Bishop Seitz of El Paso visits diocese, says helping migrants is a Christian imperative
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Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, offered a tight summary of the Church’s teaching on immigration:
“Manage your borders well, reasonably, with good policy; integrate folks carefully, intentionally; manage your economy responsibly. And as you are able, always welcome, be humane, be compassionate.”
“This is good for immigrants,” Bishop Seitz told about 200 people in St. John Henry Newman Church in Columbia. “It’s good for our country. It’s good for the soul.”
Bishop Seitz, a leading Church advocate on immigration, presented a Catholic perspective on the subject April 20 in Columbia and again on April 21 in the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Jefferson City.
He left ample time during both sessions for questions and discussion.
“Long before this was a political issue, this was a Gospel issue,” he said.
He described his message as a combination of two important topics: faith and immigration, “and how the two come together.”
“I will talk about what’s happening in our country, how we can interpret it through a Catholic moral lens, and what we are being called to do,” he said.
“Immigrant Church”
Bishop Seitz also offered Mass at several locations in Columbia and Jefferson City and toured the City of Refuge in Columbia, as well as Catholic Charities of Central and Northern Missouri, El Puente-Hispanic Ministry and the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City.
There, he visited the Missouri House and Senate floors and was greeted by lawmakers and representatives of the Missouri Catholic Conference.
In Columbia, he shared lunch with and answered questions from staff and student parishioners of St. John Henry Newman Parish.
His visit was sponsored by St. John Henry Newman Parish and the Jefferson City diocese.
For 13 years, Bishop Seitz has been living and ministering close to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It’s a place where immigration is a major part of our everyday life,” he said. “Yet, one thing that’s becoming more and more obvious in recent years is that the border is everywhere.”
Immigration has been making headlines all over the country, with dramatically increased enforcement, mass-detention and escalation of inflammatory rhetoric. Catholics must respond.
“The Church has a responsibility — members of the Church have a responsibility — to speak to issues that provide the undergirding for whatever political policy decisions are made,” said Bishop Seitz, who served as chairman of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ Committee on Migration from 2022-25.
He pointed out that immigrants brought the Catholic Church to the United States and have largely sustained it here through many generations.
“The Church has helped resettle refugees and welcomed people of many nationalities and has advocated for policies that respect human dignity, advanced family unity and offered practical pathways to fruitful integration,” he said.
Road to incivility
Immigration is not a simple issue. Bishop Seitz pointed to lingering points of debate about how best to manage migration.
“How many visas should be issued? How do we balance economic needs with fair wages and worker protections? How should countries share the responsibilities for refugees?
“These are questions for thoughtful policy, where many reasonable answers can be debated and defended,” he said.
For the most part, that is not currently happening in this country.
“Too often, for decades, important questions — how to reform asylum law, how to regularize long-term contributing residents who are without documents, how to create a forward-looking labor and refugee policy — have been unresolved,” he stated.
What’s happening now looks less like just, healthy debate and more like “our society becoming more spiteful, less civil, and a hardening of practices that wound human dignity.”
Congress’s failure to address these issues in a decisive, coherent way has left a vacuum, allowing the president to address immigration unilaterally.
“And because of that, there are things we have done as a country that leave vulnerable people stranded,” said Bishop Seitz. “We have dramatically increased funding for immigration enforcement, expanding an apparatus that now plays a central role in the lives of many communities.”
The administration calls for deporting all who are in this country without proper documentation.
“In practice, that category also includes many people who are legally pursuing avenues that are available to them in the law to regularize their status, including asylum-seekers,” Bishop Seitz noted.
He spoke of the expansion of immigrant detention and the increasing reliance on private companies to administer detention facilities.
“The immigration raids we have witnessed around the country have been driven more by the profit motive to fill the beds in these private facilities than by the need for sensible, targeted enforcement,” said Bishop Seitz.
“These are not merely statistics,” said Bishop Seitz. “We’re talking about people — neighbors, students, workers, mothers, fathers — whose lives are being upended by the policies and practices we choose.”
He added that “the steady use of dehumanizing language about immigration corrodes our moral imagination.”
“It demeans what it means to be an American and enables harm,” he said. “Call people ‘garbage,’ ‘criminals,’ ‘rapists,’ and see how that influences people’s understanding.”
“Not optional”
Bishop Seitz showed a video that his diocese produced, based on over 200 letters that had been sent to him from immigrants living all over the United States.
“Our resilience is our testimony,” a person stated in the video stated. “We know our dignity comes from God alone, and though others may deny it, it cannot be taken from us. We have hope in our God, for he walks with us.”
While visiting Rome, Bishop Seitz and others from his diocese got to show the four-minute video to Pope Leo XIV, who was brought to tears by what he saw and heard.
The people in the video asked Pope Leo to accompany them on their spiritual journey, speak up loudly for them, and “help us be a Church that refuses to abandon its people, but walks in faith and justice with our God.”
Bishop Seitz said El Paso (Spanish for “The Crossing”) is aptly named because of its proximity to the border. He noted that his diocese is one of many throughout the country that have created stable structures for helping immigrants in need.
He lauded the people in Columbia for the many services their community provides to immigrants and refugees.
He said the economic and societal benefits of immigration outweigh the costs.
“We need immigrants,” he asserted. “They contribute to an economy that depends on having people who allow it to grow, who fulfill different needs that U.S. citizens are not fulfilling.
“At the same time, the Church reminds us that we don’t want a system that forces people into this ‘Sophie’s choice’ of staying in a place where they’ll be killed or coming to a place where they’ll be mistreated,” he stated.
Bishop Seitz said that’s what happens when there aren’t enough work visas for the jobs and the people who want to do them, or when requests for asylum are not processed in a timely manner.
He referred to Jesus’s famous Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) — in which a despised foreigner shows mercy and compassion to an injured traveler by the side of the road, when others would not.
“It’s not simply a story about individual kindness,” Bishop Seitz asserted. “It’s a critique of institutions and social structures that permit a person to be left for dead in the first place.”
In the Parable of the Sheep and Goats (Matthew 25), Jesus identifies with that injured traveler: “When I was a stranger, did you help me? When I was a poor person? When I was injured?”
“Paying attention to the wounded person is not optional,” Bishop Seitz stated. “It’s an act of discipleship — of the essence of being a disciple of Jesus Christ. The Good Samaritan calls us to pay attention, and faith that pays attention must act.”
“Even if it costs”
Bishop Seitz pointed out that Missouri has an estimated 65,000 people without documents or permanent immigration status.
“Some of them might be here on campus, or in this church, or maybe have family members without documents,” he said. “Are we listening to their stories and paying attention?”
He called upon Catholics to hold their elected officials accountable for the policies they promote or condone, and to practice practical solidarity with immigrants in need.
For example, he suggested supporting mutual-aid networks for immigrants, forming coalitions within parishes to help immigrants in need, and providing pastoral care to people in immigrant detention centers.
“Small acts of solidarity, legal accompaniment, providing meals — these are all practical expressions of the Gospel and are part of forming a just political future,” he said.
He urged everyone to engage in politics, “because politics is all about how we live together as a community, as a state, as a nation.”
“I’m not saying you need to support this or that political party,” he cautioned. “In fact, as a Catholic, I think you may have trouble with either one. What I am saying is take the vision Jesus gives us in the Parable of the Good Samaritan and go make it real in our society, engaging with the long view in mind.”
Bishop Seitz encouraged the audience to address the fear that often motivates policies that hurt migrants.
He urged everyone to pursue opportunities for their parishes to bring separate ethnic and cultural groups together for common worship and fellowship.
He encouraged everyone to give courageous witness.
“Recognize that this faith of ours is not just a matter of nice feelings and happy thoughts,” he said. “It’s a matter of coming into this world with the Good News that hasn’t been received entirely, and living it faithfully, even if it costs us. Even if it means people will reject us because of what we say and do.”
He also called on everyone to pray.
“We need to bring our faith to bear and seek God’s guidance as we respond to these issues,” he said.
“Holy patience”
Aristotle once referred to politics as “the art of the possible.”
“Of course, we also need to be aware that grace can aid us in doing the impossible,” said Bishop Seitz.
Working toward just, lasting solutions requires “holy patience.”
“This means taking small but meaningful steps,” said Bishop Seitz.
He said American society and government need to identify better solutions to regulating immigration and managing the nation’s borders.
The Church teaches that “we shouldn’t be detaining people who aren’t a threat to the community ... period,” said Bishop Seitz. “That goes against people’s basic human dignity.”
He emphasized that faith without witness is empty.
“We have no interest in controlling the system,” he stated. “But we do have a responsibility to provide the principles and show how they ought to be lived out in people’s lives.”
He noted that Catholics are fortunate to have the Sacred Scriptures and 2,000 years of wise teaching on all these matters.
“So, live it with great conviction and courage and with trust that the Holy Spirit will give you the right words when you need them,” he said.
