A statement by U.S. Catholic Bishops acknowledges that governments have the legal right and moral duty to curb migration for the common good.
“We recognize that nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good,” said the statement, which was adopted on Wednesday by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) at their Fall Plenary Assembly in Baltimore, Md.
“Without such processes, immigrants face the risk of trafficking and other forms of exploitation. Safe and legal pathways serve as an antidote to such risks,” said the statement, without noting that the United States admits a huge inflow of roughly one million legalized migrants each year, or roughly two immigrants for every seven births.
The Bishop’s endorsement of migration curbs is buried within a longer statement of concern about the actual implementation of U.S. border laws in a world where millions of shockingly diverse migrants would rationally crowd into Americans’ workplaces, homes, schools, hospitals, and communities:
We are disturbed when we see among our [Catholic] people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.
The tensions between the church’s universalist ideals and government in a national democracy are both useful and long-standing, and are repeatedly recognized by senior clerics and Pope Leo XIV.
Predictably, pro-migration reporters played up the Church’s concerns and sidelined the Church’s acceptance of border enforcement. For example, the New York Times wrote:
America’s Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday rebuked the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign in a rare and near-unanimous statement that framed the immigration crisis in starkly moral terms.
The Bishop’s national responsibility comments were also ignored by the Los Angeles Times, Axios, NOTUS, and the Washington Post. An article in The Hill included the responsibility section in its last paragraph.
Since January, President Trump’s border enforcement has saved many thousands of migrants from death, robbery, or rape. During President Joe Biden’s term, the death toll was so high in Panama’s Darien Gap jungle that Mayorkas pushed Panama to create a safer coastal route via high-speed boats that delivered migrants to buses funded by Mayorkas.
In 2022, CNN’s Ray Sanchez slipped this Mayorkas special into a 2022 report:
The couple [Pedro Luis Torrealba, and his wife said they] started the roadless crossing on the border between Colombia and Panama — the deadly Darién Gap — with more than 60 other migrants, Torrealba said outside the [Martha’s Vinyard] parish house on Thursday night. Only 22 completed the trek across the 60 miles of jungle and steep mountains, he said. Some fell from cliffs, others were swept away by flood waters.
Jackie Stallings, a member of the Martha’s Vineyard Community Services nonprofit, told CNN what she had seen on the migrant’s cellphones:
“There were bodies and moms with babies trying to get through mud that was like clay … [One migrant told her] “Look, this one died … he died and this one died.” The mud is like to up to here to [their thigh] … They die because they get stuck.”
However, most Bishops and media outlets are swayed by pleas from nearby migrants more than distant deaths.
Biden’s vast migration also did enormous damage to the ability of ordinary Americans to earn a decent living, afford housing, or raise their families. Americans also lost the attention and empathy of left-wing politicians and the sympathy of left-wingers who now prefer to focus their powerful empathy on grateful migrants instead of on alienated, poor, discarded, and normal Americans.
Unsurprisingly, many Catholics opposed the mass migration.
Despite the responsibility language, some of the Bishops say their concern for migrants overrides citizens’ rights to national borders.
The Post noted:
Oscar Cantú, the Mexican American bishop of San Jose, told the group he wished the statement had gone further. In an email to The Washington Post, Cantú said that [Chicago Archbishop Blase] Cupich’s amendment did improve the statement and that “bishops are shepherds of souls and teachers of the faith. When we see assaults on human dignity, as we have been witnessing in this year’s deportation campaign, we need to speak with moral conviction. And thus, we needed a strong statement.”
…
On Wednesday evening, Cupich told The Post he hopes the actions during the meeting empower clergy and Catholics to study church teaching on the rights of immigrants — and nations — and to do more. “Catholics need to be sure they reflect from a perspective of faith rather than politics, and that’s hopefully something we can trigger,” he said.
The Bishops’ split prompted a compromise election of their new leaders, said the Post:
On Tuesday, the few hundred voting bishops at the meeting in Baltimore selected by a close margin Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, an experienced national administrator and a conservative, as their next president. They also picked Bishop Daniel Flores, of the Texas border diocese of Brownsville, known as extremely outspoken on behalf of immigrants, as vice president.
“U.S. Catholic bishops select conservative culture warrior to lead them during Trump’s 2nd term,” the Associated Press complained. It added:
The vote acts as a barometer for the bishops’ priorities. In choosing Coakley, they are doubling down on their conservative bent, even as they push for more humane immigration policies from the Trump administration.
