Well, the pope has spoken. And the Church has lost its ever-loving mind.
The role of the pope is one of the most well-known aspects of Catholicism. By this point in history, one could probably ask any Protestant to summarize it and get an answer that’s in the ballpark. He’s a sort of universal pastor. The chief, most authoritative teacher. The one who keeps us on the tracks. When he speaks, therefore—we resent him, contradict him, and impugn his moral character.
Of course, I broad-brush. But it’s hardly a secret that, in the Church in the United States, patience with the vicar of Christ is thin. Reverence for him, in many quarters, is practically threadbare. And even where these qualities survive, hardly anyone claims to understand him.[1] One of our best outlets has written that his recent missive to the US bishops is “closer to a papal hot take—long on broad strokes and short on either nuance or persuasive detail—than to a usefully substantive contribution to a heated and complicated debate.”[2]
So it seems that, since this is the blog of an American institution devoted to political theology, I ought to say a few words, as best I may, in explanation of the Holy Father’s American foray into the field.[3] He had ten numbered points; I will give only five.
A first observation is that—contrary to almost all commentary—the letter is not directly about politics. It says absolutely not one word prescribing or condemning political policies or actions. Some will accuse me of willfulness and sophistry here, of being too clever by half. I can only plead in my defense that the thing is observably true. And, indeed, its truth can be seen from the commentary itself. The general claim is that the pope has left it vague and unknowable what political course of action, exactly, he’s endorsing. Is that not good evidence that he does not, in fact, put forward any specific policy? And if he does not, isn’t the easiest explanation that he didn’t mean to?
A second observation is that the letter clearly states its own topic and concern. It is a letter not to the politicians of the United States or the people of the United States—but to the “bishops of the United States.” Specifically, the Holy Father has addressed it to the bishops “as Pastors of the People of God which journeys in the United States of America” (#1).[4] That is, it is a pastoral letter: directed to those who, being pastors, oversee the corporate spiritual life of the Church in the United States as she moves through time and (hopefully) grows. Obviously, it is concerned with American society and the contemporary global moment—but it is concerned with them indirectly, as things that depend on the life and health of the Church. The letter’s first concern is with the “People of God” in the United States, and with her “journey.” Because the Church exists in time, current events unavoidably impinge on her corporate spiritual life, just as everything that goes on in our lives impinges on our individual spiritual life. It is from this perspective—as an event affecting the spiritual life of the US Church and, indirectly, of US society—that the pope is concerned “with the initiation of a program of mass deportations” (#4).
Third, such an event has an intrinsic link to corporate spiritual life. He gives two reasons why this is so.
The first is that immigration is both closely tied to the mystery of Christ and “clearly mark[s]” “the reality of our time” (#1). Christ, both by willing to become man as a refugee (##1–2) and by “loving everyone with a universal love” (#3), demonstrates that there is no way to be close to Him without attending to the needy—particularly to the “stranger,” the one who does not belong to your society. So, in this moment in history, “so clearly marked” by immigration, there is a special convergence between Christian life and social life: living in this time requires us to deal with immigration, and living as a Christian requires us to find Christ in the migrant. We are being asked to “reaffirm ... our faith” in God-made-man in the very act of affirming the human dignity of migrants (#1). But this is not to say anything, as yet, about what concretely we should do. Nor is it to say anything about the rights of societies and cultures (a topic we’ll return to in a moment). It is only to say that our times have brought one particular Christian mystery to the fore, by the very practicalities of history, in a way that we cannot miss. If we miss it, our spiritual life will suffer, and our times will suffer too.
The second is that the human being is relational because of his openness to universal truth. This point lies very close to the center of Pope Francis’s thought. It is actually more central than the previous point, despite that the previous one looks, on the face of it, more “religious.” “The human person is not a mere individual,” he writes. Rather, the human person has a “constitutive relationship with all” (#6). If one wishes to understand how Francis thinks, the significance of this phrase cannot be underestimated. In the Middle Ages, theologians said that the human being, because he has a spiritual nature, is “capax totius”: he “takes in the whole.” It is this that allows man to perceive the natures of things and to treat them as they really are; and this, at the same time, binds him to all beings: to all men and to the whole cosmos. Being human means taking in, and being responsible to, all reality without exception. Only in doing this is man true to his being; only in doing this “can [he] gradually mature in his identity and vocation.”
What does this have to do with immigration? Francis, in a maneuver that characterizes the whole bent of his mind and spirituality, writes that man has a “constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest” (#6). This may seem a paradox, but there’s an iron logic to it. It is precisely in attending to those who are inconvenient to him, to those he could most easily exclude from his awareness (the poorest—or, as Francis writes in another paragraph, “the most fragile, unprotected, and vulnerable” [#5]), that man ensures he really is open to the whole. This is his guarantee that he is attending to natures, to truth, as such—and not merely to what is pleasant to him. If I close myself off to the value of even one human being, however “marginal,” can my love for anyone else really be motivated by their value? Value itself ceases to be what really matters; what matters—at least in effect—is what I would like, and my ability to create a world to my liking. Truth, precisely as universal and objective, speaks through the insignificant. In its absence, we cannot avoid taking up instead some “ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth” (#7). A way of behaving that involves “the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others” removes the possibility of “authentic rule of law” (#5), leaving us without any stable ground “to regulate life in society” (#3).
It is worth reemphasizing that this principle lies very close to the heart of Pope Francis’s whole spirituality and way of thinking. St. John Paul the Great had an especial insight into how the “life issues” are a sort of sacrament, through which the truth that God is Creator remains living and active in society. His defenses of them were not “moralism,” but real spirituality: a warning against “concrete and practical denial of the living God.”[5] In a similar way, Pope Francis’s intuition attunes him to fraternity, communion. He perceives that if man closes off his unrestricted openness to the world, he closes himself off to God. He grasps even the issue of abortion through this lens, as can be seen in his frequent comparison of abortion to “hiring a hitman to solve a problem”: an archetypal example of trying to create an ideal world for oneself by violating the dignity of someone inconvenient. This is undoubtedly one of the architectonic ideas of his pontificate.
One can begin to see why he should view “the initiation of a program of mass deportations” as an “important crisis” [6] in the spiritual life of the country (#4). It has nothing to do with deportation being in itself wrong. In an interview with American media in the past year (we quickly forget), the pope said "The migrant has to be received. Thereafter you see how you are going to deal with him. Maybe you have to send him back, I don’t know, but each case ought to be considered humanely.”[7] Nor does it have anything to do with whether or not deportation is especially called for now. I should think anyone who looks at the situation can tell that unrestrained immigration to the United States, especially over the past several years, has begun to destabilize certain communities, and is proving a challenge to the rule of law (not least to the enforcement of worker’s rights in regard to the migrants themselves)—in addition to encouraging human trafficking and drug smuggling. Still, the point remains: mass deportations, as such, whatever their justification, carry an inherent risk of causing us to see and act with a hard heart—refashioning reality to suit us, the dignity of others be damned. Indeed, it is precisely when there are good reasons for deportations and when society broadly has lost its patience that the vital principle—which remains true always and everywhere—is at most risk of being lost in the shuffle. It is this that makes the situation, as the pope says, “delicate” (#1).
My fourth observation is that the pope is much less concerned with concrete acts than with the spiritual state of the heart. We’ve already remarked that he says nothing at all about concrete acts. What does he talk about instead? Universal brotherhood, acknowledgment of which guarantees our contact with the truth, and Christ’s presence in the migrant (as we have seen); and—quite significantly—“meditati[on]” (#6). I think he is choosing his words carefully when he insists, twice, that we should be meditating on a passage from the Gospel—once going so far as to say that we should be “meditating constantly” on it. “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” (#6).
This passage has been criticized for vagueness; for not telling us what we should hold or what we should do. But is it not possible that it says exactly what it means to? Hold the principles of the tradition, yes: but understand them and live them in a way that springs from meditation on the Gospel. The pope is not putting forward some novel ordering of loves; he is not (of course) contradicting Aquinas. It is obvious we have particular duties to those most closely bound to us. But the whole ordo is exactly an order of love—no one in it, however far away, is at any moment excluded from love. Our love must remain awake and universal, must remain the alert, informing principle—or the whole ordo is loveless, and worthless to us. This is the key point we must not allow ourselves to forget.
It is worth pausing over this a moment. Were Christianity an ideology, correct ideas and schematically correct actions would constitute a Christlike life. But, as the New Testament constantly insists, Christianity is no schema. It is a living relationship of faith: an act of trust and openness to God, that grows through responding in all the different moments of a life. I will not retread the basics of St. Paul here. I will only stress that the spirit animates the letter. For this reason, a pope is not only a teacher. Indeed, he is not principally a teacher. He is principally a sanctifier: a pastor, a guide. He “defends the faith” by watching over not only the letter but (above all) the spirit. Francis famously hates casuistry: the reduction of moral action to a “rule to follow,” cutting it off from the actual living of life. He is not concerned to tell us what to do; he does not know our circumstances. The responsive, well-disciplined heart will find the just measure. He is concerned to remind us of a key principle without which no true corporate life of any kind is possible, and to remind us to keep our hearts awake to it by keeping ourselves face-to-face with Christ in the Gospel.
The pope, then, is not speaking in code. He is not obscurely and snidely hinting at his preferred “policy.” Is it so inconceivable, really, that someone—the vicar of Christ, no less—could be concerned primarily with the spirit without which any policy is illegitimate? (“If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing,” says St. Paul.) The Left and the Right alike read him as slyly telegraphing his political dictates to us: as though we all know what “meditating on the good Samaritan” really means. (The only difference being that the Left cheers it and the Right bewails it.) Surely this is shallowness of mind. The spirit exists—the letter is not all. The Holy Father, moreover, is hardly shy about making direct statements. It seems most credible he has made the “political” statement he wished to make.
That is: There is no Christian politics sustained solely by principles. It must—in whatever form it takes—be constantly vivified by our actual, living relation to God. It is not a system or a state-of-affairs but a living thing, a breathing whole. Politics, if it be Christian, is always a matter of spirituality.
Fifth and lastly, what he says is intended not to dismiss American concerns in this historical moment but to help America flourish as America. He goes out of his way to stress that what he is saying “does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration” (#5) and that “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” (#4). Likewise, he underscores—as he has said on numerous occasions—that a proper approach “integrates” migrants (#5). He knows that prudence is necessary in dealing with migration,[8] and opposes that which “has a levelling effect on cultures, diminishing the immense variety which is the heritage of all humanity.”[9] Yet there is a fruitful way, and a destructive way, of being concerned about cultural preservation. He says near the end of the letter—as we have already quoted in part—that “worrying about personal, community, or national identity, apart from these considerations” (that is, the considerations we’ve been laying out here), “easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth” (#7). This entails, however, that with these considerations concern for national identity stays in touch with the truth. And indeed he says as much: “it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity ... as communities reaches its maturity” (#6). That is, the pope is reminding us of the spirituality by which one reaches conclusions well, so that current American concerns may prove fruitful and not destructive.
To summarize, in conclusion: the Holy Father has written to the pastors of our country, in a time of serious potential strife, recalling to their minds the spiritual things they should not allow the “People of God” here to forget, so that the current moment in our “journey” may, both spiritually and socially, end well for us. The problem at which he takes aim is not this or that action—which may be theoretically just—but the very real possibility (at least) of enmity. The problem to which he directs himself is the powerful tendency to forget that all men, wherever they are in the ordo, are our brothers. His concluding prayer makes plain his key concern: “May the ‘Virgen morena,’ who knew how to reconcile peoples when they were at enmity, grant us all to rediscover each other as brothers and sisters” (#10).[10]
* * *
Having concluded, I should like to (briefly) begin again, and tie all this back to where I began: our almost pervasive exasperation with the pope.
Were I the Holy Father’s editor, I would have recommended revisions to the letter—because, as it stands, it is not really well-calibrated to be understood by an American audience. But we must remember that what we most need from the pope is not clarity (though every bit helps) but authority. In a very real sense, the value of the pope lies in simply his being above us.
The whole of Christian life is rooted in faith: which comes from above, “from hearing.” And faith is not a one-and-done event—as though having received the contents of the faith, we can go on our way, no longer needing to rely on God. No. Faith is a permanent, ongoing receptive relation to God, like a son to a father. This is the essential content of the faith, and the soul of all the other “contents.” This relation of faith takes visible form in the Church as the relation between the faithful and the hierarchy. We are continually receptive to the hierarchy; this is what keeps faith alive and ensures that it is real. Our relation to God is mediated through the sacrament of the Church—“a sign and instrument ... of communion with God.”[11] Or, as Christ put it, “He who hears you hears me” (Luke 10:16).
So, what most matters when the pope speaks—before even the content of what he says, which may be more or less clear, more or less wise or helpful—is the response we owe to it. The pope exists to ensure that our faith remains faith, that it preserves at its heart the receptive attitude of a son. However insufficient his words may be, we are bound by the very mystery of faith to approach them, most fundamentally, with docility and hospitality: seeking to find something in them, coming from outside us and our ideas, that does us good.
This is not a novel opinion of my own. It is the essence of authority, recognized throughout the world:
For the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pope Francis’ messages during his four-day trip were no ordinary speeches.
In Congolese culture, as in other African cultures, the discourse of a chief is seen as having a kind of mystical power. That’s why a chief’s speech is always preceded by rituals and dance, because it is expected to bring life-changing effects.[12]
If we cannot welcome with hospitality the words of the pope above us, it is doubtful we can welcome the stranger “below” us. It is doubtful whether we can really listen to anyone who tells us what we do not want to hear. Indeed, it is doubtful whether it is God we worship—or ourselves.
This is not a matter of “accepting” any old proposition, as though the faith were continually up for grabs. Of course not. (And don’t listen to anyone who says so.) It is a matter, again, of spirituality: of the definitional attitude of faith.
The whole Christian life rests on living faith. All Christian action—Christian politics, too—is most of all a matter of living faith. It is not absurd, then, to say—even though he is not dictating to us what to do—that the whole viability of Christian politics depends on submission to the pope.
Well: it is an examination of conscience, at least. In the words of St. Paul: “let any one who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor 10:12).
Notes
I count exactly one article that claims to, and does, understand him: Father Raymond J. de Souza, “Pope Francis’ Unprecedented Letter to US Bishops Stresses an Open Heart, Not an Open Border,” National Catholic Register, February 12, 2025, www.ncregister.com/commentaries/de-souza-open-heart-not-open-border-pope-francis-letter.
Ed. Condon, “ ‘Fraternally Francis’: Does a papal ‘hot take’ on immigration help?,” The Pillar, February 12, 2025, www.pillarcatholic.com/p/fraternally-francis-does-a-papal.
See Pope Francis, “Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America” (February 10, 2025). In-text citations are to the paragraphs of this letter.
I have had to correct the Vatican’s translation, which adds a word here (“together”), misrepresents Pueblo as plural, and misses the force of camina by rendering it “walks.”
See the notes of Benedict XVI to this effect in Georg Gänswein with Saverio Gaeta, Who Believes Is Not Alone: My Life Beside Benedict XVI (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2023), ch. 8.
The Spanish says “importante crisis,” which can be rendered “major crisis” but need not be. I think such a rendering obscures his point, making it sound like a matter of scale or gravity instead of a matter of significance.
It was his interview with Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes. See Father Raymond J. de Souza, “Pope Francis and ‘60 Minutes’: 4 Clear Noes and 1 Clear Yes,” National Catholic Register, May 23, 2024, www.ncregister.com/commentaries/pope-francis-and-60-minutes-de-souza.
See Pope Francis, “In-Flight Press Conference from Sweden to Rome,” November 1, 2016, www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2016/november/documents/papa-francesco_20161101_svezia-conferenza-stampa.html.Gaudium et Spes, 14.
Laudato Si’ 144.
The Vatican translator has rendered the key word in this sentence, reencontrarnos, as “meet again,” which makes the whole thing sound like a wish from the pope that he’ll see the US bishops on their ad limina—and renders it almost unintelligible.
Lumen Gentium 1.
Antoine Roger Lokongo, quoted in “For Congolese Catholics, Pope Francis’ words had real power,” The Pillar, February 6, 2023, www.pillarcatholic.com/p/for-congolese-catholics-pope-francis-words-had-real-power.