BALTIMORE (OSV News): The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] approved a “special pastoral message on immigration” November 12, voicing “our concern here for immigrants” at their annual autumn plenary assembly in Baltimore.
“We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” the statement said. “We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centres and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status.”
The statement came as a growing number of bishops have acknowledged that some of the Trump administration’s immigration policies risk presenting the Church with both practical challenges in administering pastoral support and charitable endeavours, as well as religious liberty challenges.
“We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools,” it continued. “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. Despite obstacles and prejudices, generations of immigrants have made enormous contributions to the well-being of our nation.
We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement
USCCB
“We as Catholic bishops love our country and pray for its peace and prosperity. For this very reason, we feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.”
The USCCB statement noted: “As pastors, we the bishops of the United States are bound to our people by ties of communion and compassion in Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The statement also referred to Catholic social teaching on immigration, which seeks to balance three interrelated principles: the right of persons to migrate in order to sustain themselves and their families; the right of a country to regulate its borders and immigration; and a nation’s duty to conduct that regulation with justice and mercy.
Catholic teaching “exhorts nations to recognise the fundamental dignity of all persons, including immigrants,” the statement said. “We bishops advocate for a meaningful reform of our nation’s immigration laws and procedures. Human dignity and national security are not in conflict.
“Both are possible if people of good will work together. We recognise that nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good. 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.”
The Church’s concern for neighbour and our concern here for immigrants is a response to the Lord’s command to love as he has loved us
USCCB
The Church’s teaching, it noted, “rests on the foundational concern for the human person, as created in the image and likeness of God [Genesis 1:27].”
The US bishops said, “As pastors, we look to Sacred Scripture and the example of the Lord himself, where we find the wisdom of God’s compassion. The priority of the Lord, as the prophets remind us, is for those who are most vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger [Zechariah 7:10]. In the Lord Jesus, we see the One who became poor for our sake [2 Corinthians 8:9], we see the Good Samaritan who lifts us from the dust [Luke 10:30–37], and we see the One who is found in the least of these [Matthew 25].
“The Church’s concern for neighbour and our concern here for immigrants is a response to the Lord’s command to love as he has loved us [John 13:34],” the statement said.
The message was approved by the vast majority of voting bishops and was met with a standing ovation. Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, the newly elected president of the USCCB, spoke in favour of the statement from the floor, saying, “I’m strongly in support of it for the good of our immigrant brothers and sisters,” adding that the statement sought “balance” in “protecting the rights of immigrants, but also securing and calling upon our lawmakers and our administration to offer us a meaningful path of reform for our immigration system.”
As pastors, we the bishops of the United States are bound to our people by ties of communion and compassion in Our Lord Jesus Christ
USCCB
According to a USCCB press release accompanying the statement, this “marked the first time” in 12 years that the bishops’ conference “invoked this particularly urgent way of speaking as a body of bishops.” The previous statement, issued in 2013, responded to the federal government’s contraceptive mandate.
The bishops’ concern draws upon established magisterial teaching. Pope St John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical, Veritatis Splendor [Splendour of Truth], and his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life], both cite the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes, which identifies “deportation” among several acts “offensive to human dignity”. These, the document states, “are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilisation they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator.”
St. John Paul underscored that these acts were examples of “intrinsic evil” incapable of being ordered to God or the good of the human person.
