What does the Catholic Church say about immigration?
Is there a 'natural right to migrate'—and if so, what conditions might limit its exercise?
Is there a 'natural right to migrate'—and if so, what conditions might limit its exercise?
(WM Review) – Is “the State” morally obligated to welcome all foreigners without condition? Does Catholic teaching require open borders? And, if so, at what cost—to the nation, its people, and even to the migrants themselves?
These questions arise whenever members of the Conciliar/Synodal Church criticise the immigration policies of “right-leaning” governments. But such criticism risks presenting a vision of Catholic social teaching that is simplistic, ideological and divorced from the perennial wisdom of the Church.
In this piece, we will challenge that vision with reference to the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the “social encyclicals” of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century popes and the nature of civil society itself.
Far from mandating open borders or condemning all deportations, Catholic social teaching asserts that:
The civil authority’s primary duty is to the common good of its own people, who form the “household of the nation.”
Hospitality towards migrants must be guided by prudence and ordered to justice, not by abstract ideals divorced from reality.
Unchecked immigration can undermine civil society, exploit both native workers and migrants, and serve the interests of global capitalism at the expense of the common good.
First, let us consider the teaching of Pope Pius XII in his 1952 Apostolic Constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana, contains several texts used to justify the idea of open borders and unchecked immigration today.
‘Natural right to migrate’
The Church does not deny a qualified natural right to migrate—but teaches that it must be governed by justice and prudence, not sentiment or ideology.
In his 1952 Apostolic Constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana, Pius XII explained the nature and scope of this right:
The natural law itself, no less than devotion to humanity, urges that ways of migration be opened to these people. For the Creator of the universe made all good things primarily for the good of all.
Since land everywhere offers the possibility of supporting a large number of people, the sovereignty of the State, although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations, provided of course, that the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid this.
He also referred to a 1946 allocution, in which he “again called upon the nations with more extensive territory and less numerous populations to open their borders to people from over-crowded countries.”
Earlier in the document, he referred to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and linked the right to migration to the cultivation of uncultivated land and open spaces:
Our planet, with all its extent of oceans and was and lakes, with mountains and plains covered with eternal snows and ice, with great deserts and traceless lands, is not, at the same time, without habitable regions and living spaces now abandoned to wild natural vegetation and well suited to be cultivated by man to satisfy his needs and civil activities: and more than once, it is inevitable that some families migrating from one spot to another should go elsewhere in search of a new home-land.
Then,—according to the teaching of “Rerum Novarum,” —the right of the family to a living space is recognized. When this happens, migration attains its natural scope as experience often shows. We mean, the more favorable distribution of men on the earth’s surface suitable to colonies of agricultural workers; that surface which God created and prepared for the use of all.
If the two parties, those who agree to leave their native land and those who agree to admit the newcomers, remain anxious to eliminate as far as possible all obstacles to the birth and growth of real confidence between the country of emigration and that of immigration, all those affected by such transference of people and places will profit by the transaction.
The families will receive a plot of ground which will be native for them in the true sense of the word; the thickly inhabited countries will be relieved and their people will acquire new friends in foreign countries; and the States which receive the emigrants will acquire industrious citizens. In this way, the nations which give and those which receive will both contribute to the increased welfare of man and the progress of human culture.
Application to our day
There are several points to note about these passages.
First, although Pius XII refers to what then seemed like “great numbers of migrants,” and called for larger and wealthier nations to offer them relief, it seems unlikely that these numbers were comparable to what we see today. The charts from the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory (particularly Fig. 5 here) indicate a very significant increase in the UK, which is a small nation without the wide and uncultivated areas Pius XII is discussing.
Second, while a right to “economic migration” is precisely what Pius XII has in view, he does not countenance a situation in which multitudes—without any intention of cultivating anything—arrive into already crowded nations with pre-existing economic crises, in order to benefit from social security programmes funded by native taxpayers.
Third, Pius XII was writing in the aftermath of chaotic war, and calling for those engaged in the conflicts to take responsibility for those displaced or unable to survive in their war-torn countries. In response to situation, he urged large countries with large open spaces “to try to administer as liberally as possible the overly restrictive provisions of their immigration laws.” This is quite different to calling for open borders, especially for small countries.
Fourth, document was primarily addressing the pastoral care of Catholic migrants. The Pope’s concern for such persons runs through the text, and he enacted measures to ensure that they were enabled to fulfil their religious duties. To this end, he facilitated the appointment of priests of the same nationality, émigré chaplaincies, and provisions to ensure that marriages are conducted in keeping with the laws of the Church.
He praised relief agencies established specifically to aid those “whose Catholic Faith and Catholic practices were often threatened with almost incredible dangers.” He specifically praised Pope St Pius X’s measures to ensure that Ruthenian Catholics in Canada were “protected from the inroads of heretics.”
He condemned the “perverse men” who offered material aid “with the intent of damaging their souls”—namely, by drawing Catholics away from the Church. He also cited St Ambrose, who ransomed captive prisoners at the price of the Church’s wealth, in order to deliver them from idolatry and false religions:
For who is not willing to rescue girls and boys or little children from the service of pagan idols, into which they have been forced under pain of death? We have not undertaken this work without reason; and we have done it openly to proclaim that it is far better to preserve souls for the Lord than to preserve gold.
All this is to say that the primary concern behind the document and its measures and committees is the salvation of souls. This concern is absent in modern discourse around migration. The end in view is a naturalistic “fraternity,” in which there are no more natural distinctions between peoples (e.g., between class and race).
Fifth, while Pius XII does not limit the exercise of the natural right to Catholics alone, or suggest that relief should be limited to Catholic migrants, he does not seem to have in view Catholic nations being overwhelmed by non-Catholics, or “Christian nations” (understood in the broadest, loosest sense) being overwhelmed by non-Christians. Preventing such evils is surely an aspect of the proper sense of “state sovereignty” to which the Pope alludes.
Further, he was writing in a situation in which it was well known that the idea of religious liberty was a condemned error, and in which non-Catholic sects could at best be tolerated for the sake of a greater good. The idea of welcoming swathes of non-Christians, not only to exist as independent enclaves, but even to give them the right to practise their false religions in public (and even to proselytise) would have been unthinkable. It is far from certain that the public exercise of these false religions would necessarily even be tolerated, under the circumstances.
On the contrary, Pius was clear that, if non-Catholics were to be welcomed, they should be evangelised and assimilated:
Equally noble were the vigorous ardent labors of bishops and priests who sought to bring to newcomers the blessings of the true Faith and to introduce them into the social customs of these new countries. They also facilitated the assimilation of the uncultured invaders whom they introduced both to the Christian religion and to a new culture.
To summarise, while Pius XII recognised a natural right for people to migrate and cultivate uncultivated parts of a country, which is to be justly limited and administered by the positive law of a nation state—he explicitly recognises public wealth and a moderate sense of state sovereignty as the limiting factors.
This is very different to modern programmes of open borders, and mass immigration into highly developed areas where there are already housing and economic crises for the native populations. In such circumstances, it is clearly legitimate for nations to protect their borders and limit migration.
Having examined Pius XII’s treatment of the issue, let us consider these limiting factors in detail.
St. Thomas Aquinas and immigration
In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas explains the relations between Ancient Israel and foreigners, and in so doing sets out several principles and observations that remain relevant today, even under the law of the Gospel.
In his treatment, he first notes that “Man’s relations with foreigners are twofold: peaceful, and hostile.”
Regarding peaceful relations with foreigners, he notes that the Law made three distinctions:
Foreigners who were passing through as travellers
Foreigners who came to dwell in the land as “resident aliens”
Foreigners who “wished to be admitted entirely to their fellowship and mode of worship.”
Regarding the first and second classes, St. Thomas notes that the Law commanded kindness, citing Exodus:
Thou shalt not molest a stranger [advenam—newcomer]. (Exodus 22.21)
Thou shalt not molest a stranger [peregrino—traveler] (Exodus 23:9)
However, regarding the third class, he explains that they should not be given the rights of citizens immediately—and perhaps should be required to wait for several generations before their offspring were admitted:
With regard to these a certain order was observed. For they were not at once admitted to citizenship: just as it was law with some nations that no one was deemed a citizen except after two or three generations, as the Philosopher [Aristotle] says (Polit. iii, 1).
Why was this? St. Thomas immediately explains that it was because the immediate admission of foreigners to citizenship could lead to many dangers:
The reason for this was that if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst, many dangers might occur, since the foreigners not yet having the common good firmly at heart might attempt something hurtful to the people.
Such harm could include anything from acting with in-group preference to the detriment of the native population, to importing more of their own kinsfolk than the nation can sustain, to funding or entering wars abroad on behalf of their countries of origin.
St. Thomas also explains various other particulars in the Law which have less relevance to us today—such as the respective positions of Idumeans, Egyptians and Amalekites. Nonetheless, he clearly teaches the importance of the following points:
Civil authority must protect the common good of the nation—in particular, that of the people of the nation
A nation and a people have a legitimate right to exist as they are, and to have this continuing existence protected
Civil authority can justly restrict certain civil rights of those who are not members of the civil society itself.
This leaves aside the question of hostile relations between a nation and foreigners, as well as the question of whether large-scale migration should be treated as giving rise to peaceful or hostile relations. Such immigration can be equivalent to an invasion or to war, even if conducted without open hostilities or bloodshed at the beginning—if at all.
In any event, the results of large-scale migration were equivalent to war or invasion, in the cases of:
‘The Sea Peoples,’ who around 1200 BC colonised parts of Egypt and the Near East through migratory waves
The Germanic Goths, who in 376AD were allowed to settle in Rome as refugees, soon rose up in revolt and ultimately contributed to the fall of the Empire
The Angles, Saxons and Jutes, whose migration to Britain resulted in the native British being pushed to Wales, Cornwall and Brittany and being replaced by what are now called the English
The American settlers, whose migratory waves led to the formation of the USA and relegated the Native Americans to reservations.
In brief, civil society has a right and duty to defend itself and the native population of which it is constituted. Non-citizens do not have unconditional natural rights to reside, to receive any and all benefits, to attain citizenship, and so on.
Far from being a manifestation of parochialism, xenophobia, or a distorted form of nationalism, this represents the teaching of the Holy Scripture. This is manifested most clearly in the Law of the Old Covenant, and in the duties which are imposed on us in the New Testament.
It is also manifested in the history of the Church through the practice of Christian nations, and in the writings of holy men.
But before we can consider all this any further, we need to consider the nature of civil society itself.
Once we understand that civil society is a union of individuals of families for the sake of their own temporal happiness, we will be able to evaluate whether and how policies relating to immigration—including mass deportations and other controversial measures discussed today—may be adopted by the rulers of a society.
What is civil society?
Civil society is the union of individuals and families, ordered towards securing the temporal happiness of its members. This includes the recognition that man’s ultimate happiness and purpose are found in God alone.
This “end” or purpose of civil society is manifested particularly in peace and the common good, as well the good of its members’ souls, e.g., through facilitating the practice of virtue.1
However, “the State” is not something separate to the individuals and families which make it up. Fr. Edward Cahill, an Irish priest writing on Catholic social teaching, defined it as “a union of families and individuals held together by reciprocal rights and duties.” The citizens are parts which are thus united as a whole; they are prior to the state and have an existence and proper ends independent of it.
Individuals and families on their own are unable to achieve everything that they need for legitimate temporal happiness. This is why civil society was instituted by God, and man is ordered to it by his nature as a social animal.
The nation as a union of common ancestry
The etymology of the word nation itself comes from the Latin words relating to birth (nasci, natus, etc.), and carries the sense of a kindred and shared ancestry. Cahill explains the true Catholic notion of how one’s nation relates to others:
In the Christian concept the relations of one’s country or nation to other nations are akin to the mutual relations of different families, so that the nation’s place in the universal society of mankind is somewhat like the position of the family within the nation itself.
Just as one’s family affections do not exclude a due regard and real love for members of other families and for the nation at large, so neither does Christian patriotism, even in its most intense form, exclude love and due appreciation of other nations, or zeal for the good of the human race.
In fact, these latter are the natural development of a true love for one’s own country, just as the domestic virtues and affections are the natural foundation of Patriotism itself.2
In these comments, Cahill provides a bridge between these social issues and the New Testament’s testimony to society’s duties towards migrants and non-citizens today.
The Christian dispensation
In 1 Timothy, St. Paul writes:
But if any man have not care of his own and especially of those of his house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.
The application is clear. If the nation is a union of individuals and families with a common ancestry, united for the pursuit of their temporal happiness, then a ruler who neglects his people in their distress, and prefers to give succor to outsiders, “hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.”
What would St. Paul say to a man who not only neglects his own, but in fact invites outsiders into the household and focuses on them, certainly to the detriment of his own, and even endangering them too?
Those who are advocating for extravagant immigration policies—which entail granting residency, citizenship and many other benefits to non-natives, with whom they will not personally have to deal—at the expense of their actual fellow countrymen clearly come under St. Paul’s condemnation as well.
That is, they deny the faith, and are worse than infidels.
St. Thomas comments on passage from St. Paul:
And, as Augustine says, we can wish well to everyone, but those who are closer to us are regarded as our principles [sic] and, consequently, more worthy of love. Ambrose says that the reason for this is that perhaps those who are not ashamed to receive from their own would be ashamed to receive from others.
He has denied the faith by his works, because if he does not observe the faith in regard to those to whom nature has joined him, the result is that he will not observe it in regard to others: they profess that they know God, but in their works they deny him (Titus 1:16).3
Similarly, St. John writes:
If any man say: I love God, and hateth his brother; he is a liar. For he that loveth not his brother whom he seeth, how can he love God whom he seeth not?
And this commandment we have from God, that he who loveth God love also his brother. (1 John 4.20–1)
Abstract ‘charity’ and our actual duties to our neighbours
The passage from St John instructs us on two key points regarding our relations with non-citizens and non-natives of our nations.
First, we are obliged to love our brother, which—based on the nature of a nation—applies to our countrymen, before it can apply to strangers, and even more before it can apply to an abstract mass of humanity. As Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote:
A man, who would fain begin by a general love of all men, necessarily puts them all on a level, and, instead of being cautious, prudent, and sympathising in his benevolence, is hasty and rude; does harm, perhaps, when he means to do good, discourages the virtuous and well-meaning, and wounds the feelings of the gentle. Men of ambitious and ardent minds, for example, desirous of doing good on a large scale, are especially exposed to the temptation of sacrificing individual to general good in their plans of charity.
Ill-instructed men, who have strong abstract notions about the necessity of showing generosity and candour towards opponents, often forget to take any thought of those who are associated with themselves; and commence their (so-called) liberal treatment of their enemies by an unkind desertion of their friends.4
Similarly, Dostoevsky wrote of abstract philanthropy towards those with whom we have no actual ties:
‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience. […]
‘But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.’5
Second, St. John shows us that we are indeed obliged to give succor to those whom we see, which we can understand as anyone before us who is in distress, on an individual basis, whether they are natives or citizens, or not. This is why, in reference to the Last Judgment, Our Lord refers to himself as a stranger who was or was not taken in, and this is the clear message of the parable of the Good Samaritan.
However, while noting that almsgiving from one’s surplus is a matter of strict justice, St. Thomas makes it clear that it is normally wrong to deprive oneself and one’s dependents of what is necessary for the sake of imprudent “charity”:
A thing is necessary in two ways: first, because without it something is impossible, and it is altogether wrong to give alms out of what is necessary to us in this sense; for instance, if a man found himself in the presence of a case of urgency, and had merely sufficient to support himself and his children, or others under his charge, he would be throwing away his life and that of others if he were to give away in alms, what was then necessary to him.6
It should be clear that what applies to the man in St. Thomas’s example above also applies to the rulers of civil society. They can no more be obliged “to give alms” to strangers, in the form of residency rights, jobs, handouts, citizenship or anything else, whilst neglecting the legitimate rights of their “children,” the individuals and families of which society is constituted. They are simply giving away that which is not theirs to give.
This is expressed with even greater force by Our Lord Jesus Christ himself, who said to the non-Jewish Syro-Phoenician woman:
I was not sent but to the sheep, that are lost of the house of Israel. […]
It is not good to take the bread of the children, and to cast it to the dogs. (Matt. 15.24, 26).
Thus, the Word Incarnate himself affirms the principle, whilst also showing us that we may have exceptional duties to individuals.
Fundamental rights of man in society
While man may be a part of civil society, civil society exists for the sake of man, as Pope Pius XI explains in his 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris:
God has likewise destined man for civil society according to the dictates of his very nature. In the plan of the Creator, society is a natural means which man can and must use to reach his destined end. Society is for man and not vice versa.
This must not be understood in the sense of liberalistic individualism, which subordinates society to the selfish use of the individual; but only in the sense that by means of an organic union with society and by mutual collaboration the attainment of earthly happiness is placed within the reach of all.
In a further sense, it is society which affords the opportunities for the development of all the individual and social gifts bestowed on human nature. These natural gifts have a value surpassing the immediate interests of the moment, for in society they reflect the divine perfection, which would not be true were man to live alone.
But on final analysis, even in this latter function, society is made for man, that he may recognize this reflection of God’s perfection, and refer it in praise and adoration to the Creator. Only man, the human person, and not society in any form is endowed with reason and a morally free will. (n. 29)
Pope Pius XI lists a series of rights which God has given to man, including:
The right to life
The right to bodily integrity
The right to the necessary means of existence
The right to move towards his ultimate goal in the path marked out by God
The right of association
The right to possess and to use property.7
These rights exist because man has a corresponding duty to use them in the pursuit of his end—eternal happiness.
In debates over immigration, the right to the necessary means of existence, as well as the right to possess and to use property, are of particular importance.
Here, “the right to the necessary means of existence” includes the ability for a man to provide for a family on one salary, and for this provision to be decent—for example, food which is not full of the nearly ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup.
Property refers to modest ownership of that which is productive and/or essential (e.g., land, tools, house). It does not refer to non-essential luxuries. High-tech and expensive gadgets, which are often much cheaper than productive or essential property, are not what the pope has in view here.
The rulers of civil society have a duty to safeguard these rights, to ensure conditions in which these goods can be attained, to prevent conditions arising which jeopardise them, and to remedy the situation if the latter occurs.
Once again, the reason man has rights to these goods is to assist him in attaining the end for which he was created.
These essential goods could be summarized under the heading of “public prosperity,” which Cahill defines as “the sum of the helps and facilities, which are required in order to place private prosperity within the reach of all.” He adds: “Public prosperity is what the State has to provide for the citizens.”8
This has great significance for matters such as immigration, as well as differing duties towards citizens and non-citizens.
Prosperity and the problem of immigration
As discussed above, the State is ordered towards achieving that public prosperity which enables ordinary private prosperity for men and families and thus allows them to achieve their proper ends.
This was the topic of the social encyclicals of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, which were dealing with what was called “the social question.”
This “social question” pertained to a series of obstacles by which unchecked capitalism was driving large swathes of society into a new kind of poverty, in which they lacked even the good enjoyed by the peasantry of pre-industrial society.
Following the Reformation and Industrial Revolution, productive property and land had been progressively removed from the general citizenry. These men now found themselves uprooted and within the “working class,” which was little more than a paid slave class for a minority of wealthy men, who were then (as now) unmoored from a clear sense of natural duty (let alone Christian duty).
This “social question” was made especially urgent due to the false solutions offered by socialism and communism.
Pope Leo XIII painted a bleak—but familiar—picture in Rerum Novarum:
[S]ome opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion.
By degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.
The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men.
To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. (n. 3)
The purpose of the social encyclicals was to call the leaders of civil society to act in such a way that defended the citizenry from forces enriching themselves, at the expense of the common good and the temporal happiness of society—the very aims for which civil society exists.
The question that must be asked by civil rulers—and it should be the Catholic hierarchy that is asking them—is whether mass immigration and open borders furthers those aims or undermines them.
Duties of the virtue of patriotism
As mentioned above, civil society is not something separate to and above the individuals and families which make it up. It just is the union of those parts, ordered towards the temporal happiness of the community.
Patriotism is normally distinguished by Catholic authors from “nationalism,” and is understood to be related to charity and to the virtue of piety. St. Thomas explains that piety refers primarily to God, our parents and to our country, and clarifies the latter:
The worship due to our parents includes the worship given to all our kindred, since our kinsfolk are those who descend from the same parents, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. viii, 12).
The worship given to our country includes homage to all our fellow-citizens and to all the friends of our country.9 (Emphasis added)
The idea that civil society is primarily made up of kindred—that is, those who descend from the same parents—is foreign to many today. But the truth is that the rulers of civil society are just as bound by the same duties of piety, patriotism and justice as are those whom they have been chosen to rule.
This has significant implications for the duties of rulers, including in matters regarding immigration policy.
Cahill points out that these duties “so deeply affect the well-being of the citizens,” they are “specially grave obligations.”10
Duties of rulers towards the citizens
As discussed above, the state is ordered towards achieving that public prosperity which enables ordinary private prosperity for men and families, and thus allowing them to achieve their proper ends.
Following these social encyclicals, Catholic teaching holds that the rulers of civil society, whilst being free to select the means, are obliged to protect the fundamental rights of its citizens, which include the right to improve their situation and not be enslaved by unchecked capitalism.
For the same reason, they are obliged to avoid adopting policies and practices—or tolerating situations and forces—that jeopardize the attainment of these ends.
The first of these duties is to observe the precepts of the natural and divine law, including the laws of the civil society’s constitution, as well as to avoid feathering their own nests and acting for personal advantage.
However, the duties continue. The rulers of society are to safeguard the nation in various ways, including the territory against hostile invasion, as well as industry through hostile infiltration by foreign interests:
We have already referred to the duty of the government to provide for national defence. Under the same heading comes its duty of preserving the integrity of the State and safeguarding its territory not merely against hostile armies, but (what is no less dangerous) against the peaceful penetration of foreign capitalists and syndicates.
Hence, it is an elementary duty of the government of a State to safeguard for the people of the State the territorial waters, the land, the mines, the harbours, the fisheries, the waterways, the mills, the railways, etc., and prevent their coming under foreign control.11
He continues, applying these duties to the industries:
The same applies to the industries. For a State may suffer disintegration or lose its freedom no less really by economic than by military conquest. In fact, the disintegration which the States suffers by losing control of its fisheries, harbours, mines, mills, etc., is possibly a much more serious evil than the complete loss of a certain province whose people may find their material well-being as well cared under the new State to which they are assigned.
But when alien control succeeds in penetrating into the bosom of the State, the public good and well-being of the whole nation is gravely imperilled; and a way is opened for the enslavement of the people by foreign financiers, or even by a foreign State.12
There are many other duties imposed upon the civil authority, but they all come back to the same point, which is that they have a duty to act for the common good of the individuals and families of which civil society is constituted.
This duty is the very raison d’être of civil society itself, and so it must necessarily be discharged before the authorities can begin looking to bestow what is due to their own native people on non-natives.
Mass immigration as an injustice to civil society itself
The situation expressed by Leo XIII continues today.
There is a widespread inability of working people to own their own homes, to accumulate productive property, or to support a family on a single wage.13
While such a situation continues, it is a grave dereliction of duty for civil authorities to be turning their attention to strangers. This is made worse when we consider that this attention—particularly in the form of welcoming large numbers of migrants into a country—aggravates the problems of civil society, by increasing the supply of cheap labor and the driving up the demand for housing and property.
This aggravation is gravely immoral, even if the rulers intend to act for the alleged common good of the international community, or for the private good of the migrants and other non-members of the particular civil society.
The problem is not resolved by admitting these non-members into society as citizens. A piece of paper declaring that a non-native is a citizen does not address the issues raised by St. Thomas above, and its effect on the value of citizenship is comparable to devaluing the currency through printing money.
Conclusion: Internationalism—an ‘unholy doctrine’
We should conclude by noting that some laxer immigration policies are not only crimes against civil society itself—which is nothing other than the union of citizens, who are being wronged and neglected by the authorities responsible for their care.
They are also manifestly part of an ideological agenda against the very existence and concept of civil society itself.
This fact is clear from the arguments made in favor of such policies.
Some arguments may pay lip service to the idea of patriotism, but in fact they replace the idea of a nation with that of a different kind of society—one that is artificial and atomized, and in which the existing parts are interchangeable with parts from elsewhere. This is a denial of the etymology of the word nation itself, whose etymology, as we have already seen, is related to birth and carries a sense of shared ancestry amongst kinsfolk.
However, it is more common to hear arguments based on a denial of the natural reality of the nation, and a rejection of “constructs” such as borders and nationality.
In 1896, Fr. Francis-Xavier Godts explained how this “internationalist” hostility to the idea of the nation and patriotism represents a hatred of country, and an “unholy doctrine” opposed to both nature and religion:
Just as the nature of God is charity or love, so that of Socialism is hatred—hatred towards the earthly country… whose very name they desire to blot out; hatred especially towards the heavenly country, the hope and knowledge of which they are striving to filch away from the unhappy laborers in this land of exile.
Hence, the Socialists reject the national flag which each country has made its own; and they adopt instead a red flag, the symbol of death and destruction. Hence, too, they take the name of ‘Internationalists,’ boasting that they have no country and no fellow-countrymen…
Their unholy doctrine is as much opposed to nature as it is to religion.14
Whilst also rejecting exaggerated notions of nationalism, the Thomistic philosopher Fr Henri Grenier wrote against the tendency of the “unholy doctrine” of internationalism, and explained the right of citizens and nations to preserve their existence:
Every nation, or every considerable part of a nation, has a right to self-preservation within the civil society of which it forms a part.—A good of citizens, and especially a good which is anterior to the existence of civil society, has a right to self- preservation within civil society. But nationality is a good of citizens which is anterior to the existence of civil society. Therefore.
Major. It is the duty of civil society to protect and foster, not to abolish, whatever appertains to the good of its citizens.
Minor. Experience and the very notion of the nation, which is unity in certain qualities, have shown that nationality is a good of citizens. Moreover, it is evident that nationality is a good which is anterior to the existence of civil society: it has its origin in a common stock, and hence properly belongs to men before they become members of civil society.15
All this points to an inexorable conclusion. Instead of virtue signalling and repeating trendy left-wing talking points, which are intended to destroy civil society, and to atomize and homogenize humanity (ironically to the benefit of a globalist capitalist minority), the hierarchy of the Conciliar/Synodal Church would be better served reading the social encyclicals, and finding ways to help our civil rulers fight the social evils of our day.
Let these supposed shepherds advocate for an economic climate in which a working man of their own native population may earn “a wage sufficient to support him and his family,”16 without his wife working17—a wage which Pope Pius XI said was “due in strict justice” to all working men.18
Let them help to minimise the obstacles impeding the native population from owning their own homes, accessing decent standards of food and accruing property in a modest way.19 If there are resources to be bestowed, they should be bestowed on rectifying these social inequalities suffered by the native citizenry.
These are the duties imposed by Catholic social teaching, necessary for the restoration of a societal environment in which man can pursue the ultimate and eternal end for which he was created.
The fact that this supposed hierarchy does not do this—and instead cites Pius XII, without regard for common sense, or the limiting factors he acknowledges—tells us everything we need to know about them.
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Such is the positive task, embracing at once theory and practice, which the Church undertakes in virtue of the mission, confided to her by Christ, of constructing a Christian society, and, in our own times, of resisting unto victory the attacks of Communism. It is the duty of the Christian State to concur actively in this spiritual enterprise of the Church, aiding her with the means at its command, which although they be external devices, have nonetheless for their prime object the good of souls.
Pius XI: 73.
E. Cahill SJ, The Framework of a Christian State, p 591. M.H. Gill & Son. Ltd, Dublin, 1932.
Similarly, the family enjoys rights to everything necessary for its proper ends, including:
The right to the indissolubility and unity of marriage
The right to determine the particular means to achieve its proper ends (with due subordination to civil society and its laws)
Cahill, 464.
Cahill, 499
Cahill, 500
Ibid.
Regarding the latter, Pope Pius XI writes in Quadragesimo Anno:
71. In the first place, the worker must be paid a wage sufficient to support him and his family. That the rest of the family should also contribute to the common support, according to the capacity of each, is certainly right, as can be observed especially in the families of farmers, but also in the families of many craftsmen and small shopkeepers.
But to abuse the years of childhood and the limited strength of women is grossly wrong. Mothers, concentrating on household duties, should work primarily in the home or in its immediate vicinity. It is an intolerable abuse, and to be abolished at all cost, for mothers on account of the father’s low wage to be forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the home to the neglect of their proper cares and duties, especially the training of children.
Every effort must therefore be made that fathers of families receive a wage large enough to meet ordinary family needs adequately. But if this cannot always be done under existing circumstances, social justice demands that changes be introduced as soon as possible whereby such a wage will be assured to every adult workingman.
In Cahill, 575.
Fr Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, Vol. III, n. 1109(3)
But to abuse the years of childhood and the limited strength of women is grossly wrong. Mothers, concentrating on household duties, should work primarily in the home or in its immediate vicinity. It is an intolerable abuse, and to be abolished at all cost, for mothers on account of the father’s low wage to be forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the home to the neglect of their proper cares and duties, especially the training of children.
n. 71
Pope Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum:
46. If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.
An erudite article for everyone's attention, particularly the episopate, priests and religious. Too many have bought into the marxist "liberation theology" without realizing what it is and how it is designed to destroy Catholic and other Christian countries.
Most today also believe a "nation" is a country with whoever lives, or wants, to live in it -- rather than understanding that a "nation" truly is the family writ large and is not to be destroyed by "do gooders".