Catholic faithful in Spain split from Church over immigration

Catholicism and immigration: universal faith versus borders

A practising Catholic who stops going to Mass because they disagree with their Church's line on immigration is not a contradiction: it is applied theology. The scene — a family that attends church every Sunday and one day simply stays home — captures a rift that can no longer be hidden. It separates the Vatican's universalist discourse from the concerns of a large part of its flock about borders, security and social cohesion. And the clash is being fought with vocabulary that is increasingly economic and less sarracena.

The passage that frames the whole debate

The trigger is a specific text. In Matthew 25, Jesus identifies himself with the stranger, the hungry and the prisoner, and promises the kingdom to those who sheltered them. That "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" underpins the case for welcoming migrants as a non-negotiable command. The objection raised against it does not deny the quote: it disputes its scope. There is, it is argued, no instruction in the Gospel to allow one's own community to be harmed. Where charity ends and the duty of protection begins is the question no one settles, and the full breakdown of that exchange of verses could fill a treatise.

Turning the other cheek is not surrender

The second line of friction is hermeneutic. Much of the disagreement holds that "turning the other cheek" does not amount to passivity nor forbid legitimate self-defence against a real threat. Verses are cited that rarely appear in the homily: Luke 22:36, about selling the cloak to buy a sword, or the Proverbs on the thief caught breaking into a house. The conclusion drawn is uncomfortable for the hierarchy: the Church, they say, is either mistaken or complicit. Against this, the institutional response is that doctrine on foreigners is firm and has not changed from one papacy to the next.

From Rome to the civil service: the Church as power

There is a deeper, historical layer. One strand of analysis holds that original Christianity — that of the grassroots fraternities, with the ethics practised before hierarchical structures existed — is antagonistic to the institutional Church. The early alliance with Rome, the conversion of the clergy into an apparatus of state after the French Revolution, and doubts about the authenticity of many of the epistles attributed to Paul feed that thesis, supported by authors such as Gonzalo Puente Ojea. The underlying argument is not new: when faith merges with power, the message becomes a tool. There are also those who reply that the nations defending themselves today were, precisely, the creation of confessional monarchies.

What is really at stake

Beneath the theological noise lies a secular question: is religious universalism compatible with defending a specific community? Those who say no point to changing denomination or to à la carte Catholicism; those who defend it recall that this doctrine is the same from John Paul II to Francis, including the current pontiff, who is described as more conservative than his predecessor. Underneath it all, an uncomfortable fact: the same person who skips Mass today may return when the parish priest says what they want to hear. With churches emptying and migration discontent on the rise, more believers are likely to rethink their relationship with the institution. On what terms they return — or whether they return — is something neither the hierarchy nor the dissidents can guarantee.