OPINION:
The pope’s recent request that the U.S. receive immigrants “with compassion and generosity” assumes that our current immigration policy is neither compassionate for generous.
Yet the Vatican knows — or should know — that no other country allows as many legal immigrants into the country as the U.S.
The key here is the word illegal, which appears to be of minor importance to the pontiff and his advisers.
Yet until recently, the Catholic Church never sought to merge the words legal and illegal in describing immigration. That’s a major shift in the church’s governance. Catholicism rests on a three-legged stool: Scripture, the words of the doctors of the church, and tradition.
St. Thomas Aquinas, surely one of the church’s most influential “doctors,” wrote that obedience to just law is a moral obligation when enacted by legitimate authority. Such law also fosters the common good.
No nation can maintain a semblance of societal order when it no longer possesses the ways and means to protect its citizens from those who violate “legitimate authority,” be they in the U.S. or the Vatican.
The Vatican would do what it could to accomplish that end, as the U.S. does.
In seeking to blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration, the pontifex maximus is denying two of the three legs of the stool that represent the Catholic Church.
VINCENT CHIARELLO
Reston, Virginia
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