In Defense of an Inconvenient Word: Jesús Sanz and the Immigration Issue 

Of all the disciplines that make up theology, morality is, in my opinion, the most demanding. It does not rise, perhaps, to the abstract heights of my beloved metaphysics, but neither can it allow itself to take refuge in them. It is obliged to descend to the rough terrain of history and to confront the world as it is: a web of complexities, lights and shadows, persistent injustices and difficult-to-decipher dynamics that gravitate around human freedom, often tainted by spurious interests, culpable weaknesses and heroic resistance. 

Where speculation seeks coherence in the eternal, moral theology must discern in the contingent, between fragile wills and self-interested decisions that shape, for better or for worse, the fabric of reality. Its object is not the abstract proclamation of the good, but its prudential determination in contexts traversed by juridical, cultural, economic and demographic factors. It requires simultaneously upholding universal principles and concrete circumstances, without sacrificing the former to sentimentality or the latter to abstraction. 

That is why tradition has never allowed moral judgment to be reduced to a rhetorical reflex -a decontextualized quotation, a slogan with a pretension of conscience-, but has subjected it to the higher art of prudence: that intellectual virtue that discerns, weighs, orders means and ends and assumes responsibility for the effects. It is not a simple virtue -none is-: it requires memory of the past, intelligence of the present, docility to learn and circumspection to foresee consequences. 

In the face of complex issues, moral honesty consists precisely in resisting the temptation to sloganeering. Authentic mercy is not ashamed of prudence, because it knows that peace is a just order, and that a just order requires discernment, gradualness, limits and reciprocal duties. To describe this responsibility as “extremism” can be, paradoxically, a form of moral superficiality: the substitution of judgment for gesture, of truth for applause, of the common good for an aesthetic of goodness that refuses to look reality in the face. 

An eloquent example is the question of migration, of renewed centrality and painful human and political density. Precisely because of its concrete proximity and the burden of suffering it entails, it is understandable that the first impulse should be that of immediate welcome; but the Christian tradition does not stop at this impulse, but submits it to prudential judgment. The Church has always spoken in a double key that admits of no shortcuts: the irreducible dignity of every person and the responsibility proper to every authority - as such - with respect to the social order, understood as a condition for the common good and not as a mere circumstantial strategy. 

The Franciscan tradition -from Bonaventure to Scotus, and in more recent authors- has insisted with remarkable balance that charity is not a formless energy, but an ordered love, an ordered love, a ordo amoris that respects the architecture of the common good. The legal order is not an extrinsic limit to charity, but its institutional condition. Without normative stability and a minimum of cultural cohesion, what is presented as compassion can turn into structural cruelty: the community fragments, the law weakens and the vulnerable - inside and outside - end up paying the cost. 

For this reason, it is difficult to understand certain public manifestations of perplexity and censure which, in the face of prudential judgments made by pastors in the exercise of their legitimate responsibility, adopt a tone of impugnation more characteristic of factional debate than of ecclesial discernment. In times of discursive agitation, tradition reminds us that ecclesial fruitfulness does not spring from visibility without responsibility, but from virtuous coherence. Obedience-understood as humble insertion into an order received-, silent work for the common good, effective charity translated into works rather than declarations, and a sobriety that distrusts moral protagonism have always been the pillars of Christian action.