Pope Francis caused quite a stir in the GOP presidential race on Thursday when he responded to a question about Donald Trump’s position on immigration. When a reporter told the pope that Trump wants to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall and “deport 11 million illegal immigrants, separating families,” Pope Francis replied: “I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that.”
Here’s the full exchange, according to the Catholic News Agency:
Most of the media have reported that the pope suggested anyone who supports a border wall is not a Christian, and Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Donald Trump have all responded to the news by defending border security.
“That’s not an un-Christian thing to do to make sure people don’t come across our border illegally,” said Bush. “Vatican City controls who comes in and how they come in as a sovereign state,” said Marco Rubio, who noted that the U.S. has the most compassionate immigration policies in the world. Donald Trump issued a statement defending his position on immigration and called it “disgraceful” to question his faith. (“No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith,” Trump said to today. “How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?” Trump tweeted last week.)
But as you can see from the exchange above, the pope wasn’t merely commenting on a border wall. He was also responding to Trump’s position on deporting all 11 million illegal immigrants and breaking up families.
Still, the pope’s claim that a person is “not Christian” if he takes Trump’s position on immigration will likely dismay many Catholics and other Christians. It is certainly possible that one could favor deportation policies carried out in an inhumane manner contrary to Christian teaching, but there is no Catholic prohibition on merely deporting illegal immigrants.
Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, was careful to make the distinction clear between political issues on which Catholics may have good faith disagreements and issues on which they may not. As cardinal and head of the Congregation of the Doctrine for the Faith, he wrote in a 2004 memo: “While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”
Pope Francis has never said that Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are not Christian because they support a legal right to infanticide, but now he has strongly suggested that Donald Trump is not Christian because he wants to build a border wall and deport all illegal immigrants. Trump may or may not be a Christian, but the pope’s comments are just baffling.
