“To intrude on the right to fulfill our duties to God is a grave judgment that must be guided by prudence rather than the political winds.”
This is one take on the immigration debate I haven’t seen before, from Bishop Kevin Rhoades, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty.
From OSV News:
Reports have emerged of migrant communities who are scared to go to church. There have even been reports of arrests during worship services. While a raid on church property may not be a legal threat to religious liberty in every circumstance, it is certainly a moral one.
People have a duty to offer worship to God. Religious freedom protects the rights of persons to carry out their obligations, ensuring that individuals and communities can fulfill their most sacred duty. The government has its own duties. It ought to ensure a just public order and promote the common good. And the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption” (CCC, No. 2241).
The government has a right and responsibility to regulate international borders and to enforce just immigration laws, including for the protection of existing residents, be they citizens or otherwise.
At the same time, the government’s enforcement of the law cannot come at the expense of human life or without respect for each person’s God-given dignity because the “civil law must ensure that all members of society enjoy respect for certain fundamental rights which innately belong to the person, rights which every positive law must recognize and guarantee” (Evangelium Vitae, No. 71).
While accommodating migration undertaken to preserve human life is a responsibility shared by all countries, the church has recognized that more prosperous nations are “obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin” (CCC, No. 2241).
Put another way, migrants ought to respect the law and culture of the country that receives them, but at the same time, “[p]olitical authorities are obliged to respect the fundamental rights of the human person” (CCC, No. 2237), including the natural right to migrate when “there are just reasons in favor of it” (Pacem in Terris, No. 25).
One of those fundamental rights is the right to religious freedom. To be sure, the right to religious freedom is fundamental but not absolute. Governments may justly limit it for compelling reasons, and by no more than is necessary. But to intrude on the right to fulfill our duties to God is a grave judgment that must be guided by prudence rather than the political winds.
