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In his nearly decade-long spat with President Donald Trump over illegal immigration, Pope Francis recently crossed a political Rubicon.
On Feb. 10, the pope issued a letter to American bishops that, while seemingly innocuous, basically constitutes a declaration of war. It effectively places the privileges of the immigrant, as defined by Rome, over the safety of the American people and over the American government’s moral responsibility to protect them.
“I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” Francis wrote. “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.
“Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”
The pope even committed blasphemy by using Jesus Christ’s name in vain as a testimonial for a political agenda.
“I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” Francis wrote. “With charity and clarity, we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid the walls of ignominy, and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.”
The letter is the latest salvo in a conflict not just between the two men but between the Vatican’s embrace of globalist utopianism — as FrontPage Magazine readers know all too well — and a president’s responsibility to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, even foreign ones.
On Dec. 20, Trump appointed Brian Burch as ambassador to the Holy See. Burch leads CatholicVote, a civic advocacy group that supported Trump’s presidential campaign last year. In 2022, the group joined Judicial Watch in suing the Biden Administration for communications records between the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and Catholic agencies helping immigrants at the Texas border. Two previous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were ignored.
“American Catholics deserve to know the full extent of the U.S. government’s role in funding and coordinating with Catholic church-affiliated agencies at the border,” Burch said in a statement, “and what role these agencies played in the record surge of illegal immigrants over the past year.”
Francis responded on Jan. 6 by appointing San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy to be the next archbishop of Washington, D.C. McElroy — a vigorous opponent of Trump — fully supports Francis on open borders.
Following Trump’s inauguration came mass deportations of immigrants with criminal records and Elon Musk’s audit of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which revealed that Catholic Relief Services accepted $4.6 billion between 2013 and 2022 — the largest single amount for any recipient.
The website Complicit Clergy reported Jan. 25 that since 2009, Catholic agencies have received $5.2 billion from the federal government for immigration projects. The Biden administration distributed more than half of that total: $2.9 billion. Catholic Charities obtained $2.61 billion, with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops getting $1.58 billion. Of that last figure, $1.55 billion went to the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. — where the USCCB has its headquarters.
One of the Catholic agencies receiving USAID funds was Caritas Internationalis, an international charity based in and governed by the Vatican. In July, the agency embezzled $67 million from its Luxembourg branch.
It gets worse.
Catholic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) received money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to resettle immigrants through FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program. During Fiscal Year 2024, Catholic Charities of San Diego collected about $41.2 million in two separate installments; Catholic Charities of San Antonio obtained more than $27.8 million, also in two installments.
In all, FEMA distributed $641 million in grants to various NGOs during the last fiscal year. How much of that money could have helped the victims of Hurricane Helen in the Southeast, or the wildfires in Southern California?
It gets even worse.
Corpus Christi for Unity and Peace, a Catholic organization, reported Feb. 4 that during the Biden Administration, about 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children entered the United States. But the whereabouts of more than 323,000 remain unknown.
The NGOs responsible for caring for them included the USCCB, Catholic Charities, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and Catholic Relief Services. The first two agencies alone received $449 million during Biden’s tenure.
“This issue strikes at the heart of our faith,” wrote Vicki Yamasaki, the group’s founder and chair. “Rather than supporting the children, these Catholic NGOs worsened their trauma by perpetuating separation. Catholic Charities, in particular, has received intense scrutiny for the sheer volume of children they have trafficked and their role in fracturing the family unit as well as placing children with unvetted sponsors.”
As FrontPage magazine reported, the USCCB exploits the plight of desperate immigrants to get federal taxpayer dollars.
In his letter, Francis acknowledged “the right of a nation to defend itself and keep its communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival” and that a humane approach “does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration.” But as FrontPage reported, concerning abortion and homosexuality, Francis uses rhetorical duplicity to disguise his actions and appointments.
Six years before writing that nations have the right to devise immigration laws to protect their citizens, Francis argued that those same nations no longer hold sovereign authority.
“The nation-state cannot be considered as an absolute, as an island with respect to the surrounding circumstances,” he said. “In the current situation of globalization, not just of the economy but also of technological and cultural exchanges, the nation-state is no longer able to procure on its own the common good of its population. The common good has become global and nations must affiliate themselves for their own benefit.”
As with homosexuality and abortion, personnel equates to policy on immigration. McElroy embraced the “woke” critique of society in 2020 in an address at the University of San Diego:
“The culture of exclusion has unleashed a poison of animosity against immigrants that paralyzes our politics so deeply that we cannot even find a pathway to protect young men and women who came to this nation as children and now thirst to be citizens of the only land they have ever known,” he said, blaming “racial and ethnic disparities … rooted in our nation’s historic culture of exclusion.”
Three years earlier, in another speech, McElroy used the irresponsible rhetoric of anti-Trump “resistance” in encouraging his audience to defend immigrants regardless of their legal status or criminal record.
“We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets, to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families,” he said. “We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies, rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need.”
McElroy’s histrionics effectively equated legitimate immigration authorities with Gestapo agents seeking Jews.
Archbishop Edward Weisenburger, whom Francis appointed Feb. 11 as Detroit’s new episcopal leader, offered a theological equivalent. When the USCCB met in 2018, Weisenberger suggested that the bishops make what he called a “prophetic statement” by issuing “canonical penalties” against Catholics who support Trump’s immigration policies or work for the Border Patrol.
“Canonical penalties” include excommunication.
“I think it’s important to point out that the canonical penalties are there in place to heal. First and foremost, to heal,” said Weisenberger, a canon lawyer who was archbishop of Tucson at the time. “Therefore, for the salvation of these people’s souls, maybe it’s time for us to look at canonical penalties.”
Graham Hudson, the editor of the Catholic magazine Crisis at the time, begged to differ.
“Imagine being a Border Patrol officer reading the paper at breakfast and learning you are targeted for ‘canonical penalties’ just for doing your job,” Hudson said. “He asks himself, ‘Do I have to confess my occupation to my priest in confession?’
“The intention of using excommunication to force Catholics into line about immigration policy is demeaning. It won’t be viewed as an opportunity for spiritual healing but as punishment for being part of the Trump administration.”
Making the bishops’ position even more infuriating — besides their profiting from human trafficking — is their absolute indifference toward the victims of their stance, as FrontPage reported.
The bishops are silent about the Laken Rileys of the world and their grieving families. They are silent about the young victims of sex trafficking. They are silent about the addicted victims of drug trafficking. They are silent about the corruption that allows access to traffickers. They are silent about gangs such as Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua terrorizing the innocent. They are silent about terrorists exploiting open borders. They are silent about children being sexually molested by illegal aliens.
So, too, is Francis.
“Why is Francis in such a frantic state about these grants being dismissed and defunded?” asked Elizabeth Yore, a conservative Catholic and former general counsel for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. Yore then raised a more disturbing question:
“I’m going to ask this question of OMB (the Office of Management and Budget) and DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency): Is 10 percent going to the big guys? I want to know, and so do a lot of Catholics.”
But who could be “the big guy”? Joe Biden? Maybe the pope himself?
By issuing his de facto declaration of war against the American people, Pope Francis inadvertently might have sparked the destruction of the Catholic Church in the United States.
