This past February, President Biden referred to the wave of recent refugees as “newcomers”. A word that normalizes illegal movement, it was a signal for Catholic citizens. The word was created by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops ( USCCB). It appeared in the 2024 USCCB file” Forming Minds for Faithful Membership: A Call to Political Responsibility”.
The Gospel authority to “welcome the man” requires Catholics to care for and walk with newcomers, authorized and unauthorized, including alone expat children, refugees and asylum-seekers, those excessively imprisoned, and victims of human smuggling.
Under the heading” World Solidarity”, the USCCB conflates emigration with movement. The first is a deal between visitors and the state, which is legitimate. The latter phrase, in the present context, refers to overwhelming amounts ‘ brute force forcing illegal entry. The underlying doctrine of open borders is a sanctimonious disdain for the differentiation between “authorized” and “unauthorized” entry.
In August, Pope Francis used the bully church of St. Peter’s Square to force governments of the West to maintain their borders available, no matter the effect to their local populations. He rejected legality and defended wise immigration restraint as morality. The USCCB reported:
” It needs to be said clearly: There are those who consistently function by all means to drive away refugees, and this, when done intentionally and deliberately, is a grave sin”, he said during his general market Aug. 28.
Without irony — and short on historical sense — the USCCB continued:
Reflecting on the seas and deserts migrants many cross to reach their destinations, Pope Francis noted the biblical significance of such areas as “places of suffering, of fear, of despair, but at the same time they are places of passage to liberation, to redemption, to attaining freedom and the fulfillment of God’s promises”.
In order to integrate the “biblical significance of sanctuary” into contemporary politics, the USCCB removes its cultural context from the ancient Near East. A renowned Egyptologist and scholar of biblical archeology, James K. Hoffmeier, provides the foundation for understanding the conflict between the biblical emphasis on welcoming travelers and the dual requirement of submitting to the laws of the land. According to him, the idea of sanctuary was created to lessen the negative effects of lex talionis, the law of retaliation used by most ancient civilizations.
Sanctuary in ancient Israel established boundaries in which a person who killed another person unintentionally could be shielded from arbitrary retribution. This is what we might call involuntary manslaughter. A defendant may” state his case before the elders of that city” ( Josh. 20: 4). A fair trial was the goal. It shielded a violator from a legalized vigilante justice system.
This idea of sanctuary, entrenched in Old Testament law, was rooted in a particular hour of history. It was devoid of modern sentimentality. Any sanctuary seeker who was found guilty of a deliberate or malicious murder would be removed from the temporary haven and rebuked accordingly. In contrast, our own so-called sanctuary cities and states are wild cards that can acquiesce to any ideological agenda, from transgender surgery to illegal immigration.
In summary, biblical sanctuary was a revision of accepted law. Today’s sanctuary protocols, by contrast, are a partisan end-run around established law. They employ avoidance strategies to appeal to the utopian One-World fantasy that fascinates the progressive elites.
A False Moral Equivalence
That enchantment did n’t start with Francis. Pope John Paul II ratified non-Western nationals and raped the immigration laws in the United States during his 1987 lobbying tour. His arrival in the United States coincided with the congressional debate over legislation to stop illegal immigration and the rigging of asylum laws.
John Paul II ratified the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, which featured prominent American bishops. Speaking in Texas, John Paul II ratified it. Activists, many of them underwritten by churches, were smuggling and harboring illegal aliens from Central America. The pope endorsed the struggle in numerous cities and during a meeting with President Clinton.
David Simcox, an experienced analyst of migration issues, discussed” The Pope’s Visit: Is Mass Migration a Moral Imperative”? in a 1995 essay in The Social Contract. He pointed out that John Paul II’s homilies more frequently suggested a moral equivalence between what the pope called” The Culture of Death” and immigration restrictions. Abortion became a moral crime as a result of restricted immigration:
The U.S. hierarchy’s creeping radicalization of church teaching on immigration blurs the distinction between the state’s first duty to the welfare of its own citizens and its potential obligations to all humankind. In its place, the church offers a vision of a global” common good,” but it is amorphous.
John Paul II’s href=”https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/migration/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_20010213_world-migration-day-2001.html” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>message for World Migration Day, 2001, centered on that sentiment. Beyond any nationalistic egoism, it proclaimed the supremacy of” the concept of universal common good, which includes the entire family of peoples, as defined by the title” The Pastoral Care of Migrants.”
This is utopian boilerplate. It confines the proper discussion of public policy to a plane of abstraction to which it does not belong. Worse, it suggests that the developed West is a global, multifaceted messianic project that serves as a redemptive template for globalization. The” common good” is stifled by the love of the country.
The distortion of” Welcoming the Stranger”
There is nothing Christian in allowing the demise of a country’s identity. John Paul II recognized that in relation to Poland but did not do so for the rest of the West. Nowhere is it stated that God had promised to anyone the ability to invade another country and demand social services.
No person has the right to enter or immigrate to any country if they choose to leave their country under the human right to emigrate. To insist otherwise is to rob natal citizens of the fruits of their own labor ( tax-supported services such as education, housing, medical care, waste collection, public safety, etc. ). They are also defrauded of the continuity of their own culture’s social and historical facets. The theft undermines the ethical core of our basic institutions.
” Welcoming the stranger” is a hazy, kindly-sounding motif that distorts actual behavior by ancient kingdoms. In Israel, and throughout the biblical world, territorial boundaries were closely maintained legalities:” Cursed is the man who moves his neighbor’s stone” ( Deut. 27: 17 ).
The Catholic hierarchy encourages an entitlement mentality among migrants by enshrining anarchic migration, which is distinct from legal immigration:” You owe me”! The violation of international law by foreigners who violate the laws of their home country of origin is justified by the cult of open borders.
Open-border zealotry rejects moral responsibility for the failed or malfunctioning nations from which migrants come. The USCCB hides itself in a paternalism that rejects the countrymanship that St. Thomas Aquinas embodies in the virtue of justice.
