The Abdication of Conscience: How the American Church Built Its Own Concentration Camps

by Mike Carsten OFS

The Alligator in the Sanctuary

Deep in the Florida Everglades, on land considered sacred by Native American tribes and vital to a fragile ecosystem, a new monument to American cruelty is taking shape.¹ It is a massive immigrant detention camp, built in just eight days on an abandoned airfield, designed to house 5,000 undocumented human beings awaiting deportation.¹ Its architects, the political leaders of Florida and the Trump administration, have christened it “Alligator Alcatraz,” a name chosen with deliberate, theatrical sadism.¹ This is not merely a bureaucratic designation; it is a public declaration of intent. The name, evoking the nation’s most notorious prison known for its brutal conditions, is meant to “send a message” of deterrence through fear.¹

The physical reality of the camp matches its name. It is a sprawling complex of tents surrounded by over 28,000 feet of barbed wire and monitored by more than 200 security cameras.¹ It sits in a remote swamp, prone to flooding from the frequent heavy rains, and offers little protection from the oppressive heat and swarms of mosquitoes.¹ The message is clear: those held within are not worthy of humane treatment; they are to be made an example of. This message is amplified by the gleeful marketing of “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise and the circulation of official memes depicting the barbed-wire compound “guarded” by alligators wearing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hats.¹ This is not policy; it is a performance of state-sanctioned contempt, a spectacle of dehumanization where President Trump himself could tour the facility and boast, “We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison”.⁴

The construction of such a place has rightly sparked outrage. Critics have reached for the most potent language they can find, nicknaming the facility “Alligator Auschwitz”.⁴ This comparison has, just as rightly, drawn concern from Jewish leaders and others who caution against making false equivalencies that disrespect the unique horror of the Holocaust.⁴ The point is well taken. The industrial-scale extermination of the Shoah is a singular evil. Yet, as Rabbi Ammos Chorny of Naples, Florida, warned in a sermon regarding the facility, “we would be dangerously blind not to hear the echoes of history in our midst”.⁴ The use of such a loaded term, while historically imprecise, signals a moral emergency. It reflects a gut-level recognition that the process of stripping a group of its humanity to justify its indefinite detention in punitive conditions is a path that has led to unspeakable darkness before. Therefore, this analysis will use the term “concentration camp” not to equate its function with the death camps of the Third Reich, but in its historically accurate sense: a place where a civilian population is imprisoned outside the normal judicial process, based on their group identity, for the purposes of control, punishment, and deterrence.

And this brings us to the provocative, yet necessary, thesis of this investigation. While these camps are built and funded by the state, they are the direct and foreseeable consequence of a profound moral and theological failure on the part of the institutional Catholic Church in the United States. They are the bitter harvest of a Church that has abdicated its prophetic duty in exchange for perceived political influence. They are, in a real and damning sense, Catholic Concentration Camps (CCC). This is not because the Church provided the funding or the barbed wire, but because it has meticulously cultivated the political and moral vacuum in which such atrocities can be conceived, built, and defended without facing the full, unified, and uncompromising opposition of the Body of Christ. This abdication is rooted in a duplicitous policy of “neutrality” and a deep-seated theological sin of “othering,” which together have made the American Church a silent partner in the construction of its own gulags.

Part I: The Doctrine of the Empty Chair: Neutrality as a Moral Stance

The American Catholic hierarchy, when confronted with its failure to oppose the architects of these camps, retreats behind a carefully constructed shield: the doctrine of political neutrality. This official policy, however, is not a position of moral integrity or spiritual detachment. It is a calculated political strategy, a legalistic fiction that, in the polarized landscape of American politics, amounts to a partisan choice and a catastrophic dereliction of the Gospel’s prophetic demand. It is the doctrine of the empty chair, a deliberate absence from the battlefield of justice that cedes the territory to the forces of cruelty.

1.1: ‘Forming Consciences’ or Forbidding Prophecy?

The official line from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is consistent and clear. In a statement offered on July 8, 2025, in response to a new IRS interpretation of rules governing political speech by non-profits, the Conference reaffirmed its long-held position: “The Catholic Church maintains its stance of not endorsing or opposing political candidates”.⁵ The stated purpose of the Church’s engagement in the public square, according to the USCCB, is not to pick winners in elections but to “help Catholics form their conscience in the Gospel so they might discern which candidates and policies would advance the common good”.⁵ This process of conscience formation, they argue, is a lifelong obligation for the faithful, requiring study of scripture and Church teaching, examination of facts, and prayerful reflection to discern God’s will.⁷

This posture of principled non-partisanship, however, collapses under the weight of the Church’s own teachings and priorities. The USCCB’s neutrality is, in practice, highly selective. While claiming not to endorse candidates, the bishops have been anything but neutral on certain issues. The most prominent example is abortion. In their document “Catholics in Political Life,” the bishops declare that abortion is an “intrinsically evil” act and that failing to protect the unborn from the moment of conception is a “sin against justice”.⁸ This teaching is presented not as a matter for prudential judgment, but as an absolute, a “constant and received teaching of the Church” that has been affirmed since the first century.⁸ Consequently, politicians who consistently act to support abortion rights risk being publicly labeled as “cooperators in evil”.⁸ The bishops even state that Catholic institutions “should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” by giving them awards or platforms.⁸

Herein lies the central contradiction. The USCCB claims neutrality regarding candidates but elevates one specific issue to the status of a “non-negotiable” litmus test.⁸ In a two-party political system where one party is broadly perceived as being aligned with this “non-negotiable” issue, the instruction to “form consciences” is no longer a neutral exercise in moral discernment. It becomes a thinly veiled and powerful political directive. The faithful are told that one issue is of such paramount importance that it creates a unique and grave moral obligation. When one political party is seen as the champion of that issue, the act of “forming one’s conscience” according to the bishops’ guidance leads to a predictable political conclusion.

This transforms the entire moral calculus of the Church’s political engagement. The refusal to issue a similarly absolute condemnation of the politicians and policies responsible for caging human beings in places like “Alligator Alcatraz” becomes the implicit price of maintaining influence with the party that aligns on the “non-negotiable” issue. The dehumanization of the migrant, the separation of families, the construction of concentration camps—these are relegated to the category of issues requiring “prudential judgment,” where “Catholics may choose different ways to respond to compelling social problems”.⁷ This creates a hierarchy of sin, where the caging of a child is a debatable policy choice, but abortion is an absolute evil that places a politician outside the bounds of Catholic honor. The doctrine of “forming consciences” has been weaponized. It has been perverted from a tool for seeking truth into a sophisticated mechanism for laundering a partisan political alignment through the language of faith. The USCCB’s professed neutrality is a lie. They have chosen a side not by endorsing a candidate, but by choosing which sins to treat as absolute and which to treat as negotiable. This selective outrage, this moral gerrymandering, is the foundational act of complicity that allows the camps to exist.

1.2: The Price of a Tax Exemption and the Taint of Federal Funds

The hierarchy’s strategic neutrality is reinforced by a deep-seated institutional anxiety, rooted in both legal and financial realities. The primary legal justification for this caution is the Johnson Amendment, a provision in the U.S. tax code that explicitly prohibits 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from participating or intervening in “any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office”.¹¹ While the USCCB’s Office of General Counsel provides detailed guidelines on navigating these rules, the overarching effect has been to foster a culture of profound risk aversion.¹¹ The fear of jeopardizing the Church’s vast financial and institutional tax-exempt status has, in practice, often trumped the moral imperative for a clear, prophetic voice. Institutional self-preservation becomes the highest good, a goal before which even the most egregious injustices must be addressed with carefully parsed language and an abundance of caution.

This institutional timidity is further complicated by the Church’s direct financial entanglement with the very government whose policies it is called to critique. This issue has become a flashpoint, creating a rare point of agreement between critics on the theological left and right. From a traditionalist perspective, commentators on forums like Reddit have argued that the USCCB has become a “magnet for federal funds, to the point of distorting the doctrinal messages it projects, such as emphasizing pro-immigration over pro-life”.¹⁰ This critique found a powerful voice in the political mainstream when Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic himself, publicly challenged the bishops’ motives for condemning the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Vance questioned whether the bishops’ stance was genuinely rooted in pastoral concern or if they were “actually worried about their bottom line,” citing the fact that U.S. dioceses receive over $100 million in federal grants for refugee resettlement programs.¹²

The USCCB immediately refuted this accusation, issuing a statement clarifying that the federal funds they receive are part of a long-standing partnership with the government to carry out the “work of mercy” of resettling refugees, and that these funds are insufficient to cover the full costs of the programs.¹² While the bishops’ defense may be factually correct, the political damage is done. The mere existence of such a significant financial relationship creates the

perception of a conflict of interest, providing a ready-made excuse for politicians to dismiss the Church’s moral witness as the self-interested lobbying of a government contractor.

This situation places the USCCB in a pincer movement of critique. On one side, progressive Catholics—the intended audience of this very blog—decry the Conference for its moral cowardice, its failure to stand unequivocally with the oppressed, and its prioritization of institutional access over prophetic witness. On the other side, traditionalist Catholics lambast the USCCB as a “limp-wristed bureaucracy” that has become too liberal, too entangled with government, and too compromised by federal money to speak with authentic Catholic authority.¹⁰ Though they come from opposing theological and political poles, both critiques converge on the same diagnosis of institutional decay: a Conference that has become so focused on its own bureaucratic preservation, its legal status, and its government partnerships that it has lost the ability to speak with the clear, uncompromised, and courageous moral voice the Gospel demands. This widespread crisis of legitimacy, felt across the ideological spectrum of American Catholicism, reveals an institution that is failing its primary mission, an institution whose silence on the camps in the Everglades is not an accident, but the logical outcome of its own internal priorities.

Part II: The Gospel vs. The Conference: A Church Divided on the Stranger

There exists a vast and tragic chasm between the official teachings of the Catholic Church on the treatment of migrants and the brutal reality that its political quietism allows to fester. On one side of this chasm is a rich, beautiful, and biblically-grounded tradition of welcome and solidarity. On the other side is the barbed wire, the flooding tents, and the calculated cruelty of “Alligator Alcatraz.” The failure of the USCCB is not that it lacks the right words, but that it refuses to give those words political teeth, creating a profound dissonance that leaves the most vulnerable members of its own flock abandoned and afraid.

2.1: The Eloquence of Teaching

To read the official documents of the Catholic Church on migration is to encounter a radical call to compassion and justice. The teaching is not ambiguous, tentative, or new; it is a consistent and powerful thread running from the Old Testament to the modern papacy. The Holy See, in its “Twenty Action Points for the Global Compacts,” provides a detailed policy blueprint for a just and humane migration system, calling on states to ban arbitrary and collective expulsions, to expand legal pathways for migration, and, crucially, to “adopt national policies that prefer alternatives to the detention of those seeking access to the territory”.¹³

The USCCB, in its own documents, echoes and amplifies this universal teaching for the American context. In their “Catholic Elements of Immigration Reform,” the bishops insist that all enforcement efforts must be “targeted, proportional, and humane”.¹⁴ They declare that the “dehumanization or vilification of noncitizens as a means to deprive them of protection under the law is not only contrary to the rule of law but an affront to God himself, who has created them in his own image”.¹⁴ They argue for limiting the use of detention, “especially for families, children, pregnant women, the sick, elderly, and disabled, given its proven harms and the pervasive lack of appropriate care in detention settings”.¹⁴ Their teaching is grounded in the deepest roots of the faith, recalling the story of Exodus and reminding the faithful, “You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were aliens in the land of Egypt”.¹⁵ The New Testament mandate is even more direct, with Jesus identifying himself with the stranger: “a stranger and you welcomed me” (Mt 25:35).¹⁵

Even in the face of the current crisis, the bishops have continued to issue statements that are, on paper, pastorally sensitive and morally correct. In a June 2025 statement, USCCB President Archbishop Timothy Broglio directly addressed the surge in immigration enforcement, decrying it as a “profound social crisis” that goes “well beyond those with criminal histories”.¹⁶ He spoke directly to the immigrant community, assuring them, “As your shepherds, your fear echoes in our hearts and we make your pain our own. Count on the commitment of all of us to stand with you in this challenging hour”.¹⁶ These are powerful, beautiful, and deeply Catholic words. They articulate a vision of the Church as a mother and a sanctuary for the vulnerable. The tragedy is that they remain just words, rendered hollow by the Conference’s refusal to confront the political powers that create the fear their words purport to soothe.

2.2: The Brutality of Reality

The eloquent teachings of the Church stand in stark, almost grotesque, contrast to the lived reality of the policies they fail to stop. The “Alligator Alcatraz” facility is not a regrettable but necessary component of a humane enforcement system; it is the physical embodiment of the very dehumanization the bishops condemn. It is a system built not on proportionality, but on cruelty as a form of communication. Governor Ron DeSantis and other state officials have been explicit that the facility’s “rugged and remote” location in the Everglades and its deliberately intimidating name are meant as a “deterrent”.¹ The message is not one of justice, but of suffering: do not come here, or this is what awaits you.

The conditions within the camp fulfill the promise of its name. Human rights advocates, environmental groups, and Native American tribes have all protested its construction, citing the cruelty of exposing detainees to extreme heat and mosquitoes, the threat to the fragile Everglades ecosystem, and the desecration of land the tribes consider sacred.¹ The facility’s structural integrity is dangerously inadequate for its location. During a visit by President Trump to mark its opening, a simple heavy rainstorm caused flooding in the tents.¹ While state officials claim the complex can withstand a Category 2 hurricane, they have also indicated that the detainees would not be evacuated in such an event, a policy that one state lawmaker described as creating a structure that would “blow apart like matchsticks” in a major storm.²

This architecture of cruelty is accompanied by a political spectacle of contempt. President Trump’s tour, where he joked about alligators hunting escaped detainees, was not an off-the-cuff remark but a calculated performance for his political base.⁴ It was a moment of political theater designed to mock and degrade the very people the Church, in its documents, calls “our neighbors, friends and family members”.¹⁷ The selling of “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise and the gleeful sharing of caged-in bunk photos by political supporters are not incidental details; they are evidence of a political culture that has moved beyond mere policy disagreement and into the realm of reveling in the suffering of a designated out-group.⁴ This is the brutal reality that the USCCB’s carefully worded statements and claims of neutrality have failed to prevent. It is a reality that makes a mockery of their assurances that “your fear echoes in our hearts.”

2.3: The Dissonance of the Faithful

The most damning evidence of the USCCB’s pastoral failure is the emergence of a de facto schism between the “Church of the Conference” and the “Church of the Parish.” While the national leadership in Washington D.C. navigates the political tightrope of neutrality and abstract advocacy, priests and bishops on the ground are dealing with a full-blown pastoral crisis. The consequences of the policies that the USCCB refuses to unequivocally condemn are not abstract; they are terror and panic in the pews.

In Southern California, a region on the front lines of the administration’s aggressive deportation campaign, the response from local Church leaders has been one of emergency action. In a truly extraordinary measure, Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Diocese of San Bernardino issued a formal decree freeing members of his diocese from their Sunday and Holy Day obligation to attend Mass if they fear “potential immigration enforcement actions by civil authorities”.¹⁸ This move came after federal agents detained migrants on Catholic Church property in his diocese, violating a decades-old norm that treated houses of worship as sanctuaries.¹⁸ The implication of Bishop Rojas’s decree is staggering: the policies of the state have become so threatening that a bishop must release his flock from their most sacred weekly obligation for their own safety.

This is not an isolated incident. Across the region, priests and laypeople are mobilizing to fill the void left by their national leadership. Fr. Brendan Busse, a pastor in Boyle Heights, described the language his community uses: “they feel hunted”.¹⁸ He volunteers with a neighborhood rapid response network, trained to provide support and resources when ICE activity is reported.¹⁸ Other dioceses have organized workshops to teach parishioners their rights, coordinated prayer vigils, and made food deliveries to families too afraid to leave their homes.¹⁸ Priests and deacons are accompanying individuals to immigration court, a simple act of presence that appears to improve outcomes for asylum seekers.¹⁸

This stark contrast reveals the catastrophic nature of the USCCB’s failure. Their strategy of high-level, politically cautious engagement has effectively abandoned the flock on the ground. It has created a situation where local pastors must improvise pastoral strategies to deal with a state of terror that their own national conference is unwilling to name and condemn with the full force of its moral authority. The “Church of the Conference” issues statements lamenting the “palpable cries of anxiety and fear,” while the “Church of the Parish” is left to comfort the hunted and dispense them from their religious duties. This is more than a political failure; it is a pastoral abdication of the highest order. By refusing to be a shield for the most vulnerable, the USCCB has left its own people defenseless, forcing them to wonder if they are being hunted not only by the state, but by the silence of their own shepherds.

Part III: The Theology of Othering: The Original Sin of the American Church

The political calculations and pastoral failures of the American hierarchy are not merely strategic errors; they are symptoms of a much deeper theological disease. The moral paralysis of the institutional Church in the face of state-sanctioned cruelty is made possible by a foundational sin: the sin of “othering.” It is this process of theological and social boundary-drawing, of defining who is “us” and who is “them,” that provides the moral anesthetic required for a Christian people to tolerate the intolerable. The concentration camps in the Everglades are the physical manifestation of a spiritual wall that has first been erected in the hearts of a significant portion of the American Church.

3.1: Defining the Sin: ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’

“Othering” is the process by which a dominant social group defines certain individuals or groups as not belonging, as outside the circle of shared norms and moral concern.¹⁹ As writer Ched Myers explains, while all groups establish boundaries, othering weaponizes these boundaries to “shore up the privileges of the strong against the needs of the weak”.²⁰ It functions by labeling the “Other” as inferior, unclean, dangerous, or subhuman, thereby rationalizing their subjugation.²⁰ This dynamic is a “historical constant,” visible in the way European settlers portrayed Native Americans as “savages” to justify genocide and the way white society portrayed African Americans as an “inferior race” to justify slavery and segregation.¹⁹

Within the Church, this sin manifests as a form of tribalism that stands in direct opposition to the Gospel’s universal call. As Patrick Saint-Jean, S.J., observes, “our American Catholic Church is polarized by its factions: pro-life vs. pro-choice, gun restrictions vs. pro-gun, Democrat vs. Republican, CNN vs. Fox News”.¹⁹ This factionalism creates an “us vs. them” mentality, a “selective activism” where Catholics choose to side with one group’s agenda while ignoring other pressing social justice issues.²¹ This divisive attitude, this creation of an “other” within the Body of Christ, is what Saint-Jean calls “a new sin in the Church”.²¹

The theological antidote to this poison lies at the very heart of Catholic Social Teaching. The seven key themes of this tradition are a systematic refutation of othering. The principle of the Life and Dignity of the Human Person proclaims that every person is precious and sacred, the foundation of a moral vision for society.²² The

Call to Family, Community, and Participation teaches that the person is not only sacred but also social, with a right and duty to participate in society.²² The principle of

Solidarity is the most direct counter-argument: “We are one human family whatever our national, racial, ethnic, economic, and ideological differences. We are our brothers and sisters keepers, wherever they may be”.²² Finally, the

Option for the Poor and Vulnerable provides the basic moral test for any society: “how our most vulnerable members are faring”.²² Together, these principles demand that the Christian see every human being not as an “other,” but as a brother or sister for whom we are responsible.

3.2: The Immigrant as the ‘Other’ in the ‘Traditionalist’ Church

I belive that a “traditionalist Church” has been built in the USA that enables these policies. It is crucial, however, to clarify this term. While there is a small and vocal group of liturgical traditionalists who focus on the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass and are often critical of the USCCB’s perceived liberalism ¹⁰, the more potent force in this context is a broader, politically conservative and nationalist bloc within American Catholicism. This bloc, while not necessarily “traditionalist” in the strict liturgical sense, has successfully adopted and propagated a narrative that “others” the immigrant, transforming them from a person to be welcomed into a threat to be repelled.

This narrative directly contradicts the consistent teaching of the Church. Where Church teaching, from the Pope down to the local bishops, speaks of migrants as families fleeing poverty and violence, as our “neighbors, friends and family members” ¹⁷, this nationalist bloc frames them as an invasion of criminals, a drain on the economy, and a danger to national identity and security. This is precisely the kind of discriminatory narrative that Pope Francis has warned against, stating that any measure that “tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality” is something a “rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment” against.²⁵

This process of othering is not just a political tactic; it is a psychological and theological prerequisite for cruelty. Catholic Social Teaching demands that the migrant be seen as Christ in disguise, a brother or sister in need.¹⁵ Policies like the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz,” however, are predicated on a foundation of extreme cruelty and dehumanization. It is psychologically and theologically impossible for a person to simultaneously view the detainees as their brothers and sisters in Christ and also support their indefinite confinement in a remote, flood-prone swamp under the threat of alligators. The cognitive dissonance is too great.

Therefore, for a Catholic to support such policies, the migrant must first be stripped of their shared humanity. They must be redefined. They must be “othered.” The narrative of invasion and criminality serves this exact purpose. It recasts the desperate family fleeing violence as a dangerous alien, the asylum seeker as a law-breaking invader. Once this redefinition is complete, once the “other” is no longer seen as a person with inherent dignity but as a problem to be managed, then the policies of cruelty become not only possible, but logical. The camps, then, are not merely a policy outcome of a political disagreement. They are the physical architecture built upon a foundation of successful theological malpractice. The campaign of “othering” within a powerful segment of the American Church has provided the moral license for Catholic voters and politicians to endorse and enact policies that would be utterly unthinkable if viewed through the clear, uncompromised lens of the Gospel.

The Blasphemy of Othering: A God Who is ‘Other’

The ultimate theological refutation of this sinful othering lies in the very nature of God as revealed in Christian faith. While political and social othering casts the stranger as a threat, Catholic theology presents God himself as the ultimate “Other.” In the thought of modern theologians, and influential popes like John Paul II, “the Other” is often a term used to refer to God.²⁷ God is the one who is wholly distinct from creation, who comes to us from outside our limited human categories, who speaks into our silence in ways we do not expect.²⁷ The mystery of the Trinity itself is a revelation of God as a communion of relational otherness—three distinct Persons who are one divine essence.²⁸ God is not a monolithic, self-contained being, but an eternal, dynamic relationship of love between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.²⁸

This understanding of God as the transcendent “Other” imbues the biblical command to “welcome the stranger” with profound theological weight. It is not merely an ethical injunction to be kind to foreigners. It is the central act of faith through which we welcome God himself. When we create space for the human other, the stranger, the migrant, we are creating space for God to enter our world. As Pope John Paul II wrote, “All, believers and non-believers alike, need to learn a silence that allows the Other to speak when and how he wishes, and allows us to understand his words”.²⁷

From this perspective, the construction of walls and concentration camps takes on a terrifying theological meaning. By building physical barriers to exclude the human other, we are engaging in a spiritual project to exclude God. By creating a system designed to dehumanize and silence the migrant, we are attempting to silence the voice of the divine “Other” who comes to us in the distressing disguise of the poor and the displaced. This is the ultimate blasphemy of the policies enacted at our border. It is a rejection not just of a fellow human being, but of the very nature of a God who reveals himself in the face of the stranger. The South African bishops, in their condemnation of apartheid, correctly identified this theological endpoint, trembling “at the blasphemy of thus attributing to God the offences against charity and justice that are apartheid’s necessary accompaniment”.²⁹ In the same way, the camps in the Everglades are not just an injustice; they are a blasphemy, a monument to a faction of the Church that, in its attempt to wall out the stranger, has succeeded only in walling out its God.

Part IV: Echoes in the Chamber: Historical Precedents for Complicity

The current crisis of the American Church is not a new or unique failure. It is a tragic echo of a recurring pattern of institutional compromise and moral failure that has played out whenever the Church has been confronted by powerful, nationalist, and authoritarian regimes. An examination of the Church’s response to Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, and Argentina’s Dirty War reveals a consistent and damning history of institutional self-preservation often taking precedence over prophetic witness. The silence from the USCCB today is not an anomaly; it is the modern verse of a very old and sorrowful song.

4.1: The Ghost of the Reichskonkordat: Nazi Germany

The clearest and most chilling historical parallel to the American Church’s current predicament is its relationship with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Before Hitler’s rise to power, the Catholic Church in Germany was one of the strongest voices of opposition to Nazism. Sermons and Catholic newspapers vigorously denounced the party’s neopaganism and racism, and priests were known to refuse the sacraments to Catholics in Nazi uniforms.³⁰ In the 1933 elections, the proportion of Catholics who voted for the Nazi Party was significantly lower than the national average.³⁰

However, once Hitler became Chancellor, this opposition faltered, culminating in the signing of the Reichskonkordat in July 1933 between the Vatican and the Nazi government.³⁰ From the Vatican’s perspective, the concordat was a pragmatic move to protect the institutional rights of the Church in a hostile environment. The Church pledged to abstain from political activity in exchange for the Reich’s guarantee of religious freedom for Catholics.³¹ More critically, many in the Church hierarchy saw “atheistic communism” as a far greater existential threat than National Socialism, viewing Hitler as an indispensable “bulwark against Bolshevism”.³¹ For Hitler, the treaty was a massive propaganda victory. It granted his new, radical regime international legitimacy and, by securing the dissolution of the powerful Catholic Centre Party, neutralized a major source of organized domestic opposition.³¹

The fruits of this devil’s bargain were immediate and devastating for the Church. The Nazi regime began to violate the treaty almost immediately, systematically shutting down Catholic schools, newspapers, and youth groups, confiscating Church property, and imprisoning or murdering clergy and lay leaders.³⁰ The Vatican’s strong public condemnation, the encyclical

Mit brennender Sorge (“With Burning Concern”), was smuggled into Germany and read from the pulpits in 1937. It was a courageous and powerful denunciation of the regime’s “fundamental hostility” to the church, but it came four years after the concordat had helped solidify Hitler’s power, when the regime was fully entrenched and organized opposition had been crushed.³⁰

The parallels to the current situation in the United States are disturbingly precise. The American hierarchy’s singular focus on the “non-negotiable” issue of abortion, and its corresponding fear of a Democratic party that largely supports abortion rights, mirrors the 1930s hierarchy’s fear of communism. This fear has led to a similarly transactional and morally compromised approach toward a Republican administration that commits other grave evils. The USCCB’s stance of “neutrality,” which in practice provides cover for the administration’s anti-immigrant policies, is a modern-day, informal concordat. Political silence on the creation of concentration camps is the price being paid for perceived political access and influence on the issue of abortion. The Church is once again making a deal with a nationalist power that it sees as an ally against a greater ideological foe, all while that power systematically violates the very principles of human dignity the Church claims to uphold.

4.2: The Sins of Silence and Division: Apartheid and Argentina

The pattern of institutional compromise is not limited to Nazi Germany. The Church’s history in Apartheid South Africa and during Argentina’s Dirty War reveals similar dynamics of internal division and a tragic gap between eloquent teaching and concrete action.

In South Africa, the Catholic bishops issued a powerful and theologically profound statement in 1957, condemning the principle of apartheid as “intrinsically evil” and a “blasphemy” that attributed to God the “offences against charity and justice”.²⁹ They correctly identified that enthroning racial discrimination as the supreme principle of the state was a direct contradiction of Christ’s teaching. Yet, in the very same document, the bishops were forced to make a stunning admission: “The practice of segregation, though officially not recognized in our churches, characterizes nevertheless many of our church societies, our schools, seminaries, convents, hospitals and the social life of our people”.²⁹ They went on to state, “We are hypocrites if we condemn apartheid in South African society and condone it in our own institutions”.²⁹ This reveals a Church capable of articulating the highest moral principles while simultaneously confessing its own deep complicity in the very sin it condemns. This is a direct parallel to the USCCB today, which produces eloquent documents on welcoming the stranger while a significant portion of its flock and its political allies support policies of radical exclusion.

The case of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983) presents an even more chilling parallel. The war was a conflict fought between Catholics. The military junta, led by devout Catholics like General Jorge Videla, saw itself as defending “Christian civilization” from leftist subversion.³⁴ Their victims were often “committed Catholics”—priests, nuns, and laypeople influenced by Vatican II and liberation theology to work for social justice among the poor.³⁴ The junta branded these Catholics as “communists” and “subversives who misinterpreted Catholic doctrine,” and proceeded to kidnap, torture, and murder them by the thousands.³⁴

During this time, the institutional Church hierarchy was largely silent or, in some cases, actively complicit. Fearing the “Marxist” threat and seeking to preserve its own institutional status, the bishops’ conference publicly counseled Argentinians “to cooperate in a positive way with the new government” and assured the junta that the Church “in no way intends to take a critical position”.³⁵ This created a profound internal fracture. The “committed Catholics” who were being persecuted by the state were effectively abandoned—and “othered”—by their own institution. They were denied communion in prison, a “de facto excommunication” that signaled the institutional Church’s acceptance of the state’s authority to decide “who was or wasn’t Catholic”.³⁴ This painful history, in which Pope Francis himself was the Jesuit provincial and faced accusations of not doing enough to protect his priests, demonstrates the ultimate danger of the Church allowing a nationalist state to define who belongs within the circle of Catholic concern.³⁶

The parallel to the United States today is stark. The “othering” of social-justice-oriented Catholics in Argentina is mirrored in the “othering” of immigrants and their advocates in the contemporary American Church. When a political leader can call the USCCB a “bad partner in common sense immigration enforcement,” it echoes the junta’s language of priests being “communist infiltrators”.¹² In both cases, a nationalist power seeks to divide the Church against itself, branding those who follow the Gospel’s call to serve the poor and the stranger as enemies of the state and of “authentic” faith. The silence of the hierarchy in the face of this division is a sin that has been committed before, with devastating consequences.

Conclusion: Tearing Down the Temple Walls

The barbed wire encircling the camps in the Florida Everglades does more than imprison human bodies; it lays bare a profound spiritual crisis at the heart of the American Catholic Church. These camps are the poisoned fruit of a tree whose roots run deep into the soil of institutional compromise. They are the logical endpoint of a Church that has chosen the perceived safety of political neutrality over the dangerous clarity of prophetic witness, the security of its tax-exempt status over the moral courage to defend the vulnerable, and the divisive tribalism of “othering” over the radical, universal solidarity demanded by the Gospel.

The claim of neutrality by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is a transparent fiction, a semantic shield that fails to conceal a clear political and moral choice. By elevating one issue to the status of a “non-negotiable” absolute while relegating the caging of human beings to a matter of “prudential judgment,” the hierarchy has made its allegiance clear. It has entered into an unspoken concordat with a political power that tramples on the dignity of the immigrant, trading its silence on the camps for perceived influence on other fronts. This is not neutrality; it is the complicity of the bystander, a choice for the oppressor. As the historical record from Nazi Germany to Apartheid South Africa to Argentina’s Dirty War shows, such bargains with nationalist powers never end well for the Church or for the victims of the state.

The theological foundation for this failure is the sin of “othering.” A powerful faction within the American Church has successfully redefined the immigrant, transforming the “stranger” whom Christ commands us to welcome into a criminal, an invader, a threat. This act of theological malpractice is the necessary prerequisite for cruelty, providing the moral license for Catholic citizens and politicians to support policies of dehumanization that would otherwise be unthinkable. In doing so, they commit a form of blasphemy, for in rejecting the human “other,” they reject the God who reveals Himself as the ultimate “Other,” the stranger who comes to us in the distressing disguise of the poor.

This brings the challenge directly to the readers of this blog, to those who are “Chasing the Wild Goose”—the wild, untamable Spirit of God. The critical question is not, “What will the bishops do?” The historical record suggests we already know the answer: they will issue carefully worded statements, balance competing interests, and prioritize the institution. The real question is, “What will we do?” The Spirit of justice cannot be caged by the cautious bureaucracy of a national conference or the cynical calculations of partisan politics.

The work, then, is not to politely petition the USCCB for reform, but to build a Church on the ground that makes the USCCB’s current stance of moral abdication impossible. The work is to tear down the walls of “othering” that have been erected in our own parishes, our own communities, and our own hearts. The work is to refuse the false choice between being “pro-life” and “pro-immigrant,” and to instead proclaim a consistent ethic of life that defends the dignity of the human person from the moment of conception to their last breath, whether that breath is threatened in the womb or in a sweltering tent in the Everglades.

The Church is not the marble building in Washington D.C. that issues press releases. The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ. And right now, a part of that Body is being held in bondage, isolated and tormented. The only question that matters now is whether the rest of the Body has the courage to feel that pain and the will to act to set it free.

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