Santa Clara University

In Robert Bolt’s play, “A Man for All Seasons,” the aging Cardinal Wolsey admonishes Sir Thomas More: “You’re a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see the facts flat on, without that horrible moral squint; with just a little common sense, you could have been a statesman.”¹ Today, too, Wolsey’s heirs are quick to upbraid our latter-day Mores for their sentimental “moral squint” at immigration policy. Yet even statesmen of Wolsey’s stripe seldom see the facts of migration “flat on.” Invariably, our perceptions betray our moral squints, our tacit prejudices.

Beginning with Leo XIII’s teaching on the rights of workers, modern Roman Catholic social teaching forms the moral squint the Church brings to public policy. In its social teaching on dignity and human rights, the Church follows its Lord in proclaiming the “Good News” to the poor (Lk 4:18). The Synod of Bishops in 1971, in a memorable declaration, thus affirmed that “action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.”²

In these pages, I will first consider the principal themes of modern Catholic social teaching, and then turn to their implications for immigration policy in a religiously pluralist polity such as our own. I will conclude with an assessment of the distinctively Christian obligations borne by citizens of faith in such a polity.

Good News to the Poor

Inspired by the great biblical injunctions of justice and right judgment marking the reign of God, modern Roman Catholic social teaching utilizes the distinctively modern idiom of human dignity and human rights.³ Since the first modern social encyclical, Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), the Church’s teaching has upheld the fundamental, intrinsic worth of all persons as created in the image of God.

The recognition and institutional protection of a person’s dignity as fulfilling the divine command to “love...your neighbor as yourself” (Lk 10:27) sets the framework of social policy. The equal recognition and respect due moral persons in virtue of their dignity is, in turn, analyzed in terms of an agent’s basic human rights. So it is the discourse of human rights and of correlative duties that serves as a common language in mediating the Church’s theological beliefs in a religiously pluralist context; even as the ideal of covenant fidelity enriches our conception of rights. For in specifying the “minimum conditions” for the realization of such dignity, our bishops seek to extend the modern notion of human rights to include not merely the protective civil-political rights enshrined in our American tradition (e.g., the freedoms from interference or coercion expressed in our rights to freedom of worship, assembly, speech, etc.) but the proactive socio-economic rights of subsistence, employment, minimal health care, education, etc., rights necessary for “a dignified life in community.”⁴

As the foregoing remarks reveal, Roman Catholic social teaching offers a richer, more engaged understanding of the moral aims of social policy than envisioned in much contemporary democratic deliberation. Our “moral squint” bids us recognize the equal dignity and basic human rights of every neighbor. Indeed, it is precisely our moral entitlement to equal respect or consideration, in concert with the ethical ideal of the common good, that justifies preferential treatment for those whose basic rights are most imperiled—in Camus’ phrase, our taking “the victims’ side.”⁵ For if equal consideration does not imply identical treatment, so we may distinguish legitimately between indiscriminate regard for moral persons and discriminate response to their differing situations.⁶ Aquinas’s observation that a servant who is ill merits greater attention than a son who is not, pertains,with greater reason, to equals: the fulfillment of equal basic rights, in materially dissimilar conditions, justifies a discriminate response.⁷ Now in social ethics generally, such a discriminate response is expressed in the graduated moral urgency of differing human rights (e.g., an individual’s basic rights would trump another’s private property rights), and in the differing material conditions presumed for realizing the same human rights.

These brief remarks permit us to “translate” the fundamental motifs of Roman Catholic social teaching into a persuasive, modern idiom. The biblical ideals of covenant fidelity and love of neighbor underwrite our modern teaching on the dignity of persons and their families, solidarity, human rights, and the option for the poor as an answer to the lawyer’s question, in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, “What must I do to live?” (Lk 10:25).

Immigration Policy

Church teaching is far from a panacea. The broad themes sketched thus far frame, but do not dictate, policy on such vexed social issues as immigration. And yet, as we shall see, the Church’s teaching offers us considerable wisdom in the midst of our electoral polemics.⁸

In modern Roman Catholic social teaching, the legitimate sovereignty of states in regulating immigration serves the global common good, so that states are morally bound to respect and promote the basic human rights of both citizen and resident alien, especially the most vulnerable, and of these, in particular, women and children.⁹ The Catholic Church thus recognizes not “open,” but porous borders, respecting a person’s right to change nationality for social and economic as well as political reasons. For in view of the “common purpose of created things” (and the mutual character of basic rights), “where a state which suffers from poverty combined with great population cannot supply such use of goods to its inhabitants...people possess a right to emigrate, to select a new home in foreign lands and to seek conditions of life worthy” of their common humanity.¹⁰ Just so, the “new home,” even where temporary, must provide for the equitable provision and protection of such basic human rights.

The rhetoric of basic human rights leaves many questions unresolved. Yet recognizing the graduated urgency of human rights and correlative duties does serve to indicate the contours of an equitable immigration policy, i.e., one which recognizes the moral priority of relative need (gravity and imminence of harm); particular vulnerabilities, e.g., of women and children; familial relationships; complicity of the host country in generating migratory flows; historical or cultural affiliations, e.g., historic patterns of employment; and a fair distribution of burdens. The latter consideration applies domestically as well, for the burdens of local integration or resettlement should not fall disproportionately upon the most vulnerable citizens.

In a similar vein, Paul VI and John Paul II urge acceptance of “a charter which will assure [persons’] right to emigrate, favor their integration, facilitate their professional advancement and give them access to decent housing where, if such is the case, their families can join them.”¹¹ The virtue of solidarity enjoins hospitable treatment of those seeking to change nationality, due process in adjudicating claims, assistance in their integration to a new homeland, and respect for their cultural heritage.

Citizens of faith, conversely, can never accept detention of undocumented children nor acquiesce to threats of massive deportation separating families. In a world ever more interdependent, citizens must rather seek a “continual revision of programmes, systems and regimes” so as to guarantee the full and effective implementation of the basic human rights of the most vulnerable. Recognition of the “stranger” or “alien” as neighbor attests to what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls our common “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.”¹² Under our “International Bill of Rights,” persons are never divested of moral standing, never rhetorically effaced as “illegal.”

Passing to “the victim’s side,” as did the Samaritan in Luke’s parable (Lk 10:29ff.), appears, then, as the touchstone of legitimacy for prevailing institutional arrangements, local, national, and global. Consonant with the Church’s understanding of the common good, the loss of citizenship, affirms Pope John XXIII, “does not detract in any way from [one’s] membership in the human family as a whole, nor from [one’s] citizenship in the world community.”¹³ Finally, the virtue of solidarity with both near and distant neighbors in Catholic social teaching seeks not only to protect and extend the legal rights of migrants, but to redress the “oppression, intimidation, violence, and terrorism” that all too often impel them to migrate against their will.¹⁴ The duties falling upon states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to aid and protect migrants presume the antecedent duty of preserving an international social order (the global common good) in which the basic rights of the most vulnerable are recognized as “the indispensable basis for authentic justice and the condition for enduring peace.”¹⁵

“Go and Do Likewise!”

The rhetoric of human rights, I’ve argued in the previous section, permits the Church to translate the biblical motifs of justice, solidarity, and hospitality in the public reasoning of complex, religious pluralist polities like our own. And yet, there remains a surplus of religious meaning. “Love of neighbor” is never less than just. Yet if the Christian “justices”¹⁶ in her moral deliberations, so justice bears the mark of “loving tenderly, compassionately.” To the lawyer’s question in the parable, “Who is my neighbor?” seeking a precise delimitation of rights and duties, Jesus replies with a question of his own, “Who is it that proved himself neighbor?”¹⁷

The lawyer’s reply, “the Samaritan,” is richly ironic, for the Samaritan, a despised schismatic, the quintessentially “other,” not only proves himself neighbor, but in exemplifying neighborliness as the fulfillment of the law, is the one whom the lawyer must imitate: “Go and do likewise!” (Lk 10:37). For the question posed in Jesus’ reading of the law is not finally “Whom shall I love?” but rather “Who shall I become (prove myself to be) in loving?” In Kierkegaard’s words, “Christ does not speak about recognizing one’s neighbor but about being a neighbor oneself, about proving oneself to be a neighbor, something the Samaritan showed by his compassion.”¹⁸ And this makes all the difference.

The distinctively Christian virtue of solidarity with those “broken and oppressed in spirit” thus defines the disciple’s moral squint; for “to be a Christian,” says Gustavo Gutiérrez, “is to draw near, to make oneself a neighbor, not the one I encounter in my journey but the one in whose journey I place myself.” For an ethics of discipleship, then, “What I must do to live” is, then, to “turn” to the world of the poor, of the half-dead stranger, in the martyred Archbishop Romero’s words, “becoming incarnate in their world, of proclaiming the good news to them,” even to the point of “sharing their fate.”¹⁹ In solidarity with migrants, the disciple of Jesus, our “Good Samaritan,” must “see and have compassion,” even as compassion becomes our way of seeing, our “horrible moral squint.”

Let me conclude with a thought from Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement:

For a total Christian, the goad of duty is not needed—always prodding one to perform this or that good deed. It is not a duty to help Christ, it is a privilege. Is it likely that Martha and Mary sat back and considered that they had done all that was expected of them?... If that is the way they gave hospitality to Christ, it is certain that that is the way it should still be given. Not for the sake of humanity. Not because it might be Christ who stays with us, comes to see us, takes up our time. Not because these people remind us of Christ...but because they are Christ, asking us to find room for Him, exactly as He did at the first Christmas.²⁰e