From Paul Welch, Office of Social Action Ministry:
St. John Paul II said, “Love for others, and in the first place love for the poor, in which the Church sees Christ in himself, is made concrete in the promotion of justice.” The proposed mass deportation plan by the soon to be new administration appears to run afoul of the
church’s teaching at the highest level. St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” (“Splendor of Truth”) and 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life”) — both quote the Second Vatican Council’s teaching in “Gaudium et Spes,” the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which names “deportation” among various specific acts “offensive to human dignity” that “are a disgrace, and so long as they
infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer
injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.” The late pontiff underscored their moral severity in “Veritatis Splendor” by calling them examples
of “intrinsic evil,” explaining that, no matter the motives, these acts are “not capable of being ordered to God and to the good of the person.”
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