Pope Francis touches his eyes as he presides over a mass for the jubilee of the military in St. Peter’s Sq. at The Vatican.Alessandra Tarantino/AP
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En path to Marseille, France, to headline a September 2023 migration convention, Pope Francis used to be talking to journalists when he introduced unsolicited reward for El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz and his sturdy enhance of migrants and refugees.
It wasn’t the primary time he had singled out the Texas border bishop. “I do not know if he is conservative, or if he is progressive, if he is of the right or of the left, but he is a good pastor,” remarked the pope in a December 2022 interview.
Because the starting of his papacy in 2013, there’s been a ordinary accusation that Francis fails to grasp the USA. Whilst he won’t incessantly destroy bread with American neoconservatives the way in which that the previous two popes had been recognized to do, it’s an unfair and misguided rate to levy towards historical past’s first pope from the World South.
Francis’s wisdom is knowledgeable through common conversations he has with US prelates who’re common guests to Rome and through conferences he convenes with teams just like the West/Southwest Business Spaces Basis who’ve met with the pope the ultimate 3 years for free-ranging conversations at the state of affairs of migrants and US political existence.
And to best it off, in step with his public calendar, Francis meets each Saturday morning with Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost, who advises the pope on bishops’ appointments world wide. For sure, he receives considerable knowledge from the USA from those figures.
Given this context, it’s now not precisely unexpected that following the election of a US president who has pledged to deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants, the pope may have a couple of issues to mention.
Finally, this can be a pontiff who selected to seek advice from the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa on his first actual shuttle outdoor of Rome following his election as pope to pay tribute to the lives of migrants misplaced at sea and highlight the “globalization of indifference” in opposition to their plight.
So this week, on February 11, when the Vatican revealed a letter from the pope to US bishops caution that Trump’s mass deportation plans would “end badly” and rejecting the management’s characterization of migrants as criminals, nobody will have to had been surprised through Francis’ issues.
In keeping with one senior Vatican respectable who spoke at the situation of anonymity, the pope has intently adopted the reaction of US prelates to Trump’s assaults on migrants and he expects them to provide a united entrance in opposing any mass deportation efforts.
What’s novel about this newest papal correspondence, then again, is the style during which the pope without delay replied to a contemporary effort through Vice President JD Vance to make use of Catholic theology to justify the Trump management’s immigration crackdown.
The pope didn’t purchase it.
“It’s very shocking to see the pope disavowing what a Catholic vice president has said in an interview.”
“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote in his letter to U.S. bishops. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
The Vatican-White Space change is just about remarkable in trendy historical past.
Catholic theologian Massimo Faggioli, writer of the not too long ago revealed e-book From God to Trump: Catholic Disaster and American Politics, advised me, “It’s very shocking to see the pope disavowing what a Catholic vice president has said in an interview.”
Whilst tradition wars have all the time raged in the case of questions of marriage and circle of relatives, Faggioli mentioned what’s new about this present second is Vance’s option to without delay use Roman Catholic theology to push the White Space’s time table.
What could have as soon as been a political battle, has escalated right into a theological one.
The eminent Italian church historian Alberto Melloni advised me that Francis, in scripting this letter to the American bishops, is the usage of a identical device to Pope Pius XI, when he condemned the Motion Française within the Twenties—a nationalist French political motion buttressed through most of the nation’s Catholics.
“If Trump believes that right-wing Catholics are a Trumpian Catholic Church, the pope of Rome tells him ‘go ahead, make my day,’” mentioned Melloni of Francis’ letter.
Faggioli concurred with Melloni’s evaluate, however introduced some other parallel: Pope Leo XIII’s 1899 letter, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (“Witness to our Good Will”), caution US Catholics of the risks of “Americanism”—specifically expressed thru an overzealous attachment to person liberty.
“Right now this is something similar, but it’s more interesting,” Faggioli mentioned. “Now Pope Francis is basically asking US Catholics to remember what America is about. And that’s an interesting twist of history.”
Whilst Francis—and up to date popes—have penned letters addressed to specific bishops’ meetings and international locations, the scope of the ones letters had been markedly other. In 2018, Francis wrote to the Chilean bishops to handle the mounting clergy abuse disaster in that nation and, in 2024, Francis wrote to Catholics in Nicaragua to specific his closeness as they continued spiritual persecution.
But in his newest letter, the pope is expressly excited by what it way to be Catholic. In keeping with Faggioli, it’s an effort to safeguard that identification and make sure that the church’s theology isn’t perverted.
“The pope has ramped up the confrontation,” he mentioned. “And here we have two moral views of the world that are clearly colliding.”
The Nationwide Catholic Reporter’s Rome Bureau is made imaginable partially through the generosity of Joan and Bob McGrath.
