Nathan Pinkoski is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America.
Catholic leaders speak with one voice on the issue of immigration. In July, Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, marked his home country’s 250th anniversary by calling on the United States to welcome migrants with “compassion and generosity.” That same month, Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, described the Trump administration’s immigration policy as “morally repugnant.” In January, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a “lawless organization.”
But when it comes to Catholics in the pews, the picture looks very different. Over time, Catholics have become more conservative and more Republican — with 55 percent voting for Trump in 2024. This rightward shift is visible in attitudes on immigration. Twenty-seven percent of Catholics oppose significantly expanding the border wall with Mexico, while 50 percent support the move (23 percent neither favor nor oppose it).
Lay Catholic support for a border wall is sharply at odds with the official views of the hierarchy. Under the mantra of “building bridges and not walls,” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) opposed border wall construction in 2017, in 2019 and again in 2023.
In November 2025, the bishops issued a rare special message, the first of its kind since 2013, to denounce mass deportations and “dehumanizing rhetoric.” In 2026, they filed an amicus brief in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, warning that ending birthright citizenship would be “immoral and contrary to the Catholic Church’s fundamental beliefs.” According to the logic of that brief, the three Catholic justices who dissented in the case do not merely have a different understanding of the law; they are at odds with church teaching.
Frustrated by the stances the Catholic bishops have taken, conservative Catholics have blamed the USCCB’s material incentives. Since the 1980s, faith-based associations, including the USCCB, have received federal grants to settle refugees in the United States. As migrant flows have increased in recent years, so have the grants that have gone to the USCCB.
But the Catholic hierarchy’s pro-migrant sentiments aren’t the product of these material incentives (the USCCB loses money on migration). Instead, they’re embedded in the way churchmen think and write about the public role of the Catholic Church. Bishops remain captivated by a postwar vision of migration that political leaders across the ideological spectrum are moving away from.
The end of the World War II saw tens of millions of displaced people across Europe, who were at risk of falling under the dominion of Soviet-backed tyrannies. In response, it was an archconservative pope, Pius XII, who first formulated a right to emigration. He pressed America to change its laws and accommodate more refugees.
Pius’s writings became the jumping-off point for a more enthusiastic embrace of migration by the Catholic Church. In 1963, Pope John XXIII wrote that man has the “right to enter a country in which he hopes to be able to provide more fittingly for himself and his dependents. It is therefore the duty of State officials to accept such immigrants.” Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis developed that further. Under conservative and progressive popes, the language around immigration became more sweeping. Leo is the most recent expression of this trajectory. “In every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community,” he wrote last year. Note the choice of term — migrant, not refugee. We’ve traveled some distance since Pius.
Moralistic discussions of migration are ill-suited to a time when migration is largely about economic aspirations rather than escaping totalitarian regimes. The inadequacy of the present system has impelled anti-populist politicians such as Donald Tusk and Keir Starmer to tighten asylum and immigration law. Yet church officials have taken a position that is squarely to their left.
Conservative Catholics sometimes imagine that they are the future of the church. Practicing Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week are overwhelmingly conservative. Younger converts are more conservative than their elders, as are newer clergy. But on immigration, the church is likely to remain deeply divided. Since 1999, an average of 28 percent of all priests ordained in the U.S. have been foreign-born. They may be theologically conservative, but they’re unlikely to be hard-liners on immigration restriction.
As immigration continues to define Western politics, the rupture between Catholic bishops and the laity is likely to grow. This will blunt the church’s witness, diminishing its influence on matters far beyond immigration. Catholic bishops hoping to strengthen the church’s witness should consider talking about immigration in more pragmatic terms — encouraging voters to weigh the pros and cons for the countries and communities receiving migrants. That stance might help lower the political temperature and reduce dehumanizing rhetoric in a fractured nation and church.
The post This issue is splitting the Catholic Church appeared first on Washington Post.
