Here is a Tweet from the Pope from a couple of days ago. It’s a very sloppy Tweet with bad theology. There is no such thing as the “city of God and man”. St. Augustine tells us about the City of God and contrasts it with the City of Man. This is just sloppy theology from the Pope here.
Pope Francis is talking about “challenges posed by contemporary migration”. This is also known as the migration crisis or migrant crisis. Yesterday I was thinking about the word “migrant”. Where does it come from? It almost sounds like it’s the word immigrant. It’s very similar sounding but not the same thing. An immigrant is someone who goes through the costly and lengthy legal process of moving from one country to another.
Is a migrant a refugee? A refugee is someone who is fleeing a country with an extremely unstable political situation. This could be civil war, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, or genocide. Here’s a picture from the Vatican News website:
As you can see the Vatican News website differentiates between the terms migrant and refugee so they’re obviously not the same thing. So what is a migrant?
A migrant is someone from a poor country that shows up at a border of a more prosperous country and wants to live there. That’s the best definition that I can come up with. If someone can give me a better definition please let me know. However, what we need to know is that a migrant is neither an immigrant or a refugee.
What’s the solution from Pope Francis? Four verbs which are welcome, protect, promote and integrate. I believe this is extremely irresponsible on the part of the Pope. There is no right in the Catholic faith or any universal legal system to my knowledge that says one can live anywhere they can physically go. Countries have borders for a reason. Governments have to take care of their citizens. They need to gather tax revenue and use it properly. They don’t have an obligation to put everyone who shows up at the border on a path to citizenship. There are financial, security, and medical reasons.
Along with the migration crisis, Pope Francis’ other big project is global warming which is equally problematic. A lot of people who were once marginal in the Church are now promoting homosexuality and female ordination with full force. I honestly don’t think Pope Francis cares about that. I’m not worried about it and other Catholics shouldn’t be as well.
The Pope’s preoccupation with global warming and migration is odd. If the Church was spreading like wildfire, obliterating secularism in the West, helping the Christians in the Middle East grow instead of contract and many other things, I wouldn’t care. However we know that not everything is bright and sunny right now. Until it gets like that, the Pope should get his priorities straight. It gives me pain to critique the Pope like this. I don’t like to do it but I feel that I must speak out. God help me.
Sad to say that some of this is virtue-signalling. He is prone to that. Remember when he flew some Muslim immigrants (supposed refugees who had fled from a safe country) from Greece back to Rome. in his own aeroplane – I don’t think he put them up in his palace.
Rome is nice, I really enjoyed visiting it. The climate would really suit me, and I like the way of life there. Do you think I could turn up at the Vatican and be given somewhere to live?
Having said all that I would point out that this particular pope is not the clearest thinker, nor is he precise in speech or word. That makes it difficult to really take him to task for some of his pronouncements.