The Catholic Church was on the mind of the Trump White House this weekend.
After the pope and the U.S. bishops criticized Trump’s border and immigration policies, two Catholics in the administration — including the Vice President — fired back.
From The National Review:
President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan fired back at Pope Francis on Friday for calling the new administration’s mass deportation program a “disgrace,” charging the pontiff to focus on problems within the Catholic Church instead.
The night before Monday’s inauguration, Pope Francis suggested Trump’s mass deportation operation will be inhumane for illegal immigrants and disgraceful “because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill.”
Homan, who served as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2017 to 2018, lambasted the pope for criticizing U.S. immigration policy.
The pope “ought to stick to the Catholic Church and fix that. That’s a mess,” Homan told Newsmax personality Rob Schmitt…
…The head of the Catholic Church has repeatedly called for compassionate and humane immigration policies, calling on nations to accept immigrants within their means and to take down their barriers. Francis himself grew up in a family of Italian immigrants in Argentina.
The pope previously blasted Trump’s hardline stance on illegal immigration, particularly over the Republican’s 2016 campaign promise to build the border wall. Francis said anyone who builds a wall to shut out immigrants was “not Christian,” pointedly referring to Trump.
Homan, who described himself as a “lifelong Catholic” in the interview, pointed out the pope’s hypocrisy for criticizing the border wall when the religious leader has a 39-foot-high wall that encircles the Vatican.
“They have a wall around the Vatican. And if you illegally enter the Vatican, the crime is serious. You’ll be charged with a serious crime and be jailed,” Homan said Friday evening. “So he can protect the Vatican where he lives. He can build a wall where he lives, but the American people are not allowed that.”
The border czar went on to say that border security “saves lives,” and the pope “needs to understand that.”
Then on Sunday, the vice president took aim at the bishops.
Worth noting: Trump’s people in the past have slammed the Vatican for having it’s own “border wall,” but the comparison doesn’t quite work:
After Pope Francis criticized Trump during the 2016 campaign, saying that “a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” many of his backers invoked the same argument.
Dan Scavino, who handles Trump’s social media, declared in a tweet that Vatican City is “100% surrounded by massive walls.”
While there are walls around many parts of the Vatican, visitors can, for example, walk freely into St. Peter’s Square, the main plaza there.
Vatican City is an independent city-state that’s actually located in Rome. Measuring about 0.2 square miles, it’s the smallest country in the world. It is the center of the Catholic Church and ruled by the pope.
It’s true that much of the Vatican is surrounded by walls, some of which date back to the ninth century. But in this day and age, they’re not walls you can’t get around. You don’t need a passport to enter. Millions of tourists visit the Vatican each year.
“It isn’t all surrounded by walls, and it’s not like you need a separate visa or a passport to enter,” Gerard Mannion, a professor of Catholic Studies at Georgetown University, told the New York Times in 2016, when the Trump camp was first talking about the Vatican walls. “You wouldn’t know, almost, when you even entered Vatican City. There is a white line painted on the ground in St. Peter’s Square, but that kind of thing is not obvious everywhere.”
After Homan weighed in, Vice President Vance had a few things to say on CBS News:
Vice President JD Vance blasted the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemnation of the Trump administration’s recent actions on immigration, saying the church might be more concerned with “their bottom line” than humanitarian causes.
On “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” the Vice President, in his first interview since being sworn in on Jan. 20, said several orders targeting immigration were enacted under President Trump to fulfill the promises made during his campaign.
Hours after the inauguration, the Trump administration revoked a policy that prohibited arrests by U.S. immigration agents at or near schools, places of worship and other places deemed to be “sensitive locations.”
Vance said Saturday that the order — along with several other immigration actions — empowers “law enforcement to enforce the law everywhere, to protect Americans.” The Trump administration issued roughly 200 executive actions during their first days in office, including denying birthright citizenship to the children of unauthorized immigrants and temporary visa holders — which has several legal challenges. His other executive actions, including the ICE order, could face legal challenges.
However, it was the church and schools order that drew ire from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Mark. J Seitz, migration committee chairman U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told CBS News “Many of these policies we see going against the basic tenets of our faith.”
Vance, a devout Catholic, sharply rebuked the bishops’ condemnation. “Because as a practicing Catholic, I was actually heartbroken by that statement,” he said.
Vance told Brennan the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops “has, frankly, not been a good partner in common sense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for.”
Brennan asked Vance if he specifically supported immigration agents going into churches and schools, and “conducting a raid or enforcement action in a church service, at a school.”
Vance said he “supports us doing law enforcement against violent criminals, whether they’re illegal immigrants or anybody else, in a way that keeps us safe.”
Vance asked if the bishops were more worried about their bottom line, noting they received over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants.
The USCCB responded with this statement:
“Faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving refugees. In 1980, the bishops of the United States began partnering with the federal government to carry out this service when Congress created the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). Every person resettled through USRAP is vetted and approved for the program by the federal government while outside of the United States. In our agreements with the government, the USCCB receives funds to do this work; however, these funds are not sufficient to cover the entire cost of these programs. Nonetheless, this remains a work of mercy and ministry of the Church.”
The USCCB also directed readers to this page for more information on USRAP.
