Navigating Thorny Culture

Last week, Pope Francis sent a letter to American bishops, reproving the Trump administration’s intention to deport illegal immigrants and reminding the Church of our fraternal obligation to all human persons, not just those of a shared nationality.

The issue opens up something of a can of worms. A few days later, Kevin Roberts, former president of Wyoming Catholic College and current president of the Heritage Foundation, published a short piece in First Things that noted that “The pope’s letter … comes amid rising tensions between the Trump administration and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) over the more than $2 billion in taxpayer dollars that the USCCB and its affiliates received to resettle and support inadmissible aliens in America during the Biden administration.” Rather than further criticize the president, Roberts suggests, potentially causing division among Catholics who do or don’t support Trump, it would be better for the USCCB to refuse federal funding for their work with immigrants, freeing them up from having to negotiate with governmental policy around the topic in the effort to live up to the fraternal obligation the Pope is insisting upon.

The issue touches on a larger one that’s likely to come up again and again as the months wear on: whether, and how, the Church can work with the government in certain social spheres while remaining free to abide by its own convictions about what its policies and administration entail. So it’s worth simply spelling out some principles for how one might think about the topic.

The issue ultimately revolves around the judgment one makes concerning the government one is under. Is it fundamentally Christian? Or is it fundamentally secular?

If Christian, there are areas of social life that the Church may well be involved in along with the state. Take education. This is something the state naturally has an interest in: a government ought to be concerned with educating its citizens well. It seems reasonable, then, for a Catholic school to be educating students who are also receiving financial aid from the government, though with a proviso: that such aid does not in any way impede the school from giving a full Catholic education with all that entails. Historically, this kind of congenial partnership has been plausible, even productive. Christian kings have founded and endowed monasteries and colleges without scandalizing the Church.

Something similar might be said about caring for immigrants. If a Christian government wants to care for immigrants, and Catholics are in a position to give Catholic care to them, Catholics might reasonably work with the government on such a project. A given institution may want to be entirely independent of such funds for the sake of greater flexibility, security, and freedom to chart their course; but it’s important to note that in a Christian context, that’s not necessarily a moral decision. It may be only a financial and institutional one.

If a society or government is secular, however, things become murkier. “Secular,” here, does not mean “neutral,” but committed to values that are not Catholic ones. Indeed it’s impossible to care for human souls in a “neutral” way. There is always an anthropology, a metaphysic, and ultimately a theology at work. Catholics should never take funds of any kind that come with moral or religious strings attached. And in dealing with a dicey government, they will want to be careful even if there seem to be no strings, since such things can change rapidly, and they may find themselves forced either to suppress the Gospel or to end their programs if their belief system comes into conflict with the ideology being championed by a secular administration.

This prudential question can be made more difficult when those who work for Catholic organizations redefine the Gospel away from salvation from sin and death and toward charity as the fundamental Christian message, which can open out onto a slippery, compromising slope that’s too ready to align with ideals of acceptance and compassion that secularism is sympathetic to. Such a shift puts Catholic schools, hospitals, and charity organizations at risk of drifting far from their true mission: to use their sphere of influence to uphold and witness to the saving truths of Christ’s love and plan for the human race.

So: when it comes to questions like the present one on immigration, there’s need for serious reflection on multiple levels. We need call to mind the true content of the Gospel, on one level, and on another, we need consider whether a given government allows the Church to be faithful to the mission given her in response to the Gospel, or whether its values are antithetical, perhaps even in subtle ways, to it. Such are big, thorny topics, but worthy of the conversation being embarked upon by the Pope, by the USCCB, by Roberts, by all of us who want to be faithful to our Christian calling in the midst of a big, thorny American culture.