The Feud Between the Pope and the President

The well-publicized disagreement between Pope Leo and President Trump over the Iran conflict has its roots far deeper than the conflict itself.  Pope Leo decided to speak out against the interventions the United States carried out in Iran. He said, “I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote ⁠peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the states ⁠to look for just ⁠solutions to problems.” The Pope also noted that he was not afraid of the Trump Administration. The feud began.

Before this incident, the Vatican and liberal prelates in the United States made it obvious to anyone paying attention that they were not fans of Donald Trump. Part of their beef is Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, which they find incompatible with Christian praxis. The whole immigration question goes back to Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Octogesima Adveniens, which codified the impetus for social justice of immigrants, marking the eightieth anniversary of Pope Leo XII’s social justice encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

Pope Paul wrote, “The Gospel instructs us in the preferential respect due to the poor and the special situation they have in society: the most fortunate should renounce some of their rights so as to place their goods generously at the service of others.” From that point on, the common parlance of the Church was the preferential option for the poor.  Through this lens, the Church has defended unfettered migration, believing it fulfills God’s will.

What is rarely challenged is not the fact that Christians should care about the poor, but that this care is not an isolated incident. It exists in a complex series of realities. If the preferential option for the poor is a stance meant to eliminate all poverty, it is a myopic and wrongheaded position to hold. Even Christ was clear that the “poor you will always have with you.” The Lord’s words are a realistic observation of a world that is fallen. Heaven can never be fully achieved on earth. Those who think a utopia is possible are following the erroneous philosophy of Marxism.

The problem rarely mentioned is that the Pope and the Bishops are defending illegal immigration in a vacuum without any consideration of other implications. They consider only the less fortunate but fail to acknowledge that poverty is the work of human beings, most often the corrupt. Never once do they challenge these types of governments or leaders or comment on why people are leaving their homeland. They only deign to criticize the United States, which, incidentally, is the most generous country in the world. They follow the philosophy of the New World Order of open borders. The Open Borders is a political ploy for power, and the hierarchy without thought is Christianizing it.

If the immigration laws of the United States are immoral, then they could raise their voices in opposition. But they aren’t, because every country has the right to regulate its citizens, and that by itself is not immoral. Every other country does the same, yet no condemnation is directed at these countries. Furthermore, by their support of illegal immigration, the hierarchy is promoting those individuals to break the law, something the Church should not advocate.

The feud between the Pope and the President is one that first stems from illegal immigration couched in language about the Iran conflict. Without Trump’s stance on immigration, I doubt the American Pope would be so vociferous against Trump without saying a word about the 40,000 of its own protestors Iran executed.