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SCOTUS: Catholics for Mass Immigration
As a gambit, Trump and Miller’s was always an extremely long shot, but it acts as an illustration of the seriousness of the national issue, and of the pernicious role of intellectual catholicism on the American right. This has less to do with lay Catholics, who are sometimes reactionary and sometimes liberal, or with very online rightist Catholics, whose devotion is questionable but who largely find the maximalist aesthetic interesting or more defensible than megachurch Christianity, which I sympathize with, or who find inspiration in its (arguable, the reality is rather mixed) historical antisemitism for their own LARPing.
One thing Roberts, Kavanaugh and ACB have in common is that they are all the court’s Catholic Intellectuals as an ideological grouping. This separates them from the other Catholics on the Supreme Court - Thomas left Catholicism and then came back to it but his conservatism is not distinctly Catholic (we can argue about this but it isn’t the thrust of my argument) and largely appears to view himself a jurist in both a conservative and a black conservative tradition that is not Catholic; his mentor and inspiration Sowell is (surprised to be writing is here - he’s 96 and still kicking) an atheist by all accounts. Alito is more devout but invented his own complex rationale for abandoning any form of integralism and essentially adopting WASPlite Conservatism With Ellis Islander Characteristics. Gorsuch rejected Catholicism. Sotomayor is nominally Catholic but openly lapsed as per her writings, so there is no need to even get into ideology with her.
Roberts, ACB and Kavanaugh are all much more products of the institutional Catholic Church. They continue to have senior roles in ‘official’ or semi official church organizations from which it would be extremely humiliating to be removed and where they ultimately, beyond many abstract layers of theological management, answer to the Pope, who is basically Zohran Mamdani if he was a little uncomfortable around abortion. If Thomas was denied communion on account of his politics I imagine he would laugh or ignore it; if ACB was I think she’d be very, very upset indeed, and it is laughable to think this isn’t the kind of motivator these people (who have spent most of their lives in this Catholic intellectual bubble surrounded by other Catholics) care about.
Catholicism is essentially a third-worldist institution - the largest, best funded, and most successful on earth - and has been for many decades. Third worldism as envisioned by its proponents was always more about the ‘south’ versus the ‘north’ (meaning countries with demographically european majorities, plus maybe japan) than it was about achieving socialism, which was really a second-tier target. Third worldism’s central organizing objective is ameliorating this supposed imbalance, this terrible and - in the eyes of the Church and its intellectual adherents - un-Christian state of affairs. Mass immigration is the central tool in this toolkit, since with enough of it (due to the vast majority of the world’s population being in the “global south”) the global north simply ceases to exist and one has won by Largely Peaceful™️ (and therefore very Christian) default. Catholicism is a global, transnational, extremely well functioning institution able to deploy tens of billions of (often tax) dollars towards this ideological aim; even more importantly, it has an entire ecosystem of forums, think tanks, colleges (including those on whose board the Roberts’ sit and with whom ACB has her central academic affiliation) and lobbying groups that exist to convince other ‘conservative’ Catholics (in the sense that they support some semblance of traditional marriages restriction of abortion etc) that mass immigration is actually lindy, wholesome chungus, and holy and you will go to hell if you fight it just as if you were a rapist, a murderer, or got ten abortions.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (the closest the US Church has to a governing body) is staunchly pro-life but staunchly pro-immigration. So is the (American) Pope. Conservatism for me and my issues, but not for thee and yours, you might say. By some estimates, USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980, almost all from the third world. Expecting this to have no impact on the court’s conservative justices, 5/6 of whom are somewhat Catholic and 3/6 (the aforementioned) are closely tied to the modern Catholic intellectual tradition was delusional. The Catholic Church is almost definitionally, as a transnational organization, less concerned with national borders. Far more of its adherents are would-be migrants and refugees than the people who would suffer in rich countries by their presence. Over the last two progressive papacies, by far the majority of the Catholic Church’s opprobrium for the United States has been about mass, and especially illegal, immigration. Of course, statistically, most Central and South American and Haitian illegal migrants - who are the migrants actually affected by the birthright citizenship debate since they can’t naturalize themselves - are literally Catholic.
This is part of the problem of talking about ‘social conservatism’ versus ‘economic conservatism’ or liberalism. If you hate abortion and have a kind of condescending pity for homosexuals but support the third-worldification of America, you are still a tradcon and the right will cheer as you’re appointed to the Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett has Haitian children. There are hundreds of thousands of Haitians illegally resident in the US, who have kids who look just like her kids but who weren’t lucky enough to be adopted by a rich American family. She was never going to vote to repeal birthright citizenship which, for all the legalistic arguments, is an inherently nativist-sympathetic move (just as it was when England repealed it in 1981, and when Australia did 5 years later), even if its proponents profess to and indeed do support mass immigration in general. Is your country for the world or is it, at least, for you and the people you choose to let in?
In America, our Catholic rulers have decided it is for the world.
My dudette, I am sympathetic to some of your points, but the snark level makes it difficult to tell which are serious.
In any case I don't think the Roman Catholic justices need to worry about excommunication. Their bishops are far too institutionalist to impose it, even if they felt it were appropriate.
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For this reason I was highly skeptical of ACB from before or around the time she was nominated.
She had already personally imported two members of a low human capital populace into the United States. With conservatives such as these, who even needs progressives?
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Great. Now you are making me defend the Catholics.
With your complaining about the Evil Catholics on the court, I can not help but notice that all of them except for Sotomayor were appointed by Republican presidents. In particular, two of the three you identify as strongly Catholic (ACB and Kavanaugh) were appointed by President Trump. Perhaps ask him why he did not appoint some gun enthusiast evangelicals which favor rounding up the illegals and sending them to megaprisons in some shithole nation, or blow up their ships before they arrive?
To get the obvious out of the way: the SCOTUS upholding birthright citizenship is not that surprising that we need conspiracy explanations. The plain language of the 14th, plus a century and change worth of legal precedent based on a textual interpretation of the 14th is not something you overturn easily. In fact, overturning it would have been legislation from the bench almost as bad as Roe. We do not need to suppose that the conservatives who voted for birthright citizenship are stooges of the pope when the alternative explanation is that they are textualists who are reluctant to say "actually the constitution means X when it says Y because it would be really convenient for the object level decision if it did."
Also, if you think that the Vatican would excommunicate anyone over being against open borders, think again. Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy on a platform of zero tolerance for illegal immigration. She is openly and performatively Catholic.
I am also sorry to inform you that some brands of Christianity do not make good foundations on which you can project arbitrary political messages. Christianity comes with its own ideas about what is good. Caring for the plight of the needy was very much instrumental in early Christianity spreading. There were certainly papacies where this message was lost almost completely, but a general attitude of "let the third worlders drown, who gives a fuck" is not compatible with Catholicism. (In better news, there are plenty of choices for religions which are long on not giving a fuck about others. Vance, Hegseth and his ilk might be better off worshipping Huitzilopochtli, Odin or Khorne.)
Also, do you have some source for the Vatican (or even Mamdani) arguing that the best way to fix global poverty is just to open all the borders? Personally, I do not believe that open borders scale very well. Supporting the needy in a First World country seems much less effective than supporting them directly in the global South. Rescuing drowning migrants is, in my mind, not a part of a coherent plan to tackle global poverty. Instead, it is something you do because it is the thing a decent human should do, and you realize that you do not have the stomach to crucify enough migrants to deter them from coming, and do not trust any (hypothetical) utilitarian argument that this would lead to better global outcomes.
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I see what you're doing here.
Normally, I don't love this kind of thing and I'd even chide you for not "speaking clearly," but I have to admit this is well done. I am not even certain you aren't sincere.
What is she doing here?
Sounding the alarm about the machinations of [[[Insidious Hibernia]]]. I dare say @2rafa may be the only real white man left on this board.
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There is a type of post that essentially goes: “All of the people behind this particular bad thing that happened are Jewish. Let’s unpack that,” but 2rafa wrote the post about Catholics instead.
I noticed the irony on my first read-through, but the thought that it was a bit never occurred to me. I still don’t think it’s a bit, but it certainly apes the style.
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I believe she's sincere. 2rafa's view generally is very strongly opposed to immigration and she's even made commentary in the past about how Catholic and German immigration into the United States fundamentally changed the nature of the country. I also believe she lives in the UK (London?) now because she believes the US is a lost cause due to immigration.
I admit it's very interesting for a Jewish lady to have such a strong attachment to Anglo-Saxons (of course if we go too deep on this we'll get down our own "migration into the country fundamentally changed the nature of society" story) that she'd go to bat for them against the Germans or the Italians, but nevertheless hers is a unique stance and I find it interesting even when I think she's wrong.
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Let's sanity-check this for a moment.
Let us consider comparable First World countries. If your theory holds, then the influence of the Catholic Church should positively correlate with mass migration. So, for instance, you might expect Ireland to be considerably more supportive of mass migration than England. Italy should be more supportive of it than Sweden. Spain should support it more than Denmark. Even in America, we should expect the US to be, though influenced by the Catholic Church, less supportive of mass migration than the entirety of Central America and South America.
Is this what we actually see?
I applaud the inventiveness of the top-level post - "the US is controlled by an elite conspiracy of Catholics" is a nice change from "the US is controlled by an elite conspiracy of Jews". But it doesn't survive more than a few minutes' consideration.
If nothing else, I think it requires a very specific and narrow level of Catholic ideology in power. The USCCB supports refugees and immigrants while still opposing abortion, euthanasia, LGBT, and so on - well, how are all those latter issues doing? We just saw the pope being quite critical of AI bots. I guess the Catholic conspiracy had better get on to that immediately, because man, it is doing a bad job of stopping those in the US.
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This is true, and it's a good thing. Multiculturalism elegantly refutes the protestant notion that there can be authority without authorities. Protestants behold the society they created, where each person's own preferred interpretation of "good" are paramount... and weep. They have no ability to argue for the preservation of their culture as such, because their entire culture is founded on rejecting tradition. Appeals to racial solidarity fail because race is transparently a constructed category invented by 19th century aristocrats to convince poor people to be complicit in their own oppression.
If you would only convert to the true church, you would understand that all of culture that is actively worth is propagated not by heritage, language, or skin color, but by priests, monks, and sisters.
This is not a Protestant notion.
Obviously Protestantism acknowledges authorities in some sense - the Bible is clearly authoritative, for instance. You must be taking the view that 'authorities' must mean some sort of human organisation.
But Protestantism clearly allows for the existence of human organisations and governance. Even leaving aside secular governments, which hold authority in their proper (and limited) spheres, every Protestant tradition that I'm aware of has governing authorities in the church. Protestant churches have synods and assemblies and all the tools of government. What Protestants assert is that these authorities, though valid, are necessarily subject to higher authorities, which includes the likes of scripture.
Authorities exist but they are bounded in a way that they are not in Roman Catholicism. The Protestant case would be that the Catholic investiture of absolute interpretive and governing authority in the institutional body of the church is a kind of idolatry.
Allows for? You are downplaying it. Exhibit A, Protestantism as practiced by Cromwell and contemporaries did not proscribe validity each person's own preferred interpretations, they banned public celebration of Christmas and other popery.
Cromwellian theocracy is one of the possible political arrangements compatible with Protestantism, I would say. But it is not required by Protestantism either.
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I've never understood this specific type of Catholic triumphalism. Not only did the Catholic church pretty much entirely fail to conserve early Christian culture, or the universal church (where Western insistence on changing the Nicene Creed drove a split with the East), or pre-Reformation Catholic culture, or European monarchy (and attempts were made!) it also fails to convey its own teachings to its own members. The supposed authority of the Church yields a Catholic lay culture that is poorly catechized and where the overwhelming majority of weekly churchgoers oppose the church's own teachings. This might be a tolerable situation if the church was trading off quality for quantity, but (at least in the US) the opposite is happening: Catholicism is shrinking.
I highly recommend reading Barna or other pollsters on these sorts of things. The first thing that you realize when you start to look at the numbers is that Christians really need to be better catechized. The second thing you realize is that the denominations that, stereotypically, don't know what the word "catechism" means are doing a better job at it than Catholics (somehow).
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That seems contradicted by the behavior and beliefs of roughly 100% of Catholics historically, though. While one can argue for more or less immigration on prudential grounds, all non-church institutions and culture not being worth preserving doesn't seem to be a common viewpoint. What do you base it on? I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but that posture seems more akin to radical protestantism than Catholicism or Orthodoxy I'm familiar with.
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I’m sure hereandgone will enjoy Father’s homily this weekend about how the Irish tricolor is cringe and non-Christian, and the Irish really should stop trying to preserve Irish Gaelic because heritage and language are not worth propagating. Leave the culture to the religious orders and the priests, please.
As we all know, Catholic cultures are completely apologetic and nonplussed about their heritage, culture, and language.
This is sarcastic, for the mods’ sake. But your position is very silly.
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Your post basically hangs on this:
But this passage is not adequate to the task of holding up your argument. The USCCB is not "pro immigration", it advocates for treating people (including, but not limited to, immigrants) with kindness and dignity as befits someone made in the image of God. Nor does the church in general require anyone (supreme court justice or otherwise) to take any particular position on immigration policy. Believers are urged to follow their judgement as to what is prudent, based on love for their fellow man. And the justices, being highly educated people who know well what the church does and does not require, would be well aware of this. It is in no way "delusional" to believe that the justices are following their own reasoning rather than falling in line behind the USCCB, despite your assertion to the contrary.
I don't know much about American Catholicism, but it seems awfully hard to square:
with:
The latter is what my high school history teacher would call 'crunchy' and the former what he would call 'woolly'. Our essays always had to be full of crunchy statements and avoid woolly ones, because an argument full of wooly statements can basically argue anything at all without evidence.
Here's the crunchy parts of what the USCCB actually says:
I would have quoted more but it's an unhighlightable PDF (surely a mortal sin?). But anyone reading can look at it themselves. I don't think it's too uncharitable to say that their solution to America's illegal third world immigration is to simply make that migration legal. Less charitably, to replace de facto open borders with de jure open borders.
That seems pretty pro-immigration to me...
Unfortunately, I have no idea what the actual facts behind "USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980" are, since none were provided. What are these affiliates, and what does "settled to the US" mean? I can envision very different scenarios that could be described by those words. So, without any real information about that (and also, you weren't the one advancing that point in fairness), let's focus on the PDF you linked (which I was able to highlight just fine btw, so I'm guessing there's some client differences in play). It actually says something very different from what you quoted, if you take it in context:
I think it is fair to say that the USCCB does not, based on that statement, support a complete cessation of immigration into the country. But neither are they advocating for simply opening the borders. Doing that would go against the statement that "nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good".
The statement from the USCCB is pretty light on what they envision a successful immigration policy might look like. But while it's true that they say they think our nation's policy needs reform, they also imply that national security is a legitimate concern in designing such a policy ("Human dignity and national security are not in conflict. Both are possible if people of good will work together."), as well as state outright that nations should regulate their borders (in the quote up above). They also state that we must recognize the inherent dignity of all people:
So in other words, they prioritize the importance of upholding the dignity of all people (immigrants as well as our existing citizens), with a focus on love, and finding a way forward which can meet the needs of all parties involved in the situation. I personally think that's pretty much what I said in my previous post, so I don't think that this document really refutes anything I said. In either case, I do not think that such a position qualifies as "pro immigration". They are not in favor of immigration per se, nor against it. They are instead focused on the dignity/love angle which is orthogonal to the question of what our immigration policy should be. Sometimes love is going to mean we should accept the less fortunate from other countries, and sometimes that is going to mean we should place restrictions so as to better serve the welfare of the people already living here.
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I think Catholicism even to Roman times was a slave religion and Universal Church. I don’t believe you need say their helping out compatriots today in the third world to find the reasoning for why Catholics have a lot of trouble denying immigrants.
Things like HBD or if you just want to call it racism is just very hard to square with Catholicism. It’s probably not even easy to square with Christianity and other sects but American Christianity does seem to have evolved immune responses that is more difficult for Catholicism to pick up. There is too much theological baggage that just can’t be repudiated and still maintaining their the original and true Church because Christianity is fundamentally a slave religion. Which I think was perfectly fine for Europe when they just dealt with Europeans or war with Muslims. There is just a huge parallelism with turning away a migrant and baby Jesus being turned away from the Inn in the nativity scene. Catholics were useful for abortion battles but the same thing probably going to be bad for immigration.
Maybe is just doing copium but I think at a minimum there is a 50% chance or more that within 20 years birth rate is changed. The Trump administration didn’t build this case the way the judges like. It’s better to take small steps than the whole thing at once. Just keep working exceptions and yes you probably have to quit appointing Catholics to the Court.
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It's not Catholics, it's everybody. The median person at least. But Catholics like Nick Fuentes will keep blaming the Jews, because, let's face it, the Jews are to the left of the other religious groups so they were earlier on the scene and are always going to be over-represented in leftism. Not to mention the Israel issue.
Jews are of course overrepresented in leftism, but today wasn’t about Jews. The only Jewish person on the Supreme Court, appointed as a liberal justice, voted with the liberals, as would be obvious. In the same way, the black justice appointed as a liberal voted with the liberals, and the black justice appointed as a conservative voted with the conservatives.
The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.
“If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.”
--Justice Antonin Scalia
Now admittedly the right wing has a better judicial philosophy (originalism/textualism) to vote in non partisan ways on the Supreme Court when compared to the left wing (living constitutionalism). Judges should interpret the laws as it read by the common person at the time - not how they feel should be the best outcome for their political side.
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There is nothing whatsoever that constitutes a "travesty" in justices voting against the actions of a president who appointed them. That is, in fact, the entire point behind having an independent court which serves for life. They are not meant to be an extension of the president's will, rubber stamping whatever he does. Moreover, even if the president's agenda is reasonable (an assertion you didn't bother to substantiate, but just assumed as fact), that does not therefore make his actions in pursuit of that agenda reasonable. He might be taking illegal actions in service to a reasonable goal, and in that case it is the duty of the judiciary to rein him in - that's what checks and balances are all about.
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Yes. But on average, how do Jews and Blacks vote compared to Whites? Do you understand my point now?
An original American would say it's a papist conspiracy to flood the United States with papist hispanics so the Pope can rule over the US.
Samuel Morse was never wrong, only early, and the plea for the west has been rejected.
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They might, and that would be closer to an accurate interpretation of today’s decision than that of many a modern American political commentator.
Historically, the United States had an open borders immigration policy. Perhaps we should say that the country was flooded with nativists?
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Eh, I'd take good old Leo as leader of the free world over Trump.
While I do not have anything against Leo in general, any Vatican which had the ambition to rule the US by proxy would likely be as much of a disaster as Trump is.
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