Veritatis Splendor 80: Deportation is an intrinsic evil.

ut Alt! But Alt! When the Church says depor­ta­tion is evil, it has in mind the depor­ta­tions that took place in World War II. You know, like that pic you got up there. That’s the War­saw Ghet­to upris­ing. Jews were cit­i­zens. The Church does­n’t have in mind depor­ta­tion of crim­i­nals who are in a coun­try ille­gal­ly. The Church has nev­er taught that all depor­ta­tion is evil.

Is that so? Is it? Now, you know, dear read­er, I believe in going to Church texts to find out what the Church teach­es. It’s a quirk I have. So in this case, I’m going to go to Ver­i­tatis Splen­dor (1993). (And see, I also link to the texts so you can check me out.) Pope St. John Paul II begins by defin­ing the term “intrin­sic evil.” This is in VS 80:

Rea­son attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature ‘inca­pable of being ordered’ to God, because they rad­i­cal­ly con­tra­dict the good of the per­son made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church’s moral tra­di­tion, have been termed “intrin­si­cal­ly evil” (intrin­sece malum): they are such always and per se, in oth­er words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulte­ri­or inten­tions of the one act­ing and the cir­cum­stances. Con­se­quent­ly, with­out in the least deny­ing the influ­ence on moral­i­ty exer­cised by cir­cum­stances and espe­cial­ly by inten­tions, the Church teach­es that “there exist acts which per se and in them­selves, inde­pen­dent­ly of cir­cum­stances, are always seri­ous­ly wrong by rea­son of their object.”

A per­son­’s inten­tions and cir­cum­stances mat­ter only to the extent that they might mit­i­gate cul­pa­bil­i­ty; that’s what JP2 is get­ting at in the mid­dle sec­tion. But an intrin­si­cal­ly evil act is one that is always evil regard­less of the cir­cum­stances. It is evil in itself. No inten­tion, no cir­cum­stance can make such an act lic­it.

So, for exam­ple, no one may say, “I was poor, or in a health cri­sis, and there­fore that makes my abor­tion okay.” Cas­es like these may cer­tain­ly mit­i­gate the cul­pa­bil­i­ty of the per­son procur­ing the abor­tion; but they can not trans­form the abor­tion, of itself, into a moral­ly good, or even neu­tral, act. It remains evil. That is true as well of con­tra­cep­tion. It is true of sex between two men or two women.

But watch care­ful­ly now, because John Paul II, quot­ing Gaudi­um et Spes, is going to make a list of actions that are intrin­si­cal­ly evil:

What­ev­er is hos­tile to life itself, such as any kind of homi­cide, geno­cide, abor­tion, euthana­sia and vol­un­tary sui­cide; what­ev­er vio­lates the integri­ty of the human per­son, such as muti­la­tion, phys­i­cal and men­tal tor­ture and attempts to coerce the spir­it; what­ev­er is offen­sive to human dig­ni­ty, such as sub­hu­man liv­ing con­di­tions, arbi­trary impris­on­ment, depor­ta­tion, slav­ery, pros­ti­tu­tion and traf­fick­ing in women and chil­dren; degrad­ing con­di­tions of work which treat labour­ers as mere instru­ments of prof­it, and not as free respon­si­ble per­sons: all these and the like 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 hon­our due to the Cre­ator.

So Vat­i­can II includes depor­ta­tion on the same list as abor­tion and euthana­sia as intrin­sic evils. These are offens­es against the dig­ni­ty of human per­sons, who retain their dig­ni­ty inde­pen­dent of whether or not they have com­mit­ted a crime.

Lat­er, in VS 81, the pope says that a “good inten­tion” or “cir­cum­stances” may “dimin­ish” the evil. But—and this matters—“they can­not remove it.” “They are not capa­ble,” the pope says, “of being ordered to God and to the good of the per­son.”

Noth­ing can make such acts good. Noth­ing can make them “defen­si­ble as a choice.”

But John Paul II is not done. In VS 82 he warns against using “my inten­tions were good” as an excuse. There is no such thing as a good inten­tion with an intrin­si­cal­ly evil act. An inten­tion can only be good, he says, “when it has as its aim the true good of the per­son.” But the kind of acts named by Vat­i­can II “are not capa­ble of being ordered to God and the good of the per­son.”

And one such act is depor­ta­tion.