Pope Francis criticized President Donald Trump and his administration on Tuesday in a letter to U.S. Catholic bishops about mass deportation.
The pope wrote that while governments have a right to defend themselves, they should not turn a blind eye to men, women and families who need help.
“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,” Francis wrote.
His letter includes a warning for administration officials: “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,” he wrote.
As of Wednesday morning, Trump had not responded to the pope’s letter.
His border czar, Tom Homan, criticized the pope’s comments in a Tuesday interview on Fox News.
“I’ve got harsh words for the pope: I say this as a lifelong Catholic. He ought to focus on his work and leave enforcement to us. He’s got a wall around the Vatican, does he not?” Homan said, per CBS News.
Pope Francis and Trump
Pope Francis' letter is notable for its admonishing tone, but its content is not that surprising.
Since Trump’s campaign for the presidency in 2016, the pope has urged him to adopt a more welcoming attitude toward immigrants and refugees, and to remember humanitarian concerns when forming national security policies.
“Before Trump’s first administration ... Francis famously said anyone who builds a wall to keep out migrants was ‘not a Christian,’” The Associated Press reported.
The U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops has also repeatedly urged changes to Trump’s approach to immigration policy over the years.
Two days after he returned to the White House and issued a flurry of executive orders, the bishops put out a statement criticizing the moves.
“Several of the executive orders signed by President Trump this week are specifically intended to eviscerate humanitarian protections enshrined in federal law and undermine due process, subjecting vulnerable families and children to grave danger,” their statement said.
Ordo amoris
One factor influencing the relationship between the Catholic Church and Trump’s second administration is the emergence of Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism as an adult.
Vance has made headlines lately for a number of comments about the Catholic Church’s relationship with migrants and refugees. The pope’s new letter makes it clear that he’s been paying attention.
In late January, Vance criticized the church for disrupting “common sense immigration enforcement,” as the Deseret News reported at the time.
He implied that Catholic leaders are more upset about losing the government money that often comes with immigration-related programs than with losing the programs themselves.
Then, in a later interview, Vance reflected on Catholic teaching about “ordo amoris,” the order of loves, and argued that many Americans invert the proper order.
We should focus most of our love and attention on our families, then our neighbors, then community members and then other Americans before worrying about the rest of the world, he argued.
The pope said in his letter that love is not meant to be boiled down to a neat system of concentric circles.
“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,” Pope Francis wrote.
He also said that God will reward those who work on behalf of vulnerable communities.
“God will richly reward all that you do for the protection and defense of those who are considered less valuable, less important or less human,” Francis said.
Lawsuits over immigration raids in churches
The pope’s letter arrived on the same day that more than two dozen U.S. faith groups filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from allowing immigration raids to take place in houses of worship.
Until late January, churches were protected from such raids by a Department of Homeland Security policy on sensitive locations. That policy was rescinded soon after Trump was inaugurated.
Immigration enforcement in sacred spaces tramples religious freedom rights, argues the new lawsuit, which was brought by the Episcopal Church, the Union for Reform Judaism, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the General Commission on Religion and Race of the United Methodist Church and 23 other organizations.
The Trump administration’s approach to sensitive locations was previously challenged by five Quaker congregations, as the Deseret News previously reported.
That lawsuit is ongoing. On Friday, officials from the Department of Justice released a memo defending their actions.
“The memo said that immigration enforcement affecting houses of worship had been permitted for decades, and the new policy announced in January simply said that field agents — using ‘common sense’ and ‘discretion’ — could now conduct such operations without pre-approval from a supervisor," ABC News reported.