“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.
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Of course Catholic social teaching is at odds with the philosophers of pagan antiquity. Aristotle’s consideration of society was entirely secularist, without a thought for otherworldly realities. Every society, including the U.S., ought to answer to universal principles that do not depend on it and do not originate in it.
The fact remains that the new President of the U.S. wishes to deport millions of hardworking, family-oriented Catholics and replace them with Hindus and Sikhs. The U.S. is experiencing a last gasp of nineteen-century WASPish mentality (that the Irish and the Italians once put up with). Those who like this dish may enjoy it while it lasts.
I hope you don’t believe there’s a problem with immigration from India, Mr Miguel?
It shouldn’t matter whether immigration comes from India or Latin America really, as long as it’s lawful.
We are a nation founded with Judeo Christian traditions but I’m not aware of Hindus or Sikhs causing troubles. At least not where we live. It’s just the contrary. They are great assets to the community especially in fields like healthcare.
The US was originally a people whose common heritage was the old Christian West (not sure where Judaism came into it). Hindus and Sikhs are definitely not part of that heritage and will further emasculate it. The two Indian religions also fight like nobody’s business – look up the constant problems, including terrorism, in Canada and the U.K. They tend to takeover, as you will find in healthcare (and just about any other field). The are interested in jobs that US citizens are interested. They are most definitely NOT interested in picking fruit (etc) for five dollars an hour, which is something the US economy cannot do without. I thin that the US will discover what an awful mistake it will have made in imitating the UK, but then it will be too late. Musk wants deracinated “smart” people to be cogs in his mad system. Trump makes his “techno-optimist” manifesto possible, whereas the Dems would have made problems for him. That’s the story of the last US election, I think we’ll all discover.
Goodness Mr. Miguel. I don’t think that’s a very charitable description of people from India who bring so much talent and expertise to the US.
Both Indians and Jews can become targets of prejudice because of their accomplishments and success. Learning how they become successful and adopting the parts of that plan which work for us seems a better goal than envy.
Yes, Jews have been in North America and the USA from the very beginning. Some came as crypto Jews, some came disclosing their identity. That’s not exactly what Judeo Christian refers to though.
Just an interesting FYI: you probably already know that the author Miguel Cervantes is widely believed to have come from a family of Jewish conversos? As St. Teresa of Avila and many others did.
A quite high percentage of Hispanic people in Latin America have Jewish DNA markers. The New World was a place of opportunity to escape the Inquisition.
That’s really irrelevant
I’m wondering why you are repeatedly posting these bigoted posts about Hindus and Sikhs. Allowing educated and skilled people to immigrate means they will be contributing to the economy and the country. People who entered the country illegally must be deported. That is both common sense and absolutely necessary.
It’s not bigoted at all. If you want to preserve a Christian nation, it’s better (if not ideal) to have 10 million hard-working family oriented Catholics living in the US illegally, than 10 million Sikhs and Hindus present legally. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said his experience in the Soviet Union taught him that living in a country with no legal scale of values was terrible, but that living in a country where the only scale of values was legalism, was also unworthy of man.
It is quite bigoted, truth be told. There is also no data proving that the illegals you refer to are “hard working family oriented Catholics.”
Presumably the sixty billion in remittances to Mexico from “illegals” each year is just all that social security money then. Hard-working is the only way to describe these battlers. As for the Hindus and Sikhs, when I was growing up they were fewish and innocuous. Since they started arriving in droves in recent years, everything changes, starting with their attitudes. Forget the quiet student and restaurant owner you are familiar with. A lot of very rough people are pouring out now, unfortunately.
I’m hearing exactly the same stereotypes about Indians that I’ve heard about other ethnicities. It’s a shame.
Stereotypes aside, the bottom line is that, if one wants a Christian U.S., ten million “illegal” hard-working Catholics are better than ten million “legal” Hindus and Sikhs. There are higher laws and principles than those of civil society.
I believe in human & civil rights Mr. Miguel. Not in stereotypes. I don’t think we should using stereotypes period. It works the same way for those who stereotype immigrants from Latin America. Each immigrant or visa applicant should be considered for what they can bring to our nation & workforce. Refugees are a different conversation.
My last message didn’t refer to stereotypes. It was the likelihood of de Christianisation flowing from pagan, versus Catholic migrants that is at issue.
A well-presented and thought-out treatise on Catholic Social Teaching. Thanks for this.
One of the problems with addressing an issue such as unfettered, out-of-control migration of peoples is that it leads to chaos and a deconstruction of societal bonds. No one needs to be a Fulbright Scholar to see what has happened to our country and so many countries in Europe.
Another problem with addressing the issue is that it’s difficult to tackle any issue practically when it remains at such a large scale as millions of people entering a single country from everywhere. Most large-scale issues need to be viewed on a smaller scale in order be be tackled reasonably. For example, my family lives in a home that is adequate for its members. The number of bedrooms in our home, the size of the kitchen, number of bathrooms and living space for our family to assemble is adequate to our needs. We maintain the upkeep of the house to insure adequate living. If my neighbor’s home down the street burns down one night, that is a catastrophic emergency and requires an immediate response. We move them into our house temporarily by squeezing every additional inch of square footage from our home. But, to say that it’s only temporary does not mean that my neighbors are unloved, unliked or any other such nonsense. We set about with others, however, to restore them to their status quo ante.
In yet another scenario, if my neighbor down the street suffers hard times for one reason or another – loss of job, illness, alcohol or drug addiction, prejudice, etc., and they do not have enough to eat, their house is in poor condition, their children are not being educated, I do NOT say to everyone in the family “Come, pick up your things, abandon your home, live with us permanently no matter the consequences.” Rather, the neighborly thing to do is go to them and, marshalling our and other’s resources, assist that family to get back on its feet. And, I certainly do not throw open wide the door to my home to all and everyone in any dire strait 24 hours a day and allow free entry to my home anyone who wants it. That would be insane, irresponsible in my role as father and husband and not likely to be of any help to those who seek to gain entry. In fact, allowing just anyone open access to my home would put all involved in grave peril. No one should conclude, in this instance, that I do not love my neighbor. They should only conclude that, “This man is not certifiably insane.”
So, I ask this question to all of our bishops (especially Wester, Cupich, McElroy, Wenski, Broglio, Dolan et alia) and my fellow churchmen: “If there has been identified a social problem in the lives of our neighbors to the South, what have you done to ameliorate those conditions?”
Permit me to give you a first-hand experience. When I was my diocese’s Director of Catholic Charities, the great and devastating earthquake of around 2009-10 hit Haiti. I thought (in the spirit of Solidarity) our diocese should see what we could do. I ventured on my own to Port-au-Prince. I have never seen such utter destruction. Tens of thousands of people living under tarps in a field, practically all buildings in ruin and many people seeing their death when buildings they were occupying collapsed on top of them. I put together a plan of how our diocese could assist by affiliating with a group of Catholic Sisters in helping to rebuild the school where so many of their children died. I presented the idea to my bishop and my Board of Directors. I was shocked by their non-response. They pretty much said, “Let CRS take care of it; that’s THEIR job.” I left my position with the diocese shortly after that.
The great difference between most European governments and that of the U.S. resides in the difference in the concept of authority. In much of Europe (you can see this with startling clarity in the present U.K.), the locus of power is in the government, but its citizens have the right to be well governed–hence some semblance of “democracy.” The people by their vote tell government what they will not tolerate or overwhelmingly want to change. But government grants rights, so to speak.
The U.S. concept is that authority resides in the people, as individuals first and then as a community. Government has only as much authority as the people lend it, and that loan is always temporary. Hence, the U.S. has a “negative Constitution,” which by and large tells government what it may not do and defines pretty carefully what it may do. This difference is profound, and most people do not grasp that fact. The Divine Right of Kings, which is not as simple as one might think, was totally overthrown by the American Revolution, which did, indeed, turn the world upside down. No other country really has what we have, which is perhaps why this model is still almost universally feared by other countries, and why would-be statists in our own country constantly try to diute or weaken both the system itself and our own understanding of it.
Back in the day, social scientists lamented the “brain drain” whereby the most capable members of non-Western countries migrated to the West, bringing their capabilities with them. An early 20th-century pope also counseled the capable to remain loyal to their nations and to help build the up.
Three comments:
FIRST, amidst such “complexities” of the global immigration situation, does the United States now propose a national policy of skimming off the best and the brightest as the most eligible immigrants? While, at the same time, not having a clue about the effect on the countries of origin? Ever more migrants escaping weak and often multi-national “states”.
SECOND, and in Europe, where much of the immigration challenge originates from a fideistic Islamic culture foreign to the coherence of faith and reason….How much grit or even “prudential judgment” is left at the round table to resist the green banner so foreign to Western political institutions historically rooted in the leaven of Christianity? Even the charter of the European Union celebrates only the Classical root, e.g., Aristotle noted in the article.
Are European institutions to be inhabited by the transnational ummah, in much the way that the historic Chinese dynastic form was simply inhabited by the invading Mongols in the 13th Century, or by sinicized Marxists in the mid-20th Century? Bernard Lewis foresees either “an Islamicized Europe or a Europeanized Islam.” Tweedledee or Tweedledum.
THIRD: What if there are no secular solutions to dead-end secular problems? Or, to the undifferentiated monism of the Muslim mosque-state?
What if the spreading of affluence is not enough, lubricated with cell phones, AI, and even synodal process theology? And, what if even Aristotle’s pre-Christian and self-sufficient community is necessary–and insufficient: “the political animal living with his fellows in a structured, self-governing community where they deliberate and act in common.”
Recalled is one of the last conservative European aristocrats, who in the 1980s actually supported formation of the liberal European Union, but also said that “it needs a higher purpose than fatness.”
What about the brain drain?
I would also make the point that we keep telling students to enter into science and technology fields. Only to find they are competing with H1B “serfs” who will work for less pay and put up with a lot of nonsense because they are at the mercy of the company. Much easier to be a social media influencer – just what the world needs.
The H1B visa agreement really needs to be changed so that they do not tie the person to a particular company.
Concerning Immigration,Catholics, and the USCCB in particular should study what was taught by the Greatest Doctor of the Catholic Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Lots of good items for deliberation both political and religious. Nonetheless, Seaton’s “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”, says nothing regarding reasonable ends. Rather it suggests further deliberation followed by further deliberation.
Compassion and charity cannot be divided into feelings and reasoned deliberation respectively. Sentiment is not an unnecessary appendage to the psyche, it is integral to human understanding. Archbishop Wenski USCCB Committee on Migration interviewed by an unusually strident Raymond Arroyo was finally reduced to jabbering until he hit the bottom line, “When you’re faced with people in dire need we’re compelled to offer them assistance”. That’s the existential reality Catholics face.
Politics, the deportation process requires a moral balance. As said elsewhere, ‘There’s always the intrinsic value of the human person’. Lose that for whatever reason and our faith is wind.
“As said elsewhere, ‘There’s always the intrinsic value of the human person’. Lose that for whatever reason and our faith is wind.”
True. And deporting the criminals who entered the country illegally is the best way to honor the intrinsic dignity of law abiding, tax paying citizens. That is the most important issue.
It should be reasonably assumed I’m referring to persons who are not criminals and who are here with families and are contributing to the nation. If you continue to respond to my comments with your objections, it’s that you are troubled. If you do not have any intent for compassion and exceptions but remain disconcerted by my difference of perspective, then settle your conscience with God.
Well, your comments are not clear. People here legally with families are not breaking the law and will not be deported. There is more to the issue than compassion. And if you can’t deal with people challenging your views on a public forum, you should stop posting. My conscience is clear, thank you.
And all the while I thought I was the only one who had the right to pontificate.
Thank you Dr Seaton for your eloquent analysis of the migrant crisis and all of its dimensions! I learned much from your essay and now have a better understanding of the options open to Catholics and the Church. Your followers may also wish to read a related essay in First Thing: https://firstthings.com/cardinal-mcelroy-and-immigration/
I think the First Things essay reflects your thinking and analysis of the challenge of dealing with the migrant crises.
Dear Mr. Kriesel, thank you for your kind words. I had indeed read Jim Hankins fine FT essay. Among other things, he disabused me of some misconceptions I had about Cardinal McIlroy’s stated views.
Cardinal McElroy
For decades, Catholic NGOs have been emboldened by the Texas Bishops (except “not a team player” Strickland) led by the late Archbishop Fiorenza and his numerous protégés like Archbishop-elect Vásquez to not comply with law enforcement actions they consider to be insufficiently “targeted, proportional, and humane.” So be it. They encourage a culture of don’t ask, don’t tell. Worse, they teach those who are breaking our laws how to avoid justice – as if everyone coming into our country illegally is a member of the Holy Family!
If this brazen disregard for our elected (Republican)officials like Trump and Abbott continues, the Bishops should expect federal defunding. Taking away tax dollars is blunt like tariffs, but it is the only tool left to protect our country from their reckless disregard for our elected officials and security. Donors will step up to support law abiding charities.
Watch Catholic Charities teach those breaking the law how to use the law to avoid justice:
https://catholiccharities.org/resources-and-information-on-refugees/
https://dallascatholic.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Know-your-rights.pdf
Etc.
It would be very interesting to see how you,(with your great eridicity) would present this issue if debated from the other side; for this presentation was definitely presented with a strong bias.
There is no other legitimate side of the issue. People who cross the border illegally are criminals. As such, they need to be deported immediately. It’s not rocket science.
JAMES CONNOR: I tried to find the meaning of the word “eridicity” but came up empty-handed. Can you define it or provide its etymology?
Could have meant, Erudition? Elocution? Veridicity?
Meant to keep ’em guessing? What is “the other side”?
Afraid to pontificate so therefore, must hold aloft?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/veridicity
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/veridicous_adj
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/236554/uncommon-term-for-an-excellent-orator
Illegal immigration is a moral as well as legal issue. Nations have a right to protect their borders and their national integrity. Seaton’s argument that points to this, and the inadequacy of Church policy is correct insofar as he address the current pontificates faux justice open border policy that’s destroying Christian Europe, and under pres Biden with the USCCB blessings a disastrous policy that lacked both justice and common sense.
Compassion shouldn’t be reduced to sentimentality, and Seaton does make a valid, but conditional, if valid reference in that as said in my comment sentiment is likewise not reduced to mere ‘feelings’. While Mass deportation has validity despite Vatican, USCCB objections [the USCCB position seems more moderate than the Vatican] is justifiable, a good for the integrity of the US as a sovereign nation, compassion in select cases shouldn’t be dismissed as mere sentiment as Seaton suggests.
Why not pose the issues in Ven Diagrams?
This would help us understand the problems.
They use Ven Diagrams in major Court issues.
And AI provides easy access to Ven Diagrams.
Try it.
This is actually not complicated at all. The answer is that immigration MUST be limited.
The “Lifeboat Analogy” offers the clearest reason why. Four of you are in a lifeboat which can hold ONLY 5 people. As you row away from the wreck you see 3 people in the water. You can save only one. If you admit all 3 into the boat, ALL of you will drown and die.
The answer is you must limit and chose who will get in the boat.
WE already have major cities buckling under the weight of too much immigration. Crime is soaring because of it. Not enough schools have sufficient room and equipment to educate all of them. For many, their culture and ideas of tolerance are drastically opposite of yours. For those who think the idea of limiting immigration is tough to swallow, I suggest you have not looked at the Current reality of the situation nearly enough. .
LJ
You are exactly correct.
It is called “Jurisprudence” and is taught in Law Schools.
Reference The Case of the Spelunking Explorers. You cannot save them all.
Decide each case on its merits.
And use Ven Diagrams.