The Catholic Church’s new Pope has publicly described migration as a “huge problem” even as he also urges Christians to treat migrants with respect.
“It’s a huge problem, and it’s a problem worldwide, not only in this country. There’s got to be a way both to solve the problem, but also treat people with respect,” then-Cardinal Robert Prevost preached in a Catholic Mass, according to an undated video:
His comments recognized both the Catholic Church’s universalist and idealist perspective and the practical management problem facing elected secular governments:
Both the first [Old Testament] reading and the [New Testament] Gospel make very clear a message which Pope Francis has been hammering home time and again since his very first trip as Pope, when he went to this little community, an [Mediterranean] island town of Lampedusa, where all these immigrants continue to come.
It’s a huge problem, and it’s a problem worldwide, not only in this country. There’s got to be a way both to solve the problem, but also treat people with respect.
Every one of us, whether we were born in the United States of America or on the North Pole, we all are given a gift of being created in the image and likeness of God, and the day we forget that is the day we forget who we are. We forget who Christ has called us to be.
These two-sided comments are far more nuanced than the prior Pope’s loud support for mass migration into Europe’s increasingly chaotic and violent societies.
For example, the recently deceased Pope Francis declared that building barriers to migration is “not Christian.” He told a group of mostly Muslim migrants they were “warriors of hope,” and declared that “we are all required to welcome, promote, accompany, and integrate those who knock on our doors.”
Thousands of African and Arab migrants have died while trying to reach the European welcome offered by Pope Francis — and thousands of the migrants have committed crimes against Europeans after they landed.
Despite the distance between Francis and Leo, pro-migration groups are portraying the new pope as a political ally on the issue, even though there is scant evidence he views his Catholic call for “respect” as a political call for more migration, with all of the resulting chaos, poverty, and deaths.
In recent months and years, Prevost retweeted some published op-ed criticisms of President Donald Trump’s lifesaving immigration reform policies. But those op-ed criticisms are based on a distorted view of the pro-prosperity policies promoted by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
For example, Trump’s political rhetoric paints migrants as criminals, but he also talks about the “good ones.”
“We’re doing a self-deportation [program], and we’re going to make it comfortable for people, and we’re going to work with those people to come back into our country legally — the good ones,” Trump told the Spanish-language division of Fox News in April.
Trump’s focus on migrant criminals was targeted by the former Pope Francis, who declared in February, “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”
But Vance tends to talk about the economic impact of migration, such as higher housing costs that hurt American families. In May, for example, he said the promise of cheap migrant labor is” a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation.”
“Real innovation makes us more productive, but it also, I think, dignifies our workers. It boosts our standard of living. It strengthens our workforce and the relative value of its labor,” Vance told an audience of investors.
In January, Vance sought to reconcile his personal Catholic obligation of respect for everyone with his government duty as Vice President to help Americans, saying:
There is a Christian concept [Ordo amoris, or “Order of love” 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.
The “Ordo amoris” comment was attacked by universalist-minded, left-leaning clergy, including pro-migration Pope Francis.
On February 3. Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV, tweeted, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others” with a link to an article that both agreed and disagreed with Vance’s argument that people are right to show more care for people closer to them. The article said:
No, I won’t deny the complexities of immigration. But framing love as something calculated and conditional misses the heart of it entirely. Of course, we do not neglect our families. Of course, we invest in our local communities. In fact, this is how we enact the deepest change — by voting, by fighting, by pushing back against systems in place that refuse to protect the most vulnerable among us.
On February 13, Prevost followed up by tweeting a link to an article that skewed Vance’s balanced view toward mass migration. The article said:
[Saint] Paul reminds them: love starts close. It moves first toward those in front of us, ensuring widows were not abandoned while preserving the church’s resources for those truly without support. But make no mistake — this isn’t about love confined to bloodlines or geographic boundaries. It’s about love rooted in responsibility, expanding outward. And it was subversive even then.
…
No, I won’t deny the complexities of immigration. But framing love as something calculated and conditional misses the heart of it entirely. Of course, we do not neglect our families. Of course, we invest in our local communities. In fact, this is how we enact the deepest change — by voting, by fighting, by pushing back against systems in place that refuse to protect the most vulnerable among us.
But the two articles sideline politicians’ duty to aid their citizens in national democracies — and instead seek to impose the Church’s universalist ethics on a world of competing communities and democratic governments.
That unqualified pro-migration message has been pushed by some of the universalist clerics promoted by Francis, including Cardinal Dolan of New York and Cardinal McElroy of Washington, D.C.
Back in 2015, Prevost retweeted an article by Dolan which portrayed Trump’s pro-American reforms as a resurgence of “nativism” and the “Know-Nothing” party, and added:
Yes … we need to control our borders, fairly regulate immigration and be prudent in our policies and laws, but we are wise to consider the immigrant as good for our beloved nation. To welcome them is virtuous, patriotic and beneficial for the economic and cultural future of our country.
Prevost did not retweet McElroy’s comments in March, which described Trump’s policies as “a crusade which comes from the darkest parts of our American psyche and soul and history.”
“The pathway of crusade and mass deportation cannot be followed in conscience by those who call themselves disciples of Jesus Christ, and we must work to make sure that that does not happen,” McElroy said in a speech to the Jesuit Refugee Service organization in D.C.
Regardless of McElroy’s criticism, Trump was democratically elected to carry out those life-saving, pro-prosperity policies and continues to have strong support despite vehement opposition from the investor-backed Democrat party. For example, a church-commissioned poll in July 2024 showed that 43 percent of 1,342 self-identified Catholics said they want less migration while just 23 percent favor more migration.
In December 2023, Dolan complained about Catholics’ opposition to mass migration, saying.
We were about ready — [with] Catholic Charities — a year ago to turn that [empty New York City] school into a school for immigrant kids, who would come in, and we’d help them with their English. We would help them get up to speed when it comes to their eventual insertion into one of our schools … And the people in that parish … rebelled and said, “Absolutely not, we will not have them here.
“This is part of our Catholic responsibility to do this …I am honored to receive criticism and to be maligned for defense of the immigrant,” Dolan said.
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