Dominic Preziosi: From his first trip as pope in 2013 to Lampedusa to pray for refugees and migrants lost at sea until his final moments, Pope Francis was speaking out on behalf of migrants around the world. How might his death affect what the Church is trying to do on immigration, not only in this country, but elsewhere?
Bishop Mark Seitz: We lost a huge voice, someone who really understood what is going on on a worldwide scale, at levels never before seen. He got it. He saw it. He understood it. It’s easy for people who are not in the midst of that experience to be unaware of its reality and the impact that it has on people. And by the grace of God, I think Pope Francis, he understood. He always had a special love for the poor. When you read his biographies, it’s clear that it goes way back to the beginnings of his ministry. I think what he grasped is that perhaps people on the move are the kind of people that Mother Teresa referred to as the poorest of the poor of our age. And so he was attracted to them.
Kenneth Woodward: Have the American bishops established any kind of cooperative efforts with the bishops from the countries from which the migrants are leaving to help solve some of the challenges of migration? And what are some examples? In some countries, they may not want to do it, because it may be difficult for political reasons.
Bp. MS: It’s something I’ve been working on for years, and the pope actually called us to that kind of cross-border cooperation. You know, bishops are people of their age and their place in a certain way, and we're influenced by the kind of nationalism that’s forming the way people think in our age. But the Church, fundamentally, is not limited by borders. When one reflects upon the reality of being part of a People of God, that transcends any kind of divisions that human beings create. Then you begin to see that while borders may be necessary on a political level, and a useful tool in organizing rules among people, they don’t describe the whole reality of the human race and the fact that we are all together on this one relatively small planet.
KW: Can you give us specific examples?
Bp. MS: I’ve been part of various efforts. There’s a group that unites bishops conferences in this hemisphere, which is led right now by Cardinal Álvaro Ramazzini in Guatemala. In El Paso, I’m part of a group that we fondly refer to as the Tex-Mex bishops, which has existed for going on thirty years.
Part of those cross-border efforts have involved cooperation among migrant shelters, and there are networks that have been developed—and will have to be further developed—as we begin to see a reverse flow of migrants back to their countries. We as a Church and as a country should have been helping these countries allow their people to remain where they were, to create situations of greater stability. Now, we are going to have to accept responsibility to help people who are being sent back. In 2019, when Trump succeeded for the first time in closing down the border, I established a fund in my diocese called the Border Refugee Assistance Fund, which is able to help on both sides of the border. We are working to help shelters in Ciudad Juárez right now to prepare for what we expect will be an influx.
KW: But given the political situation in Venezuela, for example, can the bishops do anything cooperative?
Bp. MS: Venezuela is a very difficult case, where we have limited opportunities to really be of assistance, but we’ll look for whatever workarounds we can find. The Church in the United States has continued to help the Church in Venezuela and other places. I belong to a committee of bishops that has an annual collection for the Church in Latin America, and we raise about $6 million every year to support the Church’s work—the formation of priests and sisters, educational programs, and so on. We’ve been able to actually assist various projects in Venezuela in that way.
KW: Are all the bishops in this country on board with the migration issue?
Bp. MS: We have 280 bishops who are not all of the same mind, but the last I checked—and excuse my being a little facetious—they’re all Catholic. And so I’m assured we read the same gospel and we followed the same teachings. Now, people are going to put their efforts and passion in different areas. Nobody can do it all, but I have felt tremendously supported in this work by bishops across whatever political spectrum you might want to put a bishop into, and even those who are considered the most conservative have a heart for this.
KW: Polls show that a majority of self-identifying Catholics voted for Donald Trump in the last election, and that they largely favor his immigration policies as they understood them at the time of the vote. What can the bishops do or say to convince those Catholics that the administration's policies on deportation run counter to Catholic moral and social teachings, not to mention basic human dignity?
Bp MS: First of all, I think it's important to recognize that the Catholic Church doesn't have the opportunity to speak to most Catholics in a direct kind of way. Unfortunately, because most Catholics don't practice their faith—only 15 percent of them attend Sunday Mass—and they certainly don't take opportunities to continue their education in the faith. The Mass can’t do it all. The ten-minute homily is not intended, really, to educate, although we hope there’s an educational role that’s filled. But it can’t do it all, and in that regard, I think the Church has to accept some of the blame. We haven’t been forming our people effectively, and we haven’t always been reaching our people as well as we can.
But we also have to acknowledge that we’re part of this huge secular tsunami that has taken our world and continues to have a great purchase in impacting the way people live. So we don’t have easy access to everyone, even those who do go to Mass on Sunday. But you should be able, just by osmosis, to accept, to recognize the call of the Christian, to recognize others who gather with you on Sunday and around the world as your brothers and sisters. It’s simple, it's clear for those who practice their faith. But people are being influenced every single day, often by the media that they choose to consume. And I think the media, even when it is attempting to be balanced, very often gives a mistaken understanding of what’s happening with immigration. What do you hear in the media? You hear about the crises, you hear about the problems, you hear about the crimes. You see an event that happens at the border on one day out of 365, but you see it repeated over and over, until people’s image of what’s going on in the border is that: the one incident you know. People are being inundated with those kinds of images, and it has a very powerful effect on people’s sense of what is happening.
KW: How can we overcome this media influence?
Bp. MS: My committee [on migration] has formed a plan for the education of people at the grassroots. I did a lot of work through these years trying to visit legislators and up on the Hill, and I’ll still try to do that, but I came to see it has very limited impact if you're not changing things at the grassroots. So we have an education plan. We’ve been working to have a liaison in every diocese of the United States who will work with a group called Justice for Immigrants, sponsored by the bishops, to transmit to parishes various programs that help them encounter an immigrant or immigrant family and to hear their stories. And when you meet the real person, hear the real story, it changes the way that you see the reality. Once people realize that these policies affect their neighbor, their friend, the person that they know—once they realize the human reality of these things—we hope that we’ll see a changing of the tide in this country.
We have to humanize this. And I was just reading today something where Pope Francis said exactly that. When he came to the United States he said we have to stop talking simply in statistics and policies; we need to talk about people. So that’s critical right now. And I’ve seen its power.
KW: For example?
Bp. MS: I have a metropolitan area in my diocese, El Paso itself, which is 850,000 people, and we’re a border community, which is a pretty fascinating dynamic in itself. But we also have a big rural part of the diocese. I was out in one of our more remote border Catholic communities to celebrate Mass. When I arrived at this little church, somebody came up and said, “We have a young man who would like to say something at the end of Mass. He's going back to Colombia. He’s self-deporting, and he wants to say goodbye.” Now, you have to understand, these rural communities are fairly conservative places. And so this young man comes up at the end of Mass and begins to talk about the community that received him when he first arrived in Texas. And he started out saying, “I'm going back next week, but I want to thank you.” And then he mentioned names: “Rosanna, I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. And Jorge, I had no place to live, and you gave me a place to stay. I needed a job, and you helped me get a job.” There was not a dry eye in that church. Now you know what happened there? People encountered these immigrants, and they became members of the family. They had come to love them.
DP: In the aftermath of the 2019 Walmart shooting, you wrote a pastoral letter, “And Night Will Be No More.” A lot has changed since then. If you were to write a new pastoral letter for this moment, or even an update to your previous one, what might you say in it?
Bp MS: I think we’d have elements of what I’ve been saying now, so more of an update. The principles are the same. They haven’t changed. But, unfortunately, our government’s policy and the anti-immigrant sentiment in our country has grown to levels I never would have imagined before. And so in a sense, it’s a little easier to point out the divergence from the teaching of the Gospel. The nativism and racial prejudices and things like that are coming to be seen as somehow more acceptable. I’d have to add to that how important it is that our country maintain fundamental protections that impact all of our rights, not only those of immigrants. Due-process rights, for instance, which are an essential bedrock of a just nation. And I’d have to speak about the fact that what began as a focus on immigrants, and especially immigrants who commit crimes, has become an assault on the poor in general in our country. I think we need to be very alert and concerned about what this is, and what kind of nation might be emerging with these warped priorities that say, “You just need to take care of yourself, and if you don’t—tough.” Or, “If you’re poor and you can't get medical help, go find some place to die.” What does that do to any kind of hope for a united nation, a healthy nation?
KW: Speaking as a citizen instead of as a bishop with your appeal to the Gospel, would you agree with the critics who say we’re heading toward a constitutional crisis, which is a larger issue than that of immigration itself?
Bp MS: You’re right. I’m a citizen as well as a bishop, and my main focus is on the Gospel, which is the place I believe we draw many of the principles that made America. We’re fighting for the soul of this nation, for the bedrock principles of this country, which are baked into our Constitution—or so we thought—and into our foundational documents. So I’m very concerned about signs of cracks in things that I thought were givens for those of us who live in this country. We were the beacon to help other countries see the right way to do things. That’s not the case anymore.
The immigrants I speak with are so terrified now that some of them are choosing to self-deport to situations that are worse than what they fled in the first place. And I think it has to do with this point that somehow it seems worse to them to live in this country with fear, with terror, because the dream is gone. You know, the hope that they had in coming here, of finding a place of peace and love and security is gone, and they'd almost rather face the threats to their life in the country of their origin.
Mark Seitz was installed as the sixth bishop of El Paso, Texas, in 2013. This interview was conducted on April 22, 2025, at Loyola University Chicago, with the help of Michael Murphy and the Hank Center for The Catholic Intellectual Heritage.
