Global media are abuzz with the Vatican’s full-on frontal assault on the United States of America. Faithful Catholics are staggered by what they call Pope Francis’s “unprecedented” intrusion into American law enforcement and politics, codified in a letter he sent to all U.S. bishops on Feb. 10 slamming the Trump administration’s immigration policies — and some of the officials in the executive branch personally.
Longtime Catholic journalist (and clerical sex abuse investigator) Philip Lawler writes:
In a letter ostensibly written to support the bishops of the US, Pope Francis has actually made life considerably more difficult for them. … the Pontiff makes an argument that is poorly informed, easily rebutted, and likely to divide the American Catholic faithful. This is an argument that the American hierarchy cannot win. And, not coincidentally, the argument presented by the Pope differs notably from the most recent statements by more prudent American prelates.
Has any modern Pontiff ever written a statement so harshly critical of the policies of a sovereign nation? If so, it has escaped my notice. Mit Brennender Sorge unequivocally denounced Nazi racial ideology, but Pope Pius XI focused that encyclical on principles, not specific public policies. …
There can be no doubt that [Francis] intended to criticize the Trump administration, and specifically its plans to deport illegal aliens. Nor can anyone who has followed the American political debate miss the Pope’s deliberate thrust at a specific Catholic political figure, Vice President J.D. Vance. …
Lawler noted how selective Francis’s indignation really is:
If the Pope’s primary goal is to uphold human dignity and expose injustice, it is curious that he addressed this letter—by far the strongest political statement of his pontificate — to the bishops of the United States. He might, for example, have denounced the injustices perpetrated by the Communist regime in China, with its suppression of democracy and religious freedom, its brutal treatment of ethnic minorities, and (since Pope Francis is keenly interested in “our common home”) its deplorable level of pollution. But this Pope has remained silent about injustice in China. In fact under his leadership the Vatican has done everything possible to ingratiate itself with the Beijing leadership, while one of the Pontiff’s key allies actually cited China as a model of Catholic social teaching!
And if the Pontiff wanted to bring the principles of Catholic social teaching to bear on the American scene, why did he never denounce the Biden administration for its worldwide promotion of abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender ideology?
Americans Don’t Deserve Borders, and Have No Right to Vote for Immigration Laws
Frequent Stream contributor Jules Gomes (a Cambridge-trained theologian) has already dissected Francis’s “poorly informed, easily rebutted” letter to U.S. bishops, where the main takeaway is that U.S. citizens don’t have the right to make and enforce immigration laws.
That’s right. Francis used his papal authority to single out Americans as unworthy of having borders, and unfit to choose which citizens join their nation and vote on its laws. By contrast, in Vatican City, the pope gets to pick all the citizens, who don’t even get to vote. If he applied to his own city-state what he proposes for Americans, Francis would have to let all the Gypsies in Rome crowd into St. Peter’s Basilica, then let them vote on how to distribute the Church’s billions in assets, rewrite its doctrines, and change its official language from Latin to Romany.
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