The thousand or so citizens of Vatican City remain exclusively Catholic. If the smallest country in the world can decide to limit citizenship on the basis of religion without committing a collective sin, why cannot other countries restrict immigration for reasons important to their citizens, too?
The elected monarch of that city-state earlier this week wrote a letter to America’s Catholic bishops. R.R. Reno of First Things describes it as Pope Francis’s “suicide note.” It rightly affirms “the dignity of every human being” and acknowledges the legitimacy of excluding criminals from entering the United States. Beyond this, it elevates cliches regarding immigration to truth and inserts Catholicism into a public policy area in which religion offers little clear instruction.
Here, the pope does not speak ex cathedra but instead from his parochial outlook as a South American priest imbued with the continent’s quasi-Marxist social-justice tradition. This means American Catholics may feel free to disagree without rebelling against their church. (RELATED: On Trump and the Border, the Pope’s Hypocrisy Is Showing)
The pope writes:
I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality. At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.
The pope writes of correct thinking not confusing a person’s “illegal status” with “criminality.” Discerning minds surely do not equate a poor person from Central America immigrating to this country illegally with, say, extortion, kidnapping, or any other devious crime one can imagine. Yet entering a nation illegally, staying there without permission, and working under the table to avoid detection all amount to crimes — crimes one can imagine oneself committing if the shoe were on the other foot but crimes nonetheless. Does not the pope, an extremely intelligent man, see the absurdity of the demand to separate “illegal status” from illegal actions, i.e., “criminality”?
Pope Francis lives in Vatican City, a place protected by fortifications since the ninth century, but expects Americans who live outside of those barriers “to avoid walls of ignominy.” Further, his epistolic message calls on the bishops to “not to give in to narratives that discriminate” against immigrants. Yet the city-state he presides over keeps its population down to about a thousand and does not appear to accept the many refugees within its own hemisphere. Most Palestinian or Afghan refugees, of course, do not subscribe to the tenets of the Catholic faith and so, quite reasonably and understandably, Vatican City does not let such people resettle there.
Its inhabitants, protected by walls and discriminatory immigration rules, do periodically lecture Americans, who live in a country that takes in more immigrants than any other, about the shortcomings of their nation’s laws.
Pope Francis cited the story of the Good Samaritan, the exile of Jews in the Book of Exodus, and other parts of the Bible to convey his point. He omitted mention of Matthew’s description of the Sermon on the Mount: “For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again,” Jesus said. “And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye; and seest not the beam that is in thy own eye?”
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