I know the pope is a compassionate man. I know the pope has a heart for immigrants and refugees, as he should. I know he has a habit of answering pointed questions with confusing platitudes. I also know that yesterday, when asked about Donald Trump, the pope answered a loaded question that misstated Trump’s position on separating families. But even with those caveats, the pope was flat-out wrong to answer the question as he did — wrong on the substance and wrong in his manner.
A reporter asked him whether an American Catholic can vote for someone who “has said that, if elected, he would build a 2,500-kilometer-long wall along the border. He wants to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, thus separating families, etc.” The pope responded:
A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel. As far as what you said about whether I would advise to vote or not to vote, I am not going to get involved in that. I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that. We must see if he said things in that way, and in this I give the benefit of the doubt.
I’m sorry, but this sounds a lot like the kind of intolerant progressive religious rhetoric one hears in the nominally Christian ranks of mainline Protestantism. First, he builds an impressive straw man (“a person who thinks only about building walls . . . and not building bridges”) and then burns that straw man in the lake of eternal fire. But just when you’re about to give Francis the benefit of the doubt — to assume that he’s speaking in abstractions — he gets concrete: “This man is not a Christian if he said things like that.”
The idea that a man’s border and immigration policy can define whether he is a Christian is simply absurd. I know I’m a Protestant and not steeped in Catholic teaching, but my definition of a Christian is derived more from Romans 10:9 (“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”) than it is by my border-control or deportation policies. Our relatively open border harms national security, facilitates drug trafficking and human trafficking, helps depress wages for America’s most vulnerable working families, and swamps already-strained social services. Where’s the compassion in that?
Moreover — again, to my Protestant ears — bringing the Gospel itself into the immigration debate is disrespectful to the Gospel. It lowers a transcendent truth. The Gospel isn’t defined by a set of social policies but rather by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s the good news of Christ’s victory over sin and death. Indeed, when one lowers the Gospel to the realm of politics, it can have the infernal side effect of leading people to believe that their politics make them righteous, when only Christ can cover our sin.
#share#Yes, I know that the pope’s defenders will say that his words have no impact on the Catechism, that of course he doesn’t believe that nations should have no control over their borders, and that he’s merely calling on people to be compassionate. But words have meaning. The pope is responsible for the things he says. He chose to cloak a progressive political position in the Gospel itself. And he did so in the wrong manner — without even gracing us with an actual argument.
The declaration that a person isn’t just “wrong” but “not a Christian” because of a position on illegal immigration or border control represents exactly the kind of dogmatic declaration that conservative Americans are simply sick of hearing. Progressives have hurled insults like “racist” or “homophobe” so frequently that it’s become the background noise of conservative life. From colleges to corporations, conservatives either learn how to handle the insults or learn to keep silent, while seething with resentment at liberal intolerance.
#related#Rather than bring a measure of goodwill to the debate, the pope handed the Left yet another moral cudgel. Look for his declaration to be echoed and amplified again and again — and not just against Trump supporters but against anyone who seeks to secure our border and to limit American jobs and educational opportunities to legal American residents. The Left will taunt Christian conservatives, asking whether we think we know more about Christianity than the pope. But here the pope is wrong, and neither his exalted position nor his admirably soft heart can make him right. Border fences do not define our faith.