A Little Common Sense: The Ethics of Immigration in Catholic Social Teaching

• Published date: 01 October 2012
• Date: 01 October 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2012.00854.x
• Author: WILLIAM R. O'NEILL

A Little Common Sense: The Ethics of

Immigration in Catholic Social Teaching

By WILLIAM R. O’NEILL, S.J.*

ABSTRACT. Modern Catholic social teaching recurs to the idiom of

human dignity and human rights. Our moral entitlement to equal

respect or consideration, in concert with the ethical ideal of the

common good, moreover, justifies preferential treatment for those

whose basic rights are most imperiled. Thus states are morally bound

to respect and promote the basic human rights of both citizen and

resident alien, especially the most vulnerable—and of these, in par-

ticular, women and children. Indeed, the duty to protect grounds the

subsidiary duty to rescue, for example, through diplomatic initiatives,

sanctions, and in extremis, humanitarian intervention in the case of

genocide or mass atrocity. Disciples thus see and have compassion,

even as compassion becomes a way of seeing. Compassion, then, not

only guides them in the fitting application of universal, essential

norms, for example, the rights of migrants, but gives rise to existential

(personal and ecclesial) imperatives as they come to the aid of

wounded humanity.

Introduction

In Robert Bolt’s (1990: 19) play, A Man for All Seasons, the aging

Cardinal Wolsey admonishes Sir Thomas More: “You’re a constant

regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see the facts flat on, without

that horrible moral squint; with just a little common sense, you could

have been a statesman.” Wolsey’s heirs are quick to upbraid our

latter-day Mores for their sentimental “moral squint” at public policy.

Yet even statesmen of Wolsey’s stripe seldom see the “facts” of

migration “flat on.” Invariably, our perceptions betray our moral

*William R. O’Neill, S.J. is Associate Professor of Social Ethics at the Jesuit School of

Theology in Berkeley, Santa Clara University.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 71, No. 4 (October, 2012).

© 2012 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

squints, our tacit prejudices (pre-judgments). (For a non-pejorative

interpretation of prejudice (praejudicium), see Gadamer 1991: 265–

307.)

Beginning with Leo XIII’s magisterial teaching on the rights of

workers to a living wage, modern Roman Catholic social teaching, we

may say, is the moral squint the Church brings to public policy. In its

social teaching on dignity and human rights, the Church follows its

Lord in proclaiming the “Good News” to the poor (Luke 4: 18). The

Synod of Bishops (1971: 289), in a memorable declaration, thus

affirmed that “action on behalf of justice and participation in the

transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive

dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the

church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its

liberation from every oppressive situation.”

In these pages, I will first consider the principal themes of modern

Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and then turn to their implications for

immigration policy in a religiously pluralist polity like our own. I will

conclude with an assessment of the distinctively Christian obligations

borne by citizens of faith in such a polity.

Good News to the Poor

Inspired by the great biblical injunctions of justice or righteousness

(sedaqah) and right judgment (misphat) marking the reign of God,

modern CST recurs to the distinctively modern idiom of human dignity

and human rights. (For an interpretation of biblical conceptions of

justice, see Donahue 1977, 2004.) Since the first modern social encyc-

lical, Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum (1891), the Church’s magisterial

teaching has upheld the fundamental, intrinsic worth of persons as

created in the “image of God” (imago dei). Earlier perfectionist inter-

pretations of human finality, consistent with an organically conceived

social hierarchy, have, in recent teaching, ceded to a more deonto-

logical appeal to moral persons’ equal dignity and rights. John XXIII

(1963: 9) thus affirms in his encyclical Pacem in Terris:

Any human society, if it is to be well-ordered and productive, must lay

down as a foundation this principle, namely, that every human being is a

person; that is, his nature is endowed with intelligence and free will.

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