Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, who will soon retire as Roman Catholic Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, likes to tell the story of the first time he met Pope St. John Paul II. I was privileged to hear him recount this story in his homily on the feast day of John Paul II last fall. DiNardo was a young bishop then, just starting out in his episcopate, when he was summoned to Rome to meet the pope. They had a good, cordial chat, but at the end of their meeting, the pope looked him in the eye and said, “Always remember the dignity of the human person.”
People are sometimes confused by the stands that the Roman Catholic Church takes on moral and social issues because they rarely fit neatly into American political categories. The teaching on human dignity is the key to unlocking the meaning behind such seeming inconsistency. It is why the response of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to the flurry of actions taken by the Trump administration in its first couple of weeks has been praise for some things, like the pardoning of nonviolent protesters outside of abortion clinics, along with strong condemnation of other things, like the authorization of mass arrests of immigrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, extending even to arrests inside of schools and churches.
“The dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1700). It is grounded in worship. We worship God, recognizing his inestimable worth and boundless glory, and we see in each human being a unique and unrepeatable expression of God’s light and life. This makes human beings more than just valuable; it makes us holy. We can sin against that holiness, but we cannot lose our worth before God. To deny people their basic human rights is more than a violation of justice; it is a kind of blasphemy.
In their statement on the administration’s executive orders on immigration, the bishops emphasized the importance of this teaching:
The Catholic Church is committed to defending the sanctity of every human life and the God-given dignity of each person, regardless of nationality or immigration status. Church teaching recognizes a country’s right and responsibility to promote public order, safety, and security through well-regulated borders and just limits on immigration. However, as shepherds, we cannot abide injustice, and we stress that national self-interest does not justify policies with consequences that are contrary to the moral law.
Among the things they list as problematic are the elimination of humanitarian protections and aid for refugees and the militarization of the border. The bishops also reject “the use of sweeping generalizations to denigrate any group, such as describing all undocumented immigrants as ‘criminals’ or ‘invaders,’ to deprive them of protection under the law.” Such amounts to “an affront to God.”
This is not a new position for the Catholic Church. It follows upon decades of teaching about the treatment of migrants. “Every human being has the right to freedom of movement and of residence within the confines of his own state,” said John Paul II in 1985. “When there are just reasons in favor for it, he must be permitted to migrate to other countries and to take up residence there. The fact that he is a citizen of a particular state does not deprive him of membership to the human family, nor of citizenship in the universal society, the common, world-wide fellowship of men.” He is echoing the sentiments of Pope Pius XII, who said in 1952, “There never has been a period during which the Church has not been active on behalf of migrants, exiles and refugees.” He condemns nations that “arbitrarily restrict the natural rights of people to migrate or to colonize, while on the other hand compelling entire populations to migrate into other lands, deporting inhabitants against their wills, and disgracefully tearing individuals from their families.”
Understood in this light, it becomes apparent that the Catholic Church’s teaching on immigration is of a kind with her teaching on abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, racism, war, poverty, care for the natural world, and a hundred other things. But when the Church’s teaching on human dignity is not understood — or worse, when it is willfully ignored, distorted, or dismissed — it becomes easy to fold the Church’s statements on these other issues into the general haze of political chatter that is constantly running in the background of our lives now.
When Vice President Vance was asked on Face the Nation about the USCCB’s statement, he made no effort to engage with the substance of the teaching but instead offered a dubious and unsubstantiated claim that the bishops were just trying to protect their “bottom line.” In a subsequent interview on Fox News, Vance said, “[A]s an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. … But there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” Later, on social media, Vance referred to this as ordo amoris, a concept from the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
The words ordo amoris do not show up in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In a letter to the bishops of the United States on February 10, Pope Francis directly challenged the notion put forth by Vance, saying:
Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
While we may have a greater duty to our family and our country than to strangers, we always have a moral obligation not to treat people with cruelty and to affirm the value of their humanity, no matter who they are. The pope noted that Catholic teaching recognizes “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.”
The situation at the southern border is complicated, with many different problems intersecting at once. It will take a great deal of work to figure out how to approach the problem adequately, and people of goodwill may disagree amicably about pragmatic solutions. Nevertheless, “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.” That is the moral principle at stake. No matter how complicated the situation, there are some actions that are immoral.
Vice President Vance is not the first Catholic politician to obfuscate about this. President Biden did the same thing on Church teachings on abortion and marriage, appealing to a broad concept of the conscience while refusing to engage with the specific teaching about human dignity. It is probably too much to expect in the current cultural moment that elected officials would be good public theologians. Nevertheless, it is incumbent upon Christians to continue to speak with clarity, and for priests and pastors especially to make sure that the people we shepherd understand the underlying issue.
Those who are not Catholic cannot be expected to hold to Catholic teachings, but the teaching on human dignity is deeply rooted in the Scriptures and the broader Christian tradition. In the Incarnation, God chose not only to take on our humanity but to bless it. Jesus identifies himself time and time again with those who were seen as less than human by his society: the poor, the sick, those in prison. We could certainly add the migrant, the refugee, the unborn child, and all the other people our society dismisses as inconvenient. We will be judged by God on how we treat these people who are our brothers and sisters, whether we recognize Christ in them or deny him. Long after the current political winners and losers have been forgotten, that judgment will remain.
Fr. Jonathan Mitchican is the chaplain and Theology Department Chair at St. John XXIII College Preparatory in Katy, Texas.