insists that we have duties to all, it also acknowledges that by nature our primary obligations are to those closest to us. But judging from the reaction to his remarks, a great many people today, including many who identify as Christians, are hostile to this idea.
Certainly much of the reaction I saw on social media rejected the very idea of the ordo amoris, as if it were somehow an embarrassment to the Christian tradition. Many did not even take the view that while Vance was correct to say that we have special duties to our own nation, he was drawing a mistaken conclusion from this fact. Rather, they objected to the very idea that we have any special duties to our own nation. Even the pope’s recent remarks on the immigration controversy, while not explicitly rejecting the idea of the ordo amoris, seemed to refrain from conceding that there is any special obligation to one’s own nation.
For these reasons, the emphasis of my article was on combating the extreme vice opposite to the one the Christian tradition has usually focused on. That is to say, it was meant as a reminder that while people are often prone to put too much emphasis on what is good for their own nation, it is also possible to put too little emphasis on it.
The remarks from Sweeney that I quoted above indicate that he agrees with me about this—and, moreover, that he agrees the problem is a real one today. But if that is indeed the case, it is not clear to me what the point was in writing a whole article criticizing my essay, as if our views were somehow at odds.
Levan Ramishvili
by Mike Johns
Catholic philosopher and prolific author Edward Feser recently penned an essay in Public Discourse, where he addressed the difficult subject of immigration laws in the United States and Catholic teaching. The subject is difficult in part because advocates and opponents alike of strict immigration reform rarely consider the fullness of Catholic teaching on immigration, as Feser points out. His essay, however, argues that:
When the entirety of the Church’s teaching is taken into account, it is clear that—within certain clearly defined boundaries—there can be reasonable disagreement about the contours of immigration policy among faithful Catholics.
Feser wants to demonstrate that the Church teaches both that nations ought to welcome immigrants, especially those forced to flee their native land due to harrowing conditions, and that those same nations have the right to place juridical limitations on immigration. Once all of the relevant principles are factored in, he argues, the virtue of prudence can guide us towards ethical decisions. Feser concludes, however, with a somewhat bizarre statement:
As to what prudence calls for, Catholics of good will can reasonably disagree.
That is, once the fullness of Church teaching on immigration is considered, reasonable Catholics can come to different conclusions regarding actually-existent policies and situations. A tacit but clear inference of Feser’s piece would seem to be that those Catholics who support the current administration’s draconian immigration policies may do so with an easy conscience.
In articulating such an understanding both of prudence and Church teaching regarding immigration, Feser virtually echoes Catholic scholar Paul Seaton, who also relativizes the act of the virtue of prudence as he writes of the “wide room for prudential considerations and the resultant difference of judgments among the faithful” concerning actually existing political realities within a given nation.
To be fair, Seaton for his part is careful to defend the autonomy of the nation state, and offers a powerful critique of the ideology, increasingly prevalent even within the Church, of “a sovereignly normative Humanity” to whose every whim and need all borders and boundaries must bend. Seaton relies on the work of the political French philosopher Pierre Manent, who also offered his own important response to the way Pope Francis reads the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Be that as it may, however, there is nonetheless a problem with both Feser’s and Seaton’s understanding of the virtue of prudence. Both thinkers manage to keep things just abstract enough so that it seems the judgement of prudence would give wide room for differing moral conclusions regarding actually existing public policy. This, however, cannot be.
In a wonderful response to Feser, Catholic philosopher Therese Cory points out Feser’s misleading characterization of prudence as dealing with the abstract and the theoretical. The virtue of prudence, she reminds us, deals with concrete particulars:
In short, it is meaningless to talk of the morality of “restrictive” versus “merciful” immigration policies. Prudential reasoning has an important role to play, yes—but that role is to illuminate the objective moral truth about specific immigration laws, policies, and enforcement activities.
It is puzzling, notes Cory, that a Thomistic philosopher such as Feser would relativize St. Thomas’ teaching on prudence, as if it were possible that an action could be both prudent as well as morally neutral. By contrast, she writes, “Thomistic prudence relates principles to particular actions.” Particular actions, of course, are either moral or immoral, prudent or imprudent. One is reminded of a statement by Josef Peiper in his classic The Four Cardinal Virtues, where he reminds us that for St. Thomas:
The work of art is true and real by its correspondence with the pattern of its prototype in the mind of the artist. In similar fashion, the free activity of man is good by its correspondence with the pattern of prudence. What is prudent and what is good are substantially one and the same; they differ only in their place in the logical succession of realization. For whatever is good must first have been prudent.
A question about concrete particulars can, then, be put to Feser: Given his articulation of Catholic principles regarding immigration, still, what ought to be done about the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living within the United States, the vast majority of whom are Hispanic and from traditionally Catholic countries? To phrase the question another way: are so-called “mass deportations” of undocumented (but otherwise guiltless) immigrants morally justifiable, or prudent? This question is most urgent, given the increasing threat of mass deportations of illegal immigrants from the United States.
The current article maintains that mass deportations can never be morally justifiable, and can never be prudent. To articulate why this is so, it is helpful to start with a 1995 message delivered by Pope John Paul II. Feser himself quotes from this very same papal message in his piece, but does so in a way that rather obscures John Paul’s teaching on illegal immigration.
We will begin, therefore, with John Paul’s 1995 message, and then turn to consider some aspects of membership as described by the philosopher Roger Scruton, in order to articulate more clearly the injustice of mass deportation.
John Paul’s 1995 speech is noteworthy both in regard to the specific topic of illegal immigration, and also for the unambiguous theological footing upon which he grounds the Church’s response. He is clear that illegal immigration should be prevented, especially in view of the rampant exploitation of the human person that so often both causes and accompanies this phenomenon. Given, however, the reality of high numbers of undocumented immigrants within certain countries, what should the response of the Church be? The pope was clear:
The Church considers the problem of illegal migrants from the standpoint of Christ, who died to gather together the dispersed children of God (cf. Jn 11:52), to rehabilitate the marginalized and to bring close those who are distant, in order to integrate all within a communion that is not based on ethnic, cultural or social membership, but on the common desire to accept God's word and to seek justice. "God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (Acts 10:34-35).
Here, the Polish Pope appeals to “communion” as the fundamental reality of the Church. In the pope’s mind it is the very nature of the Church that conditions the response to undocumented migrants:
In the Church no one is a stranger, and the Church is not foreign to anyone, anywhere. As a sacrament of unity and thus a sign and a binding force for the whole human race, the Church is the place where illegal immigrants are also recognized and accepted as brothers and sisters. It is the task of the various Dioceses actively to ensure that these people, who are obliged to live outside the safety net of civil society, may find a sense of brotherhood in the Christian community.
John Paul II’s reflection on the communion of the Church provides a key starting point. The theological reality expressed by the communion of the Church has an important parallel in the political reality expressed by the communion among the members of society. This can be seen by turning to another thinker who also thought deeply about communion—membership, as he called it—namely, the philosopher Roger Scruton.
In his delightful book, How to be a Conservative, Scruton cautions against the tendency, increasingly pervasive in modernity, to think that all our moral obligations and responsibilities are such because they have been freely chosen by individual rational agents. Scruton traces this strand of thought to the political philosophers of the Enlightenment and their theory of a social contract:
Theorists of the social contract write as though it presupposes only the first-person singular of free rational choice. In fact, it presupposes a first-person plural, in which the burdens of belonging have already been assumed.
Before ever a social contract can be agreed upon, however, there is already present a collective, a “we,” the ones making the agreement. From this presupposed “we” flows our most important obligations and responsibilities, which include such things as our obligations to family, to parents, to our friends and to our community, and to God, obligations which are unchosen because they are given. They arise spontaneously, as it were, in our dealings with one another. Scruton looks specifically to the founding document of the United States to illustrate his point:
Even in the American case, in which a decision was made to adopt a constitution and make a jurisdiction ab initio, it is nevertheless true that a first-person plural was involved in the very making. This is confessed to in the document itself. “We the people . . .” Which people? Why, us; we who already belong, whose historic tie is now to be transcribed into law. We can make sense of the social contract only on the assumption of some such pre-contractual “we.”
It is the presence of this pre-contractual “we,” the preexisting communion that already binds us together, that helps us think about the current situation concerning immigration in the United States and the threat of mass deportation.
America, like any other nation, has both the right and the obligation to maintain its borders in security and justice. This is something the Bishops of the United States have called for time and again. But it is important to point out that a supposed secure border, achieved at the expense of the bonds that hold society together, will, in fact, undermine the nation. This comes to a head when there is talk of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. “Mass” deportation means without any concern for the deported individual’s circumstance, story, history. Mass deportation of a set purpose ignores the personal dignity of the people deported. But that is not Christian. And it is not American, either. The law of the land ought always to reflect God’s law. Christians know of a higher law than the law of the land and so, traditionally, do Americans, who form one nation under God.
It is to be hoped that the rhetoric surrounding mass deportation is hyperbole. It is to be further hoped that such rhetoric will encourage self-deportation, especially of criminal and trafficking organizations and members. It is also true, however, that such rhetoric has an element that is anti-American, since it threatens the ties that bind our society together. The ties that form society come about, notes Scruton, when we are present bodily to one another:
Through face-to-face interaction. It is in the family, in local clubs and societies, in school, workplace, church, team, regiment and university that people learn to interact as free beings, taking responsibility for their actions and accounting to their neighbors. When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too.
Consider, for example, those enrolled in DACA. Whatever dubious legal justification there may have been for the program’s inception, it cannot be doubted that this program has benefited not only those enrolled immigrants but also American society in incalculable ways. Those enrolled in DACA have gone on to become teachers and nurses, they have served in our nation’s military, they have gone to college, they have served in police departments, and in these as well as a myriad of other ways they have helped to shape our local communities and so, society itself. How could the impact of, say, a single devoted teacher on her students even be calculated? In this way, our society is shaped by the relationships that people form among themselves, by living together.
The same could be said also for those immigrants who live here without documentation. For who is it that builds our houses, or roads, or shopping centers? Who is it that cleans our hotels, or hospitals, or homes? Who is it that labors in our fields, picking citrus, tomatoes, or strawberries? Who is it that works in our poultry factories? Who cooks in our restaurants? In these ways also, immigrants, documented or otherwise, help to form the relations of membership upon which society depends. Scruton considers immigrants to America:
Even when there arises, as in America, an idea of “elective nationality,” so that newcomers may choose to belong, what is chosen is precisely not a contract but a bond of membership, whose obligations and privileges transcend anything that could be contained in a defeasible agreement.
There cannot be a society without this experience of membership. For it is this that enables me to regard the interests and needs of strangers as my concern; that enables me to recognize the authority of decisions and laws that I must obey, even though they are not directly in my interest; that gives me a criterion to distinguish those who are entitled to the benefit of the sacrifices that my membership calls from me, from those who are interloping.
Are undocumented immigrants interlopers? Yes and no. An interloper is someone who is present where not invited or considered not to belong. Certainly, a case could be made that undocumented immigrants, by definition, are interlopers in our society. But, looked at from the perspective of membership, of communion, things get more complicated.
As intimated above, America has come to rely on immigrant labor in many sectors of society, and this, while not an entitlement to full membership, nonetheless places immigrants already within a certain (albeit tenuous) relationship to the “we” of society. Harvard historian James Hankins has suggested a fair and reasonable solution to the problem of the illegal status of so many migrants in the form of a temporary worker permit. In addition, American law provides for the ability to claim asylum, something that parallels the teaching of the Church upholding the right of the human person to immigrate, especially when threatened by war, poverty, or violence. Further, how to adjudicate between members of a single family, some of whom may be undocumented?
At the risk of making too fine a distinction, perhaps a difference could be noted between an interloper and a freeloader. An interloper is present but not invited. A freeloader takes advantage of societal benefits without giving in return. By and large, undocumented immigrants are not freeloaders, since in addition to the various ways their labor is demanded in society, they also pay taxes, their children can and often do volunteer for military or law enforcement service, and they accomplish many other things that contribute to the common good of society, such as the raising a family. Of course, there are immigrants who are freeloaders as well, but it should be noted that the ranks of the freeloaders by no means excludes many citizens.
America has a vested interest, then, to care for immigrants. In seeking a just and charitable solution to illegal immigration, the Church is an asset to the United States. As John Paul II insisted, the Church is the place where even the undocumented are made to stand in the light of the sonship of the children of God. In practical terms, the Church in the United States can and ought to help keep youth, both immigrant and citizen, off the streets. The Church can and ought to help immigrants learn English whenever possible, and work to better their education, from which comes so many of the benefits of integration into American society.
But above all, the Church is in the business of the salvation of souls. The Church is charged to preach the Gospel, the power of God unto salvation, in its fullness, and to make the sacraments available to the faithful. The Gospel comes to us in our own language, and so, in the vast majority of the dioceses of the United States, this means that priests of the Church need competency in Spanish as well as English, so that the Church (in the words of John Paul II quoted above) not be foreign to anyone, anywhere. In his address, the Polish Pope reminded the Church and the world that, “Man, particularly if he is weak, defenseless, driven to the margins of society, is a sacrament of Christ's presence (cf. Mt 25:40, 45).” In remaining faithful to the presence of Christ in the most vulnerable, the Church also calls on America to keep with care the injunction of the Lord God given in Deuteronomy:
When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands (Dt 24:19).
Levan Ramishvili
Political Dimensions of Moral Deliberation: The Immigration Case
The issue of immigration is a clarifying and defining issue of political existence today. It is not a mere “moral” issue.
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Wise cautionary words for those entering today’s contested political and commentarial scene from a Catholic point of view.
However, I find that contemporary Catholic Social Thought in itself is inadequate to provide adequate practical guidance in this matter of immigration, indeed that its tendency is to provide misleading ‘guidance’. To flesh out this provocative claim, I will proceed in steps. Each could be considerably developed, but they can provide initial markers, which will be filled in as we go along.
I begin with the briefest rehearsal of Catholic Social Thought as an enterprise.
The nature of Catholic Social Thought
First of all, Catholic Social Thought is said to be a part of the moral teaching of the Church, and of moral theology as a discipline. Both are supposed to guide the deliberations and actions of the agent, the Catholic believer acting in the world. Catholic Social Thought is premised on the observation (and normative conviction) that man is a social being, and that his agency needs to take these communities and contexts into account.
Second, in her Social Teaching, the Church proposes principles of social discernment and of moral evaluation to the conscience and intelligence of believers. The succinct four-fold statement of these principles is the dignity of the person, the sovereignty of the common good, and two mutually complementary principles, subsidiarity and solidarity. Longer lists are also available. Ideally, they should be employed in tandem, but different issues may call for different emphases.
Putting the two together, Catholic Social Thought’s claim is that these are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions of informed or warranted Catholic political deliberation. It leaves wide room for prudential considerations and the resultant difference of judgments among the faithful. But it always wants the moral criteria and evaluations to be actively present, tendentially paramount.
Where’s the political? Regime, form, and circumstances
My basic claim is that this framework leaves out essentials of deliberation, and its moral emphasis and abstract tenor biases and blinds necessary recognition of the situation within which the Catholic citizen is deliberating.
In a word, it is “apolitical,” whereas deliberation, especially in our hyper-politicized times, must never lose sight of that context of action. Guidance that does not illumine the political, that does not come to terms with the actual political situation, is misguided guidance.
As for what I mean by “the political,” that will show up in due course. But at the outset, I will just say that I mean pretty much what Aristotle meant: the political animal living with his fellows in structured, self-governing community where they deliberate and act in common.
The first depoliticization: The regime
Ever since Leo XIII, Catholic Social Thought has eschewed consideration and evaluation of what classical political philosophy considered the chief political phenomenon—the regime. This is a combination of the arrangement of political offices for the sake of a particular view of justice and the promotion of a particular way of life of a self-governing community.
With this omission, Catholic Social Thought demoted and obscured what the classical political philosophers considered the chief object of political reflection and deliberation. Particular issues, however, including immigration, need to be considered within this overarching context and should be carried out with its nature, preservation, and health in mind (so argued Aristotle).
The political gigantomachia
In the American case, this of course means the Constitution and its principles, national sovereignty and popular self-rule. This commonplace already raises a deeper contentious issue underlying the heated debate over immigration. The debate sets a variety of those who posit a sovereignly normative Humanity against those who still hold to popular self-rule and national sovereignty, whom they derisively call “populists” (and worse).
This, I believe, is the political gigantomachia of our times.
I am acutely aware of the complexities and nuances of this debate, and do my best to keep up with the facts of the case, and the positions of the debaters. Not surprisingly–it is a debate after all–I encounter incomprehension and distortion of opposite points of view, including by those who propose some universal Christian value as the key to the matter, or apply some ecclesiological view immediately on political reality. For all their intelligence and human sympathy, too often the facts and concerns of those that they oppose do not register with them. While I would be the first to register my deep Christian deficiencies, I would also ask them to hold up a mirror to themselves. Have they honestly engaged their brothers and sisters on the other side of the aisle? What are the relevant facts of the case? (More on this below.)
My chief concern in these debates, however, is more philosophical, or political philosophical, and more a matter of political principles.
As I said above, underlying the immigration debate are more fundamental questions about politics and political community, in this case, between the ideas and agenda of globalists or humanitarians, whether secular or religious, and partisans of the nation-state. Addressing this sort of issue pertains to the discipline of political philosophy. As recent scholarly work has demonstrated, contemporary Catholic Social Thought and papal teaching since Pope John XXIII, on the other hand, has been a rather uncertain trumpet concerning this debate. Calls for a “universal public authority,” together with inadequate attention to the status and rights of the nation-state in this proposed new dispensation, have confused matters. And, in Pope Francis’s reign, the scales have been significantly tipped in the humanitarian direction. (Here is one analysis of many.)
But this begs the questions involved, and powerful arguments for the location of free and decent political life within self-directing nations are available. The contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent has been critiquing the ersatz forms of secular and “Christian” universalism abroad in Europe and the Church for decades, while simultaneously defending in a nuanced but powerful way the legitimacy of the nation as the “political form” within which the modern political animal finds his home and is the proper context for his deliberations and activities with fellow citizens.
Manent’s notion of “political form,” a necessity of man the political animal and citizen, and of the nation as a political form, and his playing off of contemporary democratic humanitarianism and its attendant and justifying “religion of Humanity” with both, are essential to understand our situation today. The interested reader can explore his reasonings in the collection The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times (St. Augustine’s Press, 2022).
To give the reader some idea of the concept of political form: early on, Manent noticed that while the ancient city knew a number of regimes, as did the modern nation-state (a Frenchman would be particularly sensitive to that fact), they are not the same. In addition to regime, the notion of distinct political forms needed to be added to history’s and political philosophy’s repertoire.
Drilling deeper, he excavated political form–some circumscribed association of self-governing human beings, some definite putting in common of territory, population, instruments of government, and arms of defense–as a necessity of a real community of shared thought, deliberation, and action for human beings. This “circumscription” necessarily has limits and is the price of the realization of man’s political nature. However, these political forms are precious “condensations” of previous thought and action that form the next generation, removing them from the state of nature, and provide the platform and occasion for the exercise of the high human faculty of speech and agency.
In offering his trenchant critique, Manent, a Catholic political philosopher, aims to serve both the zõon politikón and the imago dei, liberating them from a great distorting Idol, and allowing them to pursue their vocations en connaissance de cause. In his judgment, the two stand or fall together. In our context, I would emphasize that means that the imago needs to consider with real respect and gratitude the zóon.
To summarize: immigration in all its dimensions has to do with both the political regime and the political form, which in our case means the nature and prerogatives of the democratic nation-state. The Church’s Social Teaching ignores the regime and is fuzzy on the nature, necessity, and goodness of the national political form.
What are the relevant political factors today?
This leads me back to an earlier issue concerning the facts of the case.
When it comes to immigration today (again: understood lato sensu), if one does not recognize 1) that for decades establishment Republicans and Democrats favored increased immigration, one for increased cheap labor, the other for clients, neither for civic reasons; 2) that the Biden administration, due to crass electoral calculations and an ideology of “transnational progressivism” that sees America as a “node” in an international system, encouraged and abetted millions of illegal immigrants, among whom are malevolent agents and criminals of all sorts; 3) that left-wing revolutionaries who want to deconstruct and dismantle the country as a “white, racist, Christian, capitalist, misogynist, patriarchal” horror seek and promote the same; 4) that foreign enemies, starting with China, but including state-sponsored Islamists, have and continue to infiltrate the country with nefarious agents; 5) that the national make-up of the influx of illegals is unprecedent in its variety, with all sorts of problems of assimilation; 6) that criminal gangs trafficking in women, children, and drugs exploit the porous border; and 7) that there are globalist agents (both institutional and individual) who seek in every way to undermine the great Opponent to their designs, a sovereign and independent America, then I maintain that one is not registering basic realities of the context within which the immigration debate and the Trump pushback are occurring.
There are other factors as well, equally worrisome—differential treatment of native citizens, strains on housing markets and school systems, the dilution of the vote in states where illegals are allowed to vote, and so on. These are all researchable facts of the matter. They must be factors in any decision about “what to do?”
To the foregoing I would add a basic consideration: no viable political community can long tolerate lack of respect for the law. This necessarily creates a cancer in the body politic. The category of “illegal” has to have critical purchase in a community. The rule of law is too great a civic (and human) good.
Europe and immigration
A quick comparison with Europe can shed light on our situation.
Again speaking with utmost brevity, in western Europe we have a confluence of what Manent has called “the umma on the move” and what the Englishman Gaven Ashenden recently noted: that the ideological Left and radical Islamists have made a pact against the European nation and its Christian and liberal character.
The coverups by the British state of rape gangs in the name of “multiculturism,” the unsafety of women and girls in European countries like Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, the skyrocketing of migrant crime in Scandinavia, the constant hectoring of Hungry by the EU for maintaining its borders and its population’s safety, and, sad to say, the quasi-humanitarian hectoring of Pope France of the nations of Europe for not being “welcoming”–all this (and much more) takes aim at democratic self-government and national preservation and pride in the West.
The main thing I would draw from this brief aperçu of the status immigrationis in the West is that the nation-state is under multi-frontal assault today, from a variety of quarters and forces, forces within and without. As is always the case when such existential battles are underway, moral, political, and civilizational factors are in play and must be weighed in considering whatever the particular presenting issue.
Immigration today necessarily “wears” these three dimensions on its face. To address it, all three must be attended to. Here, I am pointing to the political dimensions: the dimensions of regime, democratic self-rule, national identity and sovereignty, along with freedom in its great battle with tyranny variously presented and underwritten. The issue of immigration is a clarifying and defining issue of political existence today. It is not a mere “moral” issue.
The synthetic character of political judgment and decision
To be sure, Catholic Social Thought provides lots of moral distinctions that are true and relevant, and which need to be brought to the debate. And any number of Church documents try to strike a balance between the two parties, asserting the rights and duties of the foreigner and the duties and rights of the nation and its citizens (see CCC, 2241). My X and Meta feeds provide a steady stream of these reminders. Edward Feser is particularly good at retrieving these gems, but even he says that “it’s better to go back to the older documents.” When one does, however, one sees that context often matters. Addressing the situation after World War II in Europe is not today’s situation.
But the problem is really one of principle, or the limits of principles.
These statements of principle do not provide the final necessarium, an overall political decision about what is to be done. This has its own nature and requirements. In America, this takes place with candidates and elections in which a sovereign people chooses between alternatives. Before I end with this decisive political fact, I’d like to point out that, in its own way, Catholic Social Thought acknowledges its inadequacy in this regard. This is done by the introduction of the vague and malleable term “signs of the times,” which are subject to “contingent judgments,” and the acknowledgement of the irreplaceability of “the informed citizen” and (sometimes) “the statesman,” both of whom should exercise the cardinal virtue of “prudence” (not “compassion” or feeling; nothing is more manipulable than compassion and nothing today is more of a simulacrum for charity).
“Signs of the times” affirmations do not have dogmatic or even high-level doctrinal weight. And while they should be given respectful consideration, they do not bind the Catholic conscience, and the informed reader may certainly criticize points large and small. My general observation is that contemporary Catholic Social Thought not only does not, but cannot, acknowledge the threats to self-government and the new forms of tyranny in our world of the sort I indicated above. With respect to these realities and dangers, I have to confess that I see an ostrich, not a Guide. The Vatican’s pronouncements and silence on China can stand as one telling instance, and there are many others.
Happily, on its own terms, Catholic Social Thought provides, at least potentially, an antidote to its myopia. It acknowledges the necessity and legitimacy of bringing in other “sciences.” Political philosophy and political science stand by to offer their help to Catholic Social Thought and to the citizens and statesmen who must deliberate and decide. Among the things they provide are the foregoing essential notions of regime, form, and circumstances.
Manent has observed that “les choses politiques arrivent en gros”—political things show up in broad outlines. Aristotle counseled that to be reasonable, one should expect the precision that the subject matter allowed. Political judgment and political decision–decision that orders or reorders a political community–must synthesize a myriad of facts and opinions about them. They are always partial, always contestable, but politics and any approximation to the common good require them.
With the recent election, the American people decided clearly against the Old Regime of immigration and gave warrant to a new direction, one that seeks to reclaim its civic health and soul. I think they made the right choice, given the alternative. I do, however, also think that we Catholics have a civic and religious duty to comment on, guide, and (if need be) critique the direction the Trump administration takes.
However, as a fellow Catholic, a student of political philosophy, and, yes, a political conservative, I also feel duty-bound to remind my fellow Catholics of the political dimensions of moral deliberation.
Levan Ramishvili
The Catholic Church is on a collision course with the Trump administration. And likewise with governments across the developed world that are tightening their borders and carrying out — or at least, threatening — mass deportations of illegal immigrants. In an address on Thursday, Pope Leo XIV denounced “inhuman measures” and “serious crimes” against migrants, even as he granted that “states have the right and duty to protect their borders.”
Two weeks earlier, the pope instructed the American bishops to take a stronger stance in defense of migrants caught in the Trump administration’s dragnet. The pontiff suggested that he would “love” to see a statement from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, according to one bishop who attended a meeting with him. Another attendee reported that the pope would like to see the US church speak “forcefully and in unity” on migrants’ rights.
Already, many individual US bishops and Catholic groups are doing just that. Yet for such interventions to prove fruitful, the Church must take a more wholistic, nuanced, and, indeed, Catholic approach: one that takes into account not just the needs of people moving out of the Global South, but also the limitations of the Global North; not just the dignity of the migrant, but also that of workers and the poor in recipient countries; not just the threat of Western xenophobia, but the imperative to ensure a decent baseline of cultural cohesion.
To be sure, there is much to object to in Washington’s stance: the White House posting photos on X (formerly Twitter) of “deportation porn” of rows of men being flown out in shackles; the government’s foot-dragging when ordered by the courts to facilitate the return of a man who had been mistakenly deported to El Salvador; the difficulties in getting pastoral care to illegal immigrants being held at the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida; and much else of the kind. These are among the excesses for which the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts can justly be criticized.
But with immigration enforcement as in other areas, abusus non tollit usum — the abuse of a thing does not negate its proper use. And when we neglect the proper use in order to avoid abuse, we risk falling into an opposite extreme error.
As the bishops themselves sometimes acknowledge at least in passing, the general policy of enforcing immigration laws is legitimate. And while the Trump administration’s efforts have been excessively harsh at times, the surge in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden was so massive that any attempt to reverse it was bound to seem draconian by comparison. It is contrary to reason and justice to speak as if only Trump’s critics have a moral leg to stand on.
It is also contrary to the Church’s own longstanding teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that prosperous nations are obliged “to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.” But it qualifies this by adding that such nations are obliged to do so only “to the extent they are able.”
And the Catechism goes on to say: “Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”
The Church acknowledges, then, that a nation may put conditions on immigration, that it need not take in all those who want to enter it, and that those it does allow in must follow the law.
The Catechism reflects the longstanding teaching of the popes. For example, Pope Pius XII, while commending the United States for its generosity toward immigrants, observed in 1946 that “it is not surprising that changing circumstances have brought about a certain restriction being placed on foreign immigration. For in this matter, not only the interests of the immigrant but the welfare of the country also must be consulted.”
The economic needs of its own citizens are among the considerations a government may weigh when determining how many immigrants to let in. In a 1996 address, Pope St. John Paul II affirmed that “illegal immigration should be prevented” and that “the supply of foreign labor is becoming excessive in comparison to the needs of the economy, which already has difficulty in absorbing its domestic workers.” Likewise, in a 2011 address, Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged that host countries also have a “legitimate concern for security and social coherence” so that “states have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers” and “immigrants … have the duty to integrate into the host country, respecting its laws and its national identity.”
And in a 1988 document from the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, we read that “it is up to the public powers who are responsible for the common good to determine the number of refugees or immigrants which their country can accept, taking into consideration its possibilities for employment and its perspectives for development, but also the urgency of the need of other people.” Overly heavy migration waves, the document warns, can lead to “rejection,” especially when “another culture is perceived as directly threatening the identity and customs of the local community that receives them.”
Note that the Church here explicitly affirms that it is not churchmen, but rather “the public powers who are responsible for the common good” who have the right and responsibility to determine how many immigrants to let in. Note, too, that the Church acknowledges that in making this determination, public authorities may take account of economic considerations, as well as those having to do with social and cultural cohesion.
The legitimacy of this concern for national identity is something that has been affirmed repeatedly in the Catholic tradition. In his book Memory and Identity, first published in 2005, John Paul II affirmed that the duty of patriotism is an extension of our obligation to honor our parents, and writes: “Patriotism is a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features. It is a love which extends also to the works of our compatriots and the fruits of their genius. Every danger that threatens the overall good of our native land becomes an occasion to demonstrate this love.”
Several popes have been quite frank about the social problems that can develop when a minority cultural group fails to assimilate to the larger culture in which it resides. For example, in the encyclical Pacem in Terris, Pope St. John XXIII observed that “these minority groups, in reaction, perhaps, to the enforced hardships of their present situation, or to historical circumstances, frequently tend to magnify unduly characteristics proper to their own people. They even rate them above those human values which are common to all mankind, as though the good of the entire human family should subserve the interests of their own particular groups.” He went on to call for such groups to associate themselves more closely with the majorities among whom they live, and not to harness their identity to separateness.
Pope Francis, too, acknowledged the problem. In a 2016 press conference, he noted that while “hearts must not be closed to refugees … those who govern need prudence … A political price can be paid for an imprudent judgement, for accepting more than can be integrated.” Non-integration, Francis warned, leads to migrants becoming “a ghetto. A culture that does not develop in relationship with another culture, this is dangerous.”
Most recently, Pope Leo XIV, in an address in which he praised Italy’s generosity to migrants, immediately went on to underscore “the importance of constructively integrating those arriving into the values and traditions of Italian society.”
Yes, there are yahoos and jingoists who go beyond a healthy love of country to a sinful hostility towards people of other nations. But it is unjust and uncharitable to accuse all of those who are concerned about the cultural cohesion and economic needs of their own country of harboring this dishonorable motivation.
For its part, the Church has treated immigration as it does every other major question of public policy: not just a matter of individual rights and dignity — though these are indeed important — but also of duties to the common good of the whole. Thought of this way, the Catholic position on immigration doesn’t lend itself well to simplistic “pro” or “anti” posturing.
The truth is that there are two, equally Catholic sides in the debate over immigration. One side thinks that the imperative to welcome the migrant is what most needs emphasis today. The other thinks that preserving law and order, and the economic wellbeing and cultural identity of the nation is what is currently most urgent. Both can appeal to moral premises rooted in the Catholic tradition. Their dispute is about how best to balance the various relevant considerations under contemporary circumstances — a matter of prudential judgment about which reasonable people can disagree.
In the 21st century, that prudential determination must take into account new realities: such as the fact that many of today’s newcomers are economic migrants relying on strained asylum systems to get through borders; and the fact that developed economies are already bereft of high-wage, reliable manufacturing jobs, pushing many native-born workers into service sectors buffeted by even cheaper migrant labor; and the identitarian turmoil wrought by decades of high migration and failed assimilation.
The bishops have a pastoral obligation to acknowledge the concerns of both sides, rather than speaking as if only one side is truly Catholic. It is precisely when people think their legitimate concerns are not being taken seriously that they are most tempted to fall into extremism. In his essay “A Defense of Patriotism,” G. K. Chesterton warned that when a nation does not cultivate a sober “patriotism of the head and heart,” it will sink instead into a thuggish chauvinism “of its fists and its boots.”
The remedy to this excess is not to retreat to the opposite error, but to insist on holding the middle ground — the true patriotism described by St. John Paul II as a part of the Fourth Commandment to honor father and mother. “What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous jingoism,” advised Chesterton, “is a renascence of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly.”
Levan Ramishvili
Pope Leo on immigration enforcement
by Edward Feser
Pope Leo was recently asked by a reporter about the deportation and detention of illegal immigrants. In response, he made the following remarks:
I think we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have. If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that. There are courts, there’s a system of justice. I think there are a lot of problems in the system. No one has said that the United States should have open borders. I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter. But when people are living good lives, and many of them for ten, fifteen, twenty years, to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful to say the least, and there has been some violence unfortunately, I think that the Bishops have been very clear in what they said and I think that I would just invite all people in the United States to listen to them.
This is a refreshingly calm, reasonable, and nuanced approach. As I have shown in earlier articles (at Public Discourse and at UnHerd), the Church has traditionally affirmed both that wealthy nations have a general obligation to welcome immigrants to the extent they are able, but also that they are not obligated to let in all who seek to enter, that they may put conditions on entry that take account of the economic needs and cultural cohesion of the receiving nation, and that immigrants must obey the law.
Churchmen who comment on immigration these days sometimes acknowledge the right of a nation to control its borders, but only in the vaguest way, and while seeming to criticize all actual efforts at enforcement. The pope’s acknowledgement is much more concrete. He not only eschews the idea of open borders, but specifically says that a nation “has a right to determine who and how and when people enter.” That entails that not everyone must be allowed in, and that a nation can put conditions on the entry of those who are allowed in. The pope also says that it is legitimate to “treat” the problem of those who are in the country illegally, namely through “courts… [and the] system of justice.” That entails that a country need not, in general, simply accept the presence of those who are in the country illegally, but may resort to the legal penalties appropriate to this particular sort of lawbreaking.
Though he doesn’t explicitly say so, deportation is obviously among these penalties. (It would make no sense to say that people shouldn’t enter illegally but then refuse ever to deport someone, just as it would make no sense to say that people shouldn’t steal but then refuse ever to make a thief give back what he has stolen.) The qualification the pope puts on his remarks on controlling borders is not that the law should not be enforced, but rather that this should be done in a humane and respectful way.
He also puts special emphasis on the need to deal respectfully with illegal immigrants who “are living good lives, and many of them for 10, 15, 20 years.” This seems implicitly to acknowledge that the case for punishment or deportation is stronger for those who are engaged in criminal activity (beyond just illegal entry) and for those whose illegal entry was more recent.
This much is likely to be welcome to those who support the Trump administration’s efforts to use deportation to reverse the Biden administration’s lax border policies. However, many of them are also likely to be unhappy with the pope’s view that illegal immigrants who otherwise obey the law, and who have been in the country a long time, ought to be treated more gently. Some seem to take the view that the only thing that matters is whether someone entered the country illegally, so that deportation is equally appropriate for all such people, regardless of how long they have been in the country or how law-abiding they have otherwise been.
However, the moral issues here are not that simple, and the pope’s remarks reflect important and longstanding principles in natural law and Catholic moral theology. Catholics need to consider these principles and resist the temptation to view everything churchmen say about this issue through a political lens, as if absolutely every expression of sympathy for illegal immigrants reflects liberal political commitments rather than Catholic tradition. That just isn’t the case.
St. Alphonsus on custom
Among the relevant considerations here are what moral theologians have said about the way that custom can, under certain circumstances, override human law. St. Alphonsus Liguori addresses the topic in Book I, Treatise II of his Theologia Moralis. He identifies three conditions that custom must meet in order to have this effect.
First, the custom must not be merely a matter of what this or that individual does, but must reflect the practice of the entire community, or at least the majority. The reason is that if the governing authorities tolerate a custom that prevails within the community at large, that can be interpreted as their having at least tacitly consented to it.
Second, what is in question must indeed be merely human law. Custom cannot override natural law or divine law. However, it is not necessary that the initial introduction of the custom have been sinless. Liguori says that although those who first violated the law in such a case sinned, once the custom of violating it has taken hold and been tolerated, those who later follow this custom do not sin, and if the custom prevails long enough it would not be justifiable to punish them for following it.
Third, Liguori says that “a continuous and long-lasting period of time is required” in order for the custom to take root (Grant translation, p. 192). Exactly how long is a matter of dispute, but Liguori notes that some theologians hold that ten years is sufficient. (In this connection, it is interesting to note that Pope Leo refers to those who have been in the country illegally for “ten, fifteen, twenty years.”)
But how could custom override law even given these conditions? I’d explain how as follows. Note first that in the natural law tradition, promulgation is essential to law. If a custom that conflicts with some human law takes root and the governing authorities do not enforce the law but instead implicitly consent to the custom that is contrary to it, then a kind of virtual promulgation of the custom can be said to have occurred.
Note second that law exists for the good of the social order, and social life requires stability and predictability. When a custom is established and then tolerated by public authorities long enough for people to come to rely on it, suddenly to punish them for following the custom would undermine the stability of the lives they have built. And that would be contrary to the reason for which the law exists.
However, St. Alphonsus also indicates that if the governing authorities begin to enforce the human law that the custom conflicts with, this would undermine the force of the custom. From the context, it seems he may be talking about a case where such enforcement prevents the custom from taking deep root in the first place. But he may also mean that even after the custom has taken deep root, if the governing authorities start enforcing the law again, the force of the custom is nullified. Certainly such enforcement would plausibly amount to the authorities’ once again promulgating the original law.
Though St. Alphonsus does not explicitly say so, the implication of his principles would seem to be that those who violated the law during the long but temporary period when the governing authorities were still tolerating such violation should not be punished, but that more recent violators may be punished.
Application to immigration enforcement
This is, of course, all very abstract. How would it apply to the concrete case of illegal immigration? The idea would be this. For decades until recently, U.S. immigration enforcement was more lax, with public authorities tolerating large numbers of illegal immigrants. And this has been a bipartisan tendency, so that the federal government as such (and not merely this or that party that held power at any particular time) can he said to have tolerated this. To be sure, there has always been some enforcement, so that it cannot be said that the authorities had ever tacitly consented to an open borders policy. But (so the argument would continue) they did nevertheless tacitly consent to permitting large numbers of illegal immigrants to remain in the country relatively unmolested, and to secure employment, build families, etc. A custom of forming such communities had taken root and been tacitly consented to by the public authorities.
In recent years, however, the public authorities have once again begun vigorously to enforce the immigration laws. There has been some inconsistency, insofar as vigorous enforcement during the first Trump administration was followed by lax enforcement under Biden, followed by vigorous enforcement once again during the second Trump administration. But it can no longer be said that the federal government as such tacitly consents to the custom of forming communities of large numbers of illegal immigrants. Those who have entered the country illegally in recent years therefore cannot appeal to the force of custom, in the way that those who have been here illegally since the years prior to Trump might appeal to it.
Applying St. Alphonsus’s principles, then, there are grounds for treating illegal immigrants who have been in the country for decades with more leniency than those who have entered the country in recent years. And this, I believe, is basically the thinking that underlies the pope’s remarks. It doesn’t follow that those who have been here for decades may not be punished at all (through fines, for example), because while enforcement was during that time more lax, it was not non-existent. Hence the tacit message sent was not that the public authorities consented to illegal immigration, but rather that they would treat it leniently. But neither does the pope say that those who illegally entered the country decades ago may not be punished at all. What his remarks indicate is rather that they should not be dealt with in the same manner as those who have entered more recently. Because they have been here so long, peremptorily deporting them can be greatly disruptive (to families, for example) and thus contrary to the good of the social order, in a way that deporting those who entered recently is not.
To be sure, reasonable people can disagree about the details. There are multiple moral principles to bring to bear here, and multiple empirical considerations that have to be taken account of in applying them. As in other areas of prudential judgment, it is wise for the Church to set out the general principles and leave it to the faithful and to public authorities to debate and determine the best way to implement them.
The point, though, is that the pope’s remarks cannot justly be dismissed as a sellout to fashionable liberal political opinion. They have a solid foundation in traditional Catholic moral theology and deserve a respectful hearing.
Levan Ramishvili
Aquinas and prudential judgment
by Edward Feser
In contemporary debates in Catholic moral theology, a distinction is often drawn between actions that are flatly ruled out in principle and those whose permissibility or impermissibility is a matter of prudential judgment. For example, it is often noted that abortion is wrong always and in principle, whereas how many immigrants a country ought to allow in and under what conditions are matters of prudential judgment. But exactly what does this mean, and how do we tell the difference between the cases?
It is important at the outset to put aside some common misunderstandings. The difference between matters of principle and matters of prudential judgment is not a difference between moral questions and merely pragmatic ones. Morality is at issue in both cases. Prudence is, after all, one of the cardinal moral virtues. One can be mistaken in one’s prudential judgments, and when one is, one is guilty of imprudence, which is a kind of moral failure (whether or not one is culpable for the failure).
Contrary to another misunderstanding (which I recently had occasion to rebut), to say that something is a matter of prudential judgment and then go on to note that reasonable people can differ in their prudential judgments is not to commit oneself to any kind of moral relativism. Prudential judgments can indeed simply be mistaken. To say that reasonable people can disagree is merely to note that a person might have made such a judgment in good faith on the basis of the evidence available to him, even if the evidence later turns out to be misleading or his reasoning turns out to have been flawed. He is still objectively wrong all the same. Or there may in some cases be more than one reasonable way to apply a certain objective and universal moral principle, so that reasonable people might opt to apply it in any of these different ways.
As always, illumination can be found in St. Thomas Aquinas. In several places, he makes remarks that are relevant to understanding the difference between straightforward matters of principle and matters of prudential judgment. For example, in On Evil, Aquinas notes:
The will of a rational creature is obliged to be subject to God, but this is achieved by affirmative and negative precepts, of which the negative precepts oblige always and on all occasions, and the affirmative precepts oblige always but not on every occasion… One sins mortally who dishonors God by transgressing a negative precept or not fulfilling an affirmative precept on an occasion when it obliges. (Question VI, Regan translation)
Though the distinction between matters of principle and matters of prudence is somewhat loose, it seems largely (though perhaps not always) to correspond to Aquinas’s distinction between negative precepts, which oblige on every occasion, and affirmative precepts, which do not. What this distinction amounts to is made clearer in some remarks St. Thomas makes when commenting on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:
He lists the negative precepts, which forbid a person to do evil to his neighbor. And this for two reasons. First, because the negative precepts are more universal both as to time and as to persons. As to time, because the negative precepts oblige always and at every moment. For there is no time when one may steal or commit adultery. Affirmative precepts, on the other hand, oblige always but not at every moment, but at certain times and places: for a man is not obliged to honor his parents every minute of the day, but at certain times and places. Negative precepts are more universal as to persons, because no man may be harmed. Second, because they are more obviously observed by love of neighbor than are the affirmative. For a person who loves another, rather refrains from harming him than gives him benefits, which he is sometimes unable to give. (Commentary on the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans, Chapter 13, Lecture 2)
Aquinas’s examples hopefully make his meaning clear. Consider the negative precept “Do not commit adultery.” Because adultery is intrinsically evil, we must never commit it, period, regardless of the circumstances. And because we therefore needn’t consider circumstances, no judgment of prudence is required in order to apply the precept to circumstances. Whatever the circumstances happen to be, we simply refrain from committing adultery, and that’s that.
By contrast, applying the affirmative precept “Honor your father and mother” does require attention to circumstances. To be sure, the precept never fails to be binding on us (which is what Aquinas means by saying that it “obliges always”) but exactly what obeying it amounts to depends crucially on circumstances (which is why he says that “times and places” are relevant). For example, suppose your father commands you to bring him a bottle of wine. Does honoring him oblige you to do so? It depends. Suppose he has had a hard day, finds it relaxing to drink in moderation, and is infirm and has trouble walking. Then it would certainly dishonor your father to ignore him and make him get up and fetch the bottle himself. But suppose instead that he has a serious drinking problem, has already had too much wine, and will likely beat you or your mother if he gets any drunker. Then it would not dishonor him to refuse to bring the bottle.
As Aquinas suggests in the Romans commentary, affirmative precepts involve providing someone with a benefit of some kind, which one is “sometimes unable to give.” Consider the affirmative precept to give alms. Even more obviously than in the case of the precept to honor one’s parents, what following this precept entails concretely is highly dependent on circumstances. Obviously one cannot always be giving alms, for even if one tried to do so, one would quickly run out of money and not only be unable to give any further alms, but would be in need of alms oneself. How to follow this affirmative precept clearly requires making a judgment of prudence. How much money do I need for my own family? How much might I be able to spare for others, and how frequently? Exactly who, among all the people who need alms, should I give to? Should I give by donating money, or instead by giving food and the like? The answers to these questions are highly dependent on circumstances and will vary from person to person, place to place, and time to time.
The more complicated and variable the circumstances, the more difficult it can be to decide on a single correct answer and thus the greater the scope for reasonable disagreement. The disagreement can be reasonable in either of two ways. First, what might be obligatory for one person given the details of his circumstances may not be obligatory for another person given the details of his own very different circumstances. For example, a rich man is bound to be obligated to give more in the way of alms than a poor man is. Second, disagreement can be reasonable insofar as the complexity of the situation might make it uncertain which course of action is best even for people in the same personal circumstances. Aquinas makes such points in the Summa Theologiae:
The practical reason… is busied with contingent matters, about which human actions are concerned: and consequently, although there is necessity in the general principles, the more we descend to matters of detail, the more frequently we encounter defects. Accordingly then… in matters of action, truth or practical rectitude is not the same for all, as to matters of detail, but only as to the general principles: and where there is the same rectitude in matters of detail, it is not equally known to all.
It is therefore evident that… as to the proper conclusions of the practical reason, neither is the truth or rectitude the same for all, nor, where it is the same, is it equally known by all. Thus it is right and true for all to act according to reason: and from this principle it follows as a proper conclusion, that goods entrusted to another should be restored to their owner. Now this is true for the majority of cases: but it may happen in a particular case that it would be injurious, and therefore unreasonable, to restore goods held in trust; for instance, if they are claimed for the purpose of fighting against one's country. And this principle will be found to fail the more, according as we descend further into detail, e.g. if one were to say that goods held in trust should be restored with such and such a guarantee, or in such and such a way; because the greater the number of conditions added, the greater the number of ways in which the principle may fail, so that it be not right to restore or not to restore. (Summa Theologiae I-II.94.4)
Points like these are ignored when, for example, it is alleged that Catholics who favor enforcing immigration laws are somehow no less at odds with the Church’s teaching than Catholics who favor legalized abortion. For one thing, as I’ve shown elsewhere, the Church herself acknowledges the legitimacy of restrictions on immigration. For another, the principles involved in the two cases are crucially different in exactly the ways Aquinas describes. “Do not murder” is a negative precept that flatly rules out a certain kind of action, regardless of the circumstances. And since abortion is a kind of murder, it flatly rules out abortion regardless of the circumstances. There is no question of prudential judgment here.
By contrast, “Welcome the stranger” is an affirmative precept, whose application is highly dependent on circumstances. Moreover, these circumstances involve millions of people, and complex matters of culture, law, economics, and national security. Here, even more than in the case of almsgiving, there is much room for reasonable disagreement about how best to apply the precept. That would be obvious even if the Church had not explicitly acknowledged that immigration can be restricted for various reasons (as, again, in fact she has).
It is thus sheer sophistry to pretend that by appealing to the notion of prudential judgment, Catholics who support immigration restrictions are somehow trying to rationalize dissent from Catholic teaching. On the contrary, they are (whether one agrees with them or not) fully within the bounds of what Catholic moral theology has always acknowledged to be a legitimate range of opinion among Catholics.
Similar sophistry is committed by those who speak as if supporting a living wage or government provision of health care ought to be no less a matter of “pro-life” concern than abortion and euthanasia. Here too the comparison is specious. Abortion and euthanasia are flatly prohibited in all circumstances because they violate the negative precept “Do not murder.” But principles like “Pay a living wage” or “Ensure health care for all” are affirmative precepts, and how best to apply them to concrete circumstances is highly dependent on various complex and contingent economic considerations. There can be no reasonable disagreement among Catholics about whether abortion and euthanasia should be illegal. But there can be reasonable disagreement among them about whether a certain specific minimum wage law is a good idea, or which sort of economic arrangements provide the best way to secure health coverage for all.
The same point can be made about other contemporary controversies, mutatis mutandis. And it applies across the political spectrum (e.g. to those who, during the most recent presidential election, pretended that there could be no reasonable doubt that any loyal Catholic must vote for their favored candidate).
Levan Ramishvili
Despite the collapse or erasure of Christian references in Europe, contemporary language has retained a certain number of expressions that everyone still understands, at least to some extent. I believe there is no one who doesn’t know (or at least intuit) that “the Good Samaritan” is someone who voluntarily aids someone who needs help, with this additional note: that he agrees to depart from his path, or to leave what he was doing, in order to care for someone unfortunate, when nothing obliges him to do so. It is therefore quite natural that Pope Francis gives the parable of the Good Samaritan a place of honor in his recent encyclical on fraternity and social friendship, Fratelli Tutti.
nHere, therefore, is the text from St. Luke’s Gospel that opens the second chapter of the encyclical, a chapter entitled “A stranger on the road”:
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise” (Lk 10:25-37).
First, let’s highlight the principal points of Pope Francis’s commentary. Evoking the priest and the Levite who passed by without stopping for the unfortunate man left for dead by the robbers, he writes: “They were people holding important social positions, yet lacking in real concern for the common good. They could not waste a couple of minutes . . . Only one person stopped . . . and cared for him personally. . . . Above all, he gave him his time.”
Then Pope Francis poses the question: “With whom do you identify? This question, blunt as it is, is direct and incisive. Which of these characters do you resemble?” He underscores “the interior struggle” which forces us to choose “to include or to exclude those lying wounded along the roadside.” The parable thus makes apparent the most significant division between men: “The distinctions between Judean and Samaritan, priest and merchant, fade into insignificance. Now there are only two kinds of persons: those who care for someone who is hurting and those who pass by.”
I’ll go quickly through paragraphs 72-75, devoted to the “characters” of the parable, where it is above all a question of contemporary figures who are judged severely, but without being specifically designated.
In some countries, or certain sectors of them . . . contempt is shown for the poor and their culture, and one looks the other way, as if a development plan imported from without could edge them out. . . . Plunging people into despair closes a perfectly perverse circle: such is the agenda of the invisible dictatorship of hidden interests that have gained mastery over both resources and the possibility of thinking and expressing opinions.
It is difficult to discern what this “invisible dictatorship of hidden interests” is. It is true that the dictatorship is “invisible” and the interests are “hidden.”
In the paragraphs that end the commentary on the parable, Pope Francis invites us “to unite as a family that is stronger than the sum of small individual members,” to “become neighbors to all,” to become capable of “identifying with others without worrying where they were born or came from.” And here are the last lines of the chapter:
Still, there are those who appear to feel encouraged or at least permitted by their faith to support varieties of narrow and violent nationalism, xenophobia and contempt, and even the mistreatment of those who are different. Faith, and the humanism it contains, must maintain a critical sense in the face of these tendencies, and prompt an immediate response whenever they rear their head. For this reason, it is important that catechesis and preaching speak more directly and clearly about the social meaning of existence, the fraternal dimension of spirituality, our conviction of the inalienable dignity of each person, and our reasons for loving and accepting all our brothers and sisters.
This conclusion leaves us with an equivocation, however, since here the appeal to faith is rather an appeal to the “humanism” that the faith contains. In any case, this final equivocation concludes an exegesis that aims less at examining the Gospel text to see what it says exactly, than at drawing certain elements from the parable that would appear to support a view of the human and social world that is largely independent of the Gospel. Now, we often rightly ask Muslims to “contextualize” the Koran, in order to avoid applying to contemporary circumstances texts elaborated according to modes of thought and expression that have become foreign to us, and whose meaning cannot be grasped without a sustained and searching effort. We, too, would do well to “contextualize” the Gospel—not to reduce it to the circumstances of its redaction, but in order to grasp exactly what it says by taking seriously the way in which it says it. Only in this way can we truly become capable of making judicious use of it. But how to proceed, if one is not a theologian, a philologist, or historian? Well, one can begin by reading the text with a modicum of attention.
A man, no doubt a Jew, who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, was attacked, stripped, beaten, and left half dead by robbers. Aggression, robbery, blows and wounds, near-murder—one will note that the brigands cover all the cases of the penal code, as it were. A priest, then a Levite, see the man and pass by. As we saw, Pope Francis initially described these characters as “people occupying important social functions,” while he later notes that “they were religious.” He sees in their conduct a “strong warning” and “the sign that belief in God and the worship of God are not enough to ensure that we are actually living in a way pleasing to God.”
The conclusion is impeccable, but at no point does the commentator ask about the motives of the two personages. The priest is coming from Jerusalem, where, no doubt, he fulfilled the precepts of the law. He is clean. He therefore cannot defile himself by touching a cadaver, or someone “half dead” who perhaps will be dead shortly. Leviticus is explicit: “And the LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them, No one shall make himself unclean for the dead among his people” (21:1). As for the Levite, who either comes from Jerusalem or is going there, he too is bound by the law of purity. Numbers prescribes: “The one who touches a dead body, the cadaver of a man, whoever he is, will be impure for seven days. . . . Whoever touches a dead body, the cadaver of a man who is dead, and who does not deliver himself from his sin, renders the Abode of Yahweh impure; that person will be expelled from Israel. . . . Whoever touches, in open ground, a man pierced by the sword, or a dead man, or human bones, or a sepulchre, will be impure for seven days” (19:11, 13, 16).
If these two characters did not give aid to the unfortunate one, it was simply because, as a priest or a Levite, they were bound by the law of purity. This law is odious or unintelligible to us, but we need to know what we are doing here: Are we reading the Gospel in order to understand the text, or for some other purpose? The priest and the Levite are not heartless “important people.” Quite the contrary: They scrupulously respect the Law and they love God with a love that is inseparable from obedience to his Law.
As for the Samaritan himself, Pope Francis is amazingly indifferent to what the Gospel actually says about him, and he prefers to sketch a novel:
Only one person stopped, approached the man and cared for him personally, even spending his own money to provide for his needs. He also gave him something that in our frenetic world we cling to tightly: he gave him his time. Certainly, he had his own plans for that day, his own needs, commitments and desires. Yet he was able to put all that aside when confronted with someone in need. Without even knowing the injured man, he saw him as deserving of his time and attention.
Now, here is what we actually read in the Gospel, which I again cite:
“But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’”
Aren’t there things to be said about the narrative as written? The Samaritan is certainly generous. Not only does he give an adequate sum to the innkeeper, but he promises that he will reimburse him for what he must additionally spend on the wounded man. (Contrary to what Pope Francis suggests, the Samaritan does not give much of his time, nor does he change much in his plans. After all, he leaves the wounded man and returns to his affairs. On the other hand, he leaves much for the innkeeper to do.) Above all, he manifests a complete confidence in the innkeeper who, for his part, seems to have an equal confidence in him. The innkeeper doesn’t seem worried about the date of the “return” of the Samaritan who, for his part, doesn’t specify when it will be. We should note that he doesn’t even say that he will return “soon.”
Let’s summarize: The Samaritan approaches, he sees, he takes pity, he binds the wounds, he treats them with salutary unguents, he picks up the wounded man and places him on his own horse, he takes him to a place of repose and healing, where he entrusts him to a man who will take care of him until the return—at an indeterminate time—of the Samaritan, a return that this man will await with confidence. While Pope Francis recounts a story that he wishes to be motivating for the men of today, Luke’s Gospel introduces the Kingdom. Luke’s Samaritan does not resemble today’s “Good Samaritan.” There is an amplitude to his deeds, a liberty in his conduct, a competence in his care for all wounds, an authority to his word, and an ability to make promises worthy of belief, that are not those of a mere human being. The Church Fathers were right: The Samaritan is none other than Jesus himself.[1] Is that really surprising? Don’t we have here to do with the Word of God? God speaks of God. The parable doesn’t invite us to “identify[. . .] with others without worrying where they were born or came from,” but to enter into a “Christian discipleship” that has no other end than Christ.
Pope Francis quite rightly observes that Jesus, after having presented the parable, and addressing the lawyer who had asked him “and who is my neighbor?,” “completely transforms the question: He asks us not to decide who is close enough to be our neighbour, but rather that we ourselves become neighbours to all.” The parable thus teaches us, first, that we have neither the charity, nor the strength, nor the reparative virtue, nor the patience, nor the hope, nor the faith, to be like the Samaritan. At the same time, it instructs us that we must make ourselves neighbors of one another and that we cannot do so if we only count on our own forces, that is, if we content ourselves with being “humanists” or “humanitarians.”
Merely human compassion—fellow-feeling—is a passion or a sentiment that, as such, is not capable of being morally qualified. Left to itself, compassion for the victim easily changes into compassion for the torturer. From a sentiment, however, compassion can become a virtue, if it is guided by the cardinal virtues of courage, justice, and prudence. Without this guidance, however, it does more harm than good. Who could tally those murdered in the twentieth century in the name of compassion for “the poor” or for “workers”?
The Samaritan is none other than Jesus Christ. There is no Christianity outside of Jesus Christ. Christians, and no doubt many non-Christians, expect the Church to teach about Jesus Christ.
Notes
[1] The phrase translated as “was seized by pity” is found in Luke 7:13 to describe the sentiments of Jesus before the widow who had lost her only son, and in 15:20 to describe those of the father who, perceiving from afar his returning lost son, “was seized with pity.” »One could add that Jesus was himself called a “Samaritan”: “The Jews answered him: ‘Don’t we have reason to say that you are a Samaritan and possessed?’”» The parable of the good Samaritan would thus be the supremely ironic response to that accusation.
This essay was translated from the French by Paul Seaton. It is published in translation with the permission of the editors of the French quarterly Commentaire.
Levan Ramishvili
The Church and Immigration Sanity
Let’s start with a thought experiment. A foreign-looking family knocks on the door one evening and asks for a place to stay. I’ve never seen them before. They look hungry. They need shelter. I have a Christian duty to help them; the content of Luke 2 sticks in my brain and conscience. At the same time, I know nothing about them. My resources are limited. Crime is on the upswing. And my first duty is providing for, and protecting, my own family in an uncertain time.
So what do I do?
Imaginary personal encounters make bad national policy. But like parents with a family, a nation’s first duty is to its own citizens. Their security and welfare matter. Thus, borders also matter. So does immigration law, especially in a nation created ex nihilo and held together not by ethnicity, religion, or even language, but by respect for the law and the actions that flow from it.
One can reasonably criticize the Trump administration’s current deportation efforts as too broad and too blunt. Along with arresting gang members, traffickers, murderers, and rapists, they sweep up innocent, undocumented immigrants who pose no criminal threat, and many of whom contribute as much to this country as they gain from it. But those same ugly removal efforts were inevitable. They were made so by a catastrophic border collapse under the Biden administration, and the failure by both of our political parties over the past two decades to produce workable immigration reform. Undocumented immigrants possess a God-given dignity that cannot be rescinded. But their presence here, under the law, is nonetheless illegal. Which is why the Obama administration, in its own time, deported 2.7 million of them—notably without the current hysterics from the political left.
To their credit, the Catholic and other Christian churches in this country have done heroic work for decades in offering material support and legal counsel to immigrants, documented and otherwise. I saw this firsthand in twenty-seven years of diocesan staff service. The Church resources allotted to social ministry, including immigration services, typically dwarfed other pro-life efforts. The current administration’s defunding of some of those legitimate services has ironically made the immigration crisis worse. But in serving the needs and championing the rights of new immigrants, church leaders have often been seen as downplaying or ignoring the just concerns of their own people. And most of their people are not reactionary nativists or right-wing bigots but ordinary men and women, often with families, worried—rightly—about crime, the financial stability of their public institutions, and social cohesion.
Acknowledging those honest concerns, as one border state bishop told me privately, has too often been inadequate; an unconvincing “throwaway line” for too many bishops and church workers dealing with the immigration issue. Another voice—a senior border state church staffer with intimate experience of the immigration crisis—added that
I don’t like Trump’s approach; it’s long on muscle and short on explaining why these measures are necessary. But [Pope] Leo and the bishops refuse to make distinctions about immigrants; they’re prioritizing the needs of the undocumented over the legitimate concerns of the faithful who built the Church in this country. Leo’s new apostolic exhortation [Dilexi Te] says that “in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community.” That’s lazy exegesis in the service of a globalist set of assumptions. . . . My fear is that Leo does not understand why populism is sweeping Europe and the U.S. I’m also concerned about Rome’s presumption that migrants are automatically “missionaries of hope.” No. In fact, many are, but many are the opposite. And it is not inherently racist to be concerned that your country cannot handle the flood of immigrants.
The effectively “open borders” messaging of the Church in Europe seems particularly misguided because so many of the continent’s immigrants are Muslim, and Islam has a very different anthropology and approach to politics and the state from anything in Christian and Enlightenment thought. Christianity shaped the soul and development of Europe. But unlike the aftermath of Rome’s fifth-century collapse, the Church throughout Europe today is very far from having the will or the energy needed to convert the newly-arrived immigrant masses. That has massive religious, cultural, and political implications.
So how do we proceed as a believing people?
One of the best recent expositions of Christian thought on the immigration and deportation debate appeared on October 12. It’s worth reading and taking to heart. Writing in the Catholic Times, the magazine of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, Fr. Christopher Trummer outlines “a moral framework that neither oversimplifies nor ignores the complexity of immigration.” He stresses the dignity of “every human being, regardless of legal status, nationality, or origin,” that must be respected. This “obviously holds true for immigrants as well,” who should be viewed “not as burdens or statistics, but as persons to be loved, protected, and treated with justice.” Persons have a “right to migrate when necessary to protect their life, dignity, or livelihood.” This is especially true when seeking to escape from war, persecution, systemic poverty, and similar urgent factors.
Trummer goes on to note, however, that “the right to migrate is not absolute. Prudence is needed to determine what counts as a ‘just reason’ for immigration. . . . The desire to migrate, however strong and sincere, does not automatically establish the right to do so.” Alongside the rights of migrants, “the Church also affirms the right—and duty—of nations to regulate immigration in service of the common good. . . . This includes securing borders, maintaining public order, and ensuring the stability of cultural and economic life. While the right to migrate is real, it must be balanced with a nation’s capacity to welcome and integrate new arrivals. Finding this balance is the real crux of the debate.”
Finally, faithful Catholics should “note at the outset that the Church does not teach that deportation is intrinsically evil. . . . The state has the right—and at times the duty—to enforce immigration laws, including even the removal of those who lack legal standing.” In practice, deportation becomes morally problematic when it lacks justice and restraint—“when it is applied without proportionality or due process.” An inevitable tension thus arises between “overly aggressive law enforcement [that] breeds fear [and] fractures communities” and the fact that “legitimate laws do have to be enforced, and this is never done perfectly.”
The Trummer text is a model of prudent, balanced reasoning, persuasively expressed. But this should surprise no one. His bishop is Bishop Thomas Paprocki, himself both a canon and civil lawyer who spent years as a young priest working with immigrants and co-founding the Chicago Legal Clinic to help provide legal services for the poor.
Paprocki’s main focus, as he notes in the same Catholic Times issue, was immigration law, “helping people to obtain legal status as lawful immigrants and citizens.” He writes that “when migrants are undocumented, they are vulnerable to unscrupulous employers who pay them below minimum [wage], threatening to call immigration authorities if they complain. The best way for immigrants to thrive in our country is to come here legally.”
Alas, making that path more accessible to migrants, while also safe and manageable for the wider public, is a serious challenge. It demands serious immigration reform, along with the prudence and spirit of compromise to see it through. Our leaders in Washington—both political and ecclesial—might profitably give Springfield a call. Not for policy details, but some training in common sense. That would at least be a start.
Levan Ramishvili
Bishops Must Reclaim the Church’s Full Immigration Teaching
A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation. That statement should not be controversial for Catholics. It is not a partisan slogan; it is a basic moral premise of political community. And yet, for years, many faithful Catholics have been left with the impression that the Church’s teaching on immigration begins and ends with a single imperative: “Welcome the stranger,” full stop.
Now, as the temperature drops in places like Minneapolis and the national conversation becomes less apocalyptic and more concrete, there is a window for real catechesis. This is precisely when our bishops should step forward and offer what the country badly needs: a better understanding of Catholic Social Teaching on immigration, with its full architecture intact.
Catholic teaching does affirm that people often have powerful reasons to leave their homeland—violence, corruption, persecution, economic collapse, family obligation. The Church has always insisted on the dignity of the person, including the migrant.
But Catholic teaching also insists on something else that is routinely minimized in ecclesial messaging: Political authorities have the right and duty to regulate migration for the sake of the common good. That is not a loophole; it is part of the moral structure of social life. The state is not an enemy of charity. It is a real moral actor charged with order, justice, peace, and the protection of its people, including the protection of the vulnerable from exploitation by criminals who thrive on chaos.
When bishops speak as if the only settled teaching is the migrant’s right to leave and the Christian’s duty to assist, while treating enforcement as morally suspect by default, confusion is guaranteed. It leaves many Catholics thinking they must choose between fidelity to the Church and the basic belief that laws matter. That is a catechetical failure.
The bishops can fix it by stating plainly what Catholic doctrine actually allows and requires, namely that nations may say “yes” and nations may say “no,” and those decisions can be morally serious when they are ordered to the common good, proportional to capacity, and attentive to justice.
None of this means enforcement methods are above moral evaluation. The bishops should keep their freedom and moral authority to question the “how.” If enforcement actions are reckless, humiliating, indiscriminate, or unnecessarily destructive to families and communities, the Church has every right to say so. And when mistakes happen—because mistakes will happen—the Church should insist on transparency, remedies, and higher standards.
Two things are essential if the bishops are going to speak credibly and fruitfully.
First, criticism of the “how” cannot become a backdoor denial of the “why.” If every instrument of enforcement is portrayed as inherently cruel, then the only practical outcome is open borders by moral intimidation. That is not Catholic teaching; it is an ideological posture.
Second, criticism must avoid demonizing legitimate government tools that are necessary to enforce the law. A serious society cannot enforce immigration law with vibes and press releases. It requires investigations, detention capacity, adjudication, removals, and cooperation between agencies.
Catholics can debate the prudence and safeguards of particular policies. But if Catholic leaders talk as if the mere existence of enforcement infrastructure is immoral, they aren’t defending human dignity: They are denying the state’s ability to do what the Church says it may and must do.
There is a difference between condemning abuses and condemning enforcement as such. The bishops should make that difference unmistakable.
This is why strident, mostly performative criticism—especially when it is issued impulsively, without broad episcopal consultation, and without an evident grasp of facts—does not “speak truth to power.” It confuses the faithful, hardens political tribes, and substitutes posture for pastoral clarity.
A remarkable address delivered in 2000 by Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, then archbishop of Bologna, does something too many Church statements avoid: It treats immigration as a complex social fact requiring realism, prudence, and planning—not sentimental improvisation. He refused both extremes: alarmism that turns immigrants into threats, and naive idealism that pretends mass migration can be absorbed without consequences.
But the most important part of Biffi’s address may be his internal critique of the Church’s own temptations. The Church must practice concrete charity toward anyone in need—regardless of legal status—but she is not the all-purpose manager of every social crisis. Evangelization cannot be replaced by social service.
That is the kind of voice the American bishops should become right now—not to baptize any party, politician, or policy package, but to restore Catholic teaching to its full depth. The goal is neither cruelty nor chaos. The goal is ordered compassion: a system that protects the dignity of migrants while respecting the moral reality that a nation has the right and duty to regulate who enters, under what conditions, and in what numbers.
If the bishops reclaim that full teaching, they will help Catholics act like Catholics again: neither captive to ideological panic nor anesthetized by sentiment, but guided by reason, revelation, and the hard wisdom of the Church.
Levan Ramishvili
For a number of years, a kind of shortcut—or short-circuit—has been set up in public opinion between “the Christian message” and “welcoming migrants.” It is as if welcoming migrants summed up the demands and urgency of the Christian message, as if “being a Christian today” found its touchstone in the unconditional reception—or at least the broadest possible reception—of migrants. I would like to question the merits of this perspective.
First, let me make a few very quick comments on migration as a phenomenon. The dominant opinion, which governs the governors, maintains that migration is a fundamentally moral problem—that the reception of migrants is a categorical imperative, tempered only by the limited possibilities of the host country. According to this view, we know what the right action is, and the debate can only legitimately be about our assessment of particular circumstances. But this emphatically moral perspective rests on a political presupposition that is rarely questioned: that migration constitutes the major social phenomenon of our time, the most significant phenomenon in relation to which all others should be considered. This is the argument behind the Global Compact for Migration, the UN agreement covering all dimensions of international migration that was adopted by the General Assembly in 2018.
Moral Evidence or Political Postulate?
Migrants constitute a small percentage of the world’s population, which continues to live mainly in constituted states. No serious reason has yet been given to subordinate the needs and wishes of non-migrant populations—who are not necessarily less needy—to those of migrants. By urging states to do everything in their power to facilitate migratory movement, we immediately deprive bodies politic of that essential part of their legitimacy that consists in freely determining the conditions of accessing their territory and their citizenship. Even urging them to watch how their citizens speak about migration claims the right to regulate public conversation in all the countries of the world.
Thus, in the name of a moral evidence that is only an arbitrary political postulate, we weaken the legitimacy, and thereby the stability, of constituted states. This effect is most pronounced on the states that are most sensitive to this argument: the democratic countries that today receive a large number of migrants and are by far the most active when it comes to bringing them aid.
Our democracies make numerous and very diverse people live in a favored condition of peace, liberty, and even conviviality that remains the envy of large populations, whose social condition, education, religion, opinions, and lifestyles are extremely varied. This social cohesion, the fruit of great effort over a long history, is not unlimited. No one knows how far a body politic can go in accepting growing heterogeneity without breaking up. This is not only a question of self-preservation, of defending what is one’s own, however legitimate that concern may be. It is a question of preserving and if possible improving the conditions of living well and of a common education.
Migrants themselves do not escape from this primacy of citizenship. They were active citizens in the country they left. They often retain rights of citizenship or nationality in their country of origin. They received a more or less complete education there, a human formation—in short, a form of life. It is therefore a very superficial view to look at migration exclusively from a humanitarian perspective and to see migrants as simply “like us.” Undoubtedly migrants are like us, and we are required, if they are in danger, to come to their aid according to our means. But they are also citizens who have been instilled with social or religious rules, which can sometimes be directly contrary to our principles of justice.
The duty of helping here and now the migrant who is in danger does not in any way include a duty to facilitate his migration, much less that of making him a fellow citizen. All of this depends on many various considerations and finally on a judgment that is not only moral but political—or rather on an ethical judgment in the old sense of the term: a prudential judgment in which the common good of the community of citizens is the principal, though not exclusive, criterion.
Which “Christian Message”?
I now come to my second point. What exactly do we mean when we speak of the “Christian message”? The answer is all the more difficult because over the course of a long history the Christian proposal has found quite diverse expressions depending on evolutions of the Church, the world, and the interactions between them. In particular, it appears that the modalities of the Christian proposal are very different depending on whether the Church is in a position of command or authority, as she was during a large part of European history, or in a position of marginality or subordination, as she is today.
We constantly encounter among us traces, remnants, or signs of the once central and commanding position of the Church. But if we look at things as they are, we see that the Church is increasingly pushed to the margins of European society, including French society. The institutional Church, and Catholics in general, have long become accustomed to this diminished condition, but at the cost of a growing difficulty in bearing the Christian message. How can we make others hear the breadth and gravity of the Church’s call to humanity, without overstepping her modest boundaries? The Christian proposal is addressed to all men; it concerns the whole of man, and the mission of Christians is to bear this call. But even if the Church continues to fulfill this mission by guiding her active members through her liturgy and sacraments, she no longer knows how to formulate it in the public square.
In effect, the sovereign state has gradually imposed its point of view on all participants in our common life, including the Church. From the point of view of the state, Christian faith is one opinion among others, an opinion whose freedom the state guarantees, but which does not deserve any special consideration—as the state wastes no time in reminding the Church when she intervenes in the public square. However, even if the Church today does not demand any special consideration, she could not renounce her reason for existing. How can she address humanity, and first and foremost all the members of the civic body, when an increasingly rigorous interpretation of secularism leads the state to exercise an increasingly meticulous surveillance over any public expression that can be linked to religion?
It is therefore a great temptation in the Church to seek out the ear of the public and keep her audience by linking her own proclamation with the prevailing opinion today, by confusing the Christian proclamation with that “religion of humanity” that envelops Europe and North and South America, and by reducing charity to this “feeling of likeness” that Tocqueville already saw as the deepest and most powerful psychological wellspring of modern democracy. This is a temptation because—like all temptations—it is easy, and it is a lie. Indeed, the religion of humanity proclaims one human family virtually united and healed. It invites us to perceive the presence of one humanity without division or separation under the still virulent separations that exist, a humanity in which the likeness of men would be visible and sensible under their differences.
We understand the attraction of a perspective promising the unification of humanity through the contagion of a pleasant feeling. We must also point out the cost. Once it has taken root, this point of view implies a relaxation of all our ambition, a renunciation in principle of our common actions, since there could be no ambition or common action without an effort to distinguish ourselves from those who do not share this ambition, or who have no part in this common action. A humanity that claims to unite by the contagion of the feeling of likeness is a humanity that has given up on acting, since, as Rousseau explains, as soon as we act we must “take into account the differences that we find in the continual use we have to make of each other.”
The Religion of Humanity
In the eyes of the Christian, the religion of humanity is superficial because it does not understand the depth of what separates men and where their enmity is rooted. How can we imagine that they will find the healing of their divisions in that feeling of sympathy that, reduced to itself, has little strength and constancy? Moreover, it is because the human capacity for sympathy is naturally limited that compassion is prolonged, stretched out, and distorted into political projects that introduce new divisions by seeking out new enemies. How can we fail to see the political and ideological passion behind the project of a world “without borders” that presents itself as the necessary conclusion of becoming aware of human likeness?
The humanitarian proposal is hard to refuse, because it postulates that, in order to enter into justice, it is enough for everyone to be aware of the evidence of human likeness. The Christian proposal is hard to accept, because it affirms that all human beings are prisoners of an injustice from which they cannot escape by their own efforts, and that in order to escape they must accept the mediation of Christ, who is both God and man—a mediation of which the Church in turn is the mediatrix. This is a lot of mediation indeed, especially when the religion of humanity offers the immediate feeling of human likeness. Yet Christianity opens up an incomparably more instructive and demanding way of perfection, since its end is God himself, in whose image every human being is created.
It would be unfair to underestimate the virtues and positive effects of humanitarian compassion. In fact, the gestures of charity are in part the same as those of compassion. But in the face of the imaginary powers bestowed on compassion—this religion of compassion that has established its authority among us—it is important to underline its limits. Christians would lose the sense and the intention of their faith if they could no longer distinguish between compassion and charity.
Infatuation with the “Migrant”
After having sketched a political perspective on migration, I have just emphasized the specificity of the Christian message. The two approaches aim by various paths to deliver us from a vertigo that sweeps away many of us, Christian or not. From a vertigo or from an infatuation, an infatuation with the “migrant,” a figure that sums up humanity because he is the loss of the human, as Marx more or less said of the proletarian—a Christic figure who tends to substitute for Christ as the object of the intention if not of the faith of Christians. However, the attraction, the spell cast by the figure of the migrant on one part of public opinion inevitably finds its counterpart in another part of public opinion, in the form of a more or less vehement rejection of migrants. This makes the reception or refusal of migrants one of the most powerful sources of political and moral division in our countries.
I have tried to suggest that migration does not force us to change the character of our political regime or the meaning and standards of the Christian religion. That said, if migration does not fundamentally change the political condition of men, it exerts pressure on our countries that deeply affects both our political regime and, if I may put it this way, our religious regime. This pressure is at once the cause and the effect of the surprisingly rapid progress of this “religion of humanity” that is profoundly transforming the conditions of our common life.
This new political religion has delegitimized our representative republic by imposing the idea that there is something radically unjust in a community of citizens who govern themselves, because, in so doing, they separate themselves from the rest of humanity, and thereby exclude all those who are not a part of their community. As much as it wants to be democratic, our community of citizens is considered radically unjust, since the rights that it grants to its members are not granted to all those who ask for or claim them. The only just law is that which applies to mankind in general.
According to the same logic, the religion of humanity has tended to delegitimize the Christian religion, which—as a community sharing objects of faith, criteria of judgment, and a form of life that are its own—separates itself from the rest of humanity. In fact, any community of action or of education—in short, just about every community that humanity has been able to produce—is delegitimized by the religion of humanity, which only wants to see people who are alike where men have created great, different things.
The difficulty is this: the perversity of our situation is concentrated in the relationship between migration and the religion of humanity. The latter commands us to open ourselves to migrants without asking for anything in return; we should certainly not ask them to open themselves to our own form of life. Yet are we not “others” for them? In truth, there is no question here of equality or of human likeness. The encounter to which we are invited is that between someone presumed innocent and someone presumed guilty; it is ordered by a moral inequality of principle. This is because the religion of humanity has not been produced by united mankind but by the old Christianity weary of itself or in revolt against itself. Humanitarianism is not only a weakening of Christianity: there is, at the root of the religion of humanity that has taken possession of Europe, a hostility and resentment specifically directed against the Christian religion.
This state of affairs concerns non-Christians as well as Christians, in different ways. While Christianity seems to be withdrawing from European life, another religion has taken hold of consciences, depriving Europeans of any right to govern themselves and to preserve a form of life that is their own. If Europe persists in erasing the last traces of Christendom, nothing can hold it back from disappearing into a humanity without form or vocation.
Levan Ramishvili
The Catholic Church and Care for Migrants
The Church has a long tradition of generous care for migrants, while allowing room for legitimate regulation.
Years ago, while pursuing a master’s degree in theology in Rome, I witnessed firsthand the effects of Europe’s migration crisis. Pope Francis repeatedly called Europeans to greater generosity toward migrants, yet many Italian Catholics expressed genuine moral unease.
Their concern was understandable. I saw multitudes of young migrants wandering in the big cities without a job or a place to stay. Meanwhile, every Italian family I met had a relative living overseas. Italians themselves were leaving their homeland in large numbers due to economic stagnation and limited opportunities.
This tension between generosity and responsibility echoes Vice President J. D. Vance’s recent appeal to the ordo amoris. He invoked the ancient principle of the order of charity to say that love follows a hierarchy that gives priority to those closest members of the community. The vice president extrapolated this to the issue of migration controls, claiming it justified stricter regulations. As conservative Christians call for tighter migration regulations and liberal Christians promote more open approaches, I believe that we should return to the richness of the Christian tradition for a more nuanced insight.
A close study of the Christian tradition reveals a complex moral vision of migration: the Church consistently affirms a generous duty of care toward migrants while also recognizing the legitimacy of regulating the admission of newcomers for the sake of the common good. Far from endorsing either open borders or blanket restrictions, Catholic Social Teaching (CST) offers a nuanced framework shaped by hospitality, universal destination of goods, and the common good of the host communities.
In this context, it is helpful to recall the French friar and priest Yves Congar’s insight that the true agent of the Church’s living tradition is the Holy Spirit. The Divine Guest is the one who inspires and guides the Church in her practices and beliefs, just as he once inspired the human authors of Scripture. I argue that studying the history of Christian migration ethics can reveal how the Holy Spirit has continually inspired the Church in her care for migrants.
This is the very question I aim to explore in this essay: can we identify in tradition a distinctly Christian position on the care of migrants and its relationship to host communities? Vance’s comment on the ordo amoris suggests that Christian tradition has emphasized the care for the communities instead of migrants. I argue, instead, that the Catholic moral tradition has a rich heritage of ethical principles on migration that promotes a generous care for migrants, while admitting specific situations in which regulation is legitimate.
Most instances of this tradition on migrant care offer general principles such as hospitality or universal destination of goods, such as are found in the works of the Church Fathers. Other instances are more specific and directly address the migration issue, such as the teachings of the School of Salamanca. I will start with some references to the Church Fathers, then late antiquity and medieval law, and finally the work of the School of Salamanca in the sixteenth century, which I believe to be the most robust treatment of migration ethics in Christian tradition.
The Church Fathers on Migration
The most ancient instances of the Church teaching on migration, outside the biblical texts, are the teachings of the Church Fathers on poverty and wealth. When Pope Pius XII argued in the apostolic constitution Exsul Familia for the right to migrate, he referred to the principle of the universal destination of goods, meaning that God created the earth for the flourishing of all human beings, regardless of nationality, religion, or race. This principle is drawn from a strong theology of creation developed by the Church Fathers, such as Saints Ambrose, Basil, and John Chrysostom. They argue that individuals who have more resources have an obligation to support those in need. St. Ambrose puts it in very strong words: “You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.”
Although they did not have in mind our current migration crisis, sixteenth-century theologians of the School of Salamanca, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, and the twentieth-century popes, such as Pius XII, use this argument in favor of allowing foreigners to move through political borders.
Throughout Scripture, Christians identify as pilgrims themselves. For instance, in the first letter of Clement, Bishop of Rome, to the Christian community of Corinth, he refers to the Church of God as “sojourning in Rome.” Later in the second century, the Letter to Diognetus portrays Christians as resident aliens who dwell in every city yet belong fully to none, living as citizens of heaven while journeying through earthly societies.
This theme reaches a mature theological expression in St. Augustine’s City of God, where Augustine emphasizes that the Christian, as a peregrinus and viator, is a sojourner whose true homeland lies with God. By cultivating an identity rooted not in territorial possession but in spiritual citizenship, early Christians learned to see their own condition mirrored in the vulnerable outsider. This longstanding recognition that we ourselves are “strangers and sojourners” should provide a moral foundation for identifying with, and extending generous care to, migrants in need.
A more direct reference to migrant care can be found in the letters of St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage. In a letter to his own clergy, he said:
Please, take diligent care of the infirm and all the poor. And if some of the travelers should be in need, you may obtain what you need from my personal funds. Out of fear that they might have been fully spent already, I have sent another sum, in order that the effort for the suffering might take place with greater generosity as well as more promptly.
In this letter, we can see Cyprian’s concern for vulnerable travelers, many of whom face struggles that resemble those of today’s migrants. Still, it is unclear whether Cyprian is just talking about travelers or foreigners, or if he meant care for a short time or permanent relocation. The use of his letter later on by Domingo de Soto will situate it in the issue of international migration.
Care for Migrants in Medieval Law
Other hallmark documents of Christian migration ethics in tradition are found in late antiquity and medieval legal documents. The first is a decree in Justinian’s civil law code, the Novel 80, in which the emperor nominates a public official to deal with the migrants who arrived at the royal capital of Constantinople in the year 539. It was motivated by the scarcity of resources in the capital and the constant flow of migrants from all over the empire and elsewhere. The migration official, a type of Byzantine ICE officer with judicial powers, is supposed to make sure that outsiders are employed and contributing to the common good of the city. Individuals who refuse employment or engage in criminal activity should be expelled from Constantinople. Those who cannot work, such as the elderly and the sick, are to be provided for and treated humanely. The decree implicitly acknowledges the possibility of welcoming economic migrants, providing work for them, and supporting those who cannot work. However, Novel 80 also admits the possibility of legitimate regulation of migration in order to protect the common good of the host in extreme cases of scarcity. This decree is at the center of the argument in favor of migrants developed by theologian Domingo de Soto in the sixteenth century.
The Second Council of Tours in 567 addressed the migration crisis of its time in a different way. It called on local communities to care for their poor so they would not be forced to travel to foreign cities in search of help. The Council stated that “each and every city should provide its poor and needy inhabitants with sufficient nourishment in accordance with its own ability. Both priests and citizens should take care of feeding the poor in their own region. In this manner, the poor will not have to engage in tiresome traveling and dwell in foreign cities.” For the Council, public officials and members of society ought to support the poor so that they are not constrained to move away to foreign lands. This is similar to the modern idea in CST of the right to stay, also called by John Paul II the right not to migrate.
Another medieval legal document that addresses migrant care is the Decretum of Gratian, an influential compilation of the Church’s canon law of the twelfth century. In a part of the text dealing with the requirements for Holy Orders, one of the criteria to select men to become bishops and priests is that candidates must be hospitable; they must model hospitality to their congregations and encourage them to welcome strangers and travelers. Welcoming strangers was deemed so crucial that it became a legal requirement for ordination.
The School of Salamanca on Migration Ethics
Both Justinian’s code and Gratian’s Decretum were very influential in the West in shaping the concept of law, justice, and rights, especially in the work of scholastic theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas and later in the early modern theologians of the School of Salamanca. The teachings of the Spanish theologians provide the strongest evidence of the Catholic Church’s ethical stance on migration.
Dominican theologians Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto were the main representatives of this school in the sixteenth century, one of the centers of Catholic thought in Europe. They used the concept of right to travel and dwell to address the mass migration crisis of their time. While advocating the care of migrants, they used solid legal argument and theological grounding in both Scripture and Tradition. Although they pushed for a generous support of migrants, they did admit the possibility of regulating migration. What makes them special is that they are the first theologians to directly address the problem of whether people have a right to cross political borders.
Francisco de Vitoria presents the right to travel and dwell in a nation in a 1539 public lecture, De Indis. Vitoria was the leader of the movement of theological renewal that flourished at the University of Salamanca. In this public lecture, he assesses whether the Spaniards had a just title to conquer the natives in the Americas. He argues that people have a right to travel and dwell peacefully in another land, and that if the host community violates this peace, it may give rise to a legitimate right to self-defense. This right is based on legal categories such as the law of nations and natural law, and theological ideas such as hospitality and the original common ownership of goods. He also argues that the right to travel and dwell is not just about a right of passage or freedom of movement, but includes the possibility of relocating and settling in a foreign country.
References to natural law and the law of nations dominated Vitoria’s argument. Even where there is a reference to divine law, Vitoria connects it to natural law and the law of nations. These two types of law are rooted in human nature. Hence, using them as a framework is an effort to show the universality of the right to travel and dwell and to give natives and Europeans the same legal standing.
But this right to travel and dwell is not absolute. Vitoria makes frequent reference to the possibility of “harm” to the host community and “due cause” for host nations setting limitations on the right to travel and dwell. In fact, his argument implies that Europeans violated the no-harm limitation of the right to travel by actions mentioned by Vitoria, such as violent coercion to the faith, massacres, and pillages. For this reason, he concludes, Spaniards did not have the right to settle in the Americas.
Domingo de Soto, a disciple of Vitoria and his successor as a theology professor at Salamanca, does not expressly mention the phrase “right to travel and dwell” but deals with a similar concept under the idea of a right to “beg.” In his treatise Deliberation on the Cause of the Poor, Soto offers a critique of the laws regulating the poor in Europe, which prohibited beggars from traveling and asking for alms in public. Many cities enacted norms saying that beggars from other cities and countries should be prevented from receiving alms and should be sent away. He argues that divine law, natural law, and the law of nations provide the bases for a “right of passage to any road and city, the right to stay wherever one wants, and the right to spend one’s life where one wishes.”
Soto relies on the theological concepts of hospitality and the mystical body of Christ to ground his argument. However, he was not defending an open borders policy: Soto pointed to legitimate restrictions to restrict migration in order to protect the common good of the host community, specifically, in cases of crime, espionage, heresy, and extreme scarcity.
Both Vitoria and Soto use the concept of ordo amoris in their arguments, but in a different way than Vance does. Vitoria took the idea of ordo amoris from St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine. Here, Augustine argues that even the angels ought to be considered our neighbors. Vitoria uses this argument to claim that treating immigrants with dignity is obedience to the Lord’s command to love one’s neighbor. This suggests that if even cosmic beings like angels can count as neighbors, then so, too, can immigrants from other lands and cultures.
Soto addresses ordo amoris as a common objection to his argument in favor of migrants. He explains that ordo amoris is an exception to the general duty to do good to all, such as we see in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and that in extreme cases of scarcity, the individuals should be able to decide whether to help the needy. But even in those situations, he claims, migrants should still be allowed to move and try their best to appeal to the members of the community in compassion for their plea.
In sum, the Church has a long tradition of generous care for migrants, while allowing room for legitimate regulation. This tradition encompasses general theological principles that can be applied to the migration crisis, such as the universal destination of goods and hospitality, but also specific treatments of the migration rights, such as the idea of the right to travel and dwell that is discussed in the works of Vitoria and Soto. It also acknowledges the need to regulate migration in situations where the community might be harmed. Within this tradition, one finds neither an open-borders policy nor a call for overly strict controls, but rather, an attitude of compassionate concern toward migrants that also considers the good of the host community.
Levan Ramishvili
'Ordo Amoris' according to JD Vance and Pope Francis
What is the ordo amoris and why should we care about it? Just over a week ago, Pope Francis, in a letter to US Bishops, wrote the following:
“Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings!
"The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
The proximate cause of the letter appears to have been comments by the US Vice President, and Catholic convert, JD Vance. Vance, addressing the always-difficult subject of immigration and in criticism of the US Bishops’ migrant programme, had opined: “There’s this old school – and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.”
Vance’s point was the US should prioritise the needs of US citizens above those of other nationals.
Vance later clarified his comments by referring to the ordo amoris – the order of love mentioned by St Thomas Aquinas – through which we understand how to love others in ways appropriate to their relationship to us, loving more those closest to us (for example, family members) because of the particular ways and opportunities we have to love them.
Vance’s words were welcomed by many, especially conservative thinkers who are understandably sceptical of social utopianism and rationalist political thinking, which, in the name of omnipotent “reason”, favours the abstract and distant; condemning a supposed “irrational” bias towards the local and familiar.
Conservative thought has tended, in reaction to certain Enlightenment models of thought, to emphasise the ingrained and habit-formed morality of hearth and home. And it is true that, given the kind of creatures we are, we learn through the school of the intimate about what is truly good, beginning with those family relationships which are quite literally irreplaceable.
We learn in the hierarchy of the family – a hierarchy which can be a mirror of the nature of God’s love for us.
Egalitarianism and impartiality, on the other hand, should not be promoted at the cost of more urgent moral claims. The mechanisation of benevolence threatens to “critique” and stifle our most fundamental moral experiences of human solidarity. As GK Chesterton put it, “Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.” Indeed, those very wider sympathies we must also develop are (or should be) taught us by our parents.
Was Pope Francis denying what is surely part of the moral consensus of humanity – that the ordo amoris guides how we love others, whom we cannot all love in the same way? Surely not. Rather, his invocation of the Good Samaritan is timely and various lessons can be taken from the story. Fraternity is indeed universal, and we must wish the same good things to others as to our kin and co-nationals – but not necessarily wish them to the same extent.
On the one hand, the Good Samaritan story shows the necessity to expand our sympathies beyond the familiar and the tribal. The Good Samaritan responded to the needs of someone who was not only a stranger but from a different religious group. Admirable for his generous response, the Good Samaritan was also admirable in his practicality.
He was going somewhere, which was evidently important enough for him to continue his journey before coming back to check how the stranger was faring at the inn. He gave medical assistance and then partially delegated the problem – for which there was (as so often is the case) a financial cost.
In the meantime, the Priest and Levite represent not just ourselves at our least attractive, but those who did not understand the deeper meaning of the Old Covenant and thereby failed their nation and people. For, as the Church Fathers knew, the victim represents Adam, fallen man on a journey from Jerusalem to Jericho and the Good Samaritan is a type of Christ.
In fact, we all believe in the ordo amoris, understood as a natural order of priorities which, however, must encompass the urgent needs, at the very least, of those who immediately cross our path. The Good Samaritan might have been on a family errand that he was (rightly) forced to delay somewhat. But what if his own son had also been a victim of robbers, and was lying next to the stranger, in the same dire condition?
If my son is injured, should I not prioritise taking him to A&E as soon as possible? The answer seems obvious: of course I should – what kind of father wouldn’t? Yet if I take him to A&E and the doctor treats him, the doctor will delay treating the person next in line who has his own family and is also in dire need of help. Should I therefore sacrifice my parental responsibilities to some “wider duty” concerning someone else’s child?
On the other hand, my son’s minor ailment should not be prioritised over a stranger’s life – particularly when that stranger has already become a “close neighbour”, at least in terms of physical proximity.
As the philosopher David Oderberg puts it:
“The Priest and Levite were what we might call ‘default proximates’ by virtue of various communal ties – blood, racial, religious, country. The Samaritan…became a proximate as soon as he was, like the other two, physically close and in a position to help…Note the use of words in the parable such as ‘came near’, ‘seeing’, ‘moved’: we are not concerned here with a person thinking the abstract and precious thought, ‘whom might I help today?’ but with someone who passively became a proximate through simply passing by, and then actively involved himself in the victim’s plight.”
The debate over immigration – like other debates over the interaction between our duties to strangers and to our kin and co-nationals – is genuinely difficult. It not helped by over-simplifications of positions, whether it's the crude assumption that Vance is some kind of tribal-fascist, or the equally crude assumption that the Vatican is little better than a politically-correct, elitist, UN-NGO-type.
That there are elites who weaponise mass immigration at the expense of social cohesion is not to be doubted. Yet there are others who weaponise the consequences of mass immigration and gain political power from demonising others while never solving the problems they claim to care about.
We can only try to keep in balance our duties to our own and our duties to expand our sympathies beyond our immediate horizons – sympathies which should be learnt in the “school of love” of both the family and the wider Church.
The Church has always known that, unavoidably, there are “winners and losers” in this world – but, the Church also emphasises, that fact does not absolve us from the need to seek to alleviate, with generosity and prudence, the sufferings of those who cross our path.
Levan Ramishvili
A Catholic response to the immigration and deportation debate
By FATHER CHRISTOPHER TRUMMER, S.T.L.
Few issues in American public life are as divisive and emotionally charged among Catholics as immigration. The topic stirs deep and often conflicting convictions: compassion for migrants and refugees, concern for national sovereignty and legal order, a longing for justice, and anxiety about social and economic change. Even among believers, conversations on this topic are often marked by polarization, misunderstandings, and mutual suspicion — if not mutual silence.
This article proposes a better way: a Catholic approach to immigration that is morally grounded, theologically sound, and capable of fostering genuine dialogue. By recovering the Church’s principles, acknowledging the role of prudential judgment, and affirming the unique vocation of the laity in the political sphere, we can engage this issue with greater clarity, charity, and courage.
This is not a partisan argument or an endorsement of any particular policy. It is an invitation to a deeper understanding of what is at stake in this important matter of public life. The Church’s social teaching provides a moral framework that neither oversimplifies nor ignores the complexity of immigration. By examining that framework, Catholics can be equipped to speak with both conviction and compassion while also respecting the legitimate diversity of views.
Three pillars of the Church’s teaching
The Church does not offer a detailed roadmap for immigration reform. Instead, the Church proposes moral principles drawn from Scripture, Tradition, and natural law that guide both reflection and policymaking. These principles do not yield simple answers, but they do establish the moral boundaries within which Catholics must discern and decide.
1. The dignity of the human person
Every human being, regardless of legal status, nationality, or origin, is made in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:27). As a recent declaration from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith stated, “Every human person possesses an infinite dignity . . . which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter. This principle . . . underlies the primacy of the human person and the protection of human rights” (Dignitas Infinita, n. 1).
This obviously holds true for immigrants as well, regardless of their legal status, a fact that Pope Benedict XVI underlined: “Every migrant is a human person who, as such, possesses fundamental, inalienable rights that must be respected by everyone and in every circumstance” (Caritas in Veritate, n. 62).
These rights include not only life and safety, but also work, family unity, and religious freedom. No immigration system can be morally just if it fails to uphold the personal dignity of those affected by its policies. At the same time, the rights of one person do not automatically entitle one to the full benefits or resources of a group or society. The specific way our rights and duties are lived out is negotiated through consent and social norms. Many of these norms are then formalized in laws through the political process.
The principle of human dignity challenges us to view immigrants not as burdens or statistics, but as persons to be loved, protected, and treated with justice.
2. The Right to Migrate
The Church affirms that people have a natural right to migrate when necessary to protect their life, dignity, or livelihood. Pope St. John XXIII taught, “When there are just reasons in favor of it, [every human being] must be permitted to emigrate to other countries and take up residence there. The fact that he is a citizen of a particular State does not deprive him of membership in the human family” (Pacem in Terris, n. 25).
Many immigrants today do not migrate because of mere convenience or preference but due to urgent necessity, such as war, persecution, social and political unrest, systemic poverty, and environmental factors. In such cases, migration is not so much a choice as a matter of survival.
Even so, the right to migrate is not absolute. Prudence is needed to determine what counts as a “just reason” for immigration. For example, not everyone who would benefit economically by moving to another country has a moral claim to do so. Where the need is truly grave, however, wealthier nations have a moral obligation — within reason — to assist.
Importantly, the decision about whether immigration is justified in a particular case does not rest solely with the would-be immigrant; it is also the responsibility of the receiving country to make that determination. The desire to migrate, however strong and sincere, does not automatically establish the right to do so.
Legal vs. illegal immigration
When we speak of the right to migrate, it is generally assumed that migration occurs through legal channels. However, even illegal entry may be morally justified if all the following conditions are met:
· The person is unable to provide for themselves or their family in their country of origin;
· Legal immigration pathways are effectively closed or unjustly restrictive;
· Crossing a border illegally is the only available means to secure basic human goods such as safety, food, or shelter.
In such cases, the individual would not be morally culpable for violating immigration laws, even if civil penalties still apply.
This judgment is grounded in the principle of the universal destination of goods, a cornerstone of Catholic social teaching. God created the goods of the earth for all people. While private property is legitimate and necessary for human flourishing, it is not absolute. Just as a starving person who takes food to survive is not guilty of theft (cf. CCC 2408), so too a person who crosses a border out of urgent necessity may not be morally blameworthy — even if they have broken the law. Whether and how such persons can be successfully integrated into the country as long-term citizens is a separate and complex question.
3. The right and duty of nations to regulate immigration
Alongside the rights of migrants, the Church also affirms the right — and duty —of nations to regulate immigration in service of the common good. The Catechism states:
“Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions” (CCC, n. 2241).
This includes securing borders, maintaining public order, and ensuring the stability of cultural and economic life. While the right to migrate is real, it must be balanced with a nation’s capacity to welcome and integrate new arrivals. Finding this balance is the real crux of the debate.
Where the restriction of immigration is justified, this must be carried out in a way that respects the dignity of all persons involved. As the U.S. and Mexican bishops wrote in a joint statement: “While the sovereign state may impose reasonable limits on immigration, the common good is not served when the basic human rights of the individual are violated” (Strangers No Longer, n. 39).
Some proponents of expansive immigration policies have gone so far as advocating for a borderless world, appealing to ideals of universal solidarity and justice. However, the Church does not see this as an ideal or something to be pursued. Modern nation-states, though imperfect, generally serve the common good. They offer a framework for order, accountability, solidarity, and subsidiarity — values deeply rooted in Catholic teaching. Borders and sovereignty are not inherently unjust or contrary to human flourishing; they exist to promote justice and peace within a political community that is defined by shared values, culture, religion, language, history, etc.
Prudential judgment and the mission of the laity
Grounded in Scripture and the natural law, the Church teaches timeless moral principles, but the Church entrusts their application to prudential judgment, which isreasoned discernment about the best course of action in light of particular circumstances. This is especially true regarding issues like immigration, where goods such as justice, solidarity, the common good, and the rule of law must be carefully weighed together.
Prudential judgment requires a solid grasp of the issue at hand. Yet our content-saturated culture often discourages the kind of sustained attention and reflection that true understanding demands. Debates over immigration — especially online — often rely heavily on slogans and soundbites that ignore the genuine complexity of the issue.
Even Christians can fall into this tendency by quoting Scripture verses to “prove” their positions. For example, some cite Deuteronomy 10:19 (“Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt”) or Matthew 25:35 (“I was … a stranger and you welcomed me”) to justify extremely expansive and lenient immigration policies. Conversely, others might appeal to passages such as Nehemiah 2–6, which recount the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls, to highlight the importance of borders, security, and national identity. They may also cite Romans 13:1 (“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God”) to emphasize the need for law, order, and respect for government authority.
Such passages are inspired and relevant, but they were not written to directly address the complex immigration situation in the 21st century. Scripture must be read in context and interpreted through the lens of the Church’s tradition before its timeless truths can be applied to present-day situations.
Our shared faith in the Word of God and the Church’s teaching does not mean that every reasonable Catholic has to arrive at the same conclusion on this immigration debate, as though only one legitimate Catholic position exists. We should not demand uniformity where the Church permits diversity on this issue. As the U.S. bishops write in their teaching document Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship (2023):
“Catholics may choose different ways to respond to compelling social problems, but we cannot differ on our moral obligation to help build a more just and peaceful world through morally acceptable means, so that the weak and vulnerable are protected and human rights and dignity are defended” (Forming Consciences, n. 20).
This is not moral relativism. It is a recognition of the laity’s vocation. As the Second Vatican Council taught, lay people are called to “seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God” (Lumen Gentium, n. 31).
This is especially true in the case of immigration. Legislators must craft just and workable laws. Judges must interpret them with integrity. Employers must treat workers fairly. Citizens must vote with conscience. Lay Catholics in every field must help shape policies that reflect both justice and mercy.
While the bishops serve as indispensable shepherds of the Church and teachers of the Faith, it is not their role — or within their competence — to develop and promote detailed policy prescriptions. Exercising prudential judgment in their role as citizens, with consciences formed by Scripture and Church teaching, it is primarily the responsibility of the laity to infuse society and culture with the values of the Gospel. In the context of immigration policy, this involves discerning, among other things:
· What constitutes a just reason for immigration;
· What the penalties for illegal entry should be;
· When deportation is warranted, and how exactly it should be carried out;
· What level of immigration a society can absorb without undermining its stability.
Neither Scripture nor Church teaching provide ready-made answers to these important questions. Discernment about these matters must resist all ideological extremes and seek the good of all — including newcomers and long-term citizens.
Finally, our discernment of the common good must take into account not only present needs but also the well-being of future generations. This means that immigration policy cannot be evaluated solely in terms of short-term economic costs or benefits. Rather, it must also promote the long-term stability and sustainability of the economy, social fabric, and public institutions.
What about deportation?
Deportation is one of the most painful aspects of immigration enforcement. It can tear apart families, upend livelihoods, and damage communities. It is the most dramatic measure used in the enforcement of immigration laws, and for that reason, it is also the most controversial and hotly debated practice.
We have to note at the outset that the Church does not teach that deportation is intrinsically evil (i.e., morally wrong in all circumstances). The state has the right — and at times the duty — to enforce immigration laws, including even the removal of those who lack legal standing. This is especially true when:
· They entered or remained unlawfully;
· They pose a threat to public safety;
· No mitigating circumstances justify their staying.
But deportation becomes morally problematic when it is applied without proportionality or due process. Examples include:
· Separating parents from children without grave reason;
· Returning individuals to countries where they face imminent persecution;
· Ignoring a person’s deep and successful integration into local life.
While states may enforce their laws, they must do so with justice and restraint. Few people want to live in a police state characterized by mass raids, surveillance, or indiscriminate detention. Overly aggressive law enforcement breeds fear, fractures communities, and undermines trust in public institutions.
At the same time, legitimate laws do have to be enforced, and this is never done perfectly. The existence of some failures or excesses does not, by itself, invalidate the law. What matters is that those responsible are willing to confront their failures honestly and correct them in the pursuit of justice.
Finally, even when penalties for illegal immigration are justified, deportation is certainly not the only option. Other legal remedies — such as fines, delayed work permits, suspended access to benefits, or denial of citizenship — can be more proportionate responses in certain cases. When wisely applied, these measures uphold the rule of law without resorting to unnecessarily harsh consequences. A just society seeks not simply to deter wrongdoing, but to foster restoration, reintegration, and the flourishing of the community.
Finding a balanced approach through dialogue
A Catholic approach to immigration rejects two extremes: on one side, dehumanization, indifference, and scapegoating; on the other, open borders, unconditional amnesty, and the undermining of national sovereignty. Catholic social teaching holds together justice and mercy, law and love, sovereignty and solidarity — even when doing so creates serious tensions.
Thus, a Catholic approach must:
· Defend the dignity of every migrant;
· Uphold the rule of law and national sovereignty;
· Oppose unjust, discriminatory, or excessively punitive policies;
· Promote reform that is compassionate, sustainable, and ordered to the common good.
Balancing all of these goods requires charity in dialogue. Political disagreement among Catholics does not necessarily imply unfaithfulness on the part of anyone involved. Prudential questions admit multiple answers. Christian charity requires that we assume good will in others — especially fellow Christians — and seek understanding instead of resorting to accusation and personal attacks.
When faced with complex issues, it is tempting to reduce people to simplistic categories based on their views. This can stem from intellectual laziness or a need for clarity that offers comfort, but a sincere pursuit of truth fosters humility and enables charitable disagreement. Though disagreement is rarely easy, a Christian secure in his faith will not feel threatened or angered by differing views. The ability to disagree well is a mark of intellectual and emotional maturity. In today’s polarized climate, we must recognize how political rhetoric can manipulate our emotions and make us more combative, which creates further conflict and division.
Politics = The art of the possible
Politics often thrives on polarization. Partisan media, campaign rhetoric, and electoral strategies push us to see issues in black and white and to rigidly pick a side. This mindset makes it harder to grapple with the complexity of immigration and the moral ambiguity often present in policy and enforcement. But Catholic discernment requires careful evaluation — recognizing that even within a single system, some elements may respect human dignity while others may fall short. We must resist the “all or nothing” mentality that blindly endorses or rejects an entire approach. No mainstream party or political platformfully embodies Catholic social teaching. Our task is to think with the Church, applying her principles consistently, even when doing so challenges political loyalties. This mature approach enables us to affirm what is good, confront what is not, and work patiently for a more just and humane system — even when perfection remains out of reach.
What can Catholics do?
In an age of polarization, misinformation, and soundbites, Catholics are called to rise above the pettiness and noise. Drawing from the moral and spiritual riches of our Tradition, we can offer thoughtful, principled contributions in place of the slogans and emotional manipulation that dominate our political discourse.
Constructive participation in the political sphere begins with formation and leads to action. Regarding the issue of immigration, some useful steps would be:
· Study the Church’s social teaching on human dignity, solidarity, and the common good;
· Listen to the experiences of migrants and those who serve them;
· Support ministries and charities that assist immigrants;
· Advocate for policies that balance justice and compassion;
· Pray for a spirit of peace and wisdom in public discourse.
Conclusion
Immigration is not just a political issue or an economic debate. It is a deeply human concern with serious moral and spiritual implications. Because it touches the lives of people made in God’s image, it demands more than slogans or soundbites.
On this question of immigration, the Church calls us to be faithful: faithful to the dignity of every human person, to the demands of justice, and to the works of mercy. The Church also invites us to embrace the challenging work of discernment and the need for principled compromise in public life.
Catholics may differ in good conscience about specific immigration policies, including enforcement and deportation, but we are not free to ignore the Gospel or the Church’s teaching. Our conversations must be rooted in truth, guided by love, and directed toward the good of every person — both migrant and citizen. Only then can we bring light, not heat, to one of the most urgent moral challenges facing our nation.
Father Christopher Trummer, S.T.L, is parochial vicar at St. Boniface Parish in Edwardsville, where he serves the Spanish-speaking community. He is also associate delegate for Health Care Professionals and has a license in Sacred Theology in Moral Theology from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, Italy.
Levan Ramishvili
A Catholic Approach to Immigration
In the USCCB’s recent Special Pastoral Message, the bishops of the United States highlight the suffering inflicted by a broken immigration system and empathize with vulnerable families who live every day under the shadow of uncertainty. Anyone who has met immigrants in our parishes, as many Catholics in America have, recognizes the truth of the bishops’ words.
Pastoral accompaniment is certainly necessary, but it does not encompass the entirety of the Church’s moral teaching. If anything, the Church insists on holding together truths that the political imagination is tempted to sever. The bishops acknowledge this when they write that “human dignity and national security are not in conflict,” and when they reaffirm that “nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders” for the sake of the common good. These are not caveats tacked onto an otherwise humanitarian manifesto: They are part of Catholic doctrine. To omit or minimize these truths would be to deprive the Catholic moral tradition of the wisdom our nation needs.
This is the kind of nuanced conversation many American Catholics—and civic leaders—find themselves hungry for but rarely encounter: a conversation where mercy is not weaponized against justice, and where sovereignty is not reduced to xenophobia. It is precisely this fuller conversation that CatholicVote’s document “Immigration Enforcement and the Christian Conscience” wants to start.
The American bishops are right to be troubled by “a climate of fear,” by the plight of parents afraid to take their children to school, and by the often harsh, sometimes dehumanizing conditions in detention centers. These are realities Christians must not look away from.
“Immigration Enforcement and the Christian Conscience” raises the other unavoidable dimension of the problem: the federal government’s failure over decades to maintain a coherent, enforceable immigration system. This is not a peripheral concern. As we argue, it is precisely the collapse of lawful order that has created the conditions in which exploitation flourishes, cartels thrive, and millions of migrants are pushed into a shadow-world without legal recourse or clear prospects.
A nation cannot honor the dignity of immigrants if it has effectively abandoned the rule of law under which immigrants might be protected.
Catholic teaching asserts that governments have a duty to regulate migration for the sake of the common good. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms the right of persons to migrate for just reasons, but places parallel obligations on immigrants to respect a country’s laws and on governments to enforce those laws in ways consistent with justice and human dignity. Pope Benedict XVI warned repeatedly that the absence of lawful structures harms migrants most of all.
A nation’s first obligation, to its citizens and to newcomers alike, is to sustain the conditions in which authentic solidarity is possible. A border that exists merely in theory is not an instrument of mercy. On the contrary, it generates the conditions that the bishops lament. It feeds not only social fragmentation but moral confusion. When millions enter the country outside legal processes, the basic juridical relationship between the newcomer and the political community is never formally established. Charity is asked to substitute for justice, and the result is neither.
Immigration enforcement, properly conducted, is not opposed to Christian conscience. Rather, it is the precondition for any humane and sustainable immigration policy. Without enforcement, even the most generous legal pathways will collapse under the weight of circumvention.
None of this requires a rejection of the bishops’ pastoral concerns. In truth, the pastoral and the political must be held together if we are to move toward coherent reform. Law itself is a moral good. And the just enforcement of law is not contrary to the gospel; rather, it is the instrument by which the gospel’s demands are made possible in the public square.
A state that fails to enforce its borders effectively is a state that invites chaos. A state that enforces them cruelly or arbitrarily betrays its own moral foundations. Catholic social teaching never asks us to choose between these errors. It asks us to reject both.
If the bishops’ statement is an appeal to conscience, the CatholicVote document is a modest, faithful appeal to prudence; and prudence is the cardinal virtue sorely lacking in our national debate.
Catholic communities must reckon with these four truths:
1. The moral right of a state to regulate migration is not merely “allowed” by Catholic teaching but required by the common good. Ignoring this truth, or relegating it to a parenthetical aside, leaves Catholics unprepared to contribute meaningfully to policy questions.
2. Large-scale unlawful migration is not a morally neutral event; it creates real social costs borne disproportionately by the poor. Pretending otherwise erodes public trust and weakens the credibility of the bishops’ appeals for compassion.
3. The human dignity of migrants is best protected when migration occurs through lawful, transparent, orderly processes. This requires enforcement, not as a gesture of hostility, but as an extension of justice.
4. Catholics betray neither their faith nor their compassion when they insist on secure borders. To say otherwise is to confuse sentimentality with charity.
The bishops close the letter with a reminder that “hope does not disappoint.” They are right. But hope must not be confused with a refusal to confront reality. If we wish to stand with immigrants, we must also stand with the truth: the truth about human dignity, but also the truth about political responsibility and the requirements of public order.
Levan Ramishvili
Paul V. Axton
Ivan Illich and William Cavanaugh both describe the development of the modern nation state as a displacement of the church by the state. Illich traces the first step in this transformation as occurring within the Catholic Church, as it transformed itself into “an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.”[1] The institutionalization of Christian charity, fellowship, and love, had the effect of assigning a divine-like status to bureaucracy, church-law, priest and pope, such that the Christian suspension of the weight of the law becomes instead, a divinizing of the law, which through history is shifted to the powers of state.
Cavanaugh provides a case study of this development with the Church in Chile, where the responsibility and reality once assigned to the church become the domain of State in shaping peoples’ lives. The divisions between soul and body, State and society, politics and religion, effectively assigned predominance to the State. Inasmuch as the Eucharist joins Christians to the body of Christ shaping the life and mind of communicants, the State, through coercive measures such as torture, took over this Eucharistic power.
Cavanaugh shows “how torture works to discipline an entire society into an aggregate of fearful and mutually distrustful individuals” functioning as the State liturgy in Chile, in disciplining the population. [2] “Torture is liturgy – or, perhaps better said, ‘anti-liturgy’ – because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship of that mysterious power.”[3] Just as the body of Christ transforms human imagination, so too the state (in co-opting the church), can shape and discipline human imagination in a drama of its own making. Rather than divinization and salvation, the state both produces and controls the “enemy” through torture. The drama is a demonstration of the omnipotence of the state to discipline, control, and destroy the revolutionary, the subversive, or the “filth” that would oppose it.[4]
Torture atomizes the individual, destroying the connections of family, society, and church, producing the isolated individual with a singular focus (the pain of torture). In turn, the torturer functions on behalf of the state, sacrificing moral integrity in the service of the larger cause. “By focusing on their own pain and sacrifice, no matter how disproportionate to the pain of torture, torturers deny the reality of the other and confer reality on the concerns of the regime alone.”[5] The only reality that concerns torturers and their victims is that of the state, and in the process of torture this reality takes on flesh. While there is no concrete reality to the idea of state, the process of torture inscribes these ideas in the flesh. “With the demolition of the victim’s affective ties and loyalties, past and future, the purpose of torture is to destroy the person as a political actor, and to leave her isolated and compliant with the regime’s goals.”[6] In Cavanaugh’s telling, the Church in Chile is complicit in these goals, inasmuch as she relinquished the realm of the political and the body to the State.
Chile is simply a type however, of what has happened throughout the West with the rise of the modern state and what might be called modern religion, inclusive of nationalism and capitalism. He argues in Modern Theology and Political Theology, “the kinds of public devotion formerly associated with Christianity in the West never did go away, but largely migrated to a new realm defined by the nation state.”[7] It is not that in the modern secular age we do without religion, rather the enchantments of religion have been invested in the nation state. The transcendent has been traded for an idolatrous immanence. As Eugene McCarraher in, The Enchantments of Mammon similarly describes (as in the subtitle of his work) “How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.”[8] “Far from being an agent of ‘disenchantment,’ capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity.”[9] McCarraher and Cavanaugh suggest that, rather than disenchantment, modernity is simply “misenchantment,” with state and capital becoming the immanent frame of worship. The state and its economy become the unifying center, with the accompanying demand that its citizens be willing to sacrifice their lives for the nation as they might have once sacrificed for Christ.
In Cavanaugh’s narration of how sacrifice for the nation displaced Christian sacrifice, the “revulsion to killing in the name of religion is used to legitimize the transfer of ultimate loyalty to the modern state.”[10] The so-called “Wars of Religion” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe evoked the founding moment of modern liberalism by theorists such as John Rawls, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout. According to the liberal telling of the story,
In this telling, the modern state arose to keep peace among warring religious factions. The state must step in to mediate between competing religious beliefs, and the secularization of public discourse and the privatization of religion were necessary to keep religionists from slaughtering one another.
Cavanaugh maintains this telling of the story is backwards: “The ‘Wars of Religion’ were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birth pangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between ‘Protestantism” and “Catholicism,’ but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order.”[12] Cavanaugh argues that “Wars of Religion” is an anachronistic misreading, as “religion” as it will come to be known – an apolitical and private sphere, and State as the proper realm of the political (and with it the embodied and public) did not exist apart from the creation of these categories through justification provided by the Wars of Religion. “The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects.”[13] Gaining this sovereign control explains why the religious wars pitted co-religionists against one another (sometimes Catholics versus Catholics or Protestants versus Protestants), as it was not religion but state power that was being contested, and religion was simply a justifying backdrop in this effort.
As religion was privatized and separated from the political, the State shifted from reference to the condition of the ruler or condition of the realm (in the medieval period) to an abstract and independent political entity: “a form of public power separate from both ruler and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a certain defined territory.”[14] The result of the conflicts was an inversion of the previous ecclesial dominance over civil authorities, with the modern State dictating to the Church.
Martin Luther, Henry VIII, and Philip II, backed and insured this new arrangement. According to Luther, every Christian is subject to two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal. “Coercive power is ordained by God but is given only to the secular powers in order that civil peace be maintained among sinners. Since coercive power is defined as secular, the Church is left with a purely suasive authority, that of preaching the Word of God.”[15] Luther assigned coercive power (the power of the sword) to the state (picturing the state as the peacemaker), attempting to disinvest the Church from such powers. In so doing , he left no clear jurisdiction to the Church. As he writes To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation: “I say therefore that since the temporal power is ordained of God to punish the wicked and protect the good, it should be left free to perform its office in the whole body of Christendom without restriction and without respect to persons, whether it affects pope, bishops, priests, monks, nuns or anyone else.”[16]
This sensibility among both Protestants and Catholics, explains not only the case of Pinochet in Chile, but the general relegating of the religious to the private and non-political. “Because the Christian is saved by faith alone, the Church will in time become, strictly speaking, unnecessary for salvation, taking on the status of a congreganofidelium, a collection of the faithful for the purpose of nourishing the faith. What is left to the Church is increasingly the purely interior government of the souls of its members; their bodies are handed over to the secular authorities.”[17] Cavanaugh goes to great lengths in showing the Wars of Religion were actually the wars of this emerging State dominance. “The new State required unchallenged authority within its borders, and so the domestication of the Church. Church leaders became acolytes of the State as the religion of the State replaced that of the Church, or more accurately, the very concept of religion as separable from the Church was invented.”[18]
This aggravated form of Constantinianism goes beyond the early Roman Church, in that the State as guarantor of freedom and peace with final authority over the body, becomes an end in itself. Freedom in Christ and that freedom and safety secured by the State are fused, and the State is the ultimate public good, while religion is relegated to soulish goods. “Wars are now fought on behalf of this particular way of life by the State, for the defense or expansion of its borders, its economic or political interests.”[19] In the words of Immanuel Kant, thus the State can “maintain itself perpetually.”[20] For Kant, the peace and stability provided by the State is integral to his theory of right, and it would be as wrong to attempt to overthrow the State as it would be to overthrow reason.[21] So the Church in Chile serves as a type of the Church in general, in imagining it could liberate itself from political alignments with the State, it became one of many privatized groups, subject to State domination and torture.[22]
Cavanaugh’s more positive conclusion is that part of the Church in Chile gradually found a way to escape the confinement to the private and the “soul” put upon it by the State, and it was able to “body forth the life of Christ” in resistance to the liturgies of State. He describes a small segment of the Church “performing the body of Christ” as it began to reconceive itself and its relation to the State, especially in conjunction with being the body of Christ in an imagination shaped by the Eucharist.[23] “If torture is the imagination of the state, the Eucharist is the imagination of the church.”[24] It is the means of resisting the state and being conformed to Christ so as to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1-2). The body of Christ cannot be de-politicized, privatized or hidden (in the realm of the soul), but one must perform or do the Eucharist. The point is not simply a silent remembering, hearing, or attending, but to “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19) is a “literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of many in His sacrifice.”[25] “The word anamnesis had the effect not so much of a memorial, as one would say kind words about the dead, but rather of a performance.”[26] The church resists state oppression by being the body of Christ and resisting the isolating, fragmenting, discipline imposed by the state.
In the words of Justin Martyr, the Eucharist is not a common bread or drink, but just as the Word becomes incarnate so Christians are to incarnate Christ. The “food over which thanks has been given by the prayer of his word, and which nourishes our flesh and blood by assimilation, is both the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.”[27] Those who participate in communion without love, with no thought for the widow and orphan, according to Ignatius, “will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in His goodness afterwards raised up again.”[28] Ignatius is reflecting on Matthew 25:35-36, “For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” Christians are to body forth and live out His life. Those who assimilate and discern the body of Christ partake of His suffering with the weak. As Augustine reports, he heard a voice say, “I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.”[29] By the power of His life, and the power of His body (tortured and killed and raised), His followers have a body which the powers of state, the principalities and powers, the powers of death, cannot erase or disappear.
(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
[1] Though Illich wrote extensively, the ideas expressed here come toward the end of his life and were only captured in an interview recorded by David Cayley, and presented as a series of podcasts https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich, for which Cayley has provided transcripts https://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts. Paul Kennedy moderates the overall podcast, with David Cayley, commenting in both the direct conversation and explanatory asides.
[2] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 15.
[3] Torture, 30.
[4] Torture, 31.
[5] Torture, 36.
[6] Torture, 38.
[7] William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011) 1.
[8] Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. (Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition).
[9] McCarraher, 4.
[10] William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” (Modem Theology 11:4 October 1995 ISSN 0266-7177) 397.
[11] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1984), ρ 5. Cited in Cavanaugh, Wars of Religion, 397.
[12] Wars of Religion, 398.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol II, ρ 353. Cited in Wars of Religion, 398.
[15] Wars of Religion, 399.
[16] Martin Luther, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” trans Charles M Jacobs in Three Treatises (Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1966), ρ 15. Cited in Wars of Religion, 399.
[17] Wars of Religion, 399.
[18] Wars of Religion, 408.
[19] Wars of Religion, 409.
[20] Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 136 [326]. Cited in Wars of Religion, 409.
[21] Ralph Walker notes that Kant “clearly regards the stability of the state as an end which the Theory of Right requires us to pursue (though he does not put this in so many words, so that the contradiction with his other remarks about ends does not become obvious)” Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 161. Wars of Religion, 409.
[22] Torture, 202.
[23] Torture, 253.
[24] Torture, 229.
[25] Torture, 229.
[26] Torture, 230.
[27] Justin Martyr, First Apology, 66, in The Eucharist, Message of the Fathers of the Church, no. 7, ed. Daniel J. Sheerin (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1986) 34. Cited in Torture, 231.
[28] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 6-7, Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 121. Cited in Torture, 231.
[29] St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 124 [VII. X (16)]. Cited in Torture, 232.
Levan Ramishvili
Immigration and Self-Governance
The recently passed immigration bill in Arizona has rekindled our national debate over the problem of illegal immigration and potential immigration reform. Our public discourse on this issue is severely hampered, however, because we lack the necessary categories for thinking about and discussing such a social issue as this. The prospect of an adequate treatment is unlikely to be furthered without some reflection on the principles underlying the rights of nations to secure their borders, the moral costs of illegal immigration, and the virtues that could be called on in resolving our current crisis. While a proper treatment of these matters, to say nothing of the Arizona bill, would require much more than a short essay, I seek to elucidate these three topics below.
What, then, justifies the right of a nation to secure its borders? What, that is, justifies a nation’s right to exclude?
Consider first the idea of self-governance. The forms of self-governance characteristic of Western liberal democracies—free and fair elections, representative government based on public deliberation, checks and balances, and the like—are not, I think, the primary reasons for which political authority is warranted. These primary reasons include needs closer to necessary conditions for human flourishing: protection from threats internal and external to a community, coordination of a common form of life, and provision of some basic welfare needs to those who would otherwise be incapable of providing for themselves and who would also not be adequately cared for by others.
These needs could be met by a largely authoritarian form of political authority. Yet something in such an arrangement would clearly be deficient from the standpoint of our sense of human dignity, freedom, and equality. The role of subject, we have come to see, is not as fitting as the role of citizen.
So the need for citizenship, while not primary, is nevertheless of considerable importance to a people who wish to obtain forms of political rule compatible with their human dignity, freedom, and equality. And citizenship, in turn, can be understood, as Will Kymlicka puts it, as “membership in a self-governing political community.” Thus, self-governance is a legitimate and important political aspiration of a free people.
This ideal of self-governance clearly constrains the variety of ways in which a society could understand both itself and its relationships to other societies. But any self-governing society, in order to maintain its existence as such a society into the future, must possess and exercise a robust, though on occasion defeasible, right of exclusion.
The reason for this is simple. Self-governance requires a shared self-understanding. A society that has no shared sense of who it is, and of what common values, history, language, and cultural forms bind its members together, is not a single society after all. It is precisely through exclusion—through demands that entrants to the society meet certain requirements tied to shared values, history, language, or culture—that society maintains that shared sense of self. Were there no right to exclusion, or only a very weak right, then society would be in such a state of flux as to be incapable of deliberating, choosing, and acting as a single social reality. Mere contestation, or worse, would become the primary mode of politics.
Of course, the rights of self-governance and exclusion have limits. The exigent needs of refugees from political persecution and natural disaster can generate demands that must, morally, be met by a people with the resources and the ability, perhaps due to geographic proximity, to meet them. Yet to deny the right to exclusion altogether is ultimately, as John Finnis has noted in discussing liberal multiculturalism, to risk the “self-destruction of liberal states by the admission and fostering of illiberal minorities.”
It would appear, in consequence, that when the right of exclusion is flouted or inadequately enforced, then the society in question suffers from the standpoint of the standard of self-governance. That society does not, perhaps, deliberate adequately; or perhaps it does not come to a judgment; or perhaps it does not put its judgments into action; and, in any case, its deliberations, judgments, and actions fail to meet the forms of cooperation from others necessary for success. This is one moral cost to society of unchecked illegal immigration.
A society can be morally injured in other ways by illegal immigration. In the United States illegal immigration is in large part a function of a desire for work; but this desire could be effective in motivating immigration to the U.S. only if there was, in fact, work for illegal immigrants to do, often for less money than would be otherwise paid, and without any tax burden on employers. And thus the U.S. is in the untenable position of saying both “no” and “yes” to illegal immigration. We condemn it, while at the same time we collectively and individually benefit by it, and allow ourselves to depend upon it.
This is a failure of self-governance in a different sense from the one already canvassed. A society with such incompatible desires is, like an individual whose life is structured by warring motivations, lacking in integrity and self-control. Its failure is akin to that of an addict, committed to overcoming his dependence, but incapable of doing so today, and thus acting in ways contrary to his commitment. For such a person, or such a society, there is, in a sense, no one self to be determined yet, but two, in need of unification.
I wish to mention two further moral costs: to the illegal immigrant, and to legal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants to the United States are hardly in a better situation than a disunified society, from a moral standpoint. For, caught in a social world that both needs them but refuses to legally ratify their presence, they depend upon the bad faith and dishonesty of others, and acquiesce repeatedly in that same dishonesty. In this, the illegal immigrant is in something like the condition of the subject of a totalitarian society: The illegal immigrant must live a lie, and is encouraged to live that lie—to tell the truth would be to dismantle the structures on which his livelihood depends.
But a life pervasively structured by deceit and dishonesty is as bad spiritually and morally for the one lying as well as the one(s) lied to. The illegal immigrant suffers a profound failure of integrity, insofar as his external life and internal life are in constant tension. In a social world in which lying is a necessity, the illegal immigrant thus also suffers from a failure of self-governance: he cannot take charge of his personality and bring internal and external unity to it in a virtuous manner.
In addition to the costs to society as a whole and to the illegal immigrants in particular, there is the burden born by legal immigrants and even some citizens who can come under suspicion or abuse at least partly because they are suspected of being illegal. Such unfair treatment would not exist were there little or no illegal immigration, and it seems a serious problem with the Arizona legislation that it has the potential to increase this particular burden on legal immigrants.
Two conclusions can be drawn from these considerations. The first, following from the discussion of the right of exclusion, is that a state may legitimately restrict entrance in order to maintain the ability of its people to govern themselves and to pursue their common good. The second is that states should make a considerable effort to eliminate illegal immigration and the social structures that facilitate it, such as widespread employment of illegal workers. But neither of these tells us positively how states should think about either the prospects of future legal immigration, or how to deal with those immigrants currently in the country illegally. In conclusion, I wish to suggest that two virtues could be important in thinking about these problems.
The first I call the virtue of generous neighborliness. While it is true that in an abstract way all immigrants around the world may seem to have an equal right to try to gain entrance to the U.S., it is simply a brute fact that we, an extremely prosperous country, border a country in which many people struggle to make ends meet, and in which peace and justice are hard to come by. While the argument from self-governance allows fairly wide latitude to a country to determine how it will spend its resources and to whom it will provide aid, I think that the virtue of generous neighborliness, a virtue perhaps in decline at the individual and social level, would prompt a more permissive immigration policy toward our neighbors to the south, particularly insofar as their purpose in coming to the United States is generally to work and to escape near desperate living conditions. So a virtuous, although perhaps not an obligatory, response to our neighbors to the south would be a much more easily obtained work visa and a fast track for entrance for workers looking for jobs for which there is high demand.
The second I call the virtue of generous forgiveness. We are, to repeat, a prosperous and peaceful country; we make few demands of our citizens for personal sacrifice, and few of us know true want or desperation. Our form of self-governance—the way in which we determine what kind of a people we are to be—can take the shape of a willingness to forgive, as a society, the actions of our neighbors which were taken under duress and for generally noble motives, such as the desire to care for a family. This virtue prompts support for a general amnesty policy and perhaps a fast track to citizenship for some—not as an isolated act, to be repeated serially every ten or twenty years, but in conjunction with the meeting of our obligations as regards illegal immigration. Such an approach is not obligatory, but it would constitute us as a nation in a responsibly virtuous manner. This virtue would additionally need to be shared by those who had gained admission to the country legally, for they would need to forgive some amount of injustice done to them by those who had not followed the same legal protocols.
The right and obligation to enforce a non-vacuous immigration policy can thus go hand in hand with a virtuous approach both to our neighbors who wish to enter and our fellows who have entered illegally but from otherwise upright motives. What cannot co-exist with virtue or the fulfillment of obligations in justice is the maintenance of the current status quo.
Levan Ramishvili
What the bishops got wrong on immigration
It’s ‘bearing false witness’ to accuse people (even if implicitly) of systematic indiscriminate behavior that violated human dignity (and is therefore immoral)—without clear evidence.
The Apostles’ Creed teaches that the Church, as the Body of Christ, is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The Church herself—understood as the Mystical Body and safeguarded by the Holy Spirit—cannot be the object of legitimate criticism in matters of authentic faith and foundational Catholic moral teaching. Mary is the Mother and model of the Church.
At the same time, the Church’s human leadership is not without sin. All Catholics must necessarily distinguish between the Church’s essential divine constitution and the limitations of her human leadership. Scripture illustrates this mysterious reality and distinction.
Peter, though chosen as the chief of the apostles, acknowledges his unworthiness at his first encounter with Christ and later denies him during the Passion. Saint Paul, with righteous indignation, publicly corrects Peter for an imprudent pastoral decision concerning Gentile converts and for placing those who disagree in bad conscience. Priests, bishops, and popes, while entrusted with ecclesial authority, remain susceptible to misjudgments that may lead the faithful into confusion or unnecessary controversy.
This distinction is relevant to recent events. At the November 2025 meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the bishops voted overwhelmingly to approve a statement that included this declaration: “We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”
According to news coverage, the vote was followed by an overwhelming collective expression of approval among the bishops.
The content of the statement raises questions about the appropriate boundary between moral teaching and political intervention. Deportation may be immoral by intention or circumstance, but it is not intrinsically evil. The term “indiscriminate” is morally uncontroversial: few would defend capricious deportation practices violating the fundamental dignity of human beings. However, it is more likely that most will perceive the statement as a critique of U.S. immigration enforcement, presumably failing to correspond with the USCCB policy position.
If so, the declaration may be interpreted not as a clarification of moral principle but as a political commentary inferring that U.S. policy is immoral.
The bishops, as teachers of the Faith, hold an essential role in articulating Catholic doctrine and moral principles. Yet the Second Vatican Council (cf., Lumen gentium, 31, 36) and subsequent magisterial documents recognize a proper autonomy of the laity in the temporal order.
While the Church’s hierarchy may, and sometimes must, address political issues that bear directly on fundamental moral norms, clergy are generally cautioned against assuming the role of policy advocates, lest they inadvertently constrain the legitimate prudential judgment of the laity. Opinions on immigration policy vary widely among Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and responsible disagreement on such matters is both inevitable and legitimate, provided we maintain bedrock moral principles that respect the dignity of human beings.
We often hear that the USCCB is the American Catholic “teaching authority.” The assertion is dangerous without qualification and appropriate distinctions.
We may quickly conclude that those who disagree with the prudential policy statements of the USCCB consider themselves in “violation of Church teaching.” However, only those who reject fundamental Church teaching in matters of faith and morals are dissident Catholics. Blurring the distinction between the authority of Catholic principles and the broader latitude of prudential judgments is unjust. The ambiguity allows doctrinally dissident Catholics to accuse doctrinally orthodox Catholics of infidelity if they disagree with USCCB political statements.
Recent Vatican guidance regarding Marian titles such as “Co-Redemptrix” and “Mediatrix of All Graces” demonstrates the care needed in communicating theological concepts and distinctions to avoid misunderstandings. Indeed, we may toss the doctrine of papal infallibility into the arena of misunderstanding. Too many extend the doctrine to all papal utterances (and, by extension, USCCB statements), despite the narrowly defined conditions defined by the First Vatican Council.
In matters of morals, it is generally safer for the clergy to tell us what not to do than what we should do.
When ecclesial authorities speak in ways that appear to endorse or oppose specific political strategies, misunderstandings easily arise. Some observers may conflate the statements of a conference of bishops with the authoritative teaching of the Church herself. This dynamic became apparent in Tom Homan’s public response, appointed as the U.S. Border Czar and publicly identified as a practicing Catholic.
In reacting to the USCCB statement, Homan criticized what he referred to as “the Catholic Church.” His remarks illustrate a broader tendency—common in public discourse—to conflate the Church with its governing bodies or leadership structures. In this sense, the bishops’ statement contributes to the confusion regarding the distinction between fallible pastoral judgments and the Church’s enduring doctrinal authority.
In light of these considerations, it is reasonable to suggest that episcopal statements carefully avoid blurring the line between binding moral teaching and prudential political opinion. When such statements lead members of the faithful to criticize the Church herself—rather than the contingent judgments of her leaders—the result is not only counterproductive, but a danger to souls.
Taken at face value, the statement claims an authority that exceeds its jurisdiction. That is unjust. Further, a normal reader would infer from the document that what ICE is doing is, in fact, ‘indiscriminate’. But anecdotal failures do not necessarily lay the foundation for official policy. It’s ‘bearing false witness’ to accuse people (even if implicitly) of systematic indiscriminate behavior that violated human dignity (and is therefore immoral)—without clear evidence.
Finally, invoking reasonable natural law principles, there is no unqualified right for someone to enter a country illegally. Assuming sufficient evidence, there is no violation of human dignity in refusing to admit criminals or deporting them if they entered illegally. How should one compare the violation of human dignity of: 1) a citizen who has been robbed or injured, with 2) the perpetrator who has been deported?
Maybe the USCCB will apologize to Tom Homan for provoking him to resist the authority of “the Church” rather than the political opinions of many bishops. Homan’s failure to discriminate between “the Church” and the USCCB continues a necessary controversy to overcome the hubris of ecclesiastical mission creep.