Why does Pope Leo think immigration is a pro-life issue?

On Tuesday evening, the Illinois pope weighed in on Illinois politics. A reporter from the Catholic news outlet EWTN asked Pope Leo XIV about the Archdiocese of Chicago’s decision to award Senator Dick Durbin with a “lifetime achievement award” for his work advocating for immigrants coming to America. “Some people of faith are having a hard time with understanding this because [Durbin] is for legalized abortion,” the reporter said. How should Catholics feel about that?

“I am not terribly familiar with the particular case,” the Pope conceded, speaking in English. Then he spoke more broadly, and vaguely, about what it means to be “pro-life”. “Someone who says ‘I am against abortion’ but says ‘I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he said. “Someone who says ‘I am against abortion, but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ – I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

The new Pope is proving he’s consistent. From the Catholic Church’s perspective, being pro-life means standing up for the dignity of human life from conception until natural death. And there are growing examples of undeniably disturbing, gleeful responses to deportations and family separations (one only needs to look at the Department of Homeland Security’s X account). But to characterize support for a strong border and stricter enforcement of immigration law as “[agreeing] with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States” is a caricature of the complex feelings many Americans, particularly Catholic Americans (of which there are many in the Trump administration), have about the issue.

After the Pope’s comments (though not clearly because of them) Senator Durbin declined to accept the award for his immigration advocacy, according to a letter issued last night by Cardinal Blase Cupich, who named him the recipient of the “Keep Hope Alive” award. Last month, Cupich defended his decision by saying that he was acting in accordance with Church instructions “advising bishops to ‘reach out to and engage in dialogue with Catholic politicians within their jurisdictions… as a means of understanding the nature of their positions and their comprehension of Catholic teaching’.”

Cupich’s interpretation of “dialogue” misses the very clear point of those instructions given in 2021 by the Vatican’s Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Luis Ladaria. They ask US bishops to attempt to change the minds of pro-abortion politicians through civil debate, and to dispel the characterization that pro-life teaching is only about abortion and euthanasia, rather than a set of teachings about respecting human dignity throughout a person’s full life.

The decision to interpret those instructions as a directive to give politicians awards seems bizarre, even deliberately ignorant. But it’s not surprising. Many US bishops and cardinals have been vocal in their criticisms of immigration policy under the Trump administration (more vocal than they were over, say, the last administration’s stance on gender ideology or the church closures during Covid). Some have written letters to Congress to reject bills funding immigration enforcement, or have turned up at ICE hearings to show solidarity with immigrants.

The tension between Rome and the Trump administration on immigration came to a head during the previous papacy, and it is not going to disappear anytime soon. Pope Francis criticised Trump’s mass deportations, and in a letter to US bishops made a pointed reference to J.D. Vance’s interpretation of ordo amoris – that the “hierarchy of love” gives one a moral obligation to family and community first, and then the rest of the world. It’s an argument not dissimilar from the more secular one for America First. Francis wrote in that letter that the true ordo amoris is something we discover by “meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Francis’s approach to America’s border crisis struck many Americans as distant and hectoring, ignoring the realities of illegal migration – gang violence, murder, drug and sex trafficking – and choosing to remind us of what we learned in Sunday school: that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were immigrants. Pope Leo has tried to avoid that tone so far. “They are very complex issues,” he told the EWTN reporter. “I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them.” It’s a most honest interpretation on Christianity’s offerings: not to say that Church teaching is muddled on these issues, but that there are no precise instructions from a universal Christian faith on how, for example, to deal with a specifically American border crisis.

The Pope ended his answer by stating that “the Church teaching on each one of those issues is very clear”. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, all human beings must be treated with dignity and respect, the state should not have the power to end a life, and abortion is a moral evil. Even if immigration is considered the most urgent pro-life issue at the moment, that should have no bearing for American bishops and cardinals on the Church’s unnegotiable stance on the right to life.