Priest clears up ‘error’ in some interpretations of Catholic teaching on deportation

CV NEWS FEED // In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday, Catholic priest Father Peter Totleben, O.P., explained the Catholic Church’s nuanced teaching on “deportation.” 

The definition of the “deportation” explicitly opposed in certain Catholic texts “does not apply to deportation in the colloquial sense that Americans use the term,” Father Totleben wrote.

The Dominican friar wrote that when recent Church documents use the Latin word “deportatio” – usually translated to English as “deportation” – they are not referring to simply repatriating migrants to their country of origin. 

He specifically named the 1965 pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes and Pope St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor.

“According to the dictionary (and its references to Roman Law), ‘deportatio’ is displacing people from their native land,” the priest explained. “So, in condemning ‘deportatio,’ the Magisterium is thinking of things like the displacement of the Jews, or various displacements that occurred in Europe right after World War II, or things like ethnic cleansing.”

“This should be obvious,” the Dominican stressed. “The Church teaches both that people have a right to migrate both for asylum and economic reasons.”

However, he emphasized that the Church also teaches “that the welcoming country has the right to regulate immigration for economic and cultural reasons,” which “obviously entails a right to repatriate.”

“And it should be pretty clear that if border authorities apprehend someone in the very act of illegally crossing the border, they are allowed to send the person back across the border, they don’t necessarily have to give him residency,” Father Totelben continued, summarizing the common 21st-century American definition of “deportation.”

The priest added it should “be clear that ‘sending a person back to his home country who has no legal right to be in the present country’ and ‘exiling a person from his native land’ are two different species of moral action.”

“Also, notice how no Church authority when speaking out in favor of immigrants has ever said that no immigrant may ever be sent back to his home country, because it is intrinsically evil to do this,” Father Totelben highlighted.

“As always, you have to find out what the people who formulated the Church teaching meant by a term,” the priest wrote. “You can’t apply your own definitions to Church teaching.”

Moreover, he cautioned that not all deportation policies are justified by Church teachings: “Just because deportations, understood as repatriations, are not intrinsically immoral does not mean that a particular plan for mass deportations meets the demands of justice or prudence.”

“To resolve that question,” he wrote, “you would have to weigh a variety of factors” including “the evil of family breakup, the potential injustice of any procedures used to effect the deportation,” as well as “the effect on the economy.”

“And the weighing of these goods and evils are matters that Catholics can in good faith disagree on, and still be good Catholics who are following Catholic social teaching,” he wrote.

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