Why Do Progressive Christians Like Pope Francis Want to Burn the West Down?

Global media are abuzz with the Vatican’s full-on frontal assault on the United States of America. Faithful Catholics are staggered by what they call Pope Francis’s “unprecedented” intrusion into American law enforcement and politics, codified in a letter he sent to all U.S. bishops on Feb. 10 slamming the Trump administration’s immigration policies — and some of the officials in the executive branch personally.

Longtime Catholic journalist (and clerical sex abuse investigator) Philip Lawler writes:

In a letter ostensibly written to support the bishops of the US, Pope Francis has actually made life considerably more difficult for them. … the Pontiff makes an argument that is poorly informed, easily rebutted, and likely to divide the American Catholic faithful. This is an argument that the American hierarchy cannot win. And, not coincidentally, the argument presented by the Pope differs notably from the most recent statements by more prudent American prelates.

Has any modern Pontiff ever written a statement so harshly critical of the policies of a sovereign nation? If so, it has escaped my notice. Mit Brennender Sorge unequivocally denounced Nazi racial ideology, but Pope Pius XI focused that encyclical on principles, not specific public policies. …

There can be no doubt that [Francis] intended to criticize the Trump administration, and specifically its plans to deport illegal aliens. Nor can anyone who has followed the American political debate miss the Pope’s deliberate thrust at a specific Catholic political figure, Vice President J.D. Vance. …

Lawler noted how selective Francis’s indignation really is:

If the Pope’s primary goal is to uphold human dignity and expose injustice, it is curious that he addressed this letter–by far the strongest political statement of his pontificate — to the bishops of the United States. He might, for example, have denounced the injustices perpetrated by the Communist regime in China, with its suppression of democracy and religious freedom, its brutal treatment of ethnic minorities, and (since Pope Francis is keenly interested in “our common home”) its deplorable level of pollution. But this Pope has remained silent about injustice in China. In fact under his leadership the Vatican has done everything possible to ingratiate itself with the Beijing leadership, while one of the Pontiff’s key allies actually cited China as a model of Catholic social teaching!

And if the Pontiff wanted to bring the principles of Catholic social teaching to bear on the American scene, why did he never denounce the Biden administration for its worldwide promotion of abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender ideology?

Americans Don’t Deserve Borders, and Have No Right to Vote for Immigration Laws

Frequent Stream contributor Jules Gomes (a Cambridge-trained theologian) has already dissected Francis’s “poorly informed, easily rebutted” letter to U.S. bishops, where the main takeaway is that U.S. citizens don’t have the right to make and enforce immigration laws.

That’s right. Francis used his papal authority to single out Americans as unworthy of having borders, and unfit to choose which citizens join their nation and vote on its laws. By contrast, in Vatican City, the pope gets to pick all the citizens, who don’t even get to vote. If he applied to his own city-state what he proposes for Americans, Francis would have to let all the Gypsies in Rome crowd into St. Peter’s Basilica, then let them vote on how to distribute the Church’s billions in assets, rewrite its doctrines, and change its official language from Latin to Romany.

To be fair, Francis has denied political sovereignty to Italians, French, Germans, and other Western citizens — without ever suggesting the same about Asians, Africans, or Latin Americans. (In fact, as Wisconsin bishops just pointed out, the Catholic Church’s official teaching on immigration is sane and balanced, demanding that newcomers “obey the laws” of their host countries, which include their immigration laws. But Francis has never felt bound by the Catechism, sacred tradition, or even the Bible, so let’s move along.)

What’s behind Francis carving out a huge exception to Catholic doctrine, specifically to strip Western countries of their right to choose future citizens?

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Pope Francis?

But before we perform the necessary autopsy of Francis’s probable motives, let’s cheer ourselves up with a musical interlude, courtesy of two great Jewish Americans, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein:

How do you solve a problem like Pope Francis?How do you catch a Blob and hold it down?How do you find the key that opens Francis?A circus exhibitAn arsonistWith a frown?

It’s Not About the Money, But the New Gospel Globalists Preach

News media are reporting on the billions of dollars the U.S. bishops collect for “resettling” immigrants, which amounts in many cases to outright human trafficking. So there’s a financial angle here to be sure. When dealing with fallen humanity, you can never go far wrong by simply “following the money.” But there’s something deeper and darker here than simple, honest Greed, a pig snuffling at the trough. I doubt you could bribe Pope Francis or his lavender bishop appointees such as Washington’s Cardinal Robert W. McElroy into favoring Western sovereignty. There’s not enough money on earth to do that.

It’s handy that USAID and other government agencies pay liberal bishops to smuggle immigrants, but it’s worth noting that those bishops would even do it for free because they have genuine religious motives — it’s just that their religion isn’t Christianity. It’s the post-Christian cargo cult we clumsily label “wokeness.” And the Golden Calf it kneels before is the fetish we call White Guilt.

Helping Social-Climbing Whites Pass for Park Avenue Unitarians

I’ve analyzed White Guilt before in multiple columns. At its most base level, it’s just a strategy for asserting dominance, like an alpha male mountain gorilla pounding its chest to scare its rivals away from the females:

White Guilt is about white people and their feelings about themselves, and about other white people whom they either envy and want to imitate, or despise and want to disavow. …

Working-class white people aren’t vicious tribalists, but they don’t despise themselves or their ancestors. That makes them much more like black people, Latinos, and every other human group on earth. So if you’re a class-obsessed social-climbing white person and want to make it perfectly clear to everyone that you’re not some white-trash MAGA neanderthal, strutting around with shiny White Guilt feathers protruding from your tail is a surefire way to signal that.

A Civilizational Suicide Cult?

But bishops and popes probably don’t worry too much about social climbing. They’re at the tippy-top of the slippery pole in the field they consider important. So what explains Francis’s wish to crucify Western nations, blow open their borders, take all their wealth, and leave them in roiling chaos, swamped by honor-killing jihadists and spies from Communist China?

Rusty Reno of First Things speculates that it’s straight-up political hatred and a Utopian urge to smash things:

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….

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.

If Pope Francis indeed wants to destroy the U.S. and the West, our governments need to strike back. A good start, as I’ve written before, would be stripping the Vatican of its undeserved immunity from sex-abuse lawsuits from the victims of pervert priests. The pope hires and fires the bishops, interferes with their sex-abuse policies, and otherwise acts like a CEO of an international oil company. He shouldn’t be immune when his decisions contribute to a $5 billion catastrophe.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

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