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Pope Calls Trump's Mass Deportation Plan 'Major Crisis'
The pontiff also rejected Vice President JD Vance's attempt to use a Catholic tenet to serve the administration's anti-migrant agenda.
Feb 11, 2025
Pope Francis on Tuesday reaffirmed his condemnation of U.S. President Donald Trump's anti-migrant agenda and explicitly rebuked what critics have called Vice President JD Vance's misinterpretation of Catholic theology in an attempt to justify the Republican administration's mass deportation plan.
In a letter to U.S. bishops, the pontiff wrote: "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.
What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.
The Pope acknowledged "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," but also asserted that "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."
The Pope continued:
This is not a minor issue: An authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized. The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all—as I have affirmed on numerous occasions—welcomes, protects, promotes, and integrates the most fragile, unprotected, and vulnerable. This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration. However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.
While not explicitly naming him, the Pope's letter refutes remarks by Vance, who last month invoked the medieval Catholic concept of ordo amoris—which posits a ranking of affection with the deity figures God and Jesus at the highest level, followed by self, family, friends, and others—to show that Christians should love citizens more than migrants.
"Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups," the missive states. "In other words: The human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation."
"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 pontiff said.
Imagine you're just some 30-something guy who converts to one of the world's major religions and in less than a decade its spiritual leader is rebuking you in front of the entire world That's how big a loser JD Vance is apnews.com/article/pope...
[image or embed]
— Will Bunch ( @willbunch.bsky.social) February 11, 2025 at 8:21 AM
"I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of goodwill, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters," the Pope added. "With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy, and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all."
Pope Francis is a longtime champion of migrant rights. The 88-year-old Argentinian criticized Trump's so-called "zero-tolerance" immigration policies, including family separation and construction of a wall along portions of the Mexican border, during the Republican's first term in office.
"Builders of walls, be they made of razor wire or bricks, will end up becoming prisoners of the walls they build," the Pope said in 2019.
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Biden's Faith and Support for Genocide in Gaza
As a self-proclaimed observant, practicing Catholic, you have not only failed to heed Pope Francis' figurative encyclical regarding Gaza but are shipping billions of dollars of weapons into the arsenal of the Israeli government.
Dec 31, 2023
We and many other organizations and peaceful protesters in our country have worked in vain to persuade President Joe Biden to use his influence to have the Israeli regime agree to a ceasefire that would allow hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks daily into the devastated graveyard that is now the Gaza Strip. Biden regularly begs Israel to let in more trucks, paid for by the U.S. At the same time the Biden administration exercises veto power on the U.N. Security Council blocking a cease-fire, truce, or negotiations toward a permanent two-state resolution. A cease-fire would at least allow aid to reach the besieged.
According to Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, “[U]nless something changes, the world faces the prospect of almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population—close to half a million human beings” can die within a year. (See, The Guardian, December 29, 2023).
We have appealed to Biden’s duty to apply vigorous diplomacy to this cascade of genocidal war crimes by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This means suspension of hostilities, and the immediate flow of critical food, water, medical, shelter, and other supplies for civilians, followed by serious negotiations toward a two-state solution. Instead, Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, behaves as a secretary of war shuttling between the U.S. and Israel.
We have appealed to Biden’s political sense and how he is losing the support of more Americans every day as the slaughters of children, women, the elderly and other innocents worsen.
None of these appeals has moved this co-belligerent in the White House. All that is left is to appeal to what he has said his practicing Catholicism means to him every day. The following letter addresses his conscience as a matter of his professed religious faith.
December 29, 2023
Honorable Joe Biden
President of the United States
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500
Re: Your Catholic faith. Aiding and abetting Israeli government genocide in Gaza including bombing the Holy Family Catholic Church and Convent. Abuse of power is a cardinal sin.
Dear Mr. President:
You describe yourself as a “practicing Catholic.” During an interview with The Jesuit Review on September 21, 2015, you emphatically asserted that all faiths have an “obligation to fight against abuse of power” as a cardinal sin worse than all others that should be arrested and defeated. You added that “every human being is entitled to be treated with dignity.”
In late October, Pope Francis decried the Israeli government’s post-October 7, 2023, attack on Gaza in a phone conversation with Israeli President Isaac Herzog: “It is forbidden to respond to terror with terror.” On December 17, 2023, the pope deplored as “terrorism” the bombing and killings by the Israeli government of two Catholic women, an elderly mother, and her grown daughter, and the wounding of seven others who had taken refuge in the Holy Family Catholic Church and Convent.
The Israeli government’s defense minister has dehumanized 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals” and pledged to treat them, accordingly, denying them the dignity to which you insist each person is entitled according to your Catholic gospel.
You have acted unswervingly in support of the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, including a siege that according to the Israeli defense minister’s proclamation means “no electricity, no food, no fuel, no water.” Article II (c) of the Genocide Convention in 1949, born of the Holocaust, defines genocide as, “Deliberately inflicting on [a national, ethnical, racial, or religious] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
To complement the physical destruction caused by the siege, the Israeli government has bombed and invaded Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and displaced virtually its entire population targeting hospitals, ambulances, journalists, water mains, houses, apartment buildings, schools, offices, marketplaces, United Nations marked schools, UNRWA personnel, places of worship, and crowded refugee camps, roads, generators and electric networks, and more.
This is genocide by any yardstick. Pope Francis has denounced the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza as “terrorism.” As a self-proclaimed observant, practicing Catholic, you have not only failed to heed Pope Francis’ figurative encyclical regarding Gaza but are shipping billions of dollars of weapons into the arsenal of the Israeli government to assist its Gaza terrorism, including attacking the Holy Family Catholic Church. In your many expressions of support for what Netanyahu is destroying in Gaza, you have not found any room to express condemnation of this Israeli government’s attack on this lone Catholic Church in Gaza.
You have made the U.S. government into a “co-belligerent” under international law and have given a greenlight “with powerful weaponry” to what Netanyahu is doing to Gaza, including enabling him to block most humanitarian aid from starving, sick, and mortally injured Palestinians, a majority of whom are women and children.
The Israeli government has no self-defense justification for the genocide. It targets Palestinian civilians throughout Gaza wherever they are gathered, fleeing, sheltering, starving, and dying.
Practicing Catholics are made of more holy and peaceful convictions.
King Henry VIII was excommunicated by Pope Paul III in 1538 for divorcing Catherine of Aragon, a far lesser sin by your standards than the United States’ and Israeli government’s continuing “abuse of power” in Gaza, i.e., terrorism, war crimes, and genocide, promoted by American weapons, intelligence, and repeated lone vetoes in the United Nations Security Council—a cardinal sins according to your own yardstick.
What do you think Pope Francis should communicate to you?
Sincerely,
Bruce Fein, Esq.
Ralph Nader, Esq.
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Outraged by the FBI's Catholic Memo? Targeting Muslims Laid the Groundwork
Had conservative politicians stood up against government overreach when American Muslims were its victims, they could have prevented the government from even thinking about writing a memo focused on the Catholic community.
Aug 20, 2023
In one of the few relatively benign moments of Dave Chappelle's last appearance on Saturday Night Live, the comedian made an interesting observation: The complaints that some white Americans have made about law enforcement in recent years are complaints that African Americans have made about law enforcement for decades.
"Man, we can't trust the government," Chappelle said in his faux southern accent. "[Black people] have been on that. Man, we should dismantle the FBI. Word to Martin Luther King, bro. We've been on that."
Writing the jokes out doesn't do justice to the delivery, but you get the idea.
The memory of Chappelle's riff came to me last week, when conservative pundits and lawmakers railed against the FBI over an internal memorandum that proposed a strategy to address the purported threat of "radical traditional Catholic ideology."
The FBI memo says that followers of this ideology, abbreviated as RTC, are characterized by a rejection of reforms made during Vatican II, a "disdain for popes elected since then, particularly Popes Francis and John Paul II," and "adherence to antisemitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, and white supremacist ideology."
If you replace every instance of "church" and "radical traditional Catholic" in the FBI memo with "mosque" and "radical Islamic terrorist," the memo would read like the typical way the government has thought about and addressed the American Muslim community over the past 20 years.
To mitigate the threat of "RTCs," the memo advises, the FBI should engage in something called "tripwire," "source development," and outreach to "traditional Catholic parishes," among other things. The memo also identified conservative Catholic political stances, such as opposition to abortion, as potential triggers for acts of terrorism in the run-up to the 2024 election.
When the FBI memo first went public earlier this year, it sparked outrage among Catholics who felt it was inappropriate or even unconstitutional for the government to target the Catholic community in this way.
Conservative politicians and media personalities also latched onto the issue, exaggerating the content of the memo and using it as a new political cudgel in their ongoing feud with the bureau over its investigations of Donald Trump.
In response to such backlash, the FBI withdrew the memo and insisted it was the work of only one local field office. But a new report last week showed that multiple offices contributed to the memo and sparked renewed outrage.
As a Muslim civil rights attorney who has seen the injustices that can occur when law enforcement starts treating faith communities as suspect, I understand the concerns that Catholic voices have raised about the FBI memo.
Although every law enforcement agency has a duty to prevent and investigate crimes, the government has no business planting informants in churches, enlisting priests to help spy on community members, or equating acts of conservative piety with signs of extremism.
Even though I sympathize with some of the concerns raised about the FBI memo, I also cannot help but wonder: Where was the outrage when the federal government used identical thinking and tactics to target the Muslim community?
Indeed, if you replace every instance of "church" and "radical traditional Catholic" in the FBI memo with "mosque" and "radical Islamic terrorist," the memo would read like the typical way the government has thought about and addressed the American Muslim community over the past 20 years.
From New York to Los Angeles and cities in-between, federal and local law enforcement have used spies to infiltrate and monitor mosques.
Federal Countering Violent Extremism programs were used to build ties between law enforcement and Muslim community organizations, who would then be used to monitor, counter, and report signs of extremism.
Law enforcement training materials at the local and federal level have used explicitly anti-Muslim tropes. And only God knows how many internal memos have been dedicated to equating Islamic practices like growing a beard or praying regularly at a mosque with signs of extremism.
Yet some of the same voices who enthusiastically supported such dragnet policies when they were directed at Muslim Americans are now outraged that the government merely drafted a single memo focused on Catholic Americans.
When we allow law enforcement agencies to infiltrate, spy upon, entrap, and otherwise target one faith community, we open the door for law enforcement to do the same to other faith communities down the road.
This is why consistency is so important when it comes to opposing government overreach.
When we allow law enforcement agencies to infiltrate, spy upon, entrap, and otherwise target one faith community, we open the door for law enforcement to do the same to other faith communities down the road.
Had conservative politicians stood up against government overreach when American Muslims were its victims, they could have prevented the government from even thinking about writing a memo focused on the Catholic community.
Now, a naysayer might argue the FBI has good reason to worry about Muslims in a post-9/11 world but no reason to worry about Catholics, so it's perfectly fine to focus on mosques.
But this unprincipled stance would miss the point: Our nation's stated values and the text of the Constitution should forbid the government from singling out, spying on, or otherwise undermining faith communities from within.
Furthermore, if we accept that targeting a faith community is acceptable when a few of its members supposedly pose a threat, the FBI memo claims that it is monitoring hate groups and extremists who identify as Catholic and pose an active threat of violence. Essentially Timothy McVeigh all over again.
Even if this is true, it would not justify targeting Catholic institutions at-large to address such threats.
Law enforcement must follow real leads and track down real criminals, not go on fishing expeditions in churches, mosques, or other houses of worship. The rest of us must consistently oppose anti-religious bigotry under the guise of national security, regardless of what community is targeted.
The Patriot Act, warrantless bulk surveillance, the unconstitutional federal terror watchlist, sending informants into houses of worship—these government activities have predominantly impacted the Muslim community, but they could potentially threaten every community.
That's why our civil rights organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, opposes any attempts by federal law enforcement to focus on the Catholic American community just as strongly as we oppose targeting of the Muslim American community.
We can only hope that every American embraces this principled stance before their faith community shows up in a government memo.
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