An Open Letter to Francis, Bishop of Rome

On Your Letter on Mass Deportations to the Bishops in the United States

To Francis, Bishop of Rome, and through him to the Bishops in the United States

I admit that I have no standing before you. I pray for the day when I can live in visible unity with you as you occupy the seat of St Peter, the office of unity in the church. Unfortunately, this seems farther away after your letter on mass deportations to the bishops in the United States.

My heart is not closed to migrants. I lived for 25 years with those who escaped the genocides in Sudan and Cambodia, the horrible earthquake in Haiti, and the civil war in the Congo. I can tell you stories of their suffering and the depravation of those both in their home land and here. I honor their resilience and courage. At the same time, I watched the corrosive effects of the United States tear at their families, children, and traditional cultures. If you think that the United States represents freedom, I would ask that you also recognize how such an account of freedom devastates those who come from non-liberal cultures. One of the curious absences from your letter was the voice of the displaced. The letter seems more like a statement on the national common good of the United States. It is more nuanced than many have credited to it. Yet it seems to lack much.

The concrete life of migrants as human beings who leave their homeland behind seems missing. A vital body of Christ who engages in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy seems displaced in order to address the bishops as those with access to national policy makers. Post-WWII documents by the United Nations replace the Sermon on the Mount. “Affirming human dignity” replaces feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick, visiting prisoners, burying the dead, giving alms to the poor. Such abstraction seems not to honor the Congolese boy and his family whose father carried him bleeding from a gunshot wound in a refugee camp. I mourned as this young boy moved from feeding the hungry in the United States to working as a transsexual prostitute in Los Angeles. That was the freedom offered to him here.

You mention one mass deportation. You call on the bishops to resist such a policy for a temporal good that also enfolds the migrant. I honestly don’t know, nor do I have the expertise to make a judgement on whether deportation hurts or helps the common good of both those in the United States and those who were deported to the United States. I once was a friend with a person who wrote his PhD on the economics of immigration. He argued that migration had a negative economic effect on the “sending countries.” The cost involved in the migration meant that only the middle class could migrate. A social gap between the poor, who do not have resources to migrate, and the wealthy, who had no cause to migrate, opened. Local social fabrics suffered. Migration to the United States, particularly illegal migration who have no legal protections can devastate those who move into a liberal societies from traditional societies. Perhaps it is a good for some; my experience suggests that international development at home would better serve the common good of the migrants.

These migrants now encounter their second deportation. The statistics that I have seen suggest that the federal government of the United States has already massively deported those to the United States for their own political and economic end. What has been the cost to those home societies? What has been the cost to those who were deported to the United States? What has been the cost to low wage workers in the United States? Have you inquired about the well-being of these and their families as a result of the first deportation? Have you inquired about the flourishing of those in the home country as a result of this first deportation. How has this first deportation impacted the host societies? Migrations raise so many questions that remain open, at least to my awareness.

I looked in vain in your letter for your pastoral guidance for those whose temporal end opens into their final end in the Triune God. You never called parishes to open their churches to house the homeless or feed the hungry. While you speak of the dignity of the human beings, this dignity remains abstract, even artificial. As we have found in the last 80 years, human right language does little actual ethical work in the world. Direct Christian witness becomes reduced to bureaucratic lobbying efforts by the bishops. The mystical body of Christ becomes reduced to one more lobbying group “to take a position” within a complicated question of the temporal good.

I have no real expertise in the issues related to migrations. I know very little of the ‘mass deportations’ going on-who, how, and where. I do know the brutality of the United States for those who will remain. Please do not surrender to the American exceptionalism promoted by the liberal Professional Managerial class. They have no constant interaction with those who have undergone deportation to the United States. Questions of immigration remains largely virtue signaling to them. Migrants increase professional’s income rather than competing for their jobs. They have largely benefited from the low wage, immigrant without legal protection. I remember well speaking with an African-American priest from New Orleans who bemoaned the impact of African immigrants on the African American community in the United States.

Your language about God, or rather, its absence, confused me deeply. The letter does not mention the Triune God. You call us “to reaffirm not only our faith in a God who is always close, incarnate, migrant and refugee, but also the infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person.” Perhaps such language could work, with proper context and explication. It seems, however, to merely legitimate a pre-given political-ethical decision. Perhaps you chose it because you think language about God works merely symbolically, and thus the language served the end of the policy for which you wrote. Your language about God does not represent the catholic language of the faith given to the saints in Scripture and Tradition. It stands far from the language of the Creed that I confess in the liturgy and that the faithful confess at Mass.

You anchor your argument in the “transcendent dignity of every human person,” language taken from the Constitution of the United Nations, which did not enter the languages of the bishop of Rome until Pius XII in 1952. Your references to Jesus Christ seem merely illustrative. One could remove reference to Jesus from the letter without impacting the substance of your exhortation. I do not dispute the language of the infinite dignity of every human person. But as your predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI argued, Christians cannot separate this language from Jesus Christ. As stated in Gaudium et Spes, “only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (par. 22).

This absence haunts your letter. You do not confer human dignity on migrants by the Word become flesh who gave his life that all may have eternal life. Rather, it seems that you hold that in creation, “permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being, without exception” appears for all to see. The supernatural is collapsed into the natural; nature is fully graced outside redemption in Christ and the church. The Triune God becomes an unnecessary accretion to the transcendental basis of human dignity by right of birth. Affirming human dignity replaces the concrete need of the migrants to receive the works of mercy. National policy does the work of the one, holy, catholic church in visible unity under the bishop of Rome.

The reader finds very little from Scripture or Tradition in the letter. You reference “the journey from slavery to freedom” in the Book of Exodus. In the early 2000s, mainline Protestant scholar, Walter Brueggemann, and Jewish scholar, Jon Levenson, disputed about this “journey.” Brueggemann interpreted the passage according to the liberation theology reading, “the journey from slavery to freedom.” Israel represents all humanity; Pharoah oppressive forces; “freedom” represents the negative freedom of liberalism, in which the unconstrained will may chose its own end. Levenson, in response, argued that such a reading was anti-Semitic. The liberationist reading ignores the doctrine of election. Israel escapes Egypt because God elected them. They are freed to receive the Law at Sinai. They wander in the wilderness until God leads them into the land that God promised. Levenson’s reading has a much more complete reading of the Scripture than liberation theology. The church, engrafted into the holy root of Israel, receives this election and the call to be a holy people, a kingdom of priests, even though we too must life as immigrants, as “resident aliens” toward an eternal Good. Our commonwealth is in heaven, not here on earth.

Your predecessor, Pope Pius XII, expressed empathy for the plight of the immigrant in his Apostolic Constitution on the Care of Minors. He addressed the issue of migration at the end of WWII. This “Magna Carta” argues, not for the relocation of migrants, but for the church, particularly priests and its lay and clerical orders, to accompany migrants in their suffering. You argue that “The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration;” he argues, “For the almighty and most merciful God decreed that His only Son, “being made like unto men and appearing in the form of a man,” should, together with His Immaculate Virgin Mother and His holy guardian Joseph, be in this type too of hardship and grief, the firstborn among many brethren, and precede them in it.” The shift from the will of the Father to the human will of the Jesus represents a process of liberalization, a humanism unmoored from the Incarnate Word of God. A nation-state seems the end of your concern rather than the life of the faithful.

You emphasize the abstract love of Jesus Christ, “loving everyone with a universal love.” You do not mention that the cross manifests this universal love. Jesus appears in your letter as a moral exemplar and teacher, much like given in 19th century Protestant liberalism. The liberal penchant for abstraction replaces the concrete love manifested in Christ. You dismiss the ordo amoris. Yet Christ reveals his own ordo amoris on the Cross. At the moment of his greatest universal love for all humanity, Jesus turned to his mother: “When Jesus therefore had seen his mother and the disciple standing whom he loved, he saith to his mother: Woman, behold they son. After that, he saith to the disciple: Behold thy mother. And from that hour he took her to his own.”

The particularity of the body of Christ reveals God’s universal love. God manifested God’s love through the ordo amoris. The Father sent the Son who called Peter and the apostles to build his church. Little by little, the gospel increased in concentric circles through the mystical Body of Christ.

The liberal political and cultural environment, both conservative/libertarian and progressive, have eroded the life of the church catholic in the United State. Continued adherence of those who were baptized in the Catholic Church is below currently below 30%. Those of us who await entering full communion with you and the Catholic Church need you to clearly and fully proclaim and uphold the faith given by the saints in order to sustain the mystical body of Christ in its unity. We depend on you, in your own particularity, so that we too may enter into fully into a communion of communions with you. We need bishops who will work for this unity. In our daily lives, we meet enough bureaucratic managers and advocates for abstract “universal rights.” We need the glorious universal particularity of God’s love seen in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ and in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy of Christ’s mystical body. Policy statements roll off our backs like last campaign’s platforms.

I fear that your letter could be read, in the words of your predecessor, Benedict XVI, as promoting “A humanism which excludes God” (Caritas in Veritate 78), or least a liberal humanism in which God remains an unnecessary option for the justification of universal human rights. “Fundamental human rights” does much more work than the Triune God in your letter. One looks in vain in the letter for evidence of an “integral humanism.” Benedict XVI wrote, “Only a humanism open to the Absolute can guide us in the promotion and building of forms of social and civic life — structures, institutions, culture and ethos — without exposing us to the risk of becoming ensnared by the fashions of the moment. Awareness of God's undying love sustains us in our laborious and stimulating work for justice and the development of peoples, amid successes and failures, in the ceaseless pursuit of a just ordering of human affairs. God's love calls us to move beyond the limited and the ephemeral, it gives us the courage to continue seeking and working for the benefit of all, even if this cannot be achieved immediately and if what we are able to achieve, alongside political authorities and those working in the field of economics, is always less than we might wish[158]. God gives us the strength to fight and to suffer for love of the common good, because he is our All, our greatest hope.”

As the Bishop of Rome, we need you to address the common good of the temporal realm in light of the tradition of the church catholic. We must properly order the common good to the eternal Good in God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. If we fail at this point, we reduce your office and teaching to that of a national politician or CEO of an international NGO. American Protestantism continues to implode as many shifted their language from that of the Triune God to that of fundamental human rights. Liberalizing tendencies in the church under your direct authority has led to losses in the practice of the baptized. If we who seek to enter unity with you cannot count on the bishop of Rome to uphold the faith given to the saints as central, we can ask, as Peter asked our Lord, “Where else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” We need the Pope to be Catholic.

Our Lord told Peter, “Feed my sheep.” As he who holds the apostolic office of St. Peter, I deeply appreciate your concern for the suffering of immigrants. I honestly do not know the proper national policy for immigration. My understanding is that good willed and reasonable people may and will disagree about national immigration policy.

I pray that you may soon return to health and the fulness of your Petrine ministry. I join you and the Church Catholic in praying for the day when national governments might properly order the common good to the Eternal Good. Perhaps we all must wait until we enter the kingdom of God.

In Christ,

John Wright