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This past February, President Biden referred to the tsunami of current migrants as “newcomers.” A euphemism that normalizes illegal migration, it was a cue for Catholic voters. The word was the brainchild of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). It appeared in the 2024 USCCB document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility.”

The Gospel mandate to “welcome the stranger” requires Catholics to care for and stand with newcomers, authorized and unauthorized, including unaccompanied immigrant children, refugees and asylum-seekers, those unnecessarily detained, and victims of human trafficking.

Under the heading “Global Solidarity,” the USCCB conflates immigration with migration. The first is a legal process, in effect a contract between arrivals and the state. In current context, the latter term refers to illegal entry by the brute force of overwhelming numbers. Moralistic disdain for distinction between “authorized and unauthorized” entry is the core of open borders dogma.

In August, Pope Francis used the bully pulpit of St. Peter’s Square to pressure nations of the West to keep their borders open, no matter the consequence to their native populations. He presented prudent immigration restriction as a moral crime and dismissed legality. The USCCB reported:

“It needs to be said clearly: There are those who systematically work by all means to drive away migrants, and this, when done knowingly and deliberately, is a grave sin,” he said during his general audience Aug. 28.

Without irony — and short on historical sense — the USCCB continued:

Reflecting on the seas and deserts migrants many cross to reach their destinations, Pope Francis noted the biblical significance of such areas as “places of suffering, of fear, of despair, but at the same time they are places of passage to liberation, to redemption, to attaining freedom and the fulfillment of God’s promises.”

The USCCB removes the “biblical significance of sanctuary” from its cultural context in the ancient Near East in order to dress it in modern politics. James K. Hoffmeier, a leading Egyptologist and scholar of biblical archeology, lays the groundwork for understanding the tension between biblical emphasis on hospitality to sojourners and dual emphasis on requiring submission to the law of the land. As he explains, the concept of sanctuary was instituted to ameliorate the consequences of lex talionis, the law of retaliation practiced by most ancient societies.

Sanctuary in ancient Israel designated certain locations scattered about where someone who had unintentionally killed another — what we might call involuntary manslaughter — could be protected from arbitrary retaliation. A defendant could flee to a specific sanctuary and “state his case before the elders of that city” (Josh. 20:4). The purpose was to ensure a fair trial. It protected an offender from culturally admissible vigilante justice.

This idea of sanctuary, entrenched in Old Testament law, was rooted in a particular hour of history. It was devoid of modern sentimentality. Any sanctuary seeker judged guilty of malicious, deliberate murder would be expelled from the temporary haven and duly punished. By contrast, our own so-called sanctuary cities and states are wild cards that can shelter whatever ideological agenda is on the table, from illegal migration to abortion and transgender surgery.

In sum, biblical sanctuary represented a refinement of established law. Today’s sanctuary protocols, by contrast, are a partisan end-run around established law. They offer avoidance techniques that serve the utopian One-World fantasy that captivates progressive elites.

A False Moral Equivalence

That enchantment did not begin with Francis. Pope John Paul II ratified non-Western migrants and undermined U.S. immigration law on his lobbying tour in 1987. His visit to the U.S. was timed to coincide with congressional debate over bills to combat illegal immigration and the gaming of asylum codes.

Speaking in Texas, John Paul II ratified the sanctuary movement of the 1980s in which American bishops played a key role. Activists, many of them underwritten by churches, were smuggling and harboring illegal aliens from Central America. The pope repeated his endorsement of the crusade in various cities and in his meeting with President Clinton.

David Simcox, an experienced analyst of migration issues, discussed “The Pope’s Visit: Is Mass Migration a Moral Imperative?” in a 1995 essay in The Social Contract. He noted that John Paul II’s homilies increasingly implied a moral equivalence between immigration restrictions and what the pope called “The Culture of Death.” Restricted migration joined abortion as a moral crime:

The U.S. hierarchy’s creeping radicalization of church teaching on immigration blurs the distinction between the state’s first obligation to the welfare of its own citizens and the obligations it may have to all humankind. . . . National interest as a basis for immigration and population policies is deeply suspect in the hierarchy’s view. In its place the church offers a high-minded but amorphous sentiment of a global “common good . . . . ”

That sentiment was the linchpin of John Paul II’s message for World Migration Day, 2001. Under the title “The Pastoral Care of Migrants,” it proclaimed the primacy of “the concept of universal common good, which includes the whole family of peoples, beyond every nationalistic egoism.”

This is utopian boilerplate. It imprisons the rightful discussion of public policy on an abstract plane where it does not belong. Worse, it suggests that the developed West is a multinational messianic project, a redemptive font of wholesale global welfare. Love of country distracts from the “common good.”

Distortion of ‘Welcoming the Stranger’

There is nothing Christian about facilitating the erosion of national identity. John Paul II understood that in relation to Poland but did not extend recognition to the rest of the West. Nowhere is it written that God promised any people the right to gate crash another country and demand social services.

The human right to emigrate — leave one’s homeland — entails no right to enter — immigrate to — whichever country the emigrant chooses. To insist otherwise is to rob natal citizens of the fruits of their own labor (tax-supported services such as education, housing, medical care, waste collection, public safety, etc.). It cheats them, too, of the continuity of the social and historic dimensions of their own culture. The theft undermines the ethical core of our basic institutions.

“Welcoming the stranger” is a hazy, kindly-sounding motif that distorts actual behavior by ancient kingdoms. In Israel, and throughout the biblical world, territorial boundaries were closely maintained legalities: “Cursed is the man who moves his neighbor’s stone” (Deut. 27:17).

By enshrining anarchic migration — distinct from legal immigration — the Catholic hierarchy encourages an entitlement mentality among migrants: “You owe me!” The cult of open borders justifies the claim on services by foreigners who disregard the law of the land from which they seek benefits.

Open-border zealotry denies moral responsibility to those failed or malfunctioning nations from which migrants come. The USCCB garlands itself in a paternalism that displaces the patriotism — love of country — that St.Thomas Aquinas includes under the virtue of justice.

Maureen Mullarkey is a painter and a critic. A member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), she writes on art and its intersection with religious and politics. Her essays have appeared in various publications, including The Nation, The Hudson Review, Arts Magazine, Art & Antiques, and The American Arts Quarterly. She was a columnist for The New York Sun during its life as a print publication. Currently, she is a senior contributor to The Federalist, an irregular contributor to The Weekly Standard, and keeper of a weblog titled Studio Matters. She is represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC. Follow her on Twitter, @mmletters.