Our bishops continue to offer stones to the faithful who are simply asking for bread.
By Fr. John A. Perricone
Crisis Magazine
December 24, 2025
One by one, as though on a conga line for the Democratic National Committee, our bishops last November recited a scripted Instagram paean to illegal immigration. Moreover, at the end of their recent November meeting, it was reported that they also, by overwhelming majority, huffed and puffed: "We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of peoples."
For greater effect, they should have hired a better costume director. Except for one or two, they looked like unmade beds. Of course, this is part of the episcopal Spirit-of-Vatican-II look: casual, unkempt, pedestrian. All of which contributes to their "we have nothing important to say" message, joined to "we are simply here to listen to you." The unspoken caveat: "you are listened to if you are the right you."
Seems as though our good bishops have perfected the art of irrelevance.
Their view on illegal immigration reeks of an inverted Holy Charity: a regimen of good feeling, a happy indulgence of the zeitgeist married to soggy sentiment. This is galaxies away from true Charity, which C.S. Lewis describes as "severe" in his Four Loves, or, the 12th-century Richard of St. Victor, with his "violence of love" in his classic On the Four Degrees of the Violence of Love.
Charity has nothing to do with emotion but all to do with truth. It rips away at the comforts of feelings to make way for the glories of sacrifice.
This episcopal echo chamber of the DNC is a deadly serious matter. Souls hang in the balance. For many Catholics may gather the impression that this is the settled teaching of the Church, binding all Catholics in conscience. It is not. It is the opinion of a number of individual bishops. Making such a widely distributed Instagram message will most definitely leave many Catholics misinformed. The imitable Fr. Pokorsky clarifies,
The content of the (episcopal) statement raises questions about the appropriate boundary between moral teaching and political intervention. Deportation may be immoral by intention or circumstance, but it is not intrinsically evil. The term "indiscriminate" is morally uncontroversial: few would defend capricious deportation practices violating the fundamental dignity of human beings. However, it is more likely that most will perceive the statement as a critique of U.S. immigration enforcement, presumably failing to correspond with the USCCB policy position.
He concludes:
Only those who reject fundamental Church teaching in matters of faith and morals are dissident Catholics. Blurring the distinction between the authority of Catholic principles and the broader latitude of prudential judgments is unjust. The ambiguity allows doctrinally dissident Catholics to accuse doctrinally orthodox Catholics of infidelity if they disagree with the USCCB political statements.
Intelligent Catholics have every right to ask the good bishops some sharp questions. Mr. Gerard Nadal framed them pointedly in a Facebook post:
- Do all the poor people of the world have a right to free and unfettered entry into the United States?...What are your inclusive and exclusive criteria ? What moral and economic calculus has gotten you to the numbers that define their answer ? What is the number where you draw the line?
- What is the limit of government-funded support of the illegal migrants that you find acceptable ? Should the American people be compelled to pay for food, shelter, and medical care for all who choose to just walk in under the umbrella of your blessing ? Would you care to set a dollar limit on that ? The three-year cost to New York City is in the range of $12 BILLION. Are the bishops saying that New Yorkers have a gospel imperative to pay this, plus however much more from a limitless number of illegal immigrants to follow.
- Why have the bishops not made a distinction between those here legally, who must show evidence of economic self-sufficiency as a condition of entry, and illegal immigrants who have cost American taxpayers well in excess of $100 Billion ? Why have they deliberately conflated the two realities?
Mr. Nadal's questions plunge a dagger into the heart of the robotic parroting of the USCCB.
Would it not have been wiser for the good bishops to speak about St. Thomas Aquinas' Ordo Caritatis: the right ordering of charity that commences with the obligations to God; then man's immortal soul; next, to those nearest to us in blood; followed by those of the Household of the Faith; then, those who share with us our native patria. This unmistakable clarity would have unmasked the gauzy blather of the "stranger" so romantically invoked by those who have long been left unmoved by the irrevocable tenets of the Catholic Faith.
Interesting, isn't it, that most singing off this page have long abandoned a perfect obedience to Catholic moral teaching. Many of these are the same folks who have been peddling a laissez-faire Catholicism which makes very few claims on the human person. A great number of them are the clan that have wreaked havoc on the Catholic liturgy, the principal conveyance of fidelity to Catholic teaching.
Catholics love their bishops.
They pray that they would begin to speak out on issues that speak directly to their path to Heaven and their place in the world. They would rejoice to hear them call every institution of Catholic learning-primary, secondary, and university/college-to a perfect fidelity to Catholic teaching, as Pope John Paul II did in his Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Finally, perhaps, these engines of an etiolated Catholicism might be brought to a halt.
How their hearts would race if the bishops reined in Georgetown University for hiring a new president, Eduardo M. Peñalver, who has a history of supporting LGBTQ+ rights, having publicly criticized opposition to gay marriage and defended a gay teacher fired by a Catholic school while at Cornell and Seattle University.
How heartened Catholics would be to hear the bishops speak out against runaway contraception, whose use among Catholics now exceeds the general population. Rather than illegal immigrants congesting our cities, the sounds of happy Catholic families bursting with children would make their presence felt.
What applause the bishops would enjoy if they framed a joint statement calling for a true return of reverence to the Blessed Sacrament, in the hope that this joint pressure would put an end to some bishops waging war on Eucharistic piety.
Good Catholics pray daily that their bishops would speak out unequivocally for nothing more than what is taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church promulgated by Pope John Paul II. Now that would create a sea change worthy of a thousand Instagram messages.
Catholics are crying out for an Olympian Catholicism which roars the Faith rather than a sandbox one which only speaks in whimpers.
Couldn't our dear bishops heed the words of Étienne Gilson in his The Intelligence in the Service of Christ the King:
One of the greatest evils from which Catholicism suffers today is that Catholics are no longer proud enough of their faith....instead of confessing in all simplicity what we owe to our Church and to our faith, instead of showing what they bring to us and what we would not have without them, we believe it good politics or good tactics, in the interests of the Church itself, to act as if, after all, we distinguish ourselves in no way from others.
The Instagram kick-dance of the bishops after their last November conference was profoundly disheartening to the Catholic people. It evoked the sad indictment of Jacques Maritain in his elegiac Peasant of the Garonne, "kneeling before the world."
Catholics simply wish that every Successor to the Apostles acts apostolically. Catholics only want the Faith of their Fathers spoken clearly, heroically unambiguously.
Now, that's not too much to ask, is it?
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.
Fr. John A. Perricone, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Iona University in New Rochelle, New York. His articles have appeared in St. John's Law Review, The Latin Mass, New Oxford Review and The Journal of Catholic Legal Studies. He can be reached at www.fatherperricone.com.