Digesting Pope Leo on Migration

Pope Leo XIV’s recent comments on migration, both in his recent off the cuff interview and in his latest Apostolic Exhortation, have elicited a reception that I can only describe as one of fatigue and demoralization. I suspect this is because the death of Pope Francis left conservative minded Catholics with a shimmer of hope that the next Pope might curtail the excesses of Francis’ leftward ideological posturing, and given that Leo’s Papacy could easily last longer than a decade, if there is no indication that such a curtailing could happen under Leo, it becomes borderline unbearable to face yet another long dark winter of progressive reign in Rome. While I remain hopeful that this fear is not yet sufficiently grounded in concrete evidence across the board, I have conceded from the moment Leo stepped out onto the loggia that this current Pope will not meaningfully diverge from Francis on key social issues such as migration and capital punishment. For this reason, as Catholics who stand firmly opposed to mass migration, it is critical that we take on the hard work of ensuring that our political views are not in reality at odds with what the Pope and the Church is truly demanding of us in the intellectual and moral order. In this article, I will be articulating how a Catholic can remain loyal to the living magisterium while also promoting policies that are aimed at curtailing the flow of migration, especially in Europe and the United States.

In order to do this, we must, first and foremost, simply state the Church’s formal magisterial teaching on this issue so that we can analyze the Pope’s passing and contingent remarks in light of the Church’s perennial and transcultural thinking. This teaching can be summed up in two core teaching documents: Pius XII’s Apostolic Constitution Exsul familia and the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s section on immigration. In Exsul familia, Pius lays out the following principle:

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.

What we have here is a precedent set by the Papacy that has never been reversed since, which is a preferential option for the migrant, stemming from the Church’s preferential option for the poor. Yet contained within this pro-migrants stance is a key caveat that charity for the migrants must be weighed against a country’s resources and public welfare owed to its citizens. When waves of migration exceed a country’s capacity to handle, the caveat must be able to concretely apply to real situations lest it become functionally meaningless. This caveat is spelled out all the more explicitly by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states:

2241 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.

This limiting principle provides much prudential latitude to the State in fulfilling its moral obligations toward migrants. It is vitally important here to recognize that regardless of the Pope’s personal disapproval of this or that restrictive immigration policy, the prudential latitude afforded by the Catechism must remain fundamentally untouched. This is because the Pope’s authority in matters of faith and morals simply does not extend in its binding force to contingent matters of fact that may influence the prudential calculations a State must make to determine its moral actions in the world, so long as they are not intrinsically evil. He is simply not guided by the Holy Spirit to correctly identify or rule out potential dangers that a certain rate of migration could inflict on any given host country. Some of those dangers could include the erosion of the host country’s core identity, the depletion of state resources that should be primarily allocated to its native population, the dilution of cultural cohesion, etc. These are all core values that the Church has always deemed right and just for the State to preeminently consider in weighing the prudence of various decisions. Moreover, failing to curtail a flow of migration that is limitless in principle also runs the risk of depriving the host country of its ability to perpetuate the very prosperity that enables it to care for the destitute in the first place. It is for this reason that a faithful Catholic must draw a sharp distinction between the mission of the State and the mission of the Mystical Body of Christ when it comes to obligations which are owed to impoverished migrants. Whereas the scope of actionable charity for the Church knows absolutely no distinction between “Jew or Greek”, this is not necessarily true for the State or for the realm of civic action, which must subject the charitable impulse to its divinely ordained and unique hierarchy of values. Pope Leo XIV implicitly recognizes this in Dilexit te itself where he says

“The Church, like a mother, accompanies those who are walking. Where the world sees threats, she sees children; where walls are built, she builds bridges. She knows that her proclamation of the Gospel is credible only when it is translated into gestures of closeness and welcome. And she knows that in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community”.

No doubt Pope Leo would prefer for the secular order to tend toward a more relaxed immigration policy. Nevertheless, this is not strictly speaking a prescription for the secular State but for the Church. The Church cannot fail, particularly on the interpersonal level, to reflect in Her mission and exercise of the corporal works of mercy the universality of Divine benevolence. While the Church allows for space within which the State can and must subject the flow of migration to rigorously enforced limitations and preconditions, the scope of Christian charity cannot be restrained by those same boundaries. If a migrant is justly rejected by the State, his human dignity remains intact and, in the eyes of Mother Church, is fundamentally no different than any other of the world’s poor for Whom She has a divinely imposed preferential option. Just as, for example, the Church’s outreach to the imprisoned does not in itself deprive the State of the right to subject criminals to just penalties, so the Church’s outreach to migrants does not deprive the State of the right to regulate the flow of migration into its borders. As loyal subjects of the Papacy, it is our duty to allow ourselves to be sincerely challenged by the Pope’s exhortations so long as they are not overruled by the Church’s prior teachings. We must remain steadfast in what we know to be just and prudent for our country’s welfare but also allow the voice of the Spirit to inflame our hearts with a steady increase of fervent charity which can in principle exclude no one.