John M. Sandy
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
—Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883
I saw her for the first time this past July. I was in New York for a conference at NYU, and on a free evening, I went down to the pier and took a boat out to the statue, the way millions before me have done. I had known the poem since grade school—the tired and the poor and the huddled masses. I expected to feel something dutiful. What I did not expect was to stand at the base of that figure, read Emma Lazarus’ lines cut into the pedestal, and think immediately of my beloved northwest Iowa. Of the towns only an hour from my own, where the tired and the poor she describes are not a memory of Ellis Island, but the family sitting two pews ahead at Mass.
There is a stretch of Highway 71 south of Spirit Lake where, at the right hour of an August evening, the corn stands so tall and green on both sides that the road feels like the aisle of a church. I have driven it a thousand times. For most of those drives I never thought about who holds it all up. The fields and the plants that turn what they grow—hogs, turkey, cattle, and chicken—rest on the labor of people my neighbors will mostly never see. The man scrubbing the blood-drying room at two in the morning. The woman on the line in Storm Lake, Denison or Sioux Center. The children filling desks in schools that would otherwise be closing. They keep the lights on in the towns I love.
I am an Iowan and a Catholic. For a long time, I assumed those two things sat together comfortably. I am less sure of that lately, and I have found help thinking it through in an unlikely place. John Carr spent 50 years working where Catholic social teaching meets public life, most of them running the justice and peace office of the U.S. bishops. When he retired this year, he wrote down what he had learned. One of his lessons has stayed with me. It is about a single word.
The Most Important Word
Carr says the most important word in Catholic social teaching is and. Our faith joins what our politics tends to split: life and dignity, rights and responsibilities, family and community, solidarity and subsidiarity, the planet and the poor. With an example about the unborn, he shows what a conjunction can do. If we say that the protection of human life begins with the unborn child but does not end there, it sounds like a rebuke. Say it begins there and does not end there, and it sounds like an invitation to a shared task.
Northwest Iowa is a place where the wrong conjunction has done real harm. The temptation runs two ways, and both swap the word but for the word and. One says we are a nation of laws, but, and then lets the sentence trail off while fear finishes it. The other says these are human beings made in the image of God, but, and trails off into irritation at anyone who worries about a border at all. Each half is true. Neither half is the Gospel. The Catholic sentence keeps both clauses and refuses to drop either one. These are human beings made in the image of God, and we are a people who owe something to the rule of law. That sentence is harder to say. It will not fit on a yard sign. It is also the only version I can say as a Catholic without lying.
What the Numbers Cannot Hide
The facts are not really in dispute, whatever the noise around them. Storm Lake sits in the corn of Buena Vista County, a town of about 11,000; it is one of the only cities in Iowa without a white majority. Its schools, once nearly all white, now belong largely to the children of immigrants and refugees, Latino and Southeast Asian and African and Micronesian. Two-thirds of Iowa’s counties are shrinking. Storm Lake is growing, and it grows because people traveled a very long way to do work almost no one born here will take. In Sioux City, the seat of my diocese, now more than one in five residents is Hispanic. The Tyson plant in Storm Lake starts workers well above 20 dollars an hour and still cannot fill the roster. Nobody in that picture is taking anything. They are holding the place together.
The and has more work to do because it does not stop at economics. There is an easy argument that defends the immigrant because he/she is useful. Useful he/she certainly is. Without him/her, the plants close and the schools empty. But a human being is not owed his dignity because he/she is useful. They are owed it because he is. Catholic social teaching starts with the person, not his utility. I fear our willingness to see the person first is what has worn away. The worker in the blood-drying room matters because of the God whose image he carries, not because of the pork he cuts. That he also keeps the town alive is something I am glad to add, with an and, but never a therefore.
Political, but Not Partisan
Drawing on the bishops’ “Faithful Citizenship” tradition, Carr offers four postures for the Church in public life, and they read almost like an examination of conscience for Iowans. The Church is called to be political but not partisan, principled but not ideological, civil but not silent, engaged but not used.
Silence, Carr contends, is sometimes just agreement with what is wrong. In a small town, silence is comfortable. Everyone knows everyone, and the surest way to keep the peace at the coffee shop is to say nothing about the family that stopped coming to Mass because they are afraid of being seen in the parking lot. Yet a Church that will feed the hungry only as long as no one asks who they are is not being prudent; it is being quiet in the face of fear and calling the quiet prudence.
The Church is not the chaplain of a political party. I have no wish to bless a platform, and I distrust anyone who wants the crucifix out on the campaign trail. But declining to be partisan is not the same as declining to speak. My own bishop, John Keehner of Sioux City, wrote a pastoral letter this February on exactly this. He wrote of immigrant brothers and sisters who worship beside us on Sunday, whose children sit in our schools, and who now live in real fear, and he said that as their shepherd, he could not stay silent while members of the human family suffer.
What the Conjunction Asks of Us
It asks first that we not hand the works of mercy over to an argument. The Diocese of Sioux City already does more than most people in the pews realize. Catholic Charities runs a Welcome program. The diocese points families toward a Know Your Rights toolkit and to immigration attorneys. Briar Cliff University has taken up the subject in its Franciscan values lectures. These are the ordinary ministries that Carr says give the Church its standing, since what we do usually persuades more than what we say. A parish that helps a frightened family find a lawyer has preached a better sermon on human dignity than most of us will manage from a lectern.
It asks second that we give up what Carr calls the “pick a pope” habit, and its local cousin, the habit of picking a clause. In his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, Pope Leo XIV calls us to put the poor at the center of our faith and our lives. Such summons belongs to no faction. The immigrant is poor in the sense Scripture means, the stranger and the sojourner, the one with no standing, and the call to place her at the center is addressed to everyone, the people who worry about the border included.
It asks third that we speak even when speaking costs us something at the coffee shop. I am a judge. I believe in law, and I will not pretend the word illegal is vacuous. I am also a Catholic, and the same tradition that tells me to honor lawful authority tells me in the same breath that no statute ever written can undo the image of God in a person.
I think again of Highway 71 at dusk, the corn standing up like the walls of a church. For most of my life I took that country as simply mine, my state, my inheritance, the ground my people have farmed and prayed over for generations. I was not wrong about that. I was only using the smaller word. The fuller sentence is that this is my home and it has become more. Home of people who came from Michoacán and Chuuk and South Sudan to keep it alive, and who worship the same God I do, often with more fervor, in the same buildings, in a language I never learned.
Carr ends on hope, and I dare borrow his posture. My hope is that the Catholics in northwest Iowa learn to say and where the culture keeps insisting on but. That is the harder sentence. And it may be the only one that can still hold this place together. The lamp Lazarus set beside the golden door was never only New York’s to keep; some of its light was always meant to fall this far inland, on a gravel lot outside a country church, on the family two pews ahead of me at Mass.
John M. Sandy is a judge on the Iowa Court of Appeals. A graduate of the University of St. Thomas, where he studied philosophy and Catholic studies, he writes on the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution, and Catholic social thought and culture, with work forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law. He hosts The Catholic Passage Podcast. He lives in Spirit Lake, Iowa.
