Pope Francis published his suicide note. It took the form of a letter to the American Catholic bishops. In so many words, the Holy Father urged his brother bishops to intervene in American politics and oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce our country’s immigration laws. Along the way, Pope Francis also took a jab at Vice President JD Vance, correcting him (along with St. Thomas Aquinas). No, we are not to love our parents, spouses, and children more than others. The true order of love, ordo amoris, starts with the vulnerable and outcast. We must seek “a fraternity open to all.”
There can be reasons to criticize immigration policies and their enforcement. Pope Francis is correct when he states that the “infinite and transcendent dignity” possessed by every human being “surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration that can be made to regulate life in society.” The law cannot turn human beings into property, nor can it compel men to marry or women to have children. Since the end of World War II, countries in the West have recognized that immigration restrictions must be waived when confronted with refugees fleeing persecution.
But in this matter, as in so many others, Pope Francis eschews nuance. He asserts that “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.” In other words, laws limiting immigration are not licit, because breaking them involves no crime. According to this logic, short of rapists and murderers (whom Francis allows may be kept out of a country), everyone has a right to migrate.
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.
I don’t envy the bishops. Mass migration has become the central political issue throughout the West. The economic and cultural failures of the post–Cold War settlement converge on this issue.
Globalization was sold to the public as a win-win. Prosperity would spread to the rest of the world, while Western countries would reap economic benefits. Great wealth has been created, but it has gone to those at the top of the economic ladder. Meanwhile, the influx of economic migrants, who make up the vast majority of those coming to Western countries, had increased the supply of low-cost labor, thus suppressing working-class wages.
The same globalization was accompanied by a utopian cosmopolitanism, a multicultural vision of “fraternity open to all,” as Pope Francis puts it. Realities on the ground have been otherwise. Mass migration disintegrates host cultures. Newcomers overload social services, drive up housing costs, and contribute to a feeling of dispossession among the native-born. Again, the burden falls on those at the bottom of society. Rich people can opt out. They live in what a friend calls “whitetopia,” homogeneous communities serviced by Latin American migrants who cut lawns and clean toilets.
Pope Francis claims to be taking the side of the vulnerable, but his rhetoric aligns with attitudes and statements characteristic of progressive elites. “Inclusion” is a tell-word, and it crops up often in papal pronouncements regarding immigration. The Holy Father insists that we must not enforce immigration laws. To do so would lead us “to give in to narratives that discriminate.” That’s the same rationale for not enforcing laws against shoplifting.
Mass migration concerns more than economic dislocations for working-class citizens of Western countries. As voters increasingly recognize, as numbers increase, society is transformed. Populism in the United States represents a reaction against this transformation. It’s a call for the reconsolidation of national identity, a demand that elites serve their fellow citizens and promote a shared civic culture, not a seemingly superior cosmopolitanism that conveniently aligns with elite interests and excuses them from the need to make sacrifices for the sake of the nation.
Reading Pope Francis over the years has led me to believe that he harbors an apocalyptic dream for the West, one in which mass migration and ecological peril overturn the foundations of Western confidence and global hegemony. In this regard, his thinking accords with post-colonial ideologues and those at pro-Hamas rallies. The West is a den of iniquity. Its capitalism foments greed. Its enterprises have raped mother nature and polluted the biosphere. Its vainglory, especially American pride, has brought war and ruin to foreign lands. The wretched of the earth are fully within their rights to rise up, migrate, and destroy the Behemoth.
I see Pope Francis as more than a wooly-headed moralizer who can’t identify duties in justice that require discriminating between those who break laws and those who abide by them, those near us who are bound to us by a thick web of responsibility and those whose claims on our resources and affections are remote. By all appearances, he’s an accelerationist, someone who welcomes catastrophe rather than appealing to Catholic social doctrine to make nuanced judgments that might help us humanize, as best we can, the policies and actions necessary to prevent the social upheaval that attends rapid demographic change, and the disorder it will bring. The Argentine Jesuit seems to relish collapse. It will provide an opportunity to break the iron grip of homo economicus and build a new world, a “fraternity open to all.” 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.
As I said, I don’t envy America’s bishops. 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.
Image by Mikhail Kelner. Image cropped.
