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In this episode of The Counsel of Trent, Trent Horn delves into the recent letter from Pope Francis to U.S. bishops, responding to President Trump’s mass deportation orders and Vice President JD Vance’s controversial comments on Christian love and immigration. Exploring the Catholic Church’s balanced teaching on immigration, Trent addresses the complexities of illegal immigration, deportation, and border security, offering clarity on the Pope’s stance. He also critiques inconsistencies in the Church’s responses to Trump and Biden policies, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of the issues. Watch as Trent separates the heat from the light in this important discussion on immigration, the Church’s moral teachings, and the politics surrounding deportation and illegal immigration.
Transcription:
Trent:
Last week, Pope Francis wrote a letter to the US Bishops in response to President Trump’s orders of mass deportation and Vice President JD Vance’s comments about the ordering of Christian Love. It sparked a lot of debate online, and so in today’s episode, I want to generate more light and less heat in order to present a better witness on this controversial issue. But before we focus on what Pope Francis said, let’s zoom out a little and look at the Catholic church’s teaching on immigration. Basically, the church says there is a natural right to migrate, but governments have a right to defend their borders, so these two rights have to be balanced against each other. What governments cannot do is adopt one of two extreme positions. The first extreme would be open borders or prohibiting all deportation. In a previous episode of the Council of Trent and in my book Confusion in the Kingdom, I engage liberal Catholics who claim deportation is intrinsically evil or deportation can never be done.
So I won’t repeat my arguments against that false view here. The Vatican itself will deport you if you illegally enter and remain in its territory. Cardinal Fernandez, the head of the DDF released a decree back in January requiring fines up to 25,000 euros and prison time up to four years for illegal entry, and anyone convicted of this is forbidden from entering the Vatican for 15 years. None of this would make sense if the church taught that people who choose to live in a country illegally must be allowed to remain there. The church doesn’t teach that. Pope Francis himself even said that Some people who seek asylum in countries need to be sent back to their home country.
CLIP:
The migrant has to be received thereafter. You see how you’re going to deal with them? Maybe you have to send them back. I don’t know, but each case ought to be considered humanely.
Trent:
The biggest evidence that deportation is not intrinsically evil is that the Pope and the bishops who criticize Trump’s immigration policies don’t say this. They instead talk about the right to regulate borders and focus instead on the wrongness of mass deportations, not just the act of deportation itself. Now, the other prohibited extreme view would be closed borders or treating migrants as pests rather than people. In some cases, this attitude can lead to horrible suffering and death. In 19 39, 900 refugees fleeing Nazi Germany bordered the Ms St. Louis thinking they would be allowed to enter Cuba. However, Cuba changed their immigration laws a few weeks earlier and denied them entry. Many other countries, including the United States, refused to take the refugees and so the ship returned to Europe. It is estimated that one quarter of the passengers were murdered in the Holocaust and the story of the ship has been retold in films like The Voyage of the Damned.
The rapid increase of migrants after World War II prompted Pope St. Pius II to issue an apostolic constitution on migration called Exel Familia Nazar Andana named after the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. The Pope taught that in continuity with his predecessor Pope Leo xiii, that people have a natural right to migrate. He said the natural law itself, no less than devotion to humanity urges that ways of migration be opened to these people. A country doesn’t have to accept every person who seeks to live there, but nations should do their best to accept as many true refugees as they can. The church also teaches that there is a preferential option for the poor, or as Pope Francis says, faith, hope and love necessarily push us towards this preference for those most in need. This doesn’t mean there should be unlimited immigration because high rates of immigration could actually hurt the poor, be they legal or illegal residents by driving down wages or driving up the price of goods.
That’s why the catechism says 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. Those who deny the natural right to migrate often treat the right to private property or national sovereignty as being absolute rights, which they aren’t. The church teaches that the goods of creation are destined for the whole human race, which is also called the universal destination of goods. The whole world was made for the whole human race, but the church recognizes that private property is a good way to distribute those goods among all people. This makes sense given that countries which protect private property rights tend to be more prosperous than countries that don’t protect private property rights, but instead allow anarchy, communism, or corrupt government kleptocracy to reign.
The right to private property is not absolute. In the same way the right to life is absolute. For example, if someone is dying and they need my heart to live, they can’t take my heart to save their own life. Grave necessity does not transform murder into moral killing. However, if a person is starving and steals a loaf of bread from my house that he needs to live, then he is allowed to do that. In this case, grave necessity as St. Thomas Aquinas argues in the summa theologian takes what would normally be stealing and makes it instead moral taking and it would be wrong to punish a person who took out of necessity such as sentencing, a starving man who stole a loaf of bread to five years in prison. But once again, it has to be grave necessity. You can’t steal my bread just because you like sourdough and you can’t illegally immigrate somewhere just because you prefer the lifestyle in that country.
As I know to my book, can a Catholic be a socialist? Even though the right to private property is not absolute, that doesn’t mean the state can do anything it wants with our private property. Once again, we’re talking about grave necessity, not mere preference. This is why the church socialism and communism for violating the natural right to private property, the state can only reasonably limit the use of private property for the sake of the common good. For example, the state might use antitrust laws to break up harmful monopolies or require intellectual property to enter the public domain after a certain time period, which is why I can now create my new cartoon Steamboat Trenty. Just as there is no absolute right to private property, there is no absolute right to migrate and no absolute right to shut out migrants Pope St. Pius the 12 said this, 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. Now let’s get into the letter that Pope Francis wrote to the US bishops. Before I get into its contents though, two things. First, if you like the content we create here at the Council of Trent, please hit the subscribe button and like this video and it helps us to reach more people. Second, I’m going to admit at the outset that this letter from Pope Francis makes me want to roll my eyes into the back of my skull. The Pope is my spiritual father, but one’s dad isn’t always consistent or praiseworthy in his actions, even if he gets a lot right, it’s fair to point out his inconsistencies and faults. For example, in 2008, Nancy Pelosi quoted St. Augustine to say that we don’t know if the unborn or persons, so therefore abortion should be legal. In 2013, Pelosi opposed a 20 week abortion ban saying this
CLIP:
As a practicing and respectful Catholic. This is sacred ground to me when we talk about this, I don’t think it should have anything to do with politics and that’s where you’re taking it and I’m not going there.
Trent:
When Joe Biden vowed to make abortion a federal law stripping unborn children of their right to life, Pope Francis said that Biden should simply talk to his pastor about his incoherence on this issue. And when Biden was president and vice president, his administrations deported more people than Trump, and yet there was no letter from Pope Francis to the US condemning the Democrat’s border or abortion policies. This inconsistency hurts the Pope’s witness as the vicar of Christ when he looks like he just wants to play partisan politics. At the same time though, an inconsistent person can be correct and the Pope’s letter basically restate the church’s teaching on the right to migrate and the right to have secure borders. So let’s go through a few key parts of it. It says, the rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.
Now, some people say illegal entry to the United States or other countries violates federal law. So all illegal migrants are indeed criminals, but violating a law doesn’t automatically make you a criminal. Since the law can involve a civil rather than a criminal offense, for example, running a red light or speeding are usually non-criminal violations of traffic laws. These violations don’t make you a criminal, but they might cause you a headache with legal penalties including severe ones like losing your license. In contrast, criminal violations of traffic law are infractions that put people at serious risk of harm like DUIs or vehicular manslaughter, and so they incur harsher penalties. The Pope is just saying that the mere act of illegally entering and residing in a country should not make someone a criminal in this latter sense of the word, although as I noted earlier, the Vatican’s own stiff penalties for illegal entry sure make it seem like criminal behavior.
So the Pope has another inconsistency here that hurts his witness, but I agree that deportation is like war. It isn’t intrinsically evil, but we shouldn’t merrily celebrate its use because of the damage it causes. We should use it proportionally. For example, we shouldn’t rejoice in the death of the wicked, but when truly awful enemies are killed in war, I’m not going to shed a tear for those people. Likewise, I’m not sad when violent migrants like Venezuelan gangs that take over suburban apartment complexes are rightfully deported. The Pope even said in his letter to the bishops, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. But I do mourn when innocent civilians are killed as an indirect part of war. That’s part of what makes war so tragic.
Likewise, the church teaches that mass deportations can be evil when migrants who haven’t cause grave harm, suffer disproportionate harm from such a grave punishment. The Pope writes the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution, or serious deterioration of the environment damages the dignity of many men and women and of entire families and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness. Now, the state might legally tolerate some things that damage human dignity in order to prevent greater offenses to human dignity. And this passage doesn’t mean that all deportation harms human dignity. In some cases it’s rightfully carried out, but some deportations do do this. If a person illegally enters a country in order to escape genocide or ethnic cleansing and she is sent back to die because she essentially violated a trespassing law, that act of deportation harms her dignity as a human person.
To make an analogy, it was unjust when the Biden administration treated pro-life protestors who merely trespassed an abortion facilities as hardened criminals by sending them including elderly grandparents to prison for years because of their alleged crime. Now, they might be given a legal consequence for their civil disobedience like a fine, but they shouldn’t have the book thrown at them for what they did because they didn’t do anything serious. Now, one might object that these pro-life protesters were selfless. They were just trying to save babies, whereas illegal migrants just want to come to a country to enrich themselves, and that may be true of some migrants and those who truly are criminals or are trying to game the system, and those individuals could be rightfully denied entry or deported, but other migrants might want to save their own babies from horrible conditions. That doesn’t mean illegal immigrants should get off scot free though in order to have, as the Pope says, a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration, the state might punish illegal migrants with fines or tax burdens or deny them certain entitlement programs and continual violations of the law might eventually justify deportation.
But the Pope’s teaching is simply that we shouldn’t treat migrants as pests to be indiscriminately rounded up and shipped off without any concern for their welfare. Instead, each person should be treated in accord with his dignity and given a consequence that is just and proportionate for whatever infraction they committed. In some cases that will involve deportation, but in other cases it might be a punishment that allows the migrant to remain in their position as a positive contributor to society for people who live in wealthy safe countries, though it can be hard to empathize with migrants, we often forget that not too long ago many migrants to America were Italian and Irish Catholic immigrants who were despised as threats to the social order because of their ethnicity and their religion. It was the Catholic church who fought for their right to migrate and their right to be treated with dignity and to be protected from things like extreme poverty or economic exploitation.
If you like to see a good treatment of that issue, I recommend the 2024 film Cabrini that covers the work of St. Francis Cabrini, a patron saint of immigrants, especially orphans. You can also consider this scenario which keeps me up a lot at night. Imagine a nuclear war happens between Russia and NATO countries. The real horror of such a war would not be the first strikes on major cities. It would be the fires that would burn for weeks putting soot into the atmosphere that blocks out the sun. This would plunge most of the world into a nuclear winter that would kill millions of people through famine and disease. Though at some point the living would envy the dead. In just a few months, your cozy modern life would be thrown back into a medieval existence as it was portrayed in the nightmarish 1984 British film threads.
But some researchers believe the effects of nuclear winter would be confined to the northern hemisphere and countries in the southern hemisphere, especially Australia and New Zealand would be mostly spared or at least would now become the most livable parts of the world. So I ask you, what would you to get your family to a place like that so they could have a decent life or any life at all? Would you want people to treat you like a criminal just because you didn’t want to hear your child say anymore, mommy or daddy? I’m hungry. Now, on the other hand, if I were in this position, I would do everything in my power to make sure my host country was happy and to let them know I am grateful I could live there. I would learn the language of the country. I would learn its customs. I would do everything I could to integrate into society and be a positive contribution to it and not just perpetually drain the society’s welfare system and I’d understand my hosts losing their patience with me if I adamantly refuse to assimilate.
That’s why the catechism of the Catholic Church says the following political authorities for the sake of the common good for which they’re responsible may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various conditions, especially with regard to 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. I felt this a bit as a refugee from California who fled to Texas in 2020. I was very certain to tell Texans that I met who are skeptical of my California kind, that I was not bringing any California values with me, and migrants should do the same thing. Countries have a legitimate reason to exclude migrants who bring dangerous values with them like Islamic Sharia law and to prioritize instead, migrants who openly support the values of the country where they seek asylum or residency.
Now, not every migrant faces threats as severe as in my nuclear war example, but some migrants do live in conditions that feel post-apocalyptic. Some of the conditions are so bad they’re willing to send their children alone because the risk of staying where they live is even worse. That’s why a sensible immigration policy will prioritize migrants in the most need and protect people from being the victims of human trafficking, and it will do this by penalizing companies that exploit migrants through illegally low wages that also harm citizens who can’t compete with those wages. And a sensible immigration policy will do this through strong border control that apprehends illegal crossers to better identify those who are smuggling drugs, weapons, or people including children who have been smuggled and abandoned or are being trafficked for sexual abuse and those migrants who are found to be dangerous for a country or at least not in dire need, should be humanely sent away so others in need can be helped instead.
Now, some people think it’s easy to dunk on the Pope’s references to only thinking about walls because they say, Pope Francis lives in a walled city at the Vatican, but the Vatican’s walls only encompass part of the Holy Sea. Vatican city is not surrounded by a giant wall like its some medieval castle. In fact, it isn’t difficult to illegally enter and remain in parts of the Vatican. I mean, it’s not easy to do that, but you don’t have to be. Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible three, who uses a slick repelling line and hidden priest costume to get inside. When Pope Francis says it is a grave sin to reject migrants, he isn’t saying all migrants must be accepted into a country. As we’ve seen, the Pope says, in some cases they may need to be sent back. Instead, the Pope is talking about the wrongness of leaving migrants to die.
The Pontifical Council on Migrants says the following, in cases where the competent government authorities decide not to accept asylum seekers arguing that they are not true refugees, these authorities are duty bound to make sure that such people will be guaranteed to secure and free existence elsewhere. Recent history shows that many people were sent back against their will to a fate that was sometimes tragic. Some were pushed back to sea. Others were forcibly diverted towards terrains of minefields where they perished. The Pope was recently objected to a similar case in Tunisia where the Coast Guard has taken migrants apprehended at sea and dumped them in the desert near Libya, leaving them to die in the scorching heat. Another part of the Pope’s letter to the US bishops clearly take aim at JD Vance’s. Recent comments about the Ordo of Morris Vance said the following in an interview,
CLIP:
And I think it’s a very Christian concept by the way, that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that they seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.
Trent:
When Vance was later criticized for his comments, he told his detractors to Google Ordo a, which refers to Augustine and Aquinas’s formulations of the Christian Order of Love. This is the idea that Christian Love proceeds with varying degrees of intensity starting with those closest to you and extending outwards from there. If love means to will good for someone, then it makes sense that we do not will or work towards the good equally for every single person. You and I will let someone go hungry tonight because we didn’t donate our excess money to charity, but you and I are not in grave sin because we failed to feed those people. However, if I let my own child go hungry tonight because I just didn’t want to expend energy to help him, then I would be eng grave sin because I have a stronger duty towards them than I have towards a stranger.
The Bible even makes this distinction when it says in one Timothy five, eight, if anyone does not provide for his relatives and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. However, past articulations of the or morus might be incorrect, and so the church can weigh in on them in order to correct that. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas said that we should love our fathers more than we love our mothers because quote, the Father is the active principle of our biological origin. While the mother is a passive and material principle, but this superior love to father over mother is rooted in a mistaken biology, and so it’s not a sound argument. Likewise, conceptions of the or auras that treat love like a finite quantity. And so when you’re all out of love to quote the eighties band air supply, you do not have to love those distant from you or you can just negligible love them.
That’s not what Vance was saying, but it seems to be the view that the Pope was critiquing. Pope Francis writes the following, Christian Love is not a concentric expansion of interest that little by little extend to other persons in 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 constitute of relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. Saying we should first love those closest to us does not mean we should not love those who are further away from us. You can love someone less than another person and still love that person sufficiently as they deserve. What’s really irritating about this section of the Pope’s letter is that while Vance did not use the language of concentric circles in his interview, Pope Francis has used that language in the past to defend concepts similar to or Morriss.
In 2021, Pope Francis spoke about concentric circles of unity in the church among believers, and then finally with all people in a 2019 letter, Pope Francis quoted Pope Paul the sixth who explicitly spoke of concentric circles of all people who are close and far away from the church and how we ought to treat them. In these cases, the Pope makes distinctions on how we relate to different people, even though we are called to love all people. Finally, the Pope said in his letter, the true oromos that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan. That is by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all without exception. Once again, JD Vance wasn’t saying that we should only love some people and then ignore others. We should love everyone, but our love for people will differ based on circumstance.
In fact, the parable of the Good Samaritan affirms the ordo auras because it would’ve been wrong for the good Samaritan to ignore the robbers victim on the road and save his money to help more poor people. In Jerusalem. For example, God placed the robbers victim physically close to the Good Samaritan, and so the Samaritan had a greater duty to help him than other people. Many liberals who smugly condemned JD Vance would see no problem in spending large sums of money on migrants inside the United States. Instead of sending that money to people who live in the countries those migrants came from, many of whom are even in greater need. They’d feel that way because deep down they know we have more obligations to the fellow countrymen. God is placed under our care than to people who live in other countries, even though we still have obligations to help those people as much as we’re able.
Also, it’s ironic that many of these same wealthy liberals such as those who live in Martha’s Vineyard refuse to house migrants even though they chastises small border towns who make the same refusal that legitimately may not have the resources to help all these people. Finally, it’s important to remember that you can’t just ignore the Pope because he’s not speaking ex cathedra or infallibly. He’s still the vicar of Christ. When the Pope authoritatively repeats a teaching enough, it becomes part of the church’s ordinary magisterium. We can see this in the 19th and 20th century. Pope’s repeated condemnations of communism and the repeated affirmations of the right to migrate. As a Catholic, you have to give religious submission of mind and will to those teachings, but in other cases, the Pope is offering a prudential judgment on how to achieve a particular good, and in these cases, a Catholic is not similarly bound to accept those judgments.
Doum Veda says the following, when it comes to the question of interventions in the prudential order, it could happen that some magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies. Bishops and their advisors have not always taken into immediate consideration every aspect or the entire complexity of a question. This is why I’ve been critical of Pope Francis’ Prudential judgments related to climate change, even though I accept his reiteration of Catholic teaching on the need to be good stewards of creation, and in many cases, it’s not that I disagree with the Pope’s prudential judgment, it’s that I don’t know what he’s suggesting because his language is so vague. For example, the reference to the or Morris in his recent letter doesn’t tell me what the oromos is beyond the vague call to love everyone, which nobody disputes. But I think the Pope’s overall prudential judgment is that we should have an immigration system and policy that treats every migrant as an individual with dignity and unique circumstances that should be mercifully considered and not treat migrants as merely a member of a collective hoard.
We need to expel as quickly as possible. Pope Pius the 12 made a similar point in his 1947 address to the United States Senate, a point that I think all Catholics would support the welfare of the country must be considered as well as the interest of the individual seeking to enter. And in the nature of things, circumstances will at times dictate a law of restriction, but by the same token, circumstances at time will almost cry out for an easing of the application of that law. Wise legislation will ever be conscious of humanity and the calamities distress and woes to which it is air. So to summarize, the church rejects open borders and close borders. We have balance the right to migrate with the right to have borders. Deportation can be justified, but in some cases indiscriminate mass deportations can cause more harm than good, and so they become evil.
Other means of penalizing those who illegally immigrate can be used instead, and they should be based on how well the person has respected and contributed to the country in which he or she now resides. Our immigration system is a complicated and broken mess and neither I nor the Pope know how to fix it, and the Pope’s partisan double standards hurt his witness on this issue and prevent him from seeing how things like strong border control actually help migrants and provide for the poor in communities where they would immigrate. However, as the vicar of Christ, I will humbly give deference to the Pope’s reasonable proposal that immigration policy should treat migrants as individuals with dignity and give a preference to them. And all the poor immigration policies should prioritize migrants with the greatest need. Secure border policies are the best way to make that possible, and migrants should respect the country that accepts them. And I’m grateful the Pope reminds me of how easy it is to fall back on sinful reflexes, to dismiss migrants as a harm to my own lifestyle when Jesus tells us we should do whatever we can to help the least among us because that is where we find Jesus today. I hope this episode was helpful for you and that you have a very blessed day.