Broken Gates, Broken Families: How Open-Border Activism Undermines Ordered Charity, Prof. Timothy O’Donnell

Catholic tradition, from the Catechism to Popes Pius XII, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, has always taught both the duty to welcome migrants and the equal duty of nations to regulate their borders for the sake of the common good; open-border ideology is therefore contradicts, rather than fulfills, authentic Church teaching. The uncontrolled influx of millions of illegal immigrants in recent years has produced grave evils: 400,000+ unaccompanied minors lost in the system, record fentanyl deaths, surging human trafficking and sexual exploitation, violent crime by criminal aliens, and massive welfare strain on American citizens—harms that ordered charity seeks to prevent, not enable. The USCCB along with Pope Leo have nonetheless become aggressive institutional opponents of the current U.S. Presidential administration’s efforts to restore border enforcement and carry out lawful deportations, routinely denouncing these measures as “inhuman” while rarely acknowledging the social chaos and moral disorders that lax borders have unleashed. This one-sided advocacy is rendered still more problematic by the bishops’ historic dependence on hundreds of millions of dollars in annual federal grants tied to migrant and refugee services, a financial entanglement that Professor Timothy O’Donnell points out that Benedict XVI warned, risks turning the Church into a mere NGO and compromising her prophetic freedom. True Catholic charity, modeled by St. Nicholas himself, is therefore not indiscriminate but prudent and ordered: it protects the household (the nation) first so that it remains capable of protecting the vulnerable stranger, rather than dissolving the household under the illusion that the absence of boundaries equals mercy.

– CUP Chair, Vicki Yamasaki

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