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.
R.R. Reno, the Catholic editor of First Things, the leading U.S. Christian theological journal, wrote in response to the new Francis letter:
The practical upshot of the Holy Father’s letter is nothing other than the globalist, open borders position, glibly theologized. This, Francis implies, is the only position permitted for true Christians who honor Christ’s universal love.
Reno writes that in reading Pope Francis over the years, it seems that the pontiff is an “accelerationist” who believes the West—especially the United States—is so evil that only when it is destroyed can we live in a truly Christian society. He continues:
This borderless fraternity is a true utopia, a world of no-place, a future universal society free from the grave evil of loyalty to one’s country—Donald Trump’s terrible crime against universal love.
“I don’t envy America’s bishops,” writes Reno. “It’s a hard task to require the faithful to attend Mass so that they can be told that loving one’s country and its citizens is a wicked sin. That’s a recipe for ecclesiastical suicide.”
Yes, and for civilizational suicide, as many Europeans today can attest. Major European cities are overrun by migrants, who are disproportionately guilty of murders, rapes, stealing, and other serious crimes. Some of them are Islamic radicals who engage in acts of terrorism against the peoples and countries who have taken them in. In 2016, two Islamic terrorists—one born in Algeria, the other the French-born son of migrants—slaughtered an elderly French priest, Father Jacques Hamel, as he was celebrating Mass.
On Monday in Paris, the trial of Brahim Aouissaoui for the murders of three Christians, and the attempted murder of six more, began. The accused is a Tunisian charged with invading a church in Nice in 2020, and carrying out savage knife attacks. Prosecutors say the young man, now 25, left Tunisia for France with terroristic intent. He had previously described France as “a country of miscreants and dogs.”
According to Pope Francis’s thinking, though, to have deported this Tunisian before he cut Catholic throats would have been an impermissible assault on his dignity.
Leaving aside terrorism and lesser (but still violent) crimes, mass migration has made daily life hard to endure for native-born Europeans. I asked a French woman living in Budapest why she chooses the Hungarian capital over her native Paris. She told me that it’s because in Budapest, capital of a country that has strict migration laws, she can walk around without fear of harassment or assault. In her hometown, she was constantly threatened, sexually and otherwise, by migrants. She said even female Muslims in hijab routinely spat at her and made threats about how the French would soon learn their proper place.
That doesn’t happen in Budapest. You know where else it doesn’t happen? In Vatican City, where Pope Francis lives in order and peace, safely behind high walls. He is like the scribes and Pharisees, the religious authorities condemned by Jesus (Matthew 23:1-4), who, in Our Lord’s words, “do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.”
The pope’s indirect rebuke of Vance raises the question: how often did Francis call out the Catholic president Joe Biden for his open and extreme support of abortion and gender ideology, both of which have been condemned by Francis? Answer: none. For that matter, how often has Francis criticized China’s Xi Jinping in this way for his government’s grotesque persecution of Chinese Christians, as well as for the genocide of Uighur Muslims? Answer: none.
To be sure, Francis rightly opposes China’s persecution of Christians and Muslims. But it is only the Trump administration that receives this kind of personal rebuke from the pontiff—and that’s for simply trying to regain control of its borders and enforce American law. And it is only the bishops of the United States who have been openly tasked by the Bishop of Rome with resisting their government, which is acting to serve the common good of the people who elected it.
For politicians, supporting open borders covers a multitude of sins, at least in the eyes of Pope Francis. Last November, the pope paid a visit to Emma Bonino, a left-wing Italian politician who played a leading role in legalizing abortion in that country in the 1970s. Francis brought the ailing Bonino roses and chocolates, and, likely referring to her pro-migration work, called her an “example of freedom and resistance.”
What did R.R. Reno mean when he characterized Francis’s call to the US bishops as “ecclesiastical suicide”? That the Roman pontiff is turning American Catholics against their pope, and the bishops who follow his instructions. But then, by governing the Catholic Church as a sentimental, progressive humanitarian, as if the Church were nothing more than a left-wing NGO, Francis long ago lost moral authority among many Catholics.
Who would ever have imagined that in order to defend what is left of their civilization, and the peace, good order, and integrity of their nations, faithful Catholics of the West would have to defy their pope? Somewhere, Pius V weeps.
The NGO Pope Commits ‘Ecclesiastical Suicide’
Pope Francis, New Year’s celebrations in Saint Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican, on December 31, 2024.
Photo: Andreas SOLARO / AFP
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:
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.
R.R. Reno, the Catholic editor of First Things, the leading U.S. Christian theological journal, wrote in response to the new Francis letter:
Reno writes that in reading Pope Francis over the years, it seems that the pontiff is an “accelerationist” who believes the West—especially the United States—is so evil that only when it is destroyed can we live in a truly Christian society. He continues:
“I don’t envy America’s bishops,” writes Reno. “It’s a hard task to require the faithful to attend Mass so that they can be told that loving one’s country and its citizens is a wicked sin. That’s a recipe for ecclesiastical suicide.”
Yes, and for civilizational suicide, as many Europeans today can attest. Major European cities are overrun by migrants, who are disproportionately guilty of murders, rapes, stealing, and other serious crimes. Some of them are Islamic radicals who engage in acts of terrorism against the peoples and countries who have taken them in. In 2016, two Islamic terrorists—one born in Algeria, the other the French-born son of migrants—slaughtered an elderly French priest, Father Jacques Hamel, as he was celebrating Mass.
On Monday in Paris, the trial of Brahim Aouissaoui for the murders of three Christians, and the attempted murder of six more, began. The accused is a Tunisian charged with invading a church in Nice in 2020, and carrying out savage knife attacks. Prosecutors say the young man, now 25, left Tunisia for France with terroristic intent. He had previously described France as “a country of miscreants and dogs.”
According to Pope Francis’s thinking, though, to have deported this Tunisian before he cut Catholic throats would have been an impermissible assault on his dignity.
Leaving aside terrorism and lesser (but still violent) crimes, mass migration has made daily life hard to endure for native-born Europeans. I asked a French woman living in Budapest why she chooses the Hungarian capital over her native Paris. She told me that it’s because in Budapest, capital of a country that has strict migration laws, she can walk around without fear of harassment or assault. In her hometown, she was constantly threatened, sexually and otherwise, by migrants. She said even female Muslims in hijab routinely spat at her and made threats about how the French would soon learn their proper place.
That doesn’t happen in Budapest. You know where else it doesn’t happen? In Vatican City, where Pope Francis lives in order and peace, safely behind high walls. He is like the scribes and Pharisees, the religious authorities condemned by Jesus (Matthew 23:1-4), who, in Our Lord’s words, “do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.”
The pope’s indirect rebuke of Vance raises the question: how often did Francis call out the Catholic president Joe Biden for his open and extreme support of abortion and gender ideology, both of which have been condemned by Francis? Answer: none. For that matter, how often has Francis criticized China’s Xi Jinping in this way for his government’s grotesque persecution of Chinese Christians, as well as for the genocide of Uighur Muslims? Answer: none.
To be sure, Francis rightly opposes China’s persecution of Christians and Muslims. But it is only the Trump administration that receives this kind of personal rebuke from the pontiff—and that’s for simply trying to regain control of its borders and enforce American law. And it is only the bishops of the United States who have been openly tasked by the Bishop of Rome with resisting their government, which is acting to serve the common good of the people who elected it.
For politicians, supporting open borders covers a multitude of sins, at least in the eyes of Pope Francis. Last November, the pope paid a visit to Emma Bonino, a left-wing Italian politician who played a leading role in legalizing abortion in that country in the 1970s. Francis brought the ailing Bonino roses and chocolates, and, likely referring to her pro-migration work, called her an “example of freedom and resistance.”
What did R.R. Reno mean when he characterized Francis’s call to the US bishops as “ecclesiastical suicide”? That the Roman pontiff is turning American Catholics against their pope, and the bishops who follow his instructions. But then, by governing the Catholic Church as a sentimental, progressive humanitarian, as if the Church were nothing more than a left-wing NGO, Francis long ago lost moral authority among many Catholics.
Who would ever have imagined that in order to defend what is left of their civilization, and the peace, good order, and integrity of their nations, faithful Catholics of the West would have to defy their pope? Somewhere, Pius V weeps.
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