The right to migrate is a principle that draws on the core tenets of the pro-life movement. Asserting this right has also been a key part of challenging enemies of human life who have advocated for eugenics, population control, and abortion. It is therefore important for prolifers to be aware of the twentieth-century development of a commitment to migrants in the Catholic Church.

In Catholic teaching, the “right to migrate” goes back to Pope Pius XII, who declared its existence in the 1952 apostolic constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana. After World War II, the world was facing the largest migration crisis in world history. But the common assertion that the declaration was a response to the flood of postwar refugees is a misleading half-truth; there’s more to the story. The basis of this right to migrate was explained in Pius’s “Pentecost 1941 Radio Message” during the war.¹ There’s a longish excerpt from the 1941 message in the 1952 apostolic constitution, enough to alert the reader to the existence of an argument, but not enough to under-stand it easily.

Pope Francis called Exsul Familia Nazarethana the Magna Carta of the Church’s teaching on immigration. But Popes John XXIII (in Mater et magistra) and John Paul II (in Centesimus annus) included the Pentecost 1941 radio message in their lists of the papal documents that developed the late 19th century social encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum novarum. Both of these Pius XII documents are therefore significant, perhaps two halves of a single proposition. The later document is eloquent, but the earlier document is clearer about the basis of the right to migrate.

In 1952, Pope Pius said that he had asserted that there is a right to migrate in 1941. He didn’t use the phrase in 1941, but did explain the idea. He attached it to a concept that deserves careful unpacking, the “right to living space.” In the view of Pope Pius, the right to living space is based on the nature—the meaning, the origin, the teleology—of land. He had Genesis in mind. It’s as if a Pentecost blessing was added to the Lenten caution: “Remember, man, that thou art stardust, and unto the stars of heaven thou shalt return.” The earth, and all its lands—indeed, all the universe and everything in it—were created with mankind in mind.

Lebensraum and Spazio Vitale

The immense power and drama of his assertion may be clearer with a bit of translation. “Living space” is lebensraum in German and spazio vitale in Italian. Those words may not mean much to us today, but they were bumper-sticker slogans of the 1930s and 1940s, as well known as “MAGA” today. The Nazis in Germany and Fascists in Italy justified their wars of aggression by asserting their right to lebensraum and spazio vitale. Hitler justified World War II by reference to lebensraum, and Mussolini justified Italy’s wars of aggression in the Balkans and in Ethiopia by reference to spazio vitale.

So it is initially shocking that Pope Pius XII agreed that there is a right to spazio vitale. But then, he promptly upended the idea, declaring that this right belongs to individuals and to families, not to the state.

In 1941, at his proud little broadcasting studio on Vatican Hill behind St. Peter’s, perhaps two miles from the halls of power of the dictator Benito Mussolini, the bespectacled geek pope defied two violent dictators and denounced their justification for war, dismissing all the works and pomps of Europe’s conquerors. With great courage, he confronted their brutality, diplomatically but with clear intent. The Church had offered massive programs of social service to migrants, but now spoke of service and justice, advocat-ing for the inalienable right to migrate. Spazio vitale!

In 1952, after the war, the pope saw a crisis of migration and advocated for the migrants. In 1941, during the war, it was different: He was looking at the arguments offered by violent, aggressive, and greedy imperialists to justify massive bloodshed and arguing that migration was a better way to solve the problems that the murderous regimes pretended to solve. That is, in 1952, migration seemed to be a problem to be solved. By contrast, in 1941, the pope focused on the problem of population growth, and he saw migration as the solution. To understand the great significance of the pope’s teaching, we need to see that he declared a personal and family right to living space during World War II, not just after it.

But we also need to understand this population debate: who else was ad-dressing the problem, and what their solution was. Pius XII was responding to Hitler and Mussolini, but also to the Malthusians or eugenicists of his time. To grasp this, we need a sketch of the history of eugenics.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus published On Population, arguing that the world’s food supply was limited but the population grew exponentially; therefore, the world was mathematically certain to run short on food at some point. His idea was picked up by a mathematician, Francis Galton, who argued that controlling population was necessary and that it should be done with intelligent planning to breed a better human race, encouraging births among people with good genes and discouraging births among the weak and feeble-minded. In 1883, Galton invented the word “eugenics” to describe his proposal. The eugenics movement grew, and in the 1920s eugenicists were successful in passing laws in Europe and America supporting their aims: laws prohibiting miscegenation (marriages between eugenic Whites and dysgenic non-Whites), permitting the compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded,” and restricting the immigration of racially inferior people (non-Whites) into the United States.

For the eugenicists, the holy grail they sought was some way to control births effectively. When they spoke of “birth control,” the word had two very different meanings. It referred to the specific methods a woman or couple might choose to prevent birth, including contraception or sterilization or abortion. It also referred to social policies of eugenics—for example, their compulsory sterilization campaign.

The reasons that a woman or couple choose contraception or abortion are generally very different from the reasons that abortion clinics exist. Women seeking abortions are not thinking about birthrates; they are struggling to keep control of their own lives. But historically—and still today, globally—the people who open and run birth control clinics have been intent on decreasing population, or at least driving the birthrate down.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, is often portrayed as a champion of women’s rights, as though she freed women from domination by men and from the travails of unwanted pregnancy. She did indeed work on that. But a deeper goal, and her great success, involved birth control in both senses of the word. She tied the feminist movement to the eugenics movement, harnessing the energy of feminism to serve population control. You can see this even in the titles of her two books: Woman and the New Race is about feminism (woman) and eugenics (the new race); The Pivot of Civilization is about feminism (the pivot) and eugenics (the new civilization).

Consider Sanger’s argument in Woman and the New Race, chapter 13, entitled “Battalions of Unwanted Babies the Cause of War”:

We have our choice of one of three policies. We may abandon our science and leave the weak and diseased to die, or kill them, as the brutes do. Or we may go on over-populating the earth and have our famines and our wars while the earth exists. Or we can accept the third, sane, sensible, moral and practicable plan of birth control. We can refuse to bring weak, the helpless and the unwanted children into the world. We can refuse to overcrowd families, nations and the earth. There are these ways to meet the situation, and only these three ways.

She continues:

The world will never abandon its preventive and curative science; it may be expected to elevate and extend it beyond our present imagination. The efforts to do away with famine and the opposition to war are growing by leaps and bounds. Upon these efforts are largely based our modern social revolutions.

She concludes: “There remains only the third expedient—birth control, the real cure for war.”

Margaret Sanger said that the “pressure of population” forces a choice: (1) euthanasia for the weak, OR (2) famine and war, OR (3) birth control. She urged that responsible national leaders everywhere “accept the third, sane, sensible, moral and practicable plan of birth control.”

A major eugenics organization of her time, the Malthusian League, shared her view that the pressure of population and the international competition for land were great dangers to world peace. Sanger found support for her argument for birth control by quoting a resolution from their annual meeting in 1919, a resolution which they urged on the leaders of the Allied Powers who were working towards the Versailles Treaty.

The Malthusian League desires to point out that the proposed scheme for the League of Nations has neglected to take account of the important questions of the pressure of population, which causes the great international economic competition and rivalry, and of the increase of population, which is put forward as a justification for claiming increase of territory. It, therefore, wishes to put on record its belief that the League of Nations will only be able to fulfill its aim when it adds a clause to the following effect:

“That each Nation desiring to enter into the League of Nations shall pledge itself so to restrict its birth rate that its people shall be able to live in comfort in their own dominions without need for territorial expansion, and that it shall recognize that in-crease of population shall not justify a demand either for increase of territory or for the compulsion of other Nations to admit its emigrants; so that when all Nations in the League have shown their ability to live on their own resources without international rivalry, they will be in a position to fuse into an international federation, and territorial boundaries will then have little significance.”

Note that the Malthusians opposed migration—not in all cases, but when the numbers are large enough to impact population control. In their view, emigration lets nations cheat in their depopulation measures. Effective population control depends in part on restrictive immigration policies.

This is the context in which Pope Pius XII approached the questions of population, land, and immigration. Margaret Sanger and other eugenicists said that population growth was a hazard that would lead to war, and that the solution was birth control. Pius agreed that population growth was a hazard, but said that the solution was migration.

Note that the pope not only resisted the Fascists and the eugenicists, but also prodded Americans gently. In 1941, it was already clear that the migration catastrophe was not the responsibility of the Nazis alone—the Americans were also implicated, fussing and putzing about welcoming potentially large numbers of refugees. Measured against other smaller nations, Ameri-cans were indeed generous; measured against their ability, they were being lazy, and their lackadaisical approach had deadly results. One clear example of the links between the German slaughter and American immigration policy was the fate of the ship St. Louis in 1939—refugees sailed from Germany to America, saw the lights of Miami, were refused entry, and sailed back to death in Germany.

The 1941 Pentecost message was broadcast in Italian, then printed in French—the world’s lingua franca at that time, the language understood in every continent—and then also printed in the language of a principal target audience, in English. He wanted Americans to focus on the rights of immigrants.

Pope Pius XII asserted that the social doctrine included ideas about labor (Rerum novarum), and about politics (Quadragesimo anno, the 40th anniversary of Leo’s encyclical), and—he adds deliberately—about lebensraum (in his Pentecost message on the 50th anniversary of Rerum novarum). The fundamental principles of the Church’s social doctrine today speak of the common good, and the universal destination of all goods. Pope Pius pointed out that the most obvious of all common goods is the earth itself, given to all mankind. “Of all the goods that can be the object of private property, none is more conformable to nature, according to the teaching of Rerum novarum, than the land . . . If today the concept and the creation of vital spaces is at the center of social and political aims, should not one, before all else, think of the vital space of the family . . . a homestead of one’s own?”

Pope Pius did not accept the idea that the world as a whole was overpopulated; he insisted that there were some overcrowded areas—and also some underpopulated areas. And so, he argues, our planet has “habitable regions and vital spaces, now abandoned to wild natural vegetation, and well suited to be cultivated by man to satisfy his needs and civil activities; and more than once it is inevitable that some families, migrating from one spot or another, should go elsewhere in search of a new homeland.”

Immigration and Abortion

Prolifers sometimes dismiss questions about immigration because the right to life is absolute, and the right to migrate is not. This is a valid point, but the right to property is not absolute either; it is negotiable when it conflicts with someone else’s rights, but it’s still a right. A negotiable right is not a weak right. Note that of the six commands of the Lord in his sermon about the Last Judgment (Matthew 25:31-46—feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, etc.), none are absolute, all are negotiable.

In that context, the arguments put forth by Pope Pius XII were relevant. He said that population was distributed unevenly, and migration could make the distribution of wealth and land more equitable and just. He proclaimed:

If the two parties, those who agree to leave their native land, and those who agree to admit the newcomers, remain anxious to eliminate as far as possible all obstacles to the birth and growth of real confidence between the country of emigration and that of immigration, all those affected by such a transference of people and places will profit by the transaction:

• The families will receive a plot of ground which will be native land for them in the true sense of the word;

• the thickly inhabited countries will be relieved, and their peoples will acquire new friends in foreign countries;

• and the states which receive the emigrants will acquire industrious citizens.

In this way the nations which give and those which receive will both contribute to the increased welfare of man and the progress of human culture.

The ideas of Malthus, that the world could not possibly provide for all of humanity, had immense power in Europe and America. The pope’s hopes did not flower and fruit promptly. The eugenics movement had immense power in the 1920s and 1930s, and then it diminished somewhat after World War II, but the idea that population was “exploding” did not quiet down. The fear of growing population was the driving force for population control, including contraception, sterilization, and abortion.

Michael Schwartz, an influential pro-life advocate for decades, offered an insight about the seductive power of population control. Speaking at Loyola University Maryland in the 1990s, he said that “poverty” and “population explosion” refer to the same thing—an imbalance of people and goods. But the former phrase touches the Christian conscience; we all know that Jesus asked us to help the poor. The latter phrase, on the other hand, gives us per-mission to blame the poor; they can help themselves.

Pius XII’s ideas about immigration as the solution to population concerns undercut Planned Parenthood. You have to look back at history or look abroad at less developed nations to understand the problem clearly. The abortion fight, globally and historically, is not principally about women’s rights, but rather about population. Perhaps the quickest way to separate a concern for women from a concern for population is to look at Chinese family planning during the time that they had a one-child-only family policy. The policy included coercive abortion and was an assault not only on prenatal life but also on women’s privacy;² consequently, attitudes towards that policy offer a clear and dramatic way to separate pro-choicers who support women’s rights from eugenicists who want population control. In the spring of 1989, the quarterly journal of the London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), People magazine, had a remarkable issue devoted almost entirely to praising the Chinese program, with 16 separate glowing articles about it. So the pope’s insistence that overpopulation is a myth is a hugely significant pro-life argument, undercutting the strongest pro-abortion argument.

In 1941, on the 50th anniversary of Rerum novarum, Pope Pius XII set forth the third major piece of the Church’s emerging social doctrine. In his ideas about the most obvious common good—the earth itself—and his assertion of the right to own living space and the obvious corollary, a right to migrate, he defied the violent dictators who were then in control of Europe, including Rome. But he also undercut Malthusian theories. His ideas about population are relevant in debates about migration and abortion.³

Pius XII’s teaching is solidly pro-life and pro-immigration. The pope’s views on abortion and immigration are not just happily consistent; they are tightly linked. His pro-immigration views emerge from his pro-family views on population. He was pro-immigration because he was pro-life and pro-family.

NOTES

1. Acta Apostolicae Sedis 33 (1941), 216-227.

2. Michael Weisskopf, “Abortion Policy Tears at China’s Society,” Washington Post (January 7, 1985).

3. Regarding contemporary debates about the authority of nations to regulate their borders, the Catholic Church has not taught that such authority is eliminated by the right to migrate. Nations retain the right and duty to safeguard the common good, to enforce just laws, and to ensure public order. But that authority is not arbitrary. It must be exercised in light of the prior truth Pope Pius XII articulated: that the goods of the earth are ordered to the human person and the family and that migration is a legitimate means of securing that end.

_________________________________________________________________________

Original Bio:

John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe is a long-time pro-life activist who has been promoting a consistent ethic of hospitality since 2012.