It’s not often that you see Catholic lawmakers in the United States citing Catholic social teaching to justify their views and decisions. In fact, this body of the Church’s doctrine, despite being biblically based and having magisterial authority, is so regularly ignored that it is often called the Church’s best-kept secret.
So it was surprising to see forty-four members of Congress, all Democrats, explicitly claiming in a recent “Statement of Principles” on immigration enforcement that they were “guided by a living Catholic tradition that affirms the dignity of every human life, advances the common good, and demands that we protect the most vulnerable in our society through a strong and compassionate safety net.”
The statement, released February 13, said the lawmakers stood in solidarity—another Catholic social teaching principle—with immigrants, and called for them to be treated with dignity, justice, and compassion. It quotes scripture, Pope Francis, and Pope Leo’s first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te, to affirm that people have the right to migrate to sustain their lives and those of their families, while also noting that countries have the right to regulate their borders, albeit with justice and mercy.
A Religion News Service writer called the statement a “theological rebuke” to House Speaker Mike Johnson, who recently attempted to use scripture to defend President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda. Johnson, a Southern Baptist, told a reporter a week earlier that the biblical command to “welcome the sojourner” applies only to individuals, not civil authorities. He then countered the reporter’s reference to Matthew 25 by saying Romans 13 gives countries authority to regulate borders. “It’s not because we hate the people on the outside,” he explained. “It’s because we love the people on the inside.”
Johnson should be careful or he may get a papal slapdown, as Vice President J. D. Vance did from Pope Francis last year when he tried to school Christians on Aquinas’s “order of love.” An article in the Catholic press that detailed how Vance got it wrong was shared by then-cardinal Robert Prevost on his social-media account.
Such proof-texting to support the president’s clearly un-Christian policies should not be surprising. In the current political climate, party affiliation trumps all others, including religious identity. That reality is evident in the annual scorecard released by NETWORK, the Catholic political lobby that advocates for legislation that supports the common good. Every year, the group analyzes whether lawmakers follow NETWORK’s recommendations when voting on proposed legislation.
This year, it looked at seven bills in the Senate and ten in the House. They included appropriations bills that cut social spending and extended tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; the Laken Riley Act, which expanded detention of undocumented immigrants with misdemeanor convictions; and the SAVE Act, which requires citizenship documentation to vote—all of which NETWORK opposed. The group supported legislation that would extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits, regulate “deepfake” digitally altered sexually explicit images online, and restore collective-bargaining rights for much of the federal workforce.
Broadly, Democratic lawmakers tend to have higher rates of agreement with NETWORK recommendations than Republicans. A legislator’s Catholic faith rarely makes any difference; data from the scorecard reveals that Catholic lawmakers’ votes fall squarely along party lines.
“In the House, Catholic Republicans showed near or total opposition to NETWORK priorities,” executive director Laurie Carafone said. Whether on immigration or the budget, the vast majority of Catholic GOP representatives scored between 0 and 10 percent agreement with NETWORK, meaning they were consistently against the group’s positions. Only a handful of Catholic GOP reps make it to 20 or 30 percent. Among Democrats in the House, most Catholics scored in the 90 to 100 percentile; even moderate Dems had a high percentage of agreement.
Numbers in the Senate were similar for Catholic Democrats, although Catholic Republican senators had slightly more alignment with NETWORK positions, in the 14 to 20 percent range. Two Catholic senators known as moderates—Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—had scores that indicated less partisanship, 57 and 43 percent, respectively.
Carafone is hopeful, despite the immense pressure on lawmakers from Trump and well-funded special interests. Although the headline on the scorecards calls 2025 a year of “Chaos, Crisis & Complicity,” things are looking up in 2026, in no small part because lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are hearing from their voters back home, she said.
“Constituents across the country are really making a lot of noise,” Carafone said, adding that individual members of Congress have told her they are receiving—and tallying—thousands of calls. “As people are seeing the harmful effects, to themselves and others, of all these cuts to basic programs and trillions of dollars going to rich folks and corporations, they are starting to be more vocal.”
It doesn’t hurt that the U.S. bishops, including some individuals but also as a group, have publicly expressed their concern about Trump’s extensive and violent deportations, and other religious leaders have raised questions about Trump’s foreign policy. While no member of Congress is going to take voting orders from a bishop, there’s no doubt that the statements by Church leaders have emboldened everyday Catholics to question the morality of various Trump policies.
The religious response to Trump policies seems to be growing. Within twenty-four hours of the killing of Alex Pretti, faith groups organized a call that attracted ten thousand attendees. One speaker was Newark cardinal Joseph Tobin, who said Catholics should contact their representatives and “say no” to increased funding for ICE. NETWORK also organizes letter-writing campaigns. Two recent actions resulted in more than seven thousand letters rejecting additional funding for and demanding changes to ICE and CBP.
Connecticut representative Rosa DeLauro, who organized the Democrats’ statement that cited Catholic social teaching, has never shied from wearing her faith on her sleeve. Many voters, especially nonreligious ones, might be understandably nervous about faith as the foundation for public policy, especially given the recent use of Christianity to justify things like taking food from the hungry, denying health care to the poor, and imprisoning the children of undocumented immigrants. But if more politicians—maybe even Republicans!—talked about the common good, the preferential option for the poor, and solidarity, perhaps Catholic social teaching wouldn’t be such a secret anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment