Catholic Social Teaching and Solidarity with Refugees and Immigrants at a Time of Uncertainty: A U.S. Perspective

Presentation by His Eminence Robert Cardinal McElroy

 Jesuit Refugee Service USA and Center for Migration Studies Conference on Catholic Social Teaching:

March 24, 2025

Thank you very much and thank you all for being here. This is an important topic, particularly at this moment in our nation’s life.

Pope Francis brought to the fore the parable of the Good Samaritan and said that herein lies the heart of Catholic moral teaching, social teaching, and understanding of our obligations to those in need.  I would like to reflect today, in a spiritual and moral way, on that parable and its implications for us.

A reading from the Gospel of Luke.

There was a scholar of the law^* who stood up to test him and said, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” He said in reply, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” He replied to him, “you have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”

But because he wished to justify himself, he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man fell victim to robbers as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead. A priest happened to be going down that road, but when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. Likewise, a Levite came to the place and when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him was moved with compassion at the sight. He approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn and cared for him.

The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction, ‘Take care of him. If you spend more than what I have given to you, I shall repay you on my way back.’ Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?” He answered, “the one who treated him with mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37)

In his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis offered a profound reflection on the meaning of this parable.  He challenged us to understand that “all of us are or have been [at different times] like each of its characters” (Fratelli Tutti, 69), and he asked us to look deeper at each one to understand the meaning of that reality and how it exists in every one of us.

The Cast of Characters

The Pope began with the priest and the Levite. They are going down the road on their daily tasks and pass by the beaten man.

What is going on with them? What is in their hearts? Indifference.

Indifference is the fact that each of us becomes so preoccupied with our own well-being, concerns, and needs that we cease to be compassionate in the compelling, deep, and profoundly Christ-like sense of that word.  Indifference sees the reality of suffering, but refuses to let it into the human heart, to make a claim upon us and to spur us to action.

There is also another factor at work. Many scripture scholars tell us this route was particularly dangerous. Thus, in addition to the indifference that might have characterized the priest and the Levite, there is also fear:  Is that man lying there really victimized? Is he dead? Is he alive? Is this a trap? It is fear as well as indifference which keep them from helping.  They are trapped and cannot come to that compassion which Jesus calls us all to.

Some years ago, I was talking about the parable of the Good Samaritan at a retreat with deacons and their wives. I said jokingly that if it had been a bishop, he would have stopped to assist the assaulted traveler. One of the men yelled out, “Yes, because he would have had two deacons with him to do all the work.”

More seriously, I think we need to wrestle with the figures of the priest and the Levite in our own hearts and souls because all of us, at times, shut ourselves out from the compassion to which Christ calls us. This may be partly because so much suffering surrounds us. Yet, we need to remember that the call of Jesus is constant, urging us to perceive the needs of others and to act.

After talking about the priest and the Levite, Pope Francis wrote about the victim lying by the side of the road. What desperation and hopelessness must be sinking in for him. Each of us, Francis said, at times in this world, is the victim, in which we feel others are merely passing by, not paying attention to us (Fratelli Tutti, 76). Each of us sometimes feels alone in our suffering.  It is important, the Pope said, to understand the parable and recognize this experience in our own lives. Only when we do so can we see ourselves in the right relation with the Good Samaritan – the one who acts, the one who saves us.

Then there are the figures of the robbers. We do not see them, but we see what they have done. Francis said that each of us in our own lives is also the robber. Each of us victimizes others, consciously in a variety of different ways, when we place our own interests and well-being ahead of others and truly cause harm. We must be in touch with that side of ourselves and with the darkness that is the robber inside each of us.  One of the great calls of Christian conversion is to root out that darkness, to face it where it lies, and to fight against it always.

Finally we have the figure of the Good Samaritan, the centerpiece of the Gospel. The Good Samaritan is a foreigner, a fact crucial to the parable. He is a stranger and in that society, he was an outcast (Fratelli Tutti, 82). Yet, when he sees the man lying on the roadside, he stops. He overcomes the danger and the indifference, and lifts the man up, helps him on to his donkey, and takes him and cares for him so that he might be well and be rescued from his suffering. This is the example of the figure that each of us is called to be – one who sacrifices and thinks of others in their hardship and suffering, and who is not bound by the chains of indifference or fear and merely walks by that suffering.

The Current Moment

In a very real way, this reflection by Pope Francis can help us understand the current moment in our country, particularly within the framework of refugee and migration services. If we look at ourselves as the figure of the robber, we must say quite clearly and categorically that the suspension of Agency for International Development monies for humanitarian relief is moral theft from many of the poorest and most desperate men, women, and children in our world today. It is unconscionable through any prism of Catholic thought. Thus, we who are in the work of helping migrants and refugees, in this case are simply in the work of helping humanity to understand that providing this aid – less than one percent of our government’s budget – to assist the most desperate humanitarian needs of the world is our obligation as people of faith and as a nation.

In the book of Genesis, we see the beauty of God’s creation, which is bestowed as a gift upon each of us. And it points so powerfully to the universal destination of material goods which Catholic social thought teaches is at the heart of understanding material goods in our world.  In light of that, how can we not think that this action in eliminating the government’s meager, but so crucial, assistance to those in need of clinics and health, vaccines, and food services throughout the world, is not utterly contrary to everything about the Gospel and about our life as disciples of Jesus Christ?

Last week in the daily readings (Luke 16:19-31), we heard the story of Lazarus and the rich man. Lazarus sees the feasting going on every day in the rich man’s house and yet is given nothing, not even the scraps left for the dogs. We see God’s judgment upon that inequity, but not just inequity, that coldness and indifference. And we should ask ourselves as a people:  Is that the judgment God places on us as a nation now?

The Migrant and Refugee in the Parable and Today

Who in the parable is the figure of the undocumented immigrant?  We’re compelled to say it is the robbers’ victim in the moment in which we are living, in which mass deportation is the national goal of our government.  This clearly includes refugees approved for admission, but excluded from entering; and those allowed to enter, but not being resettled. It includes asylum seekers denied a hearing.  Every undocumented person, and not only every undocumented person, but as all we all know, equally every one of their family members lives in fear. And it is a purposeful fear. It is a fear meant to make life so unlivable that it generates self-deportation. It is a fear meant to reject normalcy and integration into our society. It is a fear which uproots everybody’s understanding of the bonds which undocumented men, women, children and families have formed in our society in the often decades that they have been here. The undocumented are the victims of these policies, and we as a Church need to advocate continually in solidarity with them and for their dignity as human persons. We must not only advocate, but we must support them in every way possible.

Up until two weeks ago, I was the Bishop of San Diego, which is right on the border. Probably ten percent of our Catholic population is undocumented there. And what the families are feeling – and I say families because it’s not just the undocumented who live in fear, but everyone who loves them live now in fear and their lives are being upended in a purposeful way.

The resiliency of the undocumented in these periods of time has always impressed me. They support one another in many ways. But their resiliency may not be strong enough to overcome the misery and fear that is being unleashed now.

At the same time, while the undocumented person is the victim in the story at this moment in our history, the primary character in the parable who represents the undocumented is the Good Samaritan, more than being solely the victim. And that’s what we have to give witness to.

The Good Samaritan is a man of faith, sacrifice, compassion and care. And by and large, the undocumented men and women and children of families who live in our midst are that too. We cannot surrender that; we cannot focus primarily on this notion of the undocumented and their suffering and being victims.

We need instead to reclaim the notion in our culture and society that most of the undocumented are the Good Samaritan. They sacrifice for their families. They work hard and they build up our society. They bring good values to our nation. They bring a sense of solidarity, a strong sense of family, of what it means to go without so that your children can have a better life.

Our Challenge Today

This is the fight I think we have primarily, and it is what Pope Francis was talking about in his letter to the American bishops (February 10, 2025). I think he got it precisely right. He said: What’s wrong here is to focus upon the undocumented as criminals, as if that captures the reality of who they are. It does not.

They are exactly the type of people that we wish to come to our nation, to help build it, to make it more beautiful, to make it a place where so many of the values atrophying in our society with its secularism are replaced by faith and a sense of something greater than the individual. This is the culture that our immigrants, by and large, bring to us, and it is a message we desperately need in our society.

Our greatest challenge is to understand and reclaim our heritage as our nation, that we are a people built by immigrants of every generation who came in that very same way – all of them desperate in so many ways, seeking a new and better life for themselves and their families. We must make this understanding the centerpiece of how, as a Church, we respond to the current crisis.

Yes, we must understand the suffering and the need for solidarity with undocumented men, women, children, and their families as they are victimized. But more importantly, we need to help our society recognize that these are the type of people we want among us. These are the type of people that our society needs if it is to come back to some of these cultural elements of the common good, of caring for others, and of compassion, which really need to be at the heart of who we are as a people and who we profess to be.

Resisting the Dark Side of History and Human Hearts

This brings us into grappling with the dark side of our history – because while our legacy is as a nation of immigrants, we also bear the legacy of exclusion of immigrants, of denigration of immigrants, of caricature of immigrants. Most of us who sit in this room have forebears who came here and experienced the scourge of being considered as inimical to a good American society – when the Irish came, the Polish came, the Italians came, and many others.

You know, about 100 years ago when the Immigration Act of 1924 (also called the Johnson-Reed Act) ushered in a cruel, discriminatory national origins quota system which targeted Southern and Eastern Europeans, that was also the decade in which the most popular book was called The Passing of the Great Race.  Its thesis was – and this is a theme that is not unfamiliar to us – that we as a Christian white nation are being undermined by a culture which is destroying the true American culture.  It was referring to Italians and Poles, among others.

This is the dark side of our history, with which we must continually wrestle. We live in an era when we must wrestle with those same themes now (cf. Fratelli Tutti, 37-41, 141).

To be clear, there are many people who oppose immigration because they think our borders should be secure and entry regulated. And that is consistent with Catholic teaching. Many people are seeking stronger security at the border not out of animus towards the poor or persecuted from other countries, but for security – that is a legitimate goal.  And the exclusion and removal of those who are guilty of serious crimes is also a legitimate goal.  We must understand that in our discussion; we cannot lump everyone together.

But we must also understand the many themes that are supporting the effort to undermine the rights and dignity of the undocumented come from the blackest hearts of our history and from the belief that our culture is being undermined.

That is why we must point to the undocumented as the true Good Samaritans.  Not all of them, but the vast majority are here for the same reason that people have always come to our country and built it up. They want a better life for themselves and their families, and they want to contribute to building and strengthening our country.

Returning now to the characters of the priest and the Levite in the parable:  If the message we are to give must focus on the Good Samaritan and the Good Immigrant, the audience that we need to reach most powerfully in heart and soul are the “priests” and the “Levites” – those who walk by with indifference or fear, both of whom are present at this moment.  And we must understand they are present in our own hearts and institutions as well. We must struggle with this problem.  We need to overcome indifference, face it for what it is, and move beyond it.

Jesus’ Core Message to Us and the Choices We Face

That is my understanding of Jesus’ core message in this parable:  If you truly wish to be my follower, Jesus is saying, you must in your heart and your soul have that love for the stranger which the Good Samaritan exhibited and take the risk that the Good Samaritan took for the stranger.  If you are to be my disciple, truly in this world at this moment, this is what is required.

We are faced as a society with two different choices here (Fratelli Tutti, 69-70). This is partly the result of our immigration system which has been broken for so long. Both parties have been at fault for failing to reach an accord on immigration reform. Looking back, each of us can point to moments when substantial reform could have been realized if policymakers had taken the right step and not the partisan one.  But that did not happen and now we face two different pathways.

The first path, which Catholic social teaching supports, is to change our laws so that they produce secure borders, dignified treatment of everyone at those borders, and generous asylum and refugee policies. That is one pathway we as a nation can come toward – and I actually believe most Americans would favor that pathway.

The other pathway is a crusade, which comes from the darkest parts of the American psyche, soul, and history. The crusade denigrates the undocumented. It labels them as defective. It castigates, characterizes, and encapsulates them as criminals. It refuses to see the human being that is there and good that they have already accomplished in the society in which they have been living for so many years.

These are the two choices we have, and we as a nation will have to make one choice. The pathway of crusade and mass deportation cannot be followed in conscience by those who call themselves disciples of Jesus Christ. We must work to make sure this does not happen in this nation, which we love and care for so deeply. Thank you very much.