Altar Rails and Borders

Catholicism in the United States and Europe is heading toward trouble. The presenting issue is immigration. Vice President JD Vance criticized the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for their hostility to “commonsense immigration enforcement.” Cardinal Timothy Dolan issued a testy response, calling Vance’s remarks “scurrilous.”

The American bishops are trying to cleave to the Vatican line on this issue. Pope Francis is always critical of those who propose to tighten border enforcement and limit immigration. He opposes abortion with strong words, true, but he vituperates with passion against populist politicians who tap into public discontent with elite-sponsored policies that allow for unrestricted mass migration. 

What with all the talk of Trump as the second coming of Hitler, it’s difficult for many to recognize that we’re no longer living in the twentieth century. The same holds for ecclesiastical matters. It’s hard for many older clerics to recognize that the vast majority of people living today were born after Vatican II.

In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church embarked on a sustained effort to reconcile itself with the dominant ethos of the postwar West. As I argue in Return of the Strong Gods, that ethos was characterized by an open society consensus. In response, influential figures in 1970s Catholicism articulated a vision of a Church “open to the modern world.” This meant emphasizing themes like “dialogue” and other notions suggesting engagement and openness. 

Karl Popper’s influential book The Open Society and Its Enemies was clear about metaphysics. Strong truths were enemies of the open society consensus. Open-church Catholicism echoed this view, denouncing “dogmatism” and other forms of “rigidity” as contrary to the spirit of Vatican II. 

In almost every circumstance, a theological “openness” dovetailed with progressive moral-political commitments. We were instructed to overcome boundaries and tear down barriers. Church hierarchy was discredited. Clericalism? What we need is “lay empowerment”! In society at large, the same dynamic was encouraged. The old hierarchies must be overturned. A pedagogy of the oppressed? The excluded and marginalized need to be empowered!

A similar weakening of boundaries took place in moral theology. Bernhard Häring insisted that the Church’s moral doctrine must not constrain individual discernment. Others made arguments that the Church must be open to new moral insights. Just as society needs a strong dose of openness, so also does the individual need freedom from limits and constraints—a right to migrate freely, unhindered by the sharp borders between right and wrong.

In the 1970s, altar rails were dismantled in nearly all churches in the United States. The bishops and clergy who oversaw their removal had an accurate, if misguided, intuition. Fencing the altar conveys a powerful message of separation. The sacred and profane are distinct, often antithetical. God’s gift of himself in the Eucharist must be venerated and protected from defilement. As sinners, we must approach the Most High with humility, reverently kneeling and petitioning that he not regard our unworthiness. 

These sentiments were thought to be retrograde, an impediment to the Church’s mission. The altar rails had to come down, so that the Church could refashion herself as open to the world. Instead of protecting the gift of Christ’s presence, the faithful must go out and proclaim the Good News to all. The young Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a manifesto in favor of this vision, Razing the Bastions. The title is telling.

Karl Popper published his book in 1945. It’s now 2025, and a growing number of citizens of Western nations recognize that an open society is a disintegrated, rudderless, and demoralized society. They are demanding something different, a love society, one that builds walls and enforces norms that defend, protect, and promote that which we love.

A similar shift is afoot in the Church, and for the same reason. The open Church gets colonized by the world. Its leaders talk like therapists and multicultural bureaucrats. The sacred is swamped by the banal. A growing number of churchgoers, especially the young, want something different, something confident and separate from the world. As Cardinal Cupich in Chicago has discovered, to his dismay, they want to kneel at altar rails.

Tell me your views on altar rails, and I can predict where you stand with regard to the increasingly grave political and cultural phenomenon of mass migration. If you think the restoration of altar rails represents a betrayal of Vatican II, I’m confident that you regard any attempt to enforce borders as anti-Christian xenophobia.

Pope Francis fancies himself a man of the people. But when it comes to borders, he is allied with E.U. bureaucrats and globalist elites. His moralizing criticism of any effort to stem the tide of migrants amounts to attacks on a growing body of ordinary Europeans and Americans. The pope insinuates that growing electoral support for populist politicians stems from xenophobic “hate” and a desire to “discriminate” and “exclude.” Truth be told, the Holy Father sounds like the director of DEI at Google, or a grant officer at the Ford Foundation—a globalist who dreams of an open society, an open world, and places those who think otherwise into the always ready basket of deplorables.

The same holds for his efforts to stamp out the Latin Mass and other manifestations of “rigidity.” He sounds like an elderly Jesuit (which he is) who can’t fathom why the young people aren’t harkening to his now decades-old message of openness, dialogue, and engagement. Pope Francis is far more popular among theology professors at Jesuit Universities, the ne plus ultra of open-church Catholics, than among American priests under sixty.

I foresee a crisis in Catholicism. Just as the nineteenth-century clerical establishment insisted on defending the dying ancien regime, today’s Catholic establishment hangs on to the discredited open society consensus. Meanwhile, people in the pews and clergy who minister to them wish to understand how to live faithfully in the actually existing realities of our time, which are characterized by the increasingly evident damage done by ideologically imposed “openness.” 

We’re going to need a latter-day Leo XIII, a pope for whom it is not always 1939—and who recognizes that Vatican II was one ecumenical council among many.

Image by Amanda Slater. Image cropped.