In the USCCB’s recent Special Pastoral Message, the bishops of the United States highlight the suffering inflicted by a broken immigration system and empathize with vulnerable families who live every day under the shadow of uncertainty. Anyone who has met immigrants in our parishes, as many Catholics in America have, recognizes the truth of the bishops’ words.
Pastoral accompaniment is certainly necessary, but it does not encompass the entirety of the Church’s moral teaching. If anything, the Church insists on holding together truths that the political imagination is tempted to sever. The bishops acknowledge this when they write that “human dignity and national security are not in conflict,” and when they reaffirm that “nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders” for the sake of the common good. These are not caveats tacked onto an otherwise humanitarian manifesto: They are part of Catholic doctrine. To omit or minimize these truths would be to deprive the Catholic moral tradition of the wisdom our nation needs.
This is the kind of nuanced conversation many American Catholics—and civic leaders—find themselves hungry for but rarely encounter: a conversation where mercy is not weaponized against justice, and where sovereignty is not reduced to xenophobia. It is precisely this fuller conversation that CatholicVote’s document “Immigration Enforcement and the Christian Conscience” wants to start.
The American bishops are right to be troubled by “a climate of fear,” by the plight of parents afraid to take their children to school, and by the often harsh, sometimes dehumanizing conditions in detention centers. These are realities Christians must not look away from.
“Immigration Enforcement and the Christian Conscience” raises the other unavoidable dimension of the problem: the federal government’s failure over decades to maintain a coherent, enforceable immigration system. This is not a peripheral concern. As we argue, it is precisely the collapse of lawful order that has created the conditions in which exploitation flourishes, cartels thrive, and millions of migrants are pushed into a shadow-world without legal recourse or clear prospects.
A nation cannot honor the dignity of immigrants if it has effectively abandoned the rule of law under which immigrants might be protected.
Catholic teaching asserts that governments have a duty to regulate migration for the sake of the common good. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms the right of persons to migrate for just reasons, but places parallel obligations on immigrants to respect a country’s laws and on governments to enforce those laws in ways consistent with justice and human dignity. Pope Benedict XVI warned repeatedly that the absence of lawful structures harms migrants most of all.
A nation’s first obligation, to its citizens and to newcomers alike, is to sustain the conditions in which authentic solidarity is possible. A border that exists merely in theory is not an instrument of mercy. On the contrary, it generates the conditions that the bishops lament. It feeds not only social fragmentation but moral confusion. When millions enter the country outside legal processes, the basic juridical relationship between the newcomer and the political community is never formally established. Charity is asked to substitute for justice, and the result is neither.
Immigration enforcement, properly conducted, is not opposed to Christian conscience. Rather, it is the precondition for any humane and sustainable immigration policy. Without enforcement, even the most generous legal pathways will collapse under the weight of circumvention.
None of this requires a rejection of the bishops’ pastoral concerns. In truth, the pastoral and the political must be held together if we are to move toward coherent reform. Law itself is a moral good. And the just enforcement of law is not contrary to the gospel; rather, it is the instrument by which the gospel’s demands are made possible in the public square.
A state that fails to enforce its borders effectively is a state that invites chaos. A state that enforces them cruelly or arbitrarily betrays its own moral foundations. Catholic social teaching never asks us to choose between these errors. It asks us to reject both.
If the bishops’ statement is an appeal to conscience, the CatholicVote document is a modest, faithful appeal to prudence; and prudence is the cardinal virtue sorely lacking in our national debate.
Catholic communities must reckon with these four truths:
1. The moral right of a state to regulate migration is not merely “allowed” by Catholic teaching but required by the common good. Ignoring this truth, or relegating it to a parenthetical aside, leaves Catholics unprepared to contribute meaningfully to policy questions.
2. Large-scale unlawful migration is not a morally neutral event; it creates real social costs borne disproportionately by the poor. Pretending otherwise erodes public trust and weakens the credibility of the bishops’ appeals for compassion.
3. The human dignity of migrants is best protected when migration occurs through lawful, transparent, orderly processes. This requires enforcement, not as a gesture of hostility, but as an extension of justice.
4. Catholics betray neither their faith nor their compassion when they insist on secure borders. To say otherwise is to confuse sentimentality with charity.
The bishops close the letter with a reminder that “hope does not disappoint.” They are right. But hope must not be confused with a refusal to confront reality. If we wish to stand with immigrants, we must also stand with the truth: the truth about human dignity, but also the truth about political responsibility and the requirements of public order.
