Pope Francis has sharply criticized the second Donald Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and other policies cracking down on immigration, saying they are driving a “major crisis” that “damages the dignity of men and women”.
‘Major crisis’: Pope Francis rebukes Trump mass deportation efforts Pope criticizes other anti-immigration policies and urges people not to accept administration’s harmful narratives.
David Gibson, director of the center for religion and culture at Fordham University, stated on social media that the pope’s letter “takes aim at every single absurd theological claim by JD Vance and his allies in conservative Catholicism (and the Catholic electorate)” and said that in the letter, the pope also “defends the chief target of Trumpism – the rule of law”.
During Trump’s first administration, Weisenburger suggested that Catholic border patrol agents involved in the Trump administration’s family separation policy could be denied communion, a central part of Catholic worship.
In the letter on Tuesday addressed to the US Roman Catholic church’s bishops, the pope pushed back against efforts to characterize all migrants as criminals – and urged people “not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters”.
