by Marco Baratto
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini understood something that many political leaders still struggle to grasp today: migration is not an accident of history, but one of its driving forces. At the dawn of the modern age, as millions fled poverty, violence, and instability to seek a future in the United States, Cabrini recognized that these human movements would shape not only economies and nations, but the soul of the Church itself.
Founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Cabrini did not see migrants as a "problem to manage," but as people entrusted to the Church's care. She built hospitals, schools, and orphanages, especially for Italian immigrants, not out of philanthropy alone, but out of a deeply Catholic vision. In the migrant, she saw Christ. That is why she became the first canonized saint of the United States—not because she embodied American nationalism, but because she embodied Catholic universality.
More than a century later, her legacy has become a mirror held up to the American Church. Global migration has reached unprecedented levels, provoking fear, polarization, and political exploitation. Yet beneath the policy debates lies a deeper crisis: a spiritual fracture within American Christianity, and increasingly within American Catholicism itself.
It is in this context that Pope Leo XIV's reflections on migration and U.S. immigration policy take on their full meaning. Even when he does not explicitly invoke St. Frances Cabrini, his vision echoes hers. A nation built by immigrants, he suggests, risks betraying its own moral foundations when it treats migrants as enemies. More radically, a Church that aligns itself with exclusionary nationalism risks ceasing to be truly Catholic.
This is where the discussion becomes uncomfortable. Many theologians and observers now speak of an "American schism"—not a formal break with Rome, but a functional one. A growing segment of U.S. Catholicism has adopted a worldview shaped less by Catholic social teaching and more by nationalist ideology and Protestant political theology. Borders become sacred, markets become moral arbiters, and the Gospel is filtered through the lens of cultural warfare.
The phenomenon is particularly visible among certain conservative Catholic movements, often fueled by converts from evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant backgrounds. While many of these conversions are genuine and sincere, they sometimes import into Catholicism a mindset that is deeply anti-institutional and suspicious of Rome. The Pope becomes a figure to critique rather than a shepherd to follow. Doctrine becomes negotiable. Communion becomes conditional.
In this sense, Pope Leo XIV's recent episcopal and cardinal appointments in the United States should be read not as bureaucratic reshuffling, but as strategic acts. They are attempts to halt a centrifugal force pulling the American Church away from communion and toward a quasi-denominational identity. These appointments signal a desire to re-anchor the Church in its universal mission rather than allow it to drift into a nationalized, politicized faith.
When some say that "the Pope is in danger," they are not speaking primarily of physical threats. They are naming a deeper reality: the authority of the papacy itself is being eroded in certain Catholic circles, especially when it challenges dominant political narratives. And when it is said that "the American Church is in danger," it is because the Church risks becoming indistinguishable from a religious wing of a political ideology.
St. Frances Cabrini offers a stark alternative. Her Catholicism was not rooted in fear of the outsider, but in radical hospitality. She crossed borders repeatedly, remained fiercely loyal to Rome, and refused to reduce faith to cultural identity. For her, the Church was not meant to defend a nation's purity, but to reveal God's mercy.
The battle over migration today is therefore not merely a policy dispute. It is a theological struggle over what Christianity—and Catholicism in particular—will become in the United States. Will it remain a universal Church, open to the stranger and obedient to a global communion? Or will it harden into a nationalist faith, effectively Protestant in structure and spirit, even if Catholic in name?
The answer to that question will determine not only the future of American Catholicism, but its soul.
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