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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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This is quite the broad banded statement, though, or woolly as somebody else said below. If ‘taking in the needy’ includes opinions as diverse as ‘protect a white demographic supermajority, deport millions and ban all nonwhite immigration’ (the way Groyper Catholics like Nick Fuentes want) and ‘take in the entire world, legalize all illegal migrants, create legal routes for the global south’ (the way those on the radical left of the Church want) then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.

What we can actually observe from:

  • The central role the institution of the Catholic Church has played in resettling migrants into America and Western Europe under both liberals like Leo and conservatives like Benedict
  • The public messaging of church leaders including almost all senior Western European and American bishops and various Popes themselves
  • The significant lobbying the Church has engaged in to water down naturalization law, legalize illegal migrants and so on in countries like Spain, the US and elsewhere

…is that the Church’s policy here is actually very clear. And the Catholic Church is actually an organization. It’s not an ideological grouping. It’s an actual club, with a members list and an initiation ritual and regular meetings and a management structure and a leader and if you are a member of it, then to some extent it is reasonable to expect that you broadly agree with the organization. This is different from Lutheranism or Judaism or Islam, which have religious organizations but none that can lay claim to the institutional support of anywhere close to a majority of adherents.

~all institutional churches have done this.

then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.

It's a principle, which can be interpreted by different people in different ways. But that's not the part being interpreted. No one has a problem with setting up a temporary refugee camp for Canadians who are fleeing from the great Canada-Russo war of 2035 assuming the US still has enough oatmeal and blankets to keep them alive.

The part that people are interpreting differently is if the US already has all the people it can safely assimilate without massive social upheaval. The Catholic US Bishops are pretty clueless to the actual costs of mass immigration, the Catholic groypers have perhaps an oversized idea of the costs of mass immigration. The truth is that you can take a consistent set of principles and adjust what the recommendations are based on different facts available.