Speaker Johnson Denounces Pope Leo’s Call to Welcome Migrants
In a 1700-word criticism of Catholic teaching, the House leader claims God backs border crackdowns — and mercy is not the state’s concern.
Dear friends —
Mike Johnson has decided to pick a fight with the first pope from the United States.
Moments after a vote on immigration enforcement, a reporter asked about Pope Leo XIV’s sharp criticism of American immigration abuses, Johnson didn’t blink.
Johnson launched into a psuedo-theological defense of border crackdowns. The Bible, he insisted, calls for strong national borders. Justice, he claimed, demands the sword — not sanctuary.
That night, he published a sprawling, essay-length tweet attacking the pope’s claims, dismissing Catholic teaching, and casting migrants not as neighbors to love, but as threats to be managed.
It’s a breathtaking moment in American religious history: the highest-ranking Catholic in the world and the highest-ranking lawmaker in the House are now locked in a public clash over the Gospel’s meaning.
Pope Leo has stood with immigrants. Speaker Johnson has stood with ICE.
Only one of them speaks for the Church.
Today’s subscriber-only essay unpacks the full exchange. We walk through Johnson’s tweet line by line — and take it apart with Scripture, Catholic tradition, and 2,000 years of moral teaching on the sacred duty to welcome the stranger.
We confront the lie that governments bear no responsibility for mercy.
We expose the strawman that Catholic teaching calls for open borders.
And we reclaim the truth: that the judgment in Matthew 25 is not individual — it’s national.
This isn’t about a partisan squabble. It’s about what kind of faith we will be known for — a faith that builds walls, or a faith that washes feet.
If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you. If not, I invite you to join us.
Paid subscribers have access to the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series and the Q&A mailbag that opened recently, where you can ask me anything about American politics, Catholicism, Donald Trump, Pope Leo, JD Vance — or my own faith, biography, and life.
Letters from Leo is open to anyone who wants to be informed and inspired by our pope — and to turn that inspiration into action that leaves America and the world more just, less cold, and more alive with hope.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Whether you give $0, $1, or $1,000, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about Pope Leo XIV’s deluge of comments criticizing the Trump-Vance mass deportation policy. In light of Leo’s criticism, how, he was asked, could he push for fierce immigration enforcement? Specifically, how could he square it with the Biblical command to welcome the stranger?
Johnson, a devout evangelical, doubled down.
Citing a random assortment of Scripture, he insisted that securing America’s border is not only a civic duty but a divine mandate. He even promised to publish a lengthy exposition of the “biblical case” for strict border control — and that evening, he did just that. In an 1700-word tweet, the Speaker marshaled Scripture from Moses to St. Paul in defense of hardline policies.
“Christians certainly should support a strong national border,” Johnson wrote, accusing the “progressive Left” of taking verses out of context to push a “radical open borders agenda.”
By his account, Bible verses about loving strangers are instructions for individual believers, not for governments. Lawmakers, he argued, bear a different biblical duty: “to faithfully uphold and enforce the law so that order can be maintained.”
For Johnson, a nation “bearing the sword” (Romans 13) against lawbreakers is doing God’s work — and showing mercy to migrants is a job for churches and charities, not the state.
Johnson’s impromptu Bible study might have played well on his side of the aisle, but for the vast majority of this nation’s 53 million Catholics, it falls on the deaf ears.
Pope Leo XIV — a pastor unafraid to challenge political leaders — has been sounding a very different biblical call.
Just weeks ago, Leo lamented that migrants in the U.S. are being treated “in an extremely disrespectful way,” backing a statement by U.S. Catholic bishops that denounced mass deportations.
The Chicago-born pontiff, far from preaching open borders, acknowledged that “every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter.”
Yet in the same breath Leo insisted that those already in our communities — many living peacefully for decades — must be treated with dignity, not cruelty.
In effect, Pope Leo was drawing a Gospel line in the sand: Nations will be judged not by how aggressively they police borders, but by how compassionately they treat the human beings who cross them.
Now the House Speaker’s biblical broadside has set up a remarkable confrontation: Mike Johnson’s law-and-order theology versus Pope Leo’s appeal to the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Will Nations Be Judged on Mercy?
At the core of Johnson’s argument is a sharp division between private charity and public duty. Yes, the Speaker concedes, the Bible commands believers to “love thy neighbor” — but he maintains “that ‘Greatest Commandment’ was never directed to the government.”
In his view, civil authorities exist to punish evildoers and secure order, not to show mercy. In fact, Johnson warned, when officials “ignore crime, they are directly violating their responsibilities before God.”
It’s a clever bit of theological compartmentalization, and Johnson backed it up by quoting St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: governing authorities “bear the sword” to execute wrath on wrongdoers.
But in cordoning off compassion to the private sphere, Johnson runs headlong into the very Scripture he professes to defend. The Bible’s most vivid depiction of Judgment Day does not depict God excusing governments from the duty of love. Quite the opposite — it explicitly describes nations being held accountable.
What do I mean?
