Usually, I leave it up to our own Amy Curtis to cover all things Catholic. I'm not Catholic, but my wife's a converted Catholic, my kids were raised Catholic and sent to Catholic school, and my sister is a converted Catholic … I'm Catholic adjacent. And unlike Merrick Garland's Justice Department, I don't consider Catholics a national threat.
Curtis usually has a gripe about something Pope Francis has said, and I always agree with her. He's the woke pope. He's no John Paul II.
Earlier this week, Resist the Mainstream posted that Pope Francis had criticized the Trump administration's mass deportation plans.
NEW: Pope Francis strongly criticized the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans, warning that forcibly removing migrants solely due to their legal status undermines human dignity and “will end badly.”
— Resist the Mainstream (@ResisttheMS) February 11, 2025
Pope Francis also addressed recent theological defenses of the… pic.twitter.com/KVX1wgd330
Pope Francis also addressed recent theological defenses of the deportation program, particularly those by Vice President JD Vance.
Vice President J.D. Vance, who is a converted Catholic, defended mass deportation on X writing, "You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
Pope Francis disagrees and says that Catholics must meditate constantly on the parable of the "Good Samaritan" and love everybody.
It seems we have a failure to communicate.
Rod Dreher has a piece in European Conservative in which he defends countries defending their borders.
By telling Catholics that they are wicked for wanting to defend the common good, law, and order of their own countries from illegal mass migration, Pope Francis is destroying what's left of the authority of the Church he leads.https://t.co/pxzw2UTVZg
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) February 13, 2025
Dreher, who's not Catholic, writes:
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.
Again, I'm not Catholic, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Vatican a walled city? Why not open it up to Muslim "asylum seekers" from around the globe?
God forgive me, but we need a new Pope, one who's not an activist
— Just a dail (@Dailmamamoose) February 13, 2025
Pope Francis said last August that it is a grave sin to reject migrants, saying, "There are those who work systematically and with every means to reject migrants. And this, when done with conscience and responsibility is a grave sin."
If you're reading this, you must be a VIP member, so I'd recommend checking out Curtis' recent VIP post, The Hypocrite Pope. She knows better than I do.
It seems there is a beef between Pope Francis and Vance on Catholic theology, and I've got to side with Vance on this one. The pope's message is particularly self-defeating in Europe, where countries are taking on masses of migrants who are Muslim and have no intention whatsoever of assimilating into the culture.
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