2 weeks Ago
If I believed in miracles as strongly as I did as a Catholic school student, I could hope that Vice President JD Vance would be transformed by his audience with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday just hours before the pope died, that he’d embrace Francis’ compassionate views on the world’s migrants. But I don’t much believe in miracles anymore, especially for the veep. He’s too covetous of earthly political rewards.
Jackie Calmes Still, thank God that Francis left some final words — for Vance, a Catholic convert; for other Catholics (a majority of whom voted for President Donald Trump and Vance, polls showed); and for people of any or no religious persuasion — castigating the administration’s heartless as well as lawless deportation efforts. Vance will almost certainly ignore the pope’s legacy. Trump, who will attend Francis’ funeral Saturday, surely will.
After all, Francis’ admonition in 2016 regarding then-candidate Trump — “A person who thinks only about building walls ...
and not building bridges, is not Christian” — didn’t diminish Trump’s anti-immigrant zeal. Nonetheless, Francis’ words stand as a reproach to the administration’s current policies, a pastoral shot heard round the world. People are also reading.
.. After his brief meeting with Vance, the wheelchair-bound Francis went to the balcony overlooking St.
Peter’s Square. He rasped a short Easter blessing; an archbishop read his full Easter message to the 35,000 people below and millions watching by video. “How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants!” Francis lamented.
“I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear, which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the weapons of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death.” Of course, the pope had just encountered one of the worst contempt-stirrers.
It was Vance who, in the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign, first spread lies about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, which Trump echoed with gusto despite local Republicans’ pleas to stop. Neo-Nazis arrived to intimidate the refugees to leave. Trump, referring to the Haitians as well as other migrants nationwide, told supporters in Wisconsin, “Getting them out will be a bloody story.
” The story hasn’t been bloody — yet. But it’s a cruel one. The Washington Post reported on conditions in crowded U.
S. migrant detention centers. “You’re stripped from your humanity,” América Platt told the Post.
She spent four sleepless nights on a floor mat in a Texas center after being arrested for an unresolved traffic ticket, the Post reported, and then was deported to Mexico, where she hadn’t lived since fleeing an abusive father two decades ago. Though Trump and border czar Tom Homan say they’re only rousting criminals, about half of those detained by border officials have no criminal charges or convictions, according to federal data. The overwhelming number of migrants now languishing in a Salvadoran gulag have no criminal record.
Meanwhile, immigrants here legally are seeing their status revoked, some have been snatched by hooded agents and many detained or deported without due process. The Springfield (Ohio) News-Sun reported last week that a majority of the city’s Haitian population, most of whom are legal U.S.
residents, remain there despite Trump’s threats to revoke their immigration status and deport them. “They don’t have any other place to go in the U.S.
A. where they will not be facing the same issue,” Vilès Dorsainvil, president of a local Haitian assistance group, told the newspaper. Vance has helped see to that.
In his first interview after becoming vice president, he attacked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for opposing Trump’s policy of allowing immigration agents to enter and search churches and schools.
Francis was watching all this. The pope acknowledged a nation’s right to police its borders, but urged openness toward innocents fleeing “extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment” — as Jesus, Mary and Joseph did when they fled to Egypt. This isn’t to argue that government leaders should take their cues from a pope in Rome.
Unlike MAGA Republicans, I’m among the majority of Americans who support a strong wall between church and state. But some public actions are so heinous that a pope is compelled to speak, and we should too. And for God’s sake, politicians should listen.
Jackie Calmes is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!.
