In 1571, Pope Pius V created the Holy League, organizing the Catholic states of Europe in a coalition to end Ottoman control of the Eastern Mediterranean, and to protect Europe from Islamic invasion. The naval Battle of Lepanto that year resulted in the near-total destruction of the Ottoman fleet by the Christian forces, and bought Europe time. The final assault of the Ottoman Empire on Europe would come just over a century later, at the gates of Vienna, where the Europeans defeated the Turks for all time.
The point is this: the Catholic Church once had a pope who defended Western civilization. That was then. Now it has Pope Francis.
Earlier this week, the pontiff released a public letter to the American bishops, instructing them to resist the Trump administration’s attempts to deport illegal migrants and to regain control of America’s borders. In this key passage, Francis writes:
I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality. At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.
Got that? Just because migrants broke the law to enter America does not mean that they are criminals. Who can fathom the subtlety of the Jesuit pope’s mind?
In the letter, Francis pays lip service to the Church’s teaching that nations have rights to defend and protect themselves, but affirms his belief that nations must accept non-criminal migrants as an act of charity.
Elsewhere in the epistle, Francis implicitly condemns Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, for misunderstanding the Church’s teaching on ordo amoris—the order of love. Vance, a convert who was catechized by two of the most intelligent Dominican priests in America (I introduced him personally to his first teacher), had defended the administration’s tough migration policy by referring to St. Thomas Aquinas’ teaching that the order of love requires us to love those closest to us first—not exclusively, but primarily, as God has given us the duty to care for them.
It turns out that JD Vance really is more Catholic than the pope. The Catechism teaches that the moral duty towards foreign refugees must be balanced by duties to the common good of the people within one’s own country. Yes, wealthy countries do have a moral responsibility to be generous in welcoming distressed foreigners, but they have the right to set limits on migration, and to refuse it when they judge that it harms the common good. The official Catholic teaching balances charity with common sense.
JD Vance understands that; Pope Francis does not. The pope, in his teaching, has sanctified open borders—even, as in Europe, when those ungated frontiers allow the migration into the Christian lands of Europe of millions of Muslims who at minimum do not share the ancestral faith of Europeans, and no small number of whom are militantly hostile to it. If Francis had lived in the time of Pius V, Europe would be Islamic today.
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