Stop Holding Your Nose and Start Speaking Out

… I was a stranger, and you welcomed me … (Matthew 25:35 NRSVCE)

There’s an old Latin legal maxim: Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit (Whoever is silent, when he is able and ought to speak, must be seen to consent). The other side of this coin is Martin Niemöller’s haunting poem, “First they came …”. Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor and theologian, argued that he and other Germans who remained silent as the Nazis began their horrific repression and extermination of “non-Aryans” and “undesirables” rationalized their moral cowardice by saying, “This doesn’t affect me personally.”

However, many Germans liked other aspects of the early Nazi program; and so, they were willing to hold their noses or rationalize the early stages of their fascist brutality. But it was only because they were willing to tolerate the evil for the sake of what they perceived to be good about the Nazi program that the government was able to create a police state that could crush internal opposition when their evil became too gross to ignore. Denial of the rampant genocide became a matter of survival; Germans living less than 10 kilometers from death camps blocked their existence from their minds.

Eventually, they came for the Christian opposition.

I don’t intend to argue that we Americans are in immediate danger of either a fascist dictatorship or a socialist totalitarian state. Nor is it my intent to play the game, “Which Political Party Supports More or Worse Intrinsic Evils?”

I do, however, dispute the notion that we Catholics must hold our noses or our tongues about the intrinsic evils the two parties support in order to get the social or political goods we want. I dispute the use of secular ideology as a lens for interpreting—and disemboweling—the Church’s social doctrine. I dispute the incipient American heresy that doctrinal orthodoxy forces membership in a specific party. And I dispute the fallacy that party or national loyalty prevents us Catholics from criticizing the President, Congress, or the party in power for supporting or failing to denounce or correct intrinsic evils.

In the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes (On the Church in the Modern World, 1965), the Second Vatican Council unequivocally declared subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, and deportation, along with abortion and euthanasia, to be “infamies” and “supreme dishonor to the Creator” (GS 27.3). Furthermore, the Council declared that “every type of discrimination ..., whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent” (ibid., 29.2; cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 1935).

The “priority of life” principle doesn’t make offenses against human dignity tolerable, let alone laudable; as Pope Francis has said, all moral principles are non-negotiable.

Social doctrine concedes, as a practical matter, the right of nations to exercise prudent and just measures of border control. “While people have the right to move, no country has the duty to receive so many immigrants that its social and economic life are jeopardized” (USCCB, “Catholic Social Teaching on Immigration and the Movement of Peoples”). Nevertheless, the host country’s regulations “must be governed by concern for all people and by mercy and justice.” The Church also condemns policy that “criminalizes the mere attempt to immigrate and imprisons immigrants who have committed no [other] crime or who have already served a just sentence for a crime.”

When a person who is not only a citizen but an elected representative of the American people criticizes the government, especially the President, they do so by right. That right isn’t earned—not by blood, not by making so much wealth at a particular trade, not by any test of education or moral fitness. It’s granted as part of the First Amendment and comes with the duties of a Congressperson. It’s uncharitable and infantile to suggest, let alone to state as a putative fact, that naturalized citizens who criticize the government are ungrateful or motivated by hatred for our country.

Real patriotism doesn’t blind itself to the country’s faults or pretend its warts and cancer lesions are beauty marks. That’s not love—that’s idolatry.

As Catholics and as Americans, we have both the right and the duty to condemn racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry, especially when they’re used to gain votes or to justify a particular policy. Furthermore, we have the right and duty to criticize our country’s current immigration laws regardless of which party is ultimately responsible for their design and execution. This obligation applies regardless of party affiliation and can’t be dismissed by appeal to ideology. It wasn’t that long ago that our Catholic ancestors faced similar discrimination; even today, some people think “Catholic American” is a contradiction in terms.

You don’t have to be a liberal Catholic, a Democrat, or agree with anything “the Squad” stands for in order to condemn Pres. Donald Trump’s bilious, xenophobic post on Twitter essentially telling these Congresswomen to “go back to where they came from,” or his decision to double down on the attack during his campaign speech in Greenville, N.C. In fact, if you’re a practical Catholic in communion with the Holy See, you’ll not only condemn both these incidents. You’ll also condemn the failure of Congressional Republicans, the right-wing media, the mainstream pro-life movement, and Catholic pundits to call the President out for his scandalous politics.

As for our immigration policy, you don’t need to believe in “open borders” to recognize the scandalous manner in which our government has been mishandling the border crisis, a manner which begs comparison to the British government’s bungling of the Irish Great Famine of 1845-1850. Neither Javertian legalism nor victim-blaming excuses the callousness and inhumanity with which the migrants have been imprisoned; there is no moral high ground for ICE or DHS to occupy here. We must stop letting post-9/11 hypercaution and ethnic stereotypes drive our border policy.

We cannot remain silent without being seen to consent, not only by our fellow citizens but also by Christ. If it’s imperative to speak out against abortion and euthanasia, it’s equally important to speak out against racism and nativism. After all, we risk far less by speaking out than do Christians in other, more brutal regimes around the world. At least, for now. But if we don’t speak for the least of these immigrants, when it comes to our turn, who will speak for us?