Pope Leo XIV is being lobbied by Catholic bishops and nuns to endorse more migration flows, regardless of the vast civic and economic damage inflicted on citizens, Western societies, and the migrants’ home countries.
So far, the Pope is responding with generalities without detailed policy implications or direct opposition to Trump’s popular deportation of illegal migrants,
“In the communities of ancient Christian tradition, such as those of the West, the presence of many brothers and sisters from the world’s South should be welcomed as an opportunity, through an exchange that renews the face of the Church,” the Pope declared on October 5.
“Often [migrants] maintain their strength while seeking a better future, in spite of the obstacles that they encounter,” Leo said Oct. 2 in a meeting with Catholic migration advocates.
“You can read into [his comments] what you want when it comes to specifics of government policy, responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower levels of migration into Americans’ society.
The mistake that people — both in and outside the Catholic Church or any other church, — is that they imagine that the lessons of the Gospel and of the Fathers of the Church are somehow a 10-Point white paper on how we should run [immigration] policy. In fact they [provide] general rules about how to think about these questions, and different people will come to different conclusions.
However, there is a vast pro-migration industry — and supportive media — that wants to enlist Pope Leo XIV in their high-risk, controversial cause.
“Pope Leo will ‘stand with’ Catholic leaders in protecting immigrants’ rights, advocates say,” declared an October 8 report by Politico, which added;
A delegation including El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz and members of the Hope Border Institute, an advocacy group partnered with the El Paso archdiocese, presented the pope with hundreds of letters and a four-minute video from immigrants detailing their experiences as the Trump administration’ sdeportation campaign continues to expel thousands from the U.S.
“He watched the whole thing, and his eyes at the end were filled with tears as he watched it,” Dylan Corbett, the founding executive director of the group, who was present at the meeting, told POLITICO. “As the meeting came to an end he said, ‘You stand with me and I stand with you, and the church will continue to accompany and stand with migrants.’”
“Corbett said he and other members of the delegation look forward to seeing the pope continue to “demonstrate that solidarity” but are now focusing on taking the pope’s message back to the U.S. and supporting immigrants on the ground, Politico reported.
Leo thanked “us for our commitment to the immigrant peoples and also saying that he hopes that the bishops’ conference will speak to this issue,” Bishop Mark Seitz, based in El Paso, Texas, and one of the most aggressive advocates for migrants, told the Associated Press.
“The Jubilee of Migrants and the Jubilee of Missions are both being celebrated in Rome this weekend,” the pro-migration U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reported in October:
The Vatican dicasteries [agencies] for Promoting Integral Human Development and for Culture and Education and the U.S. bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services were among the co-sponsors of the conference, held in Rome Oct. 1-3 just before the Jubilee of Migrants and the Jubilee of Missions Oct. 4-5.
Amy Pope, who runs the United Nations’ pro-migration agency, also used the meetings to portray the new Pope as an ally of her cause:
Amy Pope was put into the IOM job by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies, and she quickly helped fund the movement of more migrants into many towns and cities across the Midwest. “Our goal at IOM is to enable the choice to migrate,” IOM chief Amy Pope told National Public Radio in 2023. The migrants’ arrival was a boon for investors in low-wage businesses and rental properties.
Catholic Bishops are using stronger language and are staging a public demonstration to denounce Trump’s popular policies. In September, Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, described Trump’s popular policies as an “assault [that] seeks to make life unbearable for undocumented immigrants.”
So far, these bishops and advocacy groups have failed to get the new Pope to directly denounce Trump’s policies.
“The fact that the Pope is not saying that, you know, ICE needs to stop doing X, Y and Z in Chicago, or something like that … is a good sign, because that’s not what the church is supposed to be doing,” said Krikorian. He added:
In a sense, the immigration question is kind of like the death penalty issue for Catholics, because there’s a variety of ways to interpret even official teaching. The church’s official teaching is that countries do have the right to control their borders for the common good, but also that they have a responsibility to the underprivileged of the world … And so if you’re the Pope, you’re going to try to balance those views and make sure that the discussion of the issue stays within the parameters, within the bounds that the church has set, but not adhere to specific policy directives [for Earthly government], because that’s not what the church is.
For example, Catholic theology requires believers to help the stranger, said Krikorian.
That New Testament parable of the good man who helps a wounded stranger is portrayed by many pro-migration Catholics as a religious commandment to let migrants settle in the United States, he said,
But the Old Testament scriptures describe the stranger as a traveler or a temporary visitor, but not a settler or new member of the community, Krikorian said. “The idea that ‘You were strangers once in Egypt’ means that you have to let every illegal immigrant come over the Mexican border is just absurd,” he added.
President Joe Biden’s deputies and allies used that claim as they spent billions of dollars to invite and covertly fund the migration of roughly ten million migrants to cities in the United States. Billions of dollars were given to Catholic migration groups and the United Nations’ migration agency.
On their road north, many of the invited and supported migrants were also robbed and raped by gangs, or died in jungles, deserts, roads, and rivers. “There were two images of his treacherous journey north that he couldn’t get out of his head,” Albinson Linares from Telemundo.com wrote in January 2023 about a Venezuelan migrant named Johan Torres:
The first was how a [migrant] person who resisted a robbery in Mexico was killed with a machete; the other happened in the jungle, when he saw a man leave behind his young daughter, waist-deep in mud.
“He left her there, lying in the mud and crying. And I couldn’t do anything because I was dying of exhaustion. But I can’t forget that,” he said with tears in his eyes.
The death toll was so high in Panama’s Darien Gap jungle that Mayorkas pushed Panama to create a safer coastal route via high-speed boats that delivered migrants to buses funded by Mayorkas.
In Mexico, the northward flow of migrants paid off the cartels and coyotes with billions of dollars in loans. Those robberies were made possible by Mayorkas’s decision to allow migrants to quickly get the U.S. jobs that would pay off their smuggling debts to the coyotes. That conveyor of cash to the cartels was only possible because Mayorkas imposed catch-and-release policies on the border patrol, which is required by law to detain migrants until their asylum claims are judged.
The vast migration did enormous damage to the ability of ordinary Americans to earn a decent living, afford housing, or raise their families.
In the United States, Americans also lost the attention and empathy of left-wing politicians and the sympathy of left-wingers who now prefer to focus their powerful empathy on grateful migrants instead of on alienated, poor, discarded, and normal Americans.
Trump has almost eliminated the inflow of needy migrants — and the award of grants to the pro-migration groups and their many employees.
The migrants have also caused a shift of empathy in the U.S. Catholic Church, from ordinary Americans to the eager migrants and their vulnerable children.
Migrants “are missionaries of hope to us, because their presence with us honestly sanctifies who and where we are,” said Sister Norma Pimentel, who runs a now-empty reception center for migrants in the Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville, Texas.
Once Americans meet migrants, she said, “they will stop seeing them as somebody that is invading my space [community and jobs], but rather as somebody who I have the opportunity to be able to show the presence of God.”
But Trump’s election, she lamented, sent the message that migrants are “invaders that come and take over our land and destroy our America and take our jobs.”
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