The Bishops’ Misplaced Priorities
Last week, The Atlantic’s Francis X. Rocca penned a damning indictment of America’s Catholic bishops, although I doubt he intended it as such. “The most urgent political concern for America’s Catholic leaders is no longer abortion; it’s immigration,” Rocca wrote. Noting that immigration concerns are addressed in Catholic teaching, he added, “But now immigration dominates U.S. Catholic leaders’ public messaging.”
How shameful. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade nearly four years ago, but the butchering of unborn children in their mother’s wombs continues anyway. According to the abortion industry’s official research center, the Guttmacher Institute, abortions increased across the U.S. between 2024 and 2025, remaining above the one million mark in both cases, while the number of abortions committed via the abortion drug mifepristone increased by 26 percent. In other words, while over one million unborn children are ripped apart with scalpel and forceps or starved and expelled via a drug regimen, and the U.S. bishops are focusing their attention almost exclusively on ensuring that illegal aliens are not arrested and deported.
A U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) spokeswoman cited by Rocca stated that “human dignity and national security are not in conflict.” That’s true. Stringent immigration enforcement is in line with the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church and is, in fact, in accord with the virtue of justice. The arrest and detention of those who have violated the law (in this case, federal immigration law) is not a violation of human dignity, nor is returning foreigners who have abused U.S. hospitality and services to their home countries. In fact, it’s something of a merciful move.
Shepherds ought to protect their flocks from wolves. Instead, we find them demanding that the wolves share our pastures.
Had President Donald Trump and his administration determined to mobilize paramilitary death squads to systematically hunt down and execute those known or suspected to be in the country illegally, then the bishops might have a cause for vocal complaint.
Had the administration decided to torture or waterboard detained aliens — for any reason — then the USCCB might not be accused of manufactured hysteria. And had the bishops devoted as much time and energy to combatting the continuing scourge of abortion and protecting the human dignity of the American people as they have to defending illegal aliens and their presence in the U.S., then cries of hypocrisy would fall flat. But they don’t.
Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old Loyola University Chicago freshman hailed by friends and family as a devout Catholic, was murdered in cold blood last week by an illegal alien from Venezuela. Where is the outrage from the nation’s Catholic bishops? — who are always so quick to signal their virtue and condemn violence, even if all the facts have yet to be ascertained. A young woman, an American, and a Catholic has been slain, and her death can be traced directly to government policy. Yet there is no condemnation of former president Joe Biden (a self-identified Catholic) or his Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. No talk of how these two and their deputies violated human dignity and imperiled national security with their open-borders policies.
So the slaughter of unborn children is second fiddle. The murder of Catholic college girls is just the price of doing business. The rape and murder of so many women at the hands of foreign invaders is — what? Acceptable? A merely political matter? Not profitable? But the suggestion that hordes of foreign insurgents should perhaps be returned to foreign parts is somehow in violation of human dignity, according to their excellencies. How shameful. Shepherds ought to protect their flocks from wolves. Instead, we find them demanding that the wolves share our pastures.
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