One of the themes in the immediate reaction to Pope Francis’s 10-point letter to the American episcopate pronouncing his opposition to the Trump Administration’s mass deportation program was perhaps best expressed by Catholic scholar Samuel Gregg, who criticized the pontiff’s “consistency problem” on X (formerly Twitter). Gregg noted that Francis did not so blatantly take issue with the Biden Administration’s abortion policies, with China’s human rights violations, or with the Latin American’s left’s various abuses.
Perhaps a more helpful criterion to evaluate Francis’s reaction can be taken from Saint Oscar Romero, canonized by Francis in 2018 and believed to be deeply admired by the pontiff. Romero similarly reacted with intensity to human rights abuses by the government of El Salvador in the 1970s, but was more forgiving with leftist insurgents who opposed the government. With Romero then as with Francis now, critics protested that the pastoral reaction was dictated by the shepherd’s political preference.
Romero offered a more simple explanation, based on words he attributed to Pope Pius XI: “The Church is not involved in politics, but when politics touches the altar, the Church defends the altar.” For Romero, politics touched the altar when his friend Fr. Rutilio Grande was assassinated by a government-aligned death squad in 1977. For Francis, the tipping point is suggested in paragraphs 6 and 7 of his letter, which address the recent imbroglio in which Vice President J.D. Vance defended the administration’s policies based on the Vice President’s reading of the Augustinian precept of “ordo amoris.”
Writing in the Word On Fire website, Dr. Richard Clements defended the Vice President’s view, writing that “ordo amoris can be conceptualized as a series of concentric circles radiating outward from ourselves” and that “the right ordering of love generally requires that we ‘love locally’ first.”
Francis directly refutes that point in his letter, decisively declaring that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups” (Letter, 6).
Accordingly, it seems that the pressing reason that required a papal intervention was not simply a political disagreement with the policy at issue or even the gravity of the violation — though, admittedly, Francis considers immigration to be an issue that ‘marks’ “the reality of our time,” (Letter, 1) — but the sense that a superpower was justifying its policy on a misguided reading of Catholic doctrine.
Contrary to limiting charity to the overflow after the inner concentric pools are filled, the Pope clarified, “it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity” (Letter, 6). Focusing on concerns about “personal, community or national identity” without embracing the infinite dignity of every person “easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth” (Letter, 7).
Notably, the Pope does not pepper his letter with citations to immigration statistics or even to past social encyclicals of the popes. There is one footnote reference to his own Fratelli Tutti (2020) and to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2024 declaration Dignitas Infinita defining the “infinite and transcendent dignity” of every person.
The only other papal document referenced is Pope Pius XII’s Apostolic Constitution Exsul Familia, which declares the Holy Family — Jesus, Mary and Joseph — as “the example and the consolation of emigrants and pilgrims of every age and country” (Letter, 2). And, at the end, Francis invokes the Virgin of Guadalupe (Letter, 10).
The reference to Pius XII is particularly compelling because the former Eugenio Pacelli’s Apostolic Constitution was addressing the Church’s response to immigration (i.e., he was not exhorting political leaders to accommodate more immigration). Exsul Familia includes lengthy narratives of all the charitable projects and programs undertaken by the Italian church and churches in America and around the world to help immigrants. This is important because it is consistent with Pope Francis delivering a spiritual message, intended to clarify the proper Catholic response to immigration.
In other words, Francis does not directly criticize the US government, but instead limits his remarks to the appropriate Christian response: “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement” (Letter, 4). This framing of the issue sets the stage for the foregoing discussion regarding ordo amoris and the requirement of Christian love.
Pius XII’s views in Exsul Familia are clearly tempered and informed by the experiences of the first half of the twentieth century and the mass migrations and tremendous suffering occasioned by two world wars. That subtext is inescapable. But it is also striking that Pius XII does not shy away from the message that rich governments have a proportionate responsibility to care for migrants. In it, Pius speaks of a “right of people to migrate, which right is founded in the very nature of land,” by virtue of which “it is inevitable that some families migrating from one spot to another should go elsewhere in search of a new home-land.”
Pius recounts his own letter to the U.S. Bishops on Christmas Eve 1948, when Papa Pacelli wrote (emphasis added):
You know indeed how preoccupied we have been and with what anxiety we have followed those who have been forced by revolutions in their own countries, or by unemployment or hunger to leave their homes and live in foreign lands.
The natural law itself, no less than devotion to humanity, urges that ways of migration be opened to these people. For the Creator of the universe made all good things primarily for the good of all. Since land everywhere offers the possibility of supporting a large number of people, the sovereignty of the State, although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations, provided of course, that the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid this.
Those words are arguably as hard-hitting as anything in Francis’s letter. In Exsul Familia, Pius recounts his own pro-immigration lobbying: “In our allocution to the cardinals on the feast of our patron, St. Eugene, on July 1, 1946, we again called upon the nations with more extensive territory and less numerous populations to open their borders to people from over-crowded countries.” He recounts similar appeals to just about anyone who would hear him, including a group of US senators who were members of a committee on immigration, who visited him in Rome.
It is easy to react to a papal document that correlates to political headlines only as a political statement, and perhaps it is impossible to conclude that it has powerful political implications. But it would be irresponsible to ignore the pope’s deep-rooted spiritual lesson found just under the surface.
Image: Pope Francis at US/Mexico border. Copyright © L’Osservatore Romano.
Carlos X. Colorado is an attorney and blogger from Southern California. He tracked the canonization of St. Oscar Romero in his «Super Martyrio» blog from 2006-2018. He is a member of the board of the St. Thomas More Society of Orange County, a Catholic lawyer group.
Popular Posts