These early days of the new administration have occasioned impassioned debate about immigration, including among Catholics. Vice President JD Vance, himself a Catholic, has criticized the US bishops on immigration, prompting significant commentary and disagreement.
It’s unsurprising that American Catholics disagree about immigration policy; Catholics do not form a monolithic bloc of identical political views, after all. We disagree among ourselves about all sorts of things, which is entirely normal from a group of fifty-two million people.
Unfortunately, we see in the immigration debate, as in other political issues, a tendency to utilize, maybe even weaponize, Catholic social teaching as if it necessarily determines one and only one political judgment. While the Church maintains that some acts are intrinsically wrong and can never be licitly performed, the principles of social doctrine are just that—principles—requiring prudential specification and application in concrete policy, and there can be several, perhaps many, ways to legitimately do so. It’s always illicit to procure a direct elective abortion, for instance, but the principle of solidarity does not entail a precise marginal tax rate. It just doesn’t work that way.
There’s also a tendency to reduce social doctrine to a political stance, fitting most easily with one party or another or as an alternative “third way.” But social doctrine doesn’t work that way either. Certainly there are policy implications to social doctrine—it matters to real life—but as we are reminded by the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, the common good of society
is not an end in itself; it has value only in reference to attaining the ultimate ends of the person and the universal common good of the whole of creation. . . . A purely historical and materialistic vision would end up transforming the common good into a simple socio-economic well-being, without any transcendental goal, that is, without its most intimate reason for existing.
Social doctrine is not primarily political and social wisdom: It is an articulation of flourishing with reference to our ultimate end—namely, God. In fact, the Compendium explicitly and repeatedly reminds us that social doctrine is “an integral part of [the Church’s] evangelizing ministry,” a “valid instrument of evangelization,” and fundamentally intended to “help man on the path to salvation.” Politics matter, but they are not first or ultimate. Social teaching is directed to salvation and is a form of evangelization, but not for the sake of politics just as such. Far too often, social doctrine is reduced to political concerns, but this tames the dynamism and scope of the Church’s purpose.
Embrace and enjoy everything that is true, good, and beautiful, in all the ways that reality can be true, good, and beautiful.
It’s no secret that many people experience our contemporary moment as profoundly destabilizing. We’ve undergone revolutions, upheavals, and crises—sexual, moral, social, religious, economic, liturgical, demographic, environmental—in what feels to many as a time of accelerationism and liquidity. We’re unsure of what is fixed and secure, settled and trustworthy, centered and at rest, and it’s very natural to yearn for stability and certainty. However, we risk confusing our own preferences and prudential judgments for “what the Church teaches,” when often those judgments are within a range of licit and acceptable possibilities broader than our own opinions.
An acceptable option is permissible, but it is not required. That a judgment is sensible and permitted by the Church does not mean that any and all different judgments are nonsense and impermissible. They might be illicit, but not necessarily. Broad principles allow for various ways of instantiation or specification; what should be avoided, and what is so difficult for us frail humans to avoid, is wanting fixity when none is to be found. Or to want fixity about the wrong things and be guilty of an unintended idolatry.
In the latest issue of The New Ressourcement, Aaron Pidel, SJ, while discussing the writings of Erich Przywara, argues that fallen “humanity inclines perpetually toward divinizing some pole of created existence” and we “constantly risk losing our existential ‘catholicity’—that is, our capacity to affirm the ‘whole’ of creation.” His use of the small “c” in “catholicity” is important, for it is all too possible for Catholics to lose our commitment to the universal, to everything that is good, to all that is licit and desirable, by turning to some aspect of reality, perhaps good and acceptable in itself, in a way that diminishes, ignores, or thwarts other good aspects.
It is a great challenge to maintain “existential catholicity.” I know what I know, and I feel decentered and unstable if you ask me to consider a different way. I prefer what I prefer, and I experience your different preferences as calling mine into question, even if both are perfectly legitimate. Many people had the experience in childhood of going to dinner at a classmate’s home and discovering that other families do things quite differently, and then wondering if one’s own family might be odd, even doing things incorrectly. What seemed normal, routine, and “real” is revealed as optional and accidental. That experience can be a bit of a shock. Most of us don’t like shocks, and most of us enjoy thinking that “the way we do things” is “the way things are done.”
Existential catholicity, on the other hand, asks us to embrace and enjoy everything that is true, good, and beautiful, in all the ways that reality can be true, good, and beautiful. It’s a big ask. Existential catholicity embraces the maxim of the ancient poet Terence, who said that “nothing human is alien,” since he is at home with every human endeavor. Recall that the Church, “expert in humanity, has a perennial interest in whatever concerns men and women.” The Church’s own way is to be at home with all human things, attempting to enliven, heal, perfect, and sanctify everything that is good.
The Church’s expertise in humanity comes not from some all-encompassing study, although as the oldest institution in the world she has some experience, to be sure. Rather, the Church is expert because of Christ’s expertise, which he has taught and revealed to the Church. Not only does God create humans in his own image but in the Incarnation assumed human nature, knowing humanity both as perfect God and as perfect man. He knows humanity entirely, and knows humanity as it ought to be. No wonder, then, that Jesus is described as having “done all things well” (Mark 7:37).
In the Incarnation, God embraced human nature, and did it well. He was born, grew, worked, hungered, wept, had friends, and died—well. He knew and had compassion on sinners; he healed lepers and the blind. He, the creator of all, did not “consider being equal to God a thing to be clung to, but emptied himself” and took on human nature (Phil. 2:6). That is existential catholicity at its fullest.
Note the language in the Challoner-Rheims translation: Christ did not think of his equality to the Father as something “to be clung to.” If we lack existential catholicity, if we are not magnanimous of mind, heart, and soul, we will cling to something, and it will, in the end, not be a life raft but an anchor, a weight pulling us down. If we cling to certainty, to our own prudence, our own preferences, much of reality will be alien to us, and we will end up suspicious, hesitant and faltering in the face of many good things, timid and frightened of the good simply because it is unfamiliar to us. Rather than existential catholicity, we will be existential sectarians, small-souled and alienated.
The baptized Christian is asked to be as Christ was: to love as he loved, to live as he lived, to be holy. Remarkably, in the waters of Baptism, we are given the grace to receive Christ’s own merits as ours so that we can be little Christs in the world. When the angel of the Lord announces the Incarnation, both to Mary and Joseph, he says, “Do not be afraid” (Matt. 1:20; Luke 1:30). The arrival of Jesus allows us to be unafraid, and, like Mary and Joseph, to say yes, fiat, for we have the one thing necessary—our Lord—and as we cling to him we have no need for fear. To cling to anything else, including our own judgments and preferences, is to cling to the wrong thing, and it will disappoint.
As disciples we are asked to have very large souls: existential catholicity. At times like ours, with so much uncertainty, with so much flux, and with so much disagreement about everything (it seems), our ability to be magnanimous and unafraid would be a wonderful gift to the world.