For the entire year of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV has been talking mainly about two issues: immigration and war. America’s first pope has has said of the “inalienable rights” of migrants and bemoaning the rise of international “war effort”. He he told it The message of the American clergy fell last time that “the Church cannot be silent” in the face of mass expulsions, and he said in March, one month after the United States began attacking Iran, that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who fight wars.”
His opposition to the conflict drew the ire of President Trumpe and it brought him rebuke from prominent right-leaning Christians. Fox News anchor Sean Hannity taken Leo “is more interested in spreading left-wing politics than the real teachings of Jesus Christ.” Vice President Vance he advised the pope “be careful when he talks about theological matters.” On the pope’s comments on immigration, podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey the suspect his of combining “poisonous sympathy with Biblical love.”
This criticism, however, misses something important about Pope Leo’s thinking. His statements show that he does not ignore the teachings of the Church to focus on the political issues of the time. Instead, he builds a moral argument, rooted in Catholic thought, about how believers should treat the vulnerable—a case that leads to opposing war and protecting immigrants, as well as opposing abortion.
In September, for example, sharks he said“Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I agree with the brutal treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.” In a speech in January to Vatican diplomats, he expressed his support for Christians who defend “the unborn, refugees, and immigrants.” In March, before the group Polish loyaliststhe pope said that “in the crazy time of war, it is important to defend life from conception to its natural end.”
The idea that being anti-abortion, anti-war, and anti-immigrant are all based on similar principles is not new. In 1983, during the Cold War arms race, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin he gave a speech in which he announced the words that connect these issues and several others: “solid values of life.” It has resurfaced in American Catholic consciousness ever since.
For Bernardin, the technologies of the 20th century had increased the extent to which life could be harmed. Catholics, he argued, needed a system that would include the protection and promotion of life. It would condemn the deliberate killing of innocent life, whether non-combatants in war or, in the Catholic view, unborn children through abortion. It would also deal with caring for the world’s most vulnerable people—among them the poor, the homeless, and “undocumented immigrants.” Bernardin said, “Our moral, political and economic responsibilities do not end at birth.”
Having a strong pro-life ethic does not mean conflating the different moral ideas produced by abortion, immigration, and war, or treating them as equally important. Rather, it meant that one should strive to realize “relationship” of these issues and promote a culture that cares for all. “A systematic vision of life,” said Bernardin, “seeks to expand the moral vision of society, not to divide it into airless categories.”
A strong ethic of life, overtly or implicitly, continued to emerge in Catholic circles for years to come. In his Circular of 1995, The Gospel of Life (“Gospel of Life”), Pope John Paul II stressed that Catholics should be “absolutely firm” about their solidarity with vulnerable people in society, including immigrants. The document condemned attacks on the “right to life” in the context of abortion, and the initiation of violent conflicts as well.
Pope Leo’s worldview was also influenced by these ideas. In 2023, when he was Cardinal Robert Prevost, he gave the address in Chiclayo, Peru, in which he praised Bernardin’s system as adhering to “the dignity of the human person.” The future pope described finding ways to “correctly teach and develop this type of thinking” as one of the “main challenges” facing Catholics. As his fellow priest had done four decades earlier, Prevost cited the modern war on immigrant rights, as well as abortion.
American Catholics have long been divided over how to be consistently pro-life. Some liberal Catholics to have worry that they conservative brothers condemning abortion while ignoring issues like poverty and immigration. Some conservative Catholics to have said that liberals abuse pro-life values ”to avoid backlash from pro-abortion politicians and their supporters,” as one writer put it. These debates reflect who Catholics, like Americans more broadly, are divided by partyand that Catholics who try to imitate Bernardin’s system have no natural political home. “Popes don’t fit into any political category in America,” Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and religion at Boston College, told me, “and Catholics don’t either, in terms of official Catholic teaching.”
Catholics skeptical of the pope’s statements about transfer policies and Iran war have explained that the Church teaches that abortion is “natural evil”; when a country should fight a war and how it should control immigration, however, are subject to “discretionary judgments.” In a sense, they are right. Catholics may have good-faith disagreements about how restrictive immigration policy should be, or the moral justification for certain armed wars (even though Church teaching says wars are only permissible small state) But by conflating these three issues, Pope Leo has made it more difficult for Catholics to dismiss concerns about immigration and war as “reasonable” matters. This is not because the Church’s teaching has changed recently—it hasn’t—but because the current situation regarding immigration and war has made “reasonable” disagreement unsustainable.
Immigration debates in the past year, for example, have not been exclusively or even primarily about better migrant flows or procedural requirements. They have been about arbitrary detention and cyclesand about indifference rhetoric and image. The Trump administration’s policies have threatened the ability of immigrants to practice their faith: Catholic dioceses have reported that Mass attendance it is below because many congregants are afraid of being arrested by ICE in the church. Last summer, inmates at a Florida detention center were denied access to Mass for about a month. (Officer was reportedly told priest that the station was too crowded to admit visiting priests.) Similarly, current debates about war are not just about the effectiveness of a particular military strategy. They have also been about the regime’s indifference to the safety of non-combatants, as shown by Trump’s threat that “all civilization will die tonight.”
Abortion-“first priority,” according to the bishops of the United States and to many ordinary Catholics—it is clear that it is still important in the mind of the pope.” But Leo has explained that other threats to promote and protect life should frighten the Catholic conscience as well.
