The Israelite army defeats the armies of Sihon and Og.
And the children of Israel said to him, “We will go by the Highway, and if I or my livestock drink any of your water, then I will pay for it; let me only pass through on foot, nothing more” (Numbers 21:19).
“The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth, fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil.”
Thus began Pope Pius XII in his 1952 Apostolic Constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana (hereafter EFN), the most important statement to date by the Roman Catholic Church-State on the subjects of immigration, migration and refugee resettlement.
Having gone over EFN is some detail in earlier posts in this series, I shall not repeat myself here. But I wanted to mention EFN in connection with this week’s post, because my topic today ties back to the prior discussion on EFN.
In this respect, the words of John Robbins on philosophic systems is worth calling to mind. I don’t have the reference immediately handy, but I do recall hearing or reading Robbins state that when philosophic systems go wrong, they tend to go wrong right from the beginning. That is to say, you don’t have to plow through a thousand tedious pages of argumentation before you realize someone’s talking nonsense. If you know what to look for, you can spot the foolishness quickly.
Such is the case with EFN. Infallible Pope Pius XII drops the ball right away when he makes the rather shocking blunder of saying that the Biblical account of Joseph’s taking Mary and Jesus to Egypt to escape Herod, “is the archetype of every refugee family.” Now an archetype is defined by Merriam Webster as, “the original pattern of model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies.” But it seems to this author that the Pope is manifestly wrong in his assertion.
In the first place, the scale doesn’t quite fit the sort of mass migration that was occurring at the time Pope Pius XII wrote his Apostolic Constitution, or, for that matter, the sort of mass migration the current occupant of the office of Antichrist is encouraging. One family versus millions is not really a great comparison.
Second, the Bible is silent about how the Joseph and his family were supported. While Rome boldly asserts that the governments of receiving nations have an obligation to take property from citizens (i.e. Rome claims governments must steal from their own people) and transfer it to migrants, immigrants and refugees, the account of Joseph and his family in Egypt supports no such theft.
Third, unlike many of today’s migrants, Joseph took his family and returned home once the danger was past. But unlike Joseph, the representatives of the Babylonian Harlot fight tooth and nail to make sure all migrants remain in the receiving countries, even when they entered the receiving country on explicitly temporary terms. For example, in January 2018 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a press release lamenting how disappointed they were to hear that the Trump administration had cancelled the Temporary protected Status (TPS) of Salvadorans who had been allowed to stay in the US as a result of the devastation wrought on El Salvador by Hurricane Mitch. What the bishops failed to mention in their release is that Hurricane Mitch had hit El Salvador in, wait for it, 1999. In other words, the Salvadorans “temporary” status in the US was in its nineteenth year. Still, nearly nineteen years of American generosity wasn’t enough to satisfy the moral conscience of USCCB as they proceeded to lecture Americans on their need to “love the resident alien” as if they hadn’t already gone far any above any reasonable efforts. What part of “temporary” do the bishops not understand?
Clearly, even a brief consideration of the flight to Egypt reveals that it does not support the case for unlimited, taxpayer subsidized immigration, migration and refugee resettlement that Antichrist and his representatives in the USCCB want you to think it does. This, however, does not mean the Bible is silent on these topics. Actually, it has quite a lot to say about migration, but you have to look in the right place. And where would that be? Is there an example of a mass exodus to be found anywhere in Scripture? Why yes, there most certainly is. And the account of that mass exodus is found, oddly enough, in the Book of Exodus and the following books of Moses.
