On Tuesday, Pope Francis criticized President Trump’s policy of collective deportation and urged Catholics to reject anti -migrant accounts in an extraordinary direct attack on the American administration.
In an open message to the American bishops, Francis said that the deportation of people who often come from difficult situations violates “the dignity of many men and women, and entire families.”
The Pope wrote that he “closely continued the main crisis that occurs in the United States with the start of a group deportation program,” adding that any policy based on strength “begins badly and will end badly.”
Francis has always been a defender of the immigrants, and the condemnation of their ordeal made a pillar of the papal. The case was called the “wreckage of the ship of civilization” and spoke again and again against what it considers unwanted and non -Christian immigration policies all over the world.
Pope Francis criticized the plans of Mr. Trump to combat immigration when he was a candidate for the presidency, but the letter was one of the first general and explicit criticisms he addressed to the President of the United States since the elections. Experts said this is a sharp escalation in the mood of the relationship between the Vatican and the American administration.
“It shows the heat of the conflict,” he said. Massimo Faggioli, Professor of theology at the University of Villanova.
Experts said that by writing an open letter, the Pope indirectly addresses members of the new American administration, many of them Catholics, specifically, Vice President JD Vance.
Francis seemed to give Ribost to Mr. Vans, who recently spoke about “Ordo Amores” – the theological concept of the Middle Ages that developed a hierarchical sequence of the duties that gave priority to the immediate obligations towards the family of the individual or society over the distant needs.
The Pope wrote that “Christian love is not a united expansion of the center in interests, which extends little by little to people and groups of others.” “The love that builds brothers is open to all, without exception,” he wrote: “The real Ordo Amoris, which must be promoted, is” the love that builds brothers open to all, without exception. “
Experts said that the Pope’s speech is also addressed to some bishops and Catholics who adopted a charitable position towards President Trump.
“He wants to avoid the church to be divided into the Pope’s Church and the Trump Church,” said Alberto Meloni, the church historian and the director of the twenty -third John Foundation for Religious Sciences.
Pope Francis has previously spoken against Mr. Trump’s policies to combat immigration.
In 2016, he suggested that Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was “not a Christian” because of his promises of his campaign to deport more immigrants and build a wall along the border of Mexico.
Last year, Pope Francis said that both presidential candidates are “against life” – Kamala Harris for her support for abortion rights, and President Trump to close the door to immigrants. He urged the voters to choose “the least conditional”.
But during President Trump’s first term, Francis criticized the construction of the walls, but generally refrained from direct attacks on the administration.
This time, Francis was not directly criticizing President Trump’s policies. On an Italian TV program on the eve of the opening, he said that the deportation plans for Mr. Trump, “if it is true, will be a stigma.”
During President Trump’s first term, “The Vatican believed that Trump was a historic error that would be corrected,” said Mr. Vagoli. “Now they know it is a new era.”
There was no immediate comment from the White House.
In the message, which has not been announced, Francis urged Catholics to consider human values, not laws or regulations, as a basic compass that leads their actions.
“Considering the legitimacy of public standards and policies in light of a person’s dignity and basic rights,” he wrote. “Not the opposite.”
He reminded Catholics that Jesus and his family were immigrants to Egypt, and urged “all believers of the Catholic Church”, and not “surrendering to the narratives that distinguish and cause unnecessary suffering for our immigrant brothers and refugees.”
Other Christian leaders also criticized President Trump.
During the opening prayer service in the National Cathedral in Washington last month, bishop Marian Edgar Bod, leader of the Episcopal Diocese in Washington, requested that President Trump have mercy on Unrends not documented immigrants and children LGBTQ and others.
The next day, Mr. Trump called for an apology from the so -called “Bishop” and “extremist hardline as Trump” on his social media platform.